The Bird's Nest

by Shirley Jackson

It is not proven that Elizabeth’s personal equilibrium was set off balance by the slant of the office floor, nor could it be proven that it was Elizabeth who pushed the building off its foundations, but it is undeniable that they began to slip at about the same time.

I am not one of your psychoanalysts, but merely an honest general practitioner who believes that the illnesses of the mind are as reasonable as the illnesses of the body, and that your analytical nastiness has no place in the thoughts of a decent and modest girl

“I have never admitted to doing wrong, not in my whole rotten misbegotten sodden flodden ambergodden life, not wrong, not evil, not trespass against, no, nor adultery neither.”

We are all measured, good or evil, by the wrong we do to others; I had made a monster and turned it loose upon the world and—since recognition is, after all, the cruelest pain—had seen it clearly and with understanding; Elizabeth R. was gone; I had corrupted her beyond redemption and in the cool eyes which now belonged entirely to Bess I read my own vanity and my own arrogance. I reveal myself, then, at last: I am a villain, for I created wantonly, and a blackguard, for I destroyed without compassion; I have no excuse.