assumption. They go to the
grave with an unbroken confidence that somewhere behind all the
immediate injustices and disorders of life, behind the antics of
politics, the rigidities of institutions, the pressure of custom and the
vagaries of law, there is wisdom and purpose and adequate provision,
they never lose that faith in the human household they acquired amongst
the directed securities of home. But for more of us and more there comes
a dissolution of these assurances; there comes illumination as the day
comes into a candle-lit uncurtained room. The warm lights that once
rounded off our world so completely are betrayed for what they are,
smoky and guttering candles. Beyond what once seemed a casket of dutiful
security is now a limitless and indifferent universe. Ours is the wisdom
or there is no wisdom; ours is the decision or there is no decision.
That burthen is upon each of us in the measure of our capacity. The
talent has been given us and we may not bury it.

Sec.7

And as we reckon up the disturbing influences that were stirring Lady
Harman out of that life of acquiescences to which women are perhaps
even more naturally disposed than men, we may pick out the conversation
of Susan Burnet as something a little apart from the others, as
something with a peculiar barbed pointedness of its own that was yet in
other respects very representative of a multitude of nudges and nips and
pricks and indications that life was giving Lady Harman's awaking mind.
Susan Burnet was a woman who came to renovate and generally do up the
Putney curtains and furniture and loose covers every spring; she was
Mrs. Crumble's discovery, she was sturdy and short and she had open blue
eyes and an engaging simplicity of manner that attracted Lady Harman
from the outset. She was stuck away in one of the spare bedrooms and
there she was available for any one, so long, she explained, as they
didn't fluster her when she was cutting out, with a flow of conversation
that not even a mouth full of pins seemed to interrupt. And Lady Harman
would go and watch Susan Burnet by the hour together and think what an
enviably independent young woman she was, and listen with interest and
something between horror and admiration to the various impressions of
life she had gathered during a hardy and adventurous career.

Their early conversations were about Susan Burnet's business and the
general condition of things in that world of upholsterers' young women