rray of pros; and also
entire freedom to please herself and arrange her own comings and
goings. Ah! she wasn't sure that this last item in the tale of her
possessions did not go far to invalidate the rest. And yet only this
morning she had rejoiced in her freedom, and now she had discovered, or
thought she had, that here was the very root of her discontent. She
did not want this boasted freedom now that she had got it, for, put
into plain words, it meant that no one, not one human being, really
minded whether she came or went, no one claimed the service she would
so willingly have rendered to any one in a position to demand it.

How easy to say that life should mean service for others, but, so far
as she was concerned, no one wanted of her more than the cheap small
change of daily sociable intercourse, and what she longed to offer was
both hands full of gold--pure gold. She thought of the women in the
cottages she had passed that day, living hard, toilsome lives, but all
for somebody--all working day and night that loved ones might be
clothed and fed and comforted. Ah! that was the point, the crux of the
whole matter.

And having thus arrived at the nature of her trouble, she turned her
mind to finding a remedy. She arraigned herself at the bar of her
conscience on a charge of idleness, but justice dismissed the
accusation. Idle she was not, she never lacked occupations; her
reading, her music, her sewing, for she was a skilled embroideress,
more than filled her leisure hours. But who profited? Herself alone!

For a woman of her class what was there--what opening for the willing
service of hand and heart? First and foremost, marriage. Well,
marriage was, for her at all events, impossible without a great love to
sanctify the bond, and love had not come to her. Had her mother spoken
truly when she had reproved her for holding an ideal too high for this
work-a-day world? Possibly.

Of course she might do as other women she knew of, who gave up their
lives of ease and pleasure and spent their days in the crowded courts
and alleys of great cities, waging war against the giants of dirt and
ignorance and disease. Or, she thought whimsically, she could join the
ranks of Women with a capital W, and hurl herself into a vortex of
meetings and banner-wavings, like other unemployed. No, anything but
that.

Poor souls, clamouring for place and power as they imagine it, without
realising that even should they obta