rtunity presented itself to her of doing
any good for man or woman. She asked herself sometimes whether she had
not been impatient and wilful in her dealings with the people at home.
She still, when in a self-questioning and penitential mood, thought and
spoke of Keeton as "home," and whether she had not done wrong in
leaving the material enclosure of any place bearing even by tradition
the name of home, for a life of freedom which some censors might have
thought unwomanly. There are metaphysicians who hold that, although man
of his nature has no intuitive knowledge, yet that the accumulated
experience of generations supplies gradually for men, as they are born,
a something which is like intuition to start with, and which they could
not now start clear of. So the experience or the traditions of
generations form a sort of factitious and accumulated conscience for
women independent of any abstract or eternal laws, and amounting in
strength to something like intuition. Over this shadow they cannot
leap. Minola, filled as she was with a peculiarly independent spirit,
and driven by circumstances to consider its indulgence a right and even
a duty, could not keep from the occasional torment of a doubt whether
there must not be something wrong in the conduct of any woman who,
under any circumstances, leaves voluntarily, and while she is yet under
age, the home of her childhood, and takes up her abode among strangers,
without guardians, mistress of herself, and in lodgings.

Perhaps some such ideas were in Minola's mind when she left Mary
Blanchet, a few mornings after the meetings described in the last
chapter, and set out for a pleasant lonely walk in Regent's Park.
Perhaps it was the very pleasure of the walk, and the loneliness, now
missed for some days, that made her dread being selfish, and sent her
down into a drooping and penitent reaction. "This will never do," she
kept thinking. "I ought to try to do something for somebody. I am
growing to think only of myself--and I broke away from Keeton because I
was getting morbid in thinking about myself."

It was in this remorseful condition of mind that she approached her
favorite mound, longing for an hour of quiet delight there, and half
ashamed of her longing. When she had nearly reached its height, she
discerned that the fates had seemingly resolved to punish her for her
love of solitariness, by decreeing that her chosen retreat should that
day be occupied. There was a seat