always seemed to carry about with him than anything connected with my own
work. At least, of course, I mean before that Nuneham day. Ah, that
Nuneham day! It cut deep."

'She turned away from me, and leant over the side of the boat, so that I
could not see her face.

'"You forced it out of Eustace, you know," I said, trying to laugh at
her, "you uncompromising young person! Of course, he flattered himself
that you forgot all about his preaching the moment you got home. Men
always make themselves believe what they want to believe."

'"Why should he want to believe so?" she replied quickly. "I had half
foreseen it, I had forced it from him, and yet I felt it like a blow! It
cost me a sleepless night, and some--well, some very bitter tears. Not
that the tears were a new experience. How often, after all that noise at
the theatre, have I gone home and cried myself to sleep over the
impossibility of doing what I wanted to do, of moving those hundreds of
people, of making them feel, and of putting my own feeling into shape!
But that night, and with my sense of illness just then, I saw myself--it
seemed to me quite in the near future--grown old and ugly, a forgotten
failure, without any of those memories which console people who have been
great when they must give up. I felt myself struggling against such a
weight of ignorance, of bad habits, of unfavourable surroundings. How was
I ever to get free and to reverse that judgment of Mr. Kendal's? My very
success stood in my way, How was 'Miss Bretherton' to put herself to
school?"

'"But now," I said to her warmly, "you have got free; or, rather, you are
on the way to freedom."