chance. He had gone down on his knees and kissed her feet, and had been
so abject, so pitiful that she had given him some flowers she was
wearing. And he had sworn to dedicate the rest of his life to being
worthy 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