I was literally penniless.

I had not even the money to ride home in the cars.
Till a person has felt this sensation, he has not had one of the most remarkable experiences of life.

To know where you can get money, to feel that there is some _dernier ressort_ however hateful to you, is one thing; but to _know_ that you have not a cent--not a prospect of getting one--not a hope of earning one--no means of living--this is suffocation.
This is the stopping of that breath that keeps the world alive.
The bench on which I happened to be sitting was one of those pretty, little, covered seats, which jut out into the lake.

I looked down into the water as I sat with my empty purse in my lap, and remembered vaguely the many narratives I had seen in the newspapers about unaccounted-for and unknown suicides.

I could see how it might be inevitable--a sort of pressure, a fatality that might not be resisted.