As to hoping that if she went to the Momperts' and was patient a little
while, things might get better--it would be stupid to entertain hopes
for herself after all that had happened: her talents, it appeared,
would never be recognized as anything remarkable, and there was not a
single direction in which probability seemed to flatter her wishes.
Some beautiful girls who, like her, had read romances where even plain
governesses are centres of attraction and are sought in marriage, might
have solaced themselves a little by transporting such pictures into
their own future; but even if Gwendolen's experience had led her to
dwell on love-making and marriage as her elysium, her heart was too
much oppressed by what was near to her, in both the past and the
future, for her to project her anticipations very far off. She had a
world-nausea upon her, and saw no reason all through her life why she
should wish to live. No religious view of trouble helped her: her
troubles had in her opinion all been caused by other people's
disagreeable or wicked conduct; and there was really nothing pleasant
to be counted on in the world: that was her feeling; everything else
she had heard said about trouble was mere phrase-making not attractive
enough for her to have caught it up and repeated it. As to the
sweetness of labor and fulfilled claims; the interest of inward and
outward activity; the impersonal delights of life as a perpetual
discovery; the dues of courage, fortitude, industry, which it is mere
baseness not to pay toward the common burden; the supreme worth of the
teacher's vocation;--these, even if they had been eloquently preached
to her, could have been no more than faintly apprehended doctrines: the
fact which wrought upon her was her invariable observation that for a
lady to become a governess--to "take a situation"--was to descend in
life and to be treated at best with a compassionate patronage. And poor
Gwendolen had never dissociated happiness from personal pre-eminence
and _eclat_. That where these threatened to forsake her, she should
take life to be hardly worth the having, cannot make her so unlike the
rest of us, men or women, that we should cast her out of our
compassion; our moments of temptation to a mean opinion of things in
general being usually dependent on some susceptibility about ourselves
and some dullness to subjects which every one else would consider more
important. Surely a young creature is pitiable who has the