n Miss Martin's
place--of all mental operations one of the most difficult to achieve
successfully. Lady Gore's sheer power of sympathy might enable her to
get nearer to it than many people, but still she inevitably reckoned up
the balance, after the fashion of our kind, seeing only one side of the
scale and not knowing what was in the other, and as she did so, it
seemed to her still possible that Miss Martin might have the best of it,
or at any rate might not fall so short of the best as at first appeared.
For in spite of her age she still had the great inestimable boon of
health; she was well, she was independent, she could, when it seemed
good to her, get up and go out and join in the life of other people.
While as for herself ... and again the feeling of impotent misery, of
rebellion against her own destiny, came over Lady Gore like a wave whose
strength she was powerless to resist. For since the rheumatic fever
which five years ago had left her practically an incurable invalid, the
effort to accept her fate still needed to be constantly renewed; an
effort that had to be made alone, for the acceptance of such a fate by
those who surround the sufferer is generally made, more or less, once
for all in a moment of emotion, and then gradually becomes part of the
habitual circumstance of daily life. Mercifully she did not realise all
at once the thing that had happened to her. In the first days when she
was returning to health--she who up to the time of her illness had been
so full of life and energy--the mere pleasure in existence, the mere joy
of the summer's day in which she could lie near an open window, look out
on the world and the people in it, was enough; she was too languid to
want to do more. Then her strength slowly returned, and with it the
desire to resume her ordinary life. But weeks passed in which she still
remained at the same stage, they lengthened into months, and brought her
gradually a horrible misgiving. Then, at last, despairingly she faced
the truth, and knew that from all she had been in the habit of doing,
from all that she had meant to do, she was cut off for ever. She began
to realise then, as people do who, unable to carry their treasures with
them, look over them despairingly before they cast them away one by one,
all that her ambitions had been. She smiled bitterly to herself during
the hours in which she lay there looking her fate in the face and trying
to encounter it with becoming courage, a