“I will write nothing more till I am thirty,” she thought. “I’ve spent all my life so far in nothing but rejections, and after a certain point I don’t think they’re good for people. Besides, it’s waste of time.”
The truth was that she had been thoroughly disheartened and did not like to own up to it.
So she began to study for matriculation, but she was not fond of this kind of study, and it took all her strength of mind to keep it up. Perseverance, however, will do much, and when she had worked successfully through a book on mechanics she felt almost as if she had worked successfully through the examination itself.
Still, as time went on she began to grow low-spirited. Never in all her life before had she stuck persistently to books. Never had she let more than four months at most pass without writing some story or other; it had seemed a part and a necessity of her life.
Now month followed month, and one year lengthened almost into two, and still she stuck to the lesson books.
Low spirits were natural to her, but this was a place which would never dispel them. The unkindnesses, the unpleasant quarrels weighed on her just as much as her failures, and no amount of not-caring could ever take the sting away.
Besides, there were other troubles, flimsy skeletons in the cupboard that one never mentions, sending out at times their unwholesome odour from between the narrow chinks.
The wish to pray, to cast this heavy, darkening burden on to other shoulders grew. Deborah prayed to Christ, as she had never prayed for anything before, except her father, to give her faith and light to throw off the gloom.
She might just as well have prayed to a stone wall; to pray was simply to increase the gloom, an empty mirage that on approach mocked at the struggling traveller’s pain.
All the time she could spare from lessons she spent in that other world; it was the one bright spot in her life, the thing for which she was ineffably thankful.