Agnes Grey Chapter 17 - Confessions

In which the narrator muses upon the cruel advantage of beauty and the complex interplay of appearance and character, whilst witnessing the capricious and heartless conduct of her pupils, who manoeuvre their social and romantic entanglements with unsettling ease. Amidst these outward diversions, she shelters her own quiet suffering in secret meditations and poetry, bearing the twin weights of lost companionship and distant familial ill-health with a subdued and solitary endurance.