Certainly, she had read Esther, but what had she made of it? Nowhere, in any of her letters, does she say. We know only that now, in the winter of 1883, she had become dangerously bored. Everything and everyone was tiresome to her. Besieged by arrivistes, she had come to hate her own five o'clocks. ("Life is like a prolonged circus here now," she wrote her father.) People still came to dinner, but she no longer cared to go out. Ladies' luncheons were "a style of killing time which I detest"; diplomatic dinners were attended by people with brains "attenuated to a startling degree"; large parties were "hot rooms and crowds" that "take so much more from one than they give." She preferred to stay home and read.

How could it have been otherwise? In any life, the doubts, the depressions, the absence of self-belief -- if not engaged with --progressively worsen, moving ineluctably from occasional ailment to recurrent episode to chronic condition. The condition occupies space, eats up air, consumes energy. Energy that should have fed experience now feeds the unlived life. The unlived life is not a quiescent beast. The unlived life is a little animal in a great rage, barely permitting of survival. And sometimes not even that. Sometimes, it ends an assassin.