are so perfectly unconscious how
exacting you really are. For, after all, what is it you want? You want
to have that wonderful brain of yours restored, so that you may begin
to teach, and, perhaps, write a book. Well, to repeat my former words:
you are still at phase one, and you are longing to be strong enough to
fulfil your ambitions and write a book. When you arrive at I phase four,
you will be quite content to dust one of your uncle's books instead:
far more useful work and far more worthy of encouragement. If every one
who wrote books now would be satisfied to dust books already written,
what a regenerated world it would become!"

She laughed good-temperedly. His remarks did not vex her; or, at least,
she showed no vexation. He seemed to have constituted himself as her
critic, and she made no objections. She had given him little bits of
stray confidence about herself, and she received everything he had to
say with that kind of forbearance which chivalry bids us show to the
weak and ailing. She made allowances for him; but she did more than that
for him: she did not let him see that she made allowances. Moreover,
she recognized amidst all his roughness a certain kind of sympathy which
she could not resent, because it was not aggressive. For to some natures
the expression of sympathy is an irritation; to be sympathized with
means to be pitied, and to be pitied means to be looked down upon. She
was sorry for him, but she would not have told him so for worlds; he
would have shrunk from pity as much as she did. And yet the sympathy
which she thought she did not want for herself, she was silently giving
to those around her, like herself, thwarted, each in a different way
perhaps, still thwarted all the same.

She found more than once that she was learning to measure people by a
standard different from her former one; not by what they had _done_ or
_been_, but by what they had _suffered_. But such a change as this does
not come suddenly, though, in a place like Petershof, it comes quickly,
almost unconsciously.

She became immensely interested in some of the guests; and there were
curious types in the Kurhaus. The foreigners attracted her chiefly; a
little Parisian danseuse, none too quiet in her manner, won Bernardine's
fancy.

"I so want to get better, _cherie_," she said to Bernardine. "Life is so
bright. Death: ah, how the very thought makes one shiver! That horrid
doctor says I must not skate; it is not wise. Whe