I had, to be sure, a few commendable aspirations, but I had started out
fresh so many times with them only to see them meet the same end!
Though not by nature of a self-depreciatory turn of mind, I had
occasional flashes of inspiration, to the effect that, in spite of the
soft flattery of friends, I really was amounting to very little after
all. It was in a mood induced by one of these supernatural gleams that I
stood on one occasion, leaning a pair of very plump arms on the graveyard
wall, looking wistfully over into the place of tombs, and thinking how
nice it would be to have done forever with the fret and turmoil of life!
And it was at such a time, too, that I received from a school friend,
Mary Waite, the letter which was the moving cause of my mission to
Wallencamp.
Mary Waite, by the way, was one of those "prosy, ridiculous girls"--so I
had been compelled to classify her, although I was secretly troubled by
a sincere admiration of her virtues,--who had made it an absorbing
pursuit of her school-days to probe her text-books for useful
information, and was also accustomed to defer to her teachers as high
authority on matters of daily discipline.
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