ses. Women in
ugly houses buy some new piece of ugliness, and find it beautiful, and
rejoice. Babies toddle about--fat, pretty things, with curly mops."

She stared at me blankly.

"Curly mops! What does it matter whether their hair curls or not? Ah,
my dear, in such circumstances children are not all joy. I had a letter
from a friend the other day--Lady Templar. We were at school together.
Her nephew, Wenham Thorold, has lost his wife. Married at twenty-three.
So silly! A clergyman's daughter, without a sou. Now, of course, she
dies, and leaves him with five small children."

"Very inconsiderate!"

"Very inconvenient for the poor man! Only thirty-five, and a baby in
arms. How will it help him if its hair curls? He puts the elder
children to bed himself after his day's work. Quite pathetic to hear
of! Wouldn't he have been happier with one?"

"Possibly--for the present. Later on the five will help _him_, and he
will be glad and proud."

"Children dragged up by strangers are not always a credit and pride. I
hope these may be, but--If you'd heard my friend's tales! They live in
a flat. Quite a cheap block in some unfashionable neighbourhood. _No_
society. He has one small maid and a housekeeper to look after the
children. Most inefficient, Adela says. Holes in their stockings, and
shrieks the moment their father is out of the building!"

"What was he like?"

"He? Who? Oh, the poor father! Handsome, she said, but haggard. The
Templar nose. Poor, helpless man!"

A horrible feeling surged over me. I felt it rise, swell, crash over my
head like a flood of water--a conviction that I was listening to no
tale, but to a _call_--that Providence had heard my cry for work, and
had answered it in the person of Wenham Thorold--handsome and haggard--
in the person of little Thorold girls with holes in their stockings, of
little Thorold boys who shrieked, and a Thorold baby with problematic
hair that might, or might not, curl.

I cowered at the prospect. All very well to talk of my own way, and my
own niche, all very well to dream of fairy wands, and of the soothing,
self-ingratiating role of transforming other people's grey into gold,
while the said people sat agape, transfixed with gratitude and
admiration, _but_--how extraordinarily prosaic and unromantic the
process became when worked out in sober black and white. To mend
stockings, to stifle shrieks, to be snubbed by a cross housekeeper;
p