h your capacity and
intelligence, joined to your love of pleasure, and your impatience of
unreasonable restraint--of what you would have been in that past. And
even now, when all is won and has been for a long time, my heart is
sickened with thinking of all the waste of life that has gone on for so
many years."

"So many centuries," she said, "so many ages!"

"True," I said; "too true," and sat silent again.

She rose up and said: "Come, I must not let you go off into a dream again
so soon. If we must lose you, I want you to see all that you can see
first before you go back again."

"Lose me?" I said--"go back again? Am I not to go up to the North with
you? What do you mean?"

She smiled somewhat sadly, and said: "Not yet; we will not talk of that
yet. Only, what were you thinking of just now?"

I said falteringly: "I was saying to myself, The past, the present?
Should she not have said the contrast of the present with the future: of
blind despair with hope?"

"I knew it," she said. Then she caught my hand and said excitedly,
"Come, while there is yet time! Come!" And she led me out of the room;
and as we were going downstairs and out of the house into the garden by a
little side door which opened out of a curious lobby, she said in a calm
voice, as if she wished me to forget her sudden nervousness: "Come! we
ought to join the others before they come here looking for us. And let
me tell you, my friend, that I can see you are too apt to fall into mere
dreamy musing: no doubt because you are not yet used to our life of
repose amidst of energy; of work which is pleasure and pleasure which is
work."

She paused a little, and as we came out into the lovely garden again, she
said: "My friend, you were saying that you wondered what I should have
been if I had lived in those past days of turmoil and oppression. Well,
I think I have studied the history of them to know pretty well. I should
have been one of the poor, for my father when he was working was a mere
tiller of the soil. Well, I could not have borne that; therefore my
beauty and cleverness and brightness" (she spoke with no blush or simper
of false shame) "would have been sold to rich men, and my life would have
been wasted indeed; for I know enough of that to know that I should have
had no choice, no power of will over my life; and that I should never
have bought pleasure from the rich men, or even opportunity of action,
whereby I might have won so