e are clouds now.
You are so young. There may be great happiness in store for you yet."

"I don't see any reason for expecting it, mamma," said Gwendolen, in a
hard tone; and Mrs. Davilow was silent, thinking as she had often
thought before--"What did happen between her and Mr. Grandcourt?"

"I _will_ keep this necklace, mamma," said Gwendolen, laying it apart
and then closing the casket. "But do get the other things sold, even if
they will not bring much. Ask my uncle what to do with them. I shall
certainly not use them again. I am going to take the veil. I wonder if
all the poor wretches who have ever taken it felt as I do."

"Don't exaggerate evils, dear."

"How can any one know that I exaggerate, when I am speaking of my own
feeling? I did not say what any one else felt."

She took out the torn handkerchief from her pocket again, and wrapped
it deliberately round the necklace. Mrs. Davilow observed the action
with some surprise, but the tone of her last words discouraged her from
asking any question.

The "feeling" Gwendolen spoke of with an air of tragedy was not to be
explained by the mere fact that she was going to be a governess: she
was possessed by a spirit of general disappointment. It was not simply
that she had a distaste for what she was called on to do: the distaste
spread itself over the world outside her penitentiary, since she saw
nothing very pleasant in it that seemed attainable by her even if she
were free. Naturally her grievances did not seem to her smaller than
some of her male contemporaries held theirs to be when they felt a
profession too narrow for their powers, and had an _a priori_
conviction that it was not worth while to put forth their latent
abilities. Because her education had been less expensive than theirs,
it did not follow that she should have wider emotions or a keener
intellectual vision. Her griefs were feminine; but to her as a woman
they were not the less hard to bear, and she felt an equal right to the
Promethean tone.

But the movement of mind which led her to keep the necklace, to fold it
up in the handkerchief, and rise to put it in her _necessaire_, where
she had first placed it when it had been returned to her, was more
peculiar, and what would be called less reasonable. It came from that
streak of superstition in her which attached itself both to her
confidence and her terror--a superstition which lingers in an intense
personality even in spite of theory and sci