of the North.

The tired spirit translated the homely English country, so deeply
reposeful in its spirit, into an image of dull unrest. If only those
broken, stupid lines could have been smoothed out into the grandeur of a
plain, Hadria thought that it would have comforted her, as if a song had
moved across it with the long-stretching winds. As it was, to look from
her window only meant to find repeated the trivialities of life, more
picturesque indeed, but still trivialities. It was the estimable and
domestic qualities of Nature that presented themselves: Nature in her
most maternal and uninspired mood--Mother earth submissive to the
dictatorship of man, permitting herself to be torn, and wounded, and
furrowed, and harrowed at his pleasure, yielding her substance and her
life to sustain the produce of his choosing, her body and her soul
abandoned supine to his caprice. The sight had an exasperating effect
upon Hadria. Its symbolism haunted her. The calm, sweet English
landscape affected her at times with a sort of disgust. It was, perhaps,
the same in kind as the far stronger sensation of disgust that she felt
when she first saw Lady Engleton with her new-born child, full of pride
and exultation. It was as much as she could do to shake hands with the
happy mother.

When Valeria expressed dismay at so strange a feeling Hadria had refused
to be treated as a solitary sinner. There were plenty of
fellow-culprits, she said, only they did not dare to speak out. Let
Valeria study girls and judge for herself.

Hadria was challenged to name a girl.

Well, Algitha for one. Hadria also suspected Marion Jordan, well-drilled
though she was by her dragoon of a mother.

Valeria would not hear of it. Marion Jordan! the gentlest, timidest,
most typical of young English girls! Impossible!

"I am almost sure of it, nevertheless," said Hadria. "Oh, believe me, it
is common enough! Few grasp it intellectually perhaps, but thousands
feel the insult; of that I am morally certain."

"What leads you to think so in Marion's case?"

"Some look, or tone, or word; something slight, but to my mind
conclusive. Fellow-sinners detect one another, you know."

"Well, I don't understand what the world is coming to!" exclaimed Miss
Du Prel. "Where are the natural instincts?"

"Sprouting up for the first time perhaps," Hadria suggested.

"They seem to be disappearing, if what you say has the slightest
foundation."

"Oh, you are speaking of o