, and
there's no help for it.'

It was true; unfortunate victim of prosperity.

Next morning Adela and Alice travelled to town together. The former did
not go to Wilton Square. On the occasion of Richard's death she had met
Mrs. Mutimer, but the interview had been an extremely difficult one, in
spite of the old woman's endeavour to be courteous. Adela felt herself
to be an object of insuperable prejudice. Once again she was bidden
sound the depth of the gulf which lies between the educated and
the uneducated. The old woman would not give her hand, but made an
old-fashioned curtsey, which Adela felt to be half ironical. In speaking
of her son she was hard. Pride would not allow her to exhibit the least
symptom of the anguish which wrung her heart. She refused to accept any
share of the income which was continued to her son's widow under the
Wanley will. Alice, however, had felt no scruple in taking the half
which Adela offered her, and by paying her mother for board and lodgings
she supplemented the income derived from letting as much of the house as
possible.

Once more under the roof of her dearest friend, Adela was less
preoccupied with the sad past which afflicted her mind with the stress
of a duty ever harder to perform. After an hour passed with Stella she
could breathe freely the atmosphere of beauty and love. Elsewhere she
too often suffered from a sense of self-reproach; between her and the
book in which she tried to lose herself there would come importunate
visions of woe, of starved faces, of fierce eyes. The comfort she
enjoyed, the affection and respect with which she was surrounded,
were often burdensome to her conscience. In Stella's presence all that
vanished; listening to Stella's voice she could lay firm hold on the
truth that there is a work in the cause of humanity other than that
which goes on so clamorously in lecture halls and at street corners,
other than that which is silently performed by faithful hearts and hands
in dens of misery and amid the horrors of the lazar-house; the work
of those whose soul is taken captive of loveliness, who pursue the
spiritual ideal apart from the world's tumult, and, ever ready to
minister in gentle offices, know that they serve best when nearest home.
She was far from spiritual arrogance; her natural mood was a profound
humility; she deemed herself rather below than above the active toilers,
whose sweat was sacred; but life had declared that such toil was not f