which had never been settled.

"If I stayed down, she wouldn't like it," Hilda complained fiercely
within herself, "and if I keep away she doesn't like that either! That's
mother all over!"

She went to her bedroom. And into the soft, controlled shutting of the
door she put more exasperated vehemence than would have sufficed to bang
it off its hinges.


II

At this date, late October in 1878, Hilda was within a few weeks of
twenty-one. She was a woman, but she could not realize that she was a
woman. She remembered that when she first went to school, at the age of
eight, an assistant teacher aged nineteen had seemed to her to be
unquestionably and absolutely a woman, had seemed to belong definitely
to a previous generation. The years had passed, and Hilda was now older
than that mature woman was then; and yet she could not feel adult,
though her childhood gleamed dimly afar off, and though the intervening
expanse of ten years stretched out like a hundred years, like eternity.
She was in trouble; the trouble grew daily more and more tragic; and the
trouble was that she wanted she knew not what. If her mother had said to
her squarely, "Tell me what it is will make you a bit more contented,
and you shall have it even if it kills me!" Hilda could only have
answered with the fervour of despair, "I don't know! I don't know!"

Her mother was a creature contented enough. And why not--with a
sufficient income, a comfortable home, and fair health? At the end of a