“You are not old enough to be a general servant or a cook; you have not experience enough to be a housemaid; you don’t take to sewing, and there is no chance of being accepted as a hospital nurse:  you must confess there is nothing you can do.  You are really a very useless girl for your age.”

“There are heaps of things I could do.”

“Tell me a few of them.”

I was silent.  The professions at which I felt I had the latent power to excel, were I but given a chance, were in a sphere far above us, and to mention my feelings and ambitions to my matter-of-fact practical mother would bring upon me worse ridicule than I was already forced to endure day by day.

“Mention a few of the things you could do.”

I might as well have named flying as the professions I was thinking of.  Music was the least unmentionable of them, so I brought it forward.

“Music!  But it would take years of training and great expense before you could earn anything at that!  It is quite out of the question.  The only thing for you to do is to settle down and take interest in your work, and help make a living at home, or else go out as a nurse-girl, and work your way up.  If you have any ability in you it would soon show.  If you think you could do such strokes, and the home work is not good enough for you, go out and show the world what a wonderful creature you are.”

“Mother, you are unjust and cruel!” I exclaimed.  “You do not understand one at all.  I never thought I could do strokes.  I cannot help being constituted so that grimy manual labour is hateful to me, for it is hateful to me, and I hate it more and more every day, and you can preach and preach till you go black in the face, and still I’ll hate it more than ever.  If I have to do it all my life, and if I’m cursed with a long life, I’ll hate it just as much at the end as I do now.  I’m sure it’s not any wish of mine that I’m born with inclinations for better things.  If I could be born again, and had the designing of myself, I’d be born the lowest and coarsest-minded person imaginable, so that I could find plenty of companionship, or I’d be born an idiot, which would be better still.”

“Sybylla!” said my mother in a shocked tone.  “It is a wonder God doesn’t strike you dead; I never heard—­”

“I don’t believe there is a God,” I said fiercely, “and if there is, He’s not the merciful being He’s always depicted, or He wouldn’t be always torturing me for His own amusement.”

“Sybylla, Sybylla!  That I should ever have nurtured a child to grow up like this!  Do you know that—­”

“I only know that I hate this life.  I hate it, I hate it, I hate it,” I said vehemently.

“Talk about going out to earn your own living!  Why, there’s not a woman living would have you in her house above a day.  You are a perfect she-devil.  Oh God!” And my mother began to cry.  “What have I done to be cursed with such a child?  There is not another woman in the district with such a burden put upon her.  What have I done?  I can only trust that my prayers to God for you will soften your evil heart.”