or lack of
intrepidity; paralyzed by her masterful lord; aiming her highest at
a gilt weathercock; and a disappointed creature, her breast a home of
serpents; never herself. She thought and hoped she was herself now.
Alarm lest this might be another of her moods, victim of moods as she
had latterly been, was a shadow armed with a dart playing round her to
find the weak spot. It sprang from her acknowledged weakness of nature;
and she cast about for how to keep it outside her and lean on a true
though a small internal support. She struck at her desires, to sound
them.

They were yesterday for love; partly for distinction, for a woman having
beauty to shine in the sphere of beauty; but chiefly to love and be
loved, therefore to live. She had yesterday read letters of a man
who broke a music from the word--about as much music as there is in
a tuning--fork, yet it rang and lingered; and he was not the magical
musician. Now those letters were as dust of the road. The sphere of
beauty was a glass lamp-globe for delirious moths. She had changed.
Belief in the real change gave her full view of the compliant coward she
had been.

Her heart assured her she had natural courage. She felt that it could be
stubborn to resist a softness. Now she cared no more for the hackneyed
musical word; friendship was her desire. If it is not life's poetry, it
is a credible prose; a land of low undulations instead of Alps; beyond
the terrors and the deceptions. And she could trust her friend: he who
was a singular constancy. His mother had told her of his preserving
letters of a girl he loved when at school; and of his journeys to an
empty house at Dover. That was past; but, as the boy, so the man would
be in sincerity of feeling trustworthy to the uttermost.

She mused on the friend. He was brave. She had seen how he took his
blow, and sorrow as a sister, conquering emotion. It was not to be
expected of him by one who knew him when at school. Had he faults? He
must have faults. She, curiously, could see none. After consenting to
his career as a schoolmaster, and seeing nothing ludicrous in it, she
endowed him with the young school-hero's reputation, beheld him with the
eyes of the girl who had loved him--and burnt his old letters!--bitterly
regretted that she burnt his letters!--and who had applauded his
contempt of ushers and master opposing his individual will and the thing
he thought it right to do.

Musing thus, she turned a corner, on a