“My happiness is altogether different from Flora’s,” she replied, “though we were brought up side by side.  What has taught me to be independent of the world and its notice was my being continually compared with her, and assured, with compassionate regret, that I had none of those qualifications which could give me success in general society.”

“Which was a libel—­” I began.

“Without the last syllable,” said Flora, catching up the word.

“At any rate, I knew I was plain and shy, and made friends slowly.  So I chose such pleasures as should be under my own control, and could never fail me.  They make my life so much happier and more precious than it was ten years ago, that I feel certain I shall have a wider and fuller enjoyment of the same ten years hence.”

What they are, I partly guess, and partly drew from her, in her uncommonly frank mood.  I begin to perceive that I, as well as Flora, have been cherishing most mistaken and unsatisfactory aims.  My surly old inner self has often hinted as much, but I would not hear him.  Etty may have her mistaken views too, but she has set me thinking.

Well, you crusty old curmudgeon, what has been my course since the awe of the schoolmaster ceased to be a sort of external conscience?

“You told me study was none of my business,” says Conscience, “and a pretty piece of work you have made of it without me.  Idle in college, and, when you began to perceive the connection between study and what people call success in life, overworking yourself, here you are, and just beginning to bethink yourself that I might have furnished just the right degree of stimulus, if you had but allowed it.”—­

Hark! hark!  It is the duet!  That silvery second is Etty’s.  I will steal down stairs, and when they have ended, pop in, and it shall go hard but I will have another song.

Parlor dark and empty.  I fancied I heard Flora giggling somewhere, but I might be mistaken.  Yet the voices sounded as if they came from that quarter—­and—­and I am sure I heard one note on the piano to give the pitch.  Hark!  I hear the parlor door softly shut, and now the stairs creak, and betray them stealing up, as they probably betrayed me stealing down.  They only blew out the lights and kept perfectly still.—­Witches!—­Donkey!

Etty, your voice is still with me, clear, sweet, and penetrating, as it was when you talked so eloquently to-night, in our dreamy ramble.—­ What if I had early adopted her idea, that with every conscious power is bound up both the duty and the pleasure of developing it?  Might I not now have reached higher ground, with health of body and mind?  Ambition is an unhealthy stimulus.  A wretchedly uneasy guest too, in the breast of an invalid.  I would fain have a purer motive, which shall dismiss or control it.

Etty,—­what are the uses to be made of her talents, while she lives thus withdrawn into a world of her own?  Certainly, she is wrong; I shall convince her of it, when our friendship, now fairly planted, I trust, shall have taken root.  Now we shall be the best friends in the world, and I will confide to her my—­my—­O, I am nodding over my paper, and that click says the old clock at the stair-head is making ready to announce midnight.