d make any service absorbing. The actual truth was
that if she had been a housemaid, the room she set in order would have
taken a character under her touch; if she had been a seamstress, her
work would have been swiftly done, her imagination would have invented
for her combinations of form and colour; if she had been a nursemaid,
the children under her care would never have been sufficiently bored
to become tiresome or intractable, and they also would have gained
character to which would have been added an undeniable vividness of
outlook. She could not have left them alone, so to speak. In obeying the
mere laws of her being, she would have stimulated them. Unconsciously
she had stimulated her fellow pupils at school; when she was his
companion, her father had always felt himself stirred to interest and
enterprise.

"You ought to have been a man, Betty," he used to say to her sometimes.

But Betty had not agreed with him.

"You say that," she once replied to him, "because you see I am inclined
to do things, to change them, if they need changing. Well, one is either
born like that, or one is not. Sometimes I think that perhaps the people
who must ACT are of a distinct race. A kind of vigorous restlessness
drives them. I remember that when I was a child I could not see a pin
lying upon the ground without picking it up, or pass a drawer which
needed closing, without giving it a push. But there has always been as
much for women to do as for men."

There was much to be done here of one sort of thing and another. That
was certain. As she gazed through the small panes of her large windows,
she found herself overlooking part of a wilderness of garden, which
revealed itself through an arch in an overgrown laurel hedge. She had
glimpses of unkempt grass paths and unclipped topiary work which had
lost its original form. Among a tangle of weeds rose the heads of clumps
of daffodils, stirred by a passing wind of spring. In the park beyond a
cuckoo was calling.

She was conscious both of the forlorn beauty and significance of the
neglected garden, and of the clear quaintness of the cuckoo call, as she
thought of other things.

"Her spirit and her health are broken," was her summing up. "Her
prettiness has faded to a rag. She is as nervous as an ill-treated
child. She has lost her wits. I do not know where to begin with her.
I must let her tell me things as gradually as she chooses. Until I see
Nigel I shall not know what his me