Excerpt from Anna Lombard<br><br>For myself, I felt singularly mentally weary and disheartened, yet I was generally considered a much to be -envied person, one of Fortune's particular favourites. I was young - not yet thirty, though sometimes, possibly the result of much severe study, my brain and inner being seemed singularly old - I had, some five years before, come out head of the list in the Indian Civil Service Examination, and had been granted the coveted position of Assistant Commissioner; my pay was good, my position excellent, my work light and indeed far beneath the capacity my severe education had endowed me with girls smiled upon me, mammas were not unkind, and lucky fellow that Ethridge' was a comment frequently on the lips of my companions. And yet, in spite of all this, how empty life seemed to that lucky Ethridge himself! As a boy, always given rather to dreams, speculations and ideas, how fair that same life looked to me in my cold, hard, chaste youth of study and work, how much there had seemed to be done in it.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.