Our Nervous Friends | Page 3

both parents.
Thus, early and intensely, a morbid attitude toward death, a conviction
that self-pity was reasonable, normal, wholesome, a belief that it was
her duty to publicly display intensive evidences of her affliction,
determined a lasting and potent influence in this girl's life which was to
alloy her young womanhood--disturbing factors, all, which before
twelve caused much emotional disequilibrium. She now lived with her
uncle in New York City and her summers were spent in Canada. The
sense of fitness was so strong that during the next two vitally important,
developing years she avoided any physical expression of her natural
exuberance of spirits; and habits now formed which were, for years, to
deny her any right use of her muscular self. She read much; she read
well; she read intensely. She attended a private school and long before
her time was an accredited young lady. Mentally, she matured very
early, and with the exception of the damaging influences which have
been mentioned, she represented a superior capacity for feeling and
conceiving and accomplishing, even as she possessed an equally keen
capacity for suffering.

She was most winsome at sixteen, a bit frail and fragile, often spoken
of as a rare piece of Sevres, beloved with a tenderness which would
have warped the disposition of one less unselfish; emotionally intense,
brilliancy and vivacity periodically burst through the habit of her
reserve. A perfect pupil, and in all fine things literary, keenly alive, she
had written several short sketches which showed imaginative
originality and a sympathetic sensitiveness, especially toward human
suffering. And her uncle was sure that a greater than George Eliot had
come. There was to be a year abroad, and as the doctor and her teacher
in English agreed on Italy, there she went. At seventeen, during the
year in Florence, the inevitable lover came. Family traditions, parents,
her orphanage, the protective surroundings of her uncle's home, her
instincts--all had kept her apart. Her knowledge of young lovers was
but literary, and this particular young lover presented a side which soon
laid deep hold on her confidence. They studied Italian together. He was
musical, she was poetic, and he gracefully fitted her sonnets to
melodies. Finally, it seemed that the great Song of Life had brought
them together to complete one of its harmonies. Her confidence grew to
love, the love which seemed to stand to her for life. Then the awful
suddenness, which had in the past marked her sorrows, burst in again.
In one heart-breaking, repelling half-hour his other self was revealed,
and a damaged love was left to minister to wretchedness. Here was a
hurt denied even the expression of mourning stationery or black
apparel--a hurt which must be hidden and ever crowded back into the
bursting within. Immediate catastrophe would probably have followed
had not, first, the fine pride of her fine self, then the demands of her art
for expression, stepped in to save. She would write. She now knew
human nature. She had tasted bitterness; and with renewed seriousness
she became a severely hard- working student. But the wealth of her
joy-life slipped away; the morbid made itself apparent in every chapter
she wrote, while intensity became more and more the key-note of
thought and effort.
Back at her uncle's home, the uncle who was now even more convinced
that Ethel had never outlived the shock of the loss of her parents, she
found that honest study and devotion to her self-imposed tasks, and a
life of much physical comfort and rarely artistic surroundings, were all

failing to make living worth while. In fact, things were getting into a
tangle. She was becoming noticeably restless. Repose was so lost that it
was only with increasing effort that she could avoid attracting the
attention of those near. Even in church it would seem that some demon
of unrest would never be appeased and only could be satisfied by
constant changing of position. Thoughts of father and mother, and the
affair in Florence, intensified this spirit of unrest, and few conscious
minutes passed that unseen stray locks were not being replaced. It
seemed to be a relief to take off and put on, time and again, the ring
which had been her mother's. Even her feet seemed to rebel at the
confinement of shoes, and she became obsessed with the impulse to
remove them, even in the theater or at the concert. A sighing habit
developed. It had been growing for years into an air- hunger, and
finally all physical, and much of mental, effort developed a sense of
suffocation which demanded short periods of absolute rest.
Associations were then formed between certain foods and disturbing
digestive sensations. Tea alone seemed to help, and she became
dependent upon increasingly numerous cups of this beverage. Knowing
her history