ness of
circumstances, the narrow theatre which life offers to a girl of
twenty, who cannot conceive herself as anything else than a lady, or as
in any position which would lack the tribute of respect. She had no
permanent consciousness of other fetters, or of more spiritual
restraints, having always disliked whatever was presented to her under
the name of religion, in the same way that some people dislike
arithmetic and accounts: it had raised no other emotion in her, no
alarm, no longing; so that the question whether she believed it, had
not occurred to her, any more than it had occurred to her to inquire
into the conditions of colonial property and banking, on which, as she
had had many opportunities of knowing, the family fortune was
dependent. All these facts about herself she would have been ready to
admit, and even, more or less indirectly, to state. What she
unwillingly recognized, and would have been glad for others to be
unaware of, was that liability of hers to fits of spiritual dread,
though this fountain of awe within her had not found its way into
connection with the religion taught her, or with any human relations.
She was ashamed and frightened, as at what might happen again, in
remembering her tremor on suddenly feeling herself alone, when, for
example, she was walking without companionship and there came some
rapid change in the light. Solitude in any wide scene impressed her
with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her, in
the midst of which she was helplessly incapable of asserting herself.
The little astronomy taught her at school used sometimes to set her
imagination at work in a way that made her tremble; but always when
some one joined her she recovered her indifference to the vastness in
which she seemed an exile; she found again her usual world, in which
her will was of some avail, and the religious nomenclature belonging to
this world was no more identified for her with those uneasy impressions
of awe than her uncle's surplices seen out of use at the rectory. With
human ears and eyes about her, she had always hitherto recovered her
confidence, and felt the possibility of winning empire.

Her difficulties all came out of this egoistic spirit, this want of
spiritual anchorage and religious faith. Gradually her bitter experiences
awakened in her a de