All these men -- a diplomat, a historian, a paid wanderer -- struggled mightily with demons they could not master. But every day, throughout their lives, each one went out to do battle with the world; doing battle with the world allowed them to do battle with themselves; doing battle with themselves they brought their miseries under enough control to achieve sufficient detachment; achieving detachment they did the work that gives human existence its meaning.

Clover had no similar relief: nothing was expected of her. She ran the salon, she socialized skillfully, she exercised a wit that as time passed yielded less pleasure, less energy, less meaning. In short: she had no work. No work meant inner drift. The men in her circle were each compelled by inner necessity to convert disability to virtue -- especially Henry whose genius it was to make of his own self-doubt an instrument of historic interpretation -- but Clover remained an intelligent woman who feared being thought a blue, condemned to back off from the only kind of struggle that would have sufficiently freed her from the same conviction of inner worthlessness that dogged the men around her. With no useful way to vent themselves, her anxieties went underground where they increasingly transformed into postures of spiritual inertness, hesitating thought, demoralized will. In time she became that which women were accused of being by nature.

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.