I love this entire section. The personification of Love and Life here is stunning. I suppose these words being identified with gender such as Love being male and Life being female is a commentary on gender roles and how these roles work in society and within the human condition. Here, Life waits for Love. In other words, Life is merely empty and nothing unless Love is involved- as if the only way worth living is if somebody loves you. Which is why, Life waited, and she was not sure what she was waiting for until Love came her way. But, Love is also nothing without Life. Love was dull and plain. I think the word "drew" can have a double meaning here. In one way, it is physical, as Life was sitting and I imagine, Love extended his hand and drew her up to him. But, "drew" in a philosophical, more metaphysical context, could also mean that Love without life is plain and dull. And if you have no one to give Love to, no Life to place it upon, then it is dead. But Life revitalizes Love. And so, the two create Joy.

I want to believe that Alice speaks of her sister so frequently because she feels she has taken on the role of mother in her life and she is merely concerned. However, her constant scrutiny of her sister's happiness during travel and meeting charles tells me otherwise.

I think Alicia's grief will be Caroline's separation from her. I think Alicia is threatened by the idea of her younger sister starting a married life before she does. Considering she is the oldest, it can impact her ego with insecurities. And so she lashes out in a way that comes off both as scrutinizing and maternal to hide the fact she is jealous and hurt inside.

She accredits herself with a lot of responsibility in Caroline's life. She also compares herself to her here. Which is interesting considering the premise of the story. There is a love triangle that will soon become the center of the story. Could it have been driven by Alicia's jealousy? Sibling rivalry? The fact that she feels like she is stronger than Caroline tells me that perhaps she thinks she would be able to handle him better than Caroline.

She lives out excitement through her sister's letters which distract her from a lonely existence at home it seems. This far, her journal entries are less about herself and all about her sister.

She feels left out, this assists in growing curiosity and perhaps, envy.

Masking Jealousy of her sister through sympathy for her mother and father? What does this tell me about her character thus far...

This piece finds itself circling and making many fascinating connections. The signalman was paranoid throughout the entire text as he awaited some sort of imminent doom. However, this doom he was waiting for, the evil which he felt the spectre was a symbolic prediction of, was of his own death. Even from the beginning of the piece we are made to be aware of something malignant. The signalman had sworn that he had seen the narrator before. Was the arrival of the narrator into the signalman's life the sign of his death? Perhaps the spectre took the form of the narrator and presented himself to the signalman before the narrator's actual arrival. Furthermore, the tunnel is described as having a mouth; somehow telling us that things are swallowed up there, that in that tunnel, things cease to exist.

This piece of text stood out to me (perhaps because Charles Dickens was in my head as the introduction stated he was the editor of the magazine which "The Ghost in the Garden Room" was published) because it reminds of Great Expectations when Pip returns to Satis House and he sees that Estella's beauty had faded away. Further, Pip learns that Estella's true father was Magwitch, a criminal- and yet at the beginning of the novel, Pip was deemed unfit for Estella because he was not from the same cut of the cloth as Estella, when in fact, her situation may have actually been worse. I find this twist at the beginning of the piece to kind of work in tandem here. Nathan Huntroyd fancied Hester in his early life, but her father did not find him to be an acceptable suitor because he was not of wealth. However, now that Hester and her family have found themselves in a state of poverty, the power roles switch. Hester has lost her beauty and has become a working woman. Hester has hit a low in her life where now, Nathan who has come into money, can quite literally choose to be with her. When he saw her, he did not feel glee or fall into a state of "ecstasies" but rather, is simply satisfied that he can now have the woman he wanted by choice this time, and have her as both wife and maid. His exclamation of "she'll do" is a form of power reversal. Where Hester's father had the power over Nathan to reject him as a suitor for Hester, Nathan now has the power to examine her, determine she is not the best, she has lost her beauty, but "she'll do" for what she is (a woman who can be a wife) and what she is capable of (being a maid).

In a Victorian society, reading was a sensorial experience meant to provide an immersive experience for the reader. Illustrations encouraged the reader to appreciate the artistic nature of books enough to display them. Furthermore, these sensorial experiences encouraged the reader to further understand the alternate reality the author created through language. To read became an art, and other mediums of art assisted in making reading a multi-sensory and immersive journey.