Hadria,"
she said emphatically; "you are wrong, wrong, wrong."

"How? why?"

"One can't have everything in this life. You must be willing to resign
part of your privileges for the sake of the far greater privileges that
you acquire."

"I can imagine nothing that would compensate for the loss of freedom,
the right to oneself."

"What about love?" murmured Henriette.

"Love!" echoed Hadria scornfully. "Do you suppose I could ever love a
man who had the paltry, ungenerous instinct to enchain me?"

"Why use such extreme terms? Love does not enchain."

"Exactly what I contend," interrupted Hadria.

"But naturally husband and wife have claims."

"Naturally. I have just been objecting to them in what you describe as
extreme terms."

"But I mean, when people care for one another, it is a joy to them to
acknowledge ties and obligations of affection."

"Ah! one knows what _that_ euphemism means!"

"Pray what does it mean?"

"That the one serious endeavour in the life of married people is to be
able to call each other's souls their own."

Henriette stared.

"My language may not be limpid."

"Oh, I see what you mean. I was only wondering who can have taught you
all these strange ideas."

Hadria at length gave way to a laugh that had been threatening for some
time.

"My mother," she observed simply.

Henriette gave it up.

CHAPTER XV.

The family had reassembled for the New Year's festivities. The change in
Algitha since her departure from home was striking. She was gentler,
more affectionate to her parents, than of yore. The tendency to grow
hard and fretful had entirely disappeared. The sense of self was
obviously lessened with the need for self-defence. Hadria discovered
that an attachment was springing up between her sister and Wilfrid
Burton, about whom she wrote so frequently, and that this development of
her emotional nature, united with her work, had given a glowing centre
to her life which showed itself in a thousand little changes of manner
and thought. Hadria told her sister that she felt herself unreal and
fanciful in her presence. "I go twirling things round and round in my
head till I grow dizzy. But you compare ideas with fact; you even turn
ideas into fact; while I can get no hold on fact at all. Thoughts rise
as mists rise from the river, but nothing happens. I feel them begin to
prey upon me, working inwards."

Algitha shook her head. "It is a mad world," she said. "Week afte