ives, but she found that this was the work of women tried in the
service, who understood it, and who made her first serve her
apprenticeship by reading the German Bible to old women whose eyes
were dim, but who were as hopelessly clean and quite as
self-respecting in their way as herself. The heroism and the
self-sacrifice of a Father Damien or a Florence Nightingale were not
for her; older and wiser young women saw to that work with a quiet
matter-of-fact cheerfulness and a common-sense that bewildered her.
And they treated her kindly, but indulgently, as an outsider. It took
her some time to understand this, and she did not confess to herself
without a struggle that she was disappointed in her own usefulness;
but she brought herself to confess it to her friends "uptown," when
she visited that delightful country from which she was self-exiled.
She went there occasionally for an afternoon's rest or to a luncheon
or a particularly attractive dinner, but she always returned to the
Settlement at night, and this threw an additional interest about her
to her friends--an interest of which she was ashamed, for she knew how
little she was really doing, and that her sacrifice was one of
discomfort merely. The good she did now, it was humiliating to
acknowledge, was in no way proportionate to that which her influence
had wrought among people of her own class.

And what made it very hard was that wherever she went they seemed to
talk of him. Now it would be a girl just from the other side who had
met him on the terrace of the Lower House, "where he seemed to know
every one," and another had driven with him to Ascot, where he had
held the reins, and had shown them what a man who had guided a
mail-coach one whole winter over the mountains for a living could do
with a coach for pleasure. And many of the men had met him at the
clubs and at house parties in the country, and they declared with
enthusiastic envy that he was no end of a success. Her English friends
all wrote of him, and wanted to know all manner of little things
concerning him, and hinted that they understood they were very great
friends. The papers seemed to be always having him doing something,
and there was apparently no one else in London who could so properly
respond to the toasts of America at all the public dinners. She had
had letters from him herself--of course bright, clever ones--that
suggested what a wonderfully full and happy life his was, but with no
refere