rtable;
or whether she would turn her back upon the temptation, and shun
delights, and live laborious days.

Could she hesitate? What woman with nothing to depend upon except her
own exertions, and urged to assent (as she would be) by her only
intimate friends, would have hesitated in her place? Yet she did
hesitate, and it was necessary to weigh the reasons against accepting,
as she had dwelt upon the reasons in favor of it.

If it was easy to imagine that life at Angleford Manor might be very
peaceful and luxurious, there could be no doubt that she would have to
purchase her pleasure at the cost of a great deal of her independence.
She might be able to write, in casual and ornamental fashion; but she
felt that there would be little real sympathy with her literary
occupations, and the zest of effort and ambition which she now felt
would be gone. Moreover, independence of action counted for very little
in comparison with independence of thought--and how could she nurse her
somewhat heretical ideas in the drawing-room of a Tory High Church
squire, a member of the Oligarchy, whose friends would nearly all be
like-minded with himself? She had no right to introduce so great a
discord into his life. If she married him, she would at any rate try
(consciously, or unconsciously) to adopt his views, as the proper basis
of the partnership; and therefore to marry him unquestionably meant the
sacrifice of her independent judgment.

So much for the intellectual and material sides of the question. But,
Lettice asked herself, was that all?

No, there was something else. She had been steadily and obstinately, yet
almost unconsciously, trying to push it away from her all the time--ever
since Brooke Dalton began to betray his affection, and even before that
when Mrs. Hartley, unknown to her, kept her in ignorance of things which
she ought to have known. She had refused to face it, pressed it out of
her heart, made believe to herself that the chapter of her life which
had been written in London was closed and forgotten--and how nearly she
had succeeded! But she had not quite succeeded. It was there still--the
memory, the hope, the pity, the sacrifice.

She must not cheat herself any longer, if she would be an honest and
honorable woman. She would face the truth and not palter with it, now
that the crisis had really come. What was Alan Walcott to her? Could she
forget him, and dismiss him from her thoughts, and go to the altar with
a