oning
animal. Her sister arranged situations for her, told her how to conduct
herself in them, how to make up anew, in unobtrusive shapes, the valuable
wearing apparel she sent from time to time--so as to provoke neither
exasperation in the little gentry, nor superciliousness in the great.
Ethelberta did everything for her, in short; and Picotee obeyed orders
with the abstracted ease of mind which people show who have their
thinking done for them, and put out their troubles as they do their
washing. She was quite willing not to be clever herself, since it was
unnecessary while she had a much-admired sister, who was clever enough
for two people and to spare.

This arrangement, by which she gained an untroubled existence in exchange
for freedom of will, had worked very pleasantly for Picotee until the
anomaly of falling in love on her own account created a jar in the
machinery. Then she began to know how wearing were miserable days, and
how much more wearing were miserable nights. She pictured Christopher in
London calling upon her dignified sister (for Ethelberta innocently
mentioned his name sometimes in writing) and imagined over and over again
the mutual signs of warm feeling between them. And now Picotee resolved
upon a noble course. Like Juliet, she had been troubled with a
consciousness that perhaps her love for Christopher was a trifle forward
and unmaidenly, even though she had determined never to let him or
anybody in the whole world know of it. To set herself to pray that she
might have strength to see him without a pang the lover of her sister,
who deserved him so much more than herself, would be a grand penance and
corrective.

After uttering petitions to this effect for several days, she still felt
very bad; indeed, in the psychological difficulty of striving for what in
her soul she did not desire, rather worse, if anything. At last, weary
of walking the old road and never meeting him, and blank in a general
powerlessness, she wrote the letter to Ethelberta, which was only the
last one of a series that had previously been written and torn up.

Now this hope had been whirled away like thistledown, and the case was
grievous enough to distract a greater stoic than Picotee. The end of it
was that she left the school on insufficient notice, gave up her cottage
home on the plea--true in the letter--that she was going to join a
relative in London, and went off thither by a morning train, leaving her
th