It is no wonder then that we sometimes go on a wild-goose chase after pleasure; it is not surprising that the wisest of us make foolish attempts to grasp the will-o'-the-wisp that has been coaxing and deceiving men for centuries. It is surprising that our persistent self-confidence persuades our better sense that where countless generations of pleasure-seekers have failed we can hope to succeed.
This parenthetical deviation is the fruit of my deep reflections concerning this early period of my development; it is the web which the deft fingers of my memory have woven around many a quiet reverie; the substance of many a fire side cogitation, the phantoms of many a twilight's dreaming.
I doubt not, that in that world of speculative opinions and questionings, I have met the kindred spirits of many of my fellow beings, clad in the ideal personality with which my thought invests people, at the cross of those four great roads towards which, from all corners of the earth, the spirits of mankind come trooping. We have only to close our lids upon our external surroundings and swift as thought itself is our passage into that fairy land of our reverie.
As early as my tenth year I had begun to build castles in the open fire and to people the gloaming with whispering shadows; somehow the habit has grown with me through all these years, with this difference, however: in the reveries of my womanhood the heroes and heroines come to me, from a long vanished past, clothed in a misty reality, and associated with every joy and sorrow of my life.
In my childhood these were typical visions, the anticipation of a restless impatience which yearned for the touchstone of sober experience, to-day they are the re-creation of memory, and a rehearsal of all those circumstances that have made sober experience a comprehensive word for me.
Not that my life has made a heroine of me either in the world's eyes or my own. I dare say, to the passive observer, it is plain and ordinary enough. It is when we take away the flesh and blood reality, which is the temple of the moral man, that the common-place aspects of life become strange and attractive.
Subtract one of those every-day lives from the busy, moving mass of humankind and place it under the microscope; bring up to the visible surface all that has lain hidden for years from the casual glance of the general observer; lay bare the secret tenor of its every thought and motive and impulse. Is it any longer the thing it seemed to be when jostled about in the busy throng?
Pluck one of the dusty blades of grass that grow unheeded by the roadside; there are hundreds of them at your feet so much alike that the one you chose had no identity, whatever, until you had, by chance or design, separated it from the rest. Bear it away to your home and place it under a powerful lens; is it still the same uninteresting blade it was a moment ago out in the noisy and crowded thoroughfare? Why does your gaze become riveted upon what is revealed? Ah! you discern that such homely things are not at all what you have been wont to think them. You are astonished to find how each individual trifle is in itself a wonderful creation, swarming with a hidden and undreamt of life, feeding a multitude of appetites, satisfying countless cravings, struggling with a most powerful vitality, and challenging powers, whose unseen tyranny is unsuspected by more than half the world.
No wonder, then, that a singled-out human life excites our astonishment; no wonder that we look upon an isolated fellow-creature as if he were not one of us, but removed by adventitious circumstances far above or below the common level of men and women.
It is not always the exaggerating pen of the author that creates heroes and heroines out of our prosy humanity, and it is an undeniable and stable fact that truth is far stranger than fiction. It is because we men and women will conceal the realities of our lives from one another, and under the banner of an all-enduring pride, struggle for the privilege of living under a surface of smooth, unruffled evenness, that humanity has become susceptible of so many false and misleading interpretations.