r pleasures with the dreary
method and shortness of view of a race tethered to the ledger. Even the
verbal flexibility which had made her feel that she was in a world of
freer ideas, soon revealed itself as a form of flight from them, in
which the race was distinctly to the swift; and Justine's phase of
passive enjoyment passed with the return of her physical and mental
activity. She was a creature tingling with energy, a little fleeting
particle of the power that moves the sun and the other stars, and the
deadening influences of the life at Lynbrook roused these tendencies to
greater intensity, as a suffocated person will suddenly develop abnormal
strength in the struggle for air.

She did not, indeed, regret having come. She was glad to be with Bessy,
partly because of the childish friendship which had left such deep
traces in her lonely heart, and partly because what she had seen of her
friend's situation stirred in her all the impulses of sympathy and
service; but the idea of continuing in such a life, of sinking into any
of the positions of semi-dependence that an adroit and handsome girl may
create for herself in a fashionable woman's train--this possibility
never presented itself to Justine till Mrs. Ansell, that afternoon, had
put it into words. And to hear it was to revolt from it with all the
strength of her inmost nature. The thought of the future troubled her,
not so much materially--for she had a light bird-like trust in the
morrow's fare--but because her own tendencies seemed to have grown less
clear, because she could not rest in them for guidance as she had once
done. The renewal of bodily activity had not brought back her faith in
her calling: her work had lost the light of consecration. She no longer
felt herself predestined to nurse the sick for the rest of her life, and
in her inexperience she reproached herself with this instability. Youth
and womanhood were in fact crying out in her for their individual
satisfaction; but instincts as deep-seated protected her from even a
momentary illusion as to the nature of this demand. She wanted
happiness, and a life of her own, as passionately as young
flesh-and-blood had ever wanted them; but they must come bathed in the
light of imagination and penetrated by the sense of larger affinities.
She could not conceive of shutting herself into a little citadel of
personal well-being while the great tides of existence rolled on
unheeded outside. Whether they swept t