would also, she imagined, begin to avail herself of those
conceded liberties which their isolation together abroad and her
husband's constant need of her presence had so far prevented her from
tasting. She had an idea that Susan Burnet might prove suggestive about
the Hostels.

And moreover, if now and then she could have a good talk with someone
understanding and intelligent, someone she could trust, someone who
cared enough for her to think with her and for her....

Sec.3

We have traced thus far the emergence of Lady Harman from that state of
dutiful subjection and social irresponsibility which was the lot of
woman in the past to that limited, ill-defined and quite unsecured
freedom which is her present condition. And now we have to give an
outline of the ideas of herself and her uses and what she had to do,
which were forming themselves in her mind. She had made a determination
of herself, which carried her along the lines of her natural
predisposition, to duty, to service. There she displayed that acceptance
of responsibility which is so much more often a feminine than a
masculine habit of thinking. But she brought to the achievement of this
determination a discriminating integrity of mind that is more frequently
masculine than feminine. She wanted to know clearly what she was
undertaking and how far its consequences would reach and how it was
related to other things.

Her confused reading during the last few years and her own observation
and such leakages of fact into her life as the talk of Susan Burnet, had
all contributed to her realization that the world was full of needless
discomfort and hardships and failure, due to great imperfectly
apprehended injustices and maladjustments in the social system, and
recently it had been borne in upon her, upon the barbed point of the
_London Lion_ and the quick tongue of Susan, that if any particular
class of people was more answerable than any other for these evils, it
was the people of leisure and freedom like herself, who had time to
think, and the directing organizing people like her husband, who had
power to change. She was called upon to do something, at times the call
became urgent, and she could not feel any assurance which it was of the
many vague and conflicting suggestions that came drifting to her that
she had to do. Her idea of Hostels for the International waitresses had
been wrung out of her prematurely during her earlier discussions with
her husband.