impertinent inquiries
from one who never could understand, though she deeply respected, the
mysterious impulses which urged these superior beings to philanthropic
toil. For her own part she would have preferred to take the universe
less broadly.

A second effect of this crisis in Phillida's life was to drive her back
upon the example and teaching of her father. Having utterly abandoned
the leadership of Mrs. Frankland, she naturally sought support for her
self-sacrificing course of action outside of her own authority. All her
father's old letters, written to her when she was a child, were
unbundled and read over again, and some of his manuscript sermons had
the dust of years shaken from their leaves that she might con their
pages written in the dear, familiar hand.

If she had had her decision to make over again without any bolstering
from Mrs. Frankland she would have sought, for a while at least, to
establish a _modus vivendi_ between her love for Millard and the ultra
form of her religious work. But the more she thought of it the more she
considered it unlikely that her decision regarding her lover would ever
come up for revision. She accepted it now as something providential,
because inevitable, to which she must grow accustomed, an ugly fact with
which she must learn to live in peace. She had a knack of judging of
herself and her own affairs in an objective way. She would not refuse to
see merely because it was painful to her that a woman of her tastes and
pursuits was an unsuitable mate for a man of society. She admitted the
incongruity; she even tried to console herself with it. For if the break
had not come so soon, it might have come after marriage in forms more
dreadful. There was not much comfort in this--might have been worse is
but the skim-milk of consolation.

To a nature like Phillida's one door of comfort, or at least of blessed
forgetfulness, is hardly ever shut. After the first bitter week she
found hours of relief from an aching memory in her labors among the
suffering poor. Work of any kind is a sedative; sympathy with the
sorrows of others is a positive balm. Her visits to the Schulenberg
tenement were always an alleviation to her unhappiness. There she was
greeted as a beneficent angel. The happiness of Wilhelmina, of her
mother, and of her brother, for a time put Phillida almost at peace with
her destiny.

Her visits to and her prayers for other sufferers were attended with
varying success