er what only school life can do.
This experience, though held needless and doubtful in many opinions,
Estelle felt to miss and her conscience prompted her to go to London and
mix with other people, while her inclination tempted her to stop with
her father. She went to London for two years and worked upon a woman's
newspaper. Then she fell ill and came home and spent her time with
Arthur Waldron, with Raymond Ironsyde, and with Ernest Churchouse. A
girl friend or two from London also came to visit her.

She recovered perfect health, and having contracted a great new worship
for poetry in her convalescence, retained it afterwards. Ernest was her
ally, for he loved poetry--an understanding denied to her other friends.
So Estelle passed through a period of dreaming, while her intellect grew
larger and her human sympathy no less. She had developed into a handsome
woman with regular features, a large and almost stately presence and a
direct, undraped manner not shadowed as yet by any ray of sex instinct.
Nature, with her many endowments, chose to withhold the feminine
challenge. She was as stark and pure as the moon. Young men, drawn by
her smile, fled from her self. Her father's friends regarded her much as
he did: with a sort of uneasy admiration. The people were fond of her,
and older women declared that she would never marry.

Of such was Miss Jenny Ironsyde. "Estelle's children will be good
works," she told Raymond. For she and her nephew were friends again. The
steady tides of time had washed away her prophecy of eternal enmity, and
increasing infirmity made her seek companionship where she could find
it. Moreover, she remembered a word that she had spoken to Raymond in
the past, when she told him how a grudge entertained by one human being
against another poisons character and ruins the steadfast outlook upon
life. She escaped that danger.

It is a quality of small minds rather than of great to remain unchanged.
They fossilise more quickly, are more concentrated, have a power to
freeze into a mould and preserve it against the teeth of time, or the
wit and wisdom of the world. The result is ugly or beautiful, according
to the emotion thus for ever embalmed. The loves of such people are
intuitive--shared with instinct and above, or below, reason; their hate
is similarly impenetrable--preserved in a vacuum. For only a vacuum can
hold the sweet for ever untainted, or the bitter for ever unalloyed.
Mary Dinnett belonged t