Feb. 4.-The name of Charley Underhill appears on these pages for the last time. He is engaged to Amelia! From this moment she is lost to me forever. How desolate, how mortified, how miserable I am! Who could have thought this of Amelia! She came to see me, radiant with joy. I concealed my disgust until she said that Charley felt now that he had never really loved me, but had preferred her all along. Then I burst out. What I said I do not know, and do not care. The whole thing is so disgraceful that I should be a stock or a stone not to resent it.
Feb. 5.-After yesterday's passion of grief, shame, and anger, I feel perfectly stupid and languid. Oh, that I was prepared for a better world, and could fly to it and be at rest!
Feb. 6.-Now that it is all over, how ashamed I am of the fury I have been in, and which has given Amelia such advantage over me! I was beginning to believe that I was really living a feeble and fluttering, but real Christian life, and finding some satisfaction in it. But that is all over now. I am doomed to be a victim of my own unstable, passionate, wayward nature, and the sooner I settle down into that conviction, the better. And yet how my very soul craves the highest happiness, and refuses to be comforted while that is wanting.
Feb. 7.-After writing that, I do not know what made me go to see Dr. Cabot. He received me in that cheerful way of his that seems to promise the taking one's burden right off one's back.
"I am very glad to see you, my dear child," he said.
I intended to be very dignified and cold. As if I was going to have any Dr. Cabot's undertaking to sympathize with me! But those few kind words just upset me, and I began to cry.
"You would not speak so kindly," I got out at last, "if you knew what a dreadful creature I am. I am angry with myself, and angry with everybody, and angry with God. I can't be good two minutes at a time. I do everything I do not want to do, and do nothing I try and pray to do. Everybody plagues me and tempts me. And God does not answer any of my prayers, and I am just desperate."
"Poor child!" he said, in a low voice, as if to himself. "Poor, heart-sick, tired child, that cannot see what I can see, that its Father's loving arms are all about it?"
I stopped crying, to strain my ears and listen. He went on.
"Katy, all that you say may be true. I dare say it is. But God loves you. He loves you."