s, jealous
competition in useless expenditure, husband-hunting, flirting, dancing,
theatres, and concerts. The last three, which Agatha liked, helped to
make the contrast between Alton and London tolerable to her, but
they had their drawbacks, for good partners at the dances, and good
performances at the spiritless opera and concerts, were disappointingly
scarce. Flirting she could not endure; she drove men away when they
became tender, seeing in them the falsehood of Smilash without his wit.
She was considered rude by the younger gentlemen of her circle. They
discussed her bad manners among themselves, and agreed to punish her by
not asking her to dance. She thus got rid, without knowing why, of
the attentions she cared for least (she retained a schoolgirl's cruel
contempt for "boys"), and enjoyed herself as best she could with such of
the older or more sensible men as were not intolerant of girls.

At best the year was the least happy she had ever spent. She repeatedly
alarmed her mother by broaching projects of becoming a hospital nurse,
a public singer, or an actress. These projects led to some desultory
studies. In order to qualify herself as a nurse she read a handbook of
physiology, which Mrs. Wylie thought so improper a subject for a young
lady that she went in tears to beg Mrs. Jansenius to remonstrate with
her unruly girl. Mrs. Jansenius, better advised, was of opinion that the
more a woman knew the more wisely she was likely to act, and that Agatha
would soon drop the physiology of her own accord. This proved true.
Agatha, having finished her book by dint of extensive skipping,
proceeded to study pathology from a volume of clinical lectures. Finding
her own sensations exactly like those described in the book as symptoms
of the direst diseases, she put it by in alarm, and took up a novel,
which was free from the fault she had found in the lectures, inasmuch
as none of the emotions it described in the least resembled any she had
ever experienced.

After a brief interval, she consulted a fashionable teacher of singing
as to whether her voice was strong enough for the operatic stage. He
recommended her to study with him for six years, assuring her that at
the end of that period--if she followed his directions--she should be
the greatest singer in the world. To this there was, in her mind, the
conclusive objection that in six years she should be an old woman. So
she resolved to try privately whether she could not