of her condescension.  Poor lad!  She wondered—­for the first time since that afternoon—­what had become of him.  There had been others; a third cousin who still wrote to her from Egypt, sending her presents that perhaps he could ill afford, and whom she answered about once a year.  And promising young men she had met at Cambridge, ready, the felt instinctively, to fall down and worship her.  And 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 care of even one poor woman, I’ll come back and ask you to keep me.”  She was sitting on the arm of his chair, and laughing, she drew his head towards her and pressed it against her.  “If I succeed, if I am strong enough to fight the world for myself and win, that will mean I am strong enough and clever enough to help others.”