“They didn’t apply,” said Helen, “but they ought to have done so, and I wanted them to. That is the whole trouble. I never wanted to be different from others, and yet I’ve never felt that I was living in the same world with them. Can’t you see how the situation would arise, and how fatal it would be? No one has the right to shut us out from any part of life, not even from hard things, from the sorrows and sufferings. They always said I was beautiful, but the only effect I could notice was that they treated me as if I weren’t a human being. My whole life has been an attempt to put myself back among other people, to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. I resented being excused from the ordinary rules of life. If I did wrong when I was a child, I wasn’t punished. When I asked why they didn’t punish me, they thought I was abnormally good, or very conscientious, but the fact was I wanted everything that was supposed to go with my conduct. As a young girl, foolish and inexperienced, my mistakes never brought me to harm. In marriage at least I expected to find reality; living with a man, I thought, would bring home to me the mortal drama in which we are supposed to be playing our parts; surely I should feel it if the marriage turned out unhappy. But I was more sheltered than ever—practically immune to life. It wearied me to be complimented still on my good looks, for the phrase was always a reason why they should cheat me of what I wanted most. I understood what is meant when men say beauty is a curse. Without sharp edges, life is a smooth habit, and meaningless. I gave myself to Paris because I loved him, but somewhere in my thoughts was the hope that our love would actually be the great tragedy it seemed to promise, and that in the end I should suffer and feel. But my days in Troy might have been so many seconds in a dream; no one took me seriously; no one, not even Priam, upbraided me for ruining the city—not even Hector, who on general principles disapproved of Paris and me. When the end came, I said to myself, I shall live at last, for Menelaus will surely kill me. Your father will never know what was in my mind as I saw the anger go out of his face, and that sheltering look come back into it. It isn’t exactly that he has forgiven me, but I am not counted in the same world with other people—I’m a sort of wraith. When he thinks of Paris and me, and I’m not in his presence, he feels murderous, I believe; but if I’m there when he remembers, he is, as you might say, merely annoyed. Hermione, the reason I have such a desire for life, the reason I want you to love life early, is that I have never lived. But in my search for the real things, I’ve learned to grasp at strict honesty with myself and complete frankness about myself with other people; it’s my only hope. When you wished to save my reputation by saying I was in Egypt, never in Troy, don’t you see what you robbed me of? For all of us, I’m sure, insincerity becomes a screen between life and our souls, but it would be particularly dangerous for me. I am as far away as I can get from the so-called respectable whose respectability means only that they are afraid to live.”