1. Miss Gwilt’s Diary
“NAPLES, October 10th.—It is two months to-day since I declared that I had closed my Diary, never to open it again.
“Why have I broken my resolution? Why have I gone back to this secret friend of my wretchedest and wickedest hours? Because I am more friendless than ever; because I am more lonely than ever, though my husband is sitting writing in the next room to me. My misery is a woman’s misery, and it will speak—here, rather than nowhere; to my second self, in this book, if I have no one else to hear me.
“How happy I was in the first days that followed our marriage, and how happy I made him! Only two months have passed, and that time is a by-gone time already! I try to think of anything I might have said or done wrongly, on my side—of anything he might have said
