irst time since her return, into her own bedroom, and
stood looking down on the hearth, where the servants had forgotten to
light the sticks that were laid cross-wise on the andirons. It was the
habit of those about her to forget her existence, except when she
was needed to render service, and after more than fifty years of such
omissions, she had ceased, even in her thought, to pass judgment upon
them. In her youth she had rebelled fiercely--rebelled against nature,
against the universe, against the fundamental injustice that divided her
sister's lot from her own. Generations existed only to win love or to
bestow it. Inheritance, training, temperament, all combined to develop
the racial instinct within her, yet something stronger than these--some
external shaping of clay--had unfitted her for the purpose for which
she was designed. And since, in the eyes of her generation, any
self-expression from a woman, which was not associated with sex, was
an affront to convention, that single gift of hers was doomed to wither
away in the hot-house air that surrounded her. A man would have struck
for freedom, and have made a career for himself in the open world, but
her nature was rooted deep in the rich and heavy soil from which she
had tried to detach it. Years after her first fight, on the day of her
mother's death, she had suffered a brief revival of youth; and then she
had pulled in vain at the obstinate tendrils that held her to the spot
in which she had grown. She was no longer penniless, she was no longer
needed, but she was crushed. The power of revolt was the gift of
youth. Middle-age could put forth only a feeble and ineffectual
resistance--words without passion, acts without abandonment. At times
she still felt the old burning sense of injustice, the old resentment
against life, but this passed quickly now, and she grew quiet as soon
as her eyes fell on the flat, spare figure, a little bent in the
chest, which her mirror revealed to her. The period was full of woman's
advancement--a peaceful revolution had triumphed around her--yet she had
taken no part in it, and the knowledge left her unmoved. She had read
countless novels that acclaimed hysterically the wrongs of her sex, but
beneath the hysterics she had perceived the fact that the newer woman
who grasped successfully the right to live, was as her elder sister
who had petitioned merely for the privilege to love. The modern heroine
could still charm even after she had