Joan Haste

Her troubles were vulgar enough, poor girl: a scolding and coarse-minded aunt, a suitor toward whom she had no longings, the constant jar of the talk and jest of the ale-house where she lived, and the irk of some vague and half-understood shame that clung to her closely as the ivy clung to the ruined tower above her. Common though such woes be, they were yet sufficiently real to Joan—in truth, their somewhat sordid atmosphere pressed with added weight upon a mind which was not sordid.

Those misfortunes that are proper to our station and inherent to our fate we can bear, if not readily, at least with some show of resignation: those that fall upon us from a sphere of which we lack experience, or arise out of a temperament unsuited to its surroundings, are harder to endure. To be different from our fellows, to look upwards where they look down, to live inwardly at a mental level higher than our circumstances warrant, to desire that which is too far from us, are miseries petty in themselves, but gifted with Protean reproductiveness.