The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence

The discovery came to Paulina suddenly.She looked up one evening from her reading and it stood before her like a ghost.It had entered her life with stealthy steps,creeping close before she was aware of it.She sat in the library,among the carefully-tended books and portraits;and it seemed to her what she had been walled alive into a tomb hung with the effigies of dead ideas.She felt a desperate longing to escape into the outer air,where people toiled and loved,and living sympathies went hand in hand.It was the sense of wasted laber that oppressed her;of two lives consumed in that ruthless process that uses generation of effort to build a single cell.There was a dreary parallel between her grandfather's fruitless toil and her own unprofitable sacrifice.Each in turn had kept vigil by a corpse.