I felt it, though no one
told me a thing. I fancy that most older people have the same
experience often that I have had lately. All at once you are aware
something is wrong. You can't tell why you feel this; you only know
that you are living in the cold shadow of some invisible unhappiness.
You see no tears in the eyes of the people you love, but tears have
been shed just the same. Why? You don't know, and no one thinks of
telling you. It is like seeing life from so far off that you cannot
make out what has happened. I have sometimes leaned out of a window and
have seen down the street a crowd of gesticulating people, but I was
too far off to know whether some one was hurt or whether it was only
people gathered around a man selling something. When I see such things
my heart beats, for I am always afraid it is an accident, and so with
the things I don't know in my own household. I always fancy them worse
than they are. There are so many things one can imagine when one
doesn't KNOW, and now I fancied everything. Such things, I think, tell
on older people more than on younger ones, and at last I went to my
room and kept there most of the time, reading William James's Varieties
of Religious Experience. It is an excellent work in many ways. I am
told it is given in sanitariums for nervous people to read, for the
purpose of getting their minds off themselves.
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