all the use she had had
for them was to convert them to her views--a task so easy as to be quite
uninteresting--with a vague idea that they might come in handy in the
future, when she might need help in shaping that world of the future.

Only once had she ever thought of marriage. And that was in favour of a
middle-aged, rheumatic widower with three children, a professor of
chemistry, very learned and justly famous. For about a month she had
thought herself in love. She pictured herself devoting her life to him,
rubbing his poor left shoulder where it seemed he suffered most, and
brushing his picturesque hair, inclined to grey. Fortunately his eldest
daughter was a young woman of resource, or the poor gentleman, naturally
carried off his feet by this adoration of youth and beauty, might have
made an ass of himself. But apart from this one episode she had reached
the age of twenty-three heart-whole.

She rose and replaced the chair. And suddenly a wave of pity passed over
her for the dead woman, who had always seemed so lonely in the great
stiffly-furnished house, and the tears came.

She was glad she had been able to cry. She had always hated herself for
her lack of tears; it was so unwomanly. Even as a child she had rarely
cried.

Her father had always been very tender, very patient towards her mother,
but she had not expected to find him so changed. He had aged and his
shoulders drooped. She had been afraid that he would want her to stay
with him and take charge of the house. It had worried her considerably.
It would be so difficult to refuse, and yet she would have to. But when
he never broached the subject she was hurt. He had questioned her about
her plans the day after the funeral, and had seemed only anxious to
assist them. She proposed continuing at Cambridge till the end of the
term. She had taken her degree the year before. After that, she would
go to London and commence her work.

"Let me know what allowance you would like me to make you, when you have
thought it out. Things are not what they were at the works, but there
will always be enough to keep you in comfort," he had told her. She had
fixed it there and then at two hundred a year. She would not take more,
and that only until she was in a position to keep herself.

"I want to prove to myself," she explained, "that I am capable of earning
my own living. I am going down into the market-place. If I'm no good,
if I can't take car