he but a god in exile, bending great powers and a splendid character
upon ridiculously unimportant interests? Indeed, was not his destiny,
more or less, their destiny as a family? Henry would escape from it
through literature, and she through Mike. But what of Dot, what of Mat,
not yet to speak of "the children"?

All she envied Marie Bashkirtseff was her opportunity. Great Goddess
Opportunity! So much had come to Marie in the cradle, and came daily to
a hundred thousand insignificant aristocratic babes, to approach which
for the Mesuriers, even ten years too late, meant convulsions of the
home, and to attain which in any satisfactory degree was probably
impossible. French, for example, and music! Why, if so disposed, Marie
Bashkirtseff might have read old French romances at ten, and to play
Chopin at an earlier age was not surprising in the opportunitied,
so-called "aristocratic" infant. Oh, why had they not been born like the
other Sidonians, whose natures and ideals had been mercifully calculated
to the meridian of Sidon! Why didn't they think the Proudfoots and the
Wilkinsons and the Wagstaffs, and other local nobody-somebodies, people
of importance, and why did they think the mayor a ludicrous upstart,
and the adjacent J.P. a sententious old idiot? Far better to have rested
content in that state of life to which God had called them. To talk
French, or to play Chopin! What did it matter? In one sense nothing, but
in another it mattered like other convenient facilities of life. To the
immortal soul it mattered nothing, but to the mortal social unit it made
life the easier, made the passage of ideas, the intercourse of
individualities, the readier, and, in general, facilitated spiritual and
intellectual, as well as social, communication. To be first-rate
in your instincts, in all your fibres, and third-rate in your
opportunities,--that was a bitter indignity of circumstance.