as thrown from the first into a society
which her clergyman brother, who had never seen it, pronounced to be
frivolous, worldly, profane, but which no one has called dull. There
were many facets in Hester's character, and Lady Susan had managed to
place her where they caught the light. Was she witty? Was she
attractive? Who shall say? Man is wisely averse to "cleverness" in a
woman, but if he possesses any armor wherewith to steel himself against
wit it is certain that he seldom puts it on. She refused several offers,
one so brilliant that no woman ever believed that it was really made.

Lady Susan saw that her niece, without a fortune, with little beauty
save that of high breeding, with weak health, was becoming a personage.
"What will she become?" people said. And in the meanwhile Hester did
nothing beyond dressing extremely well. And everything she saw and every
person she met added fuel to an unlit fire in her soul.

At last Rachel was able to earn a meagre living by type-writing, and for
four years, happy by contrast with those when despair and failure had
confronted her, she lived by the work of her hands among those poor as
herself. Gradually she had lost sight of all her acquaintances. She had
been out of the school-room for too short a time to make friends. And,
alas! in the set in which she had been launched poverty was a crime; no,
perhaps not quite that, but as much a bar to intercourse as in another
class a want of the letter _h_ is found to be.

It was while Rachel was still struggling for a livelihood that the event
happened which changed the bias of her character, as a geranium
transplanted from the garden changes its attitude in a cottage window.

On one of the early days of her despair she met on the dreary stairs of
the great rabbit-warren in which she had a room, a man with whom she
had been acquainted in the short year of her social life before the
collapse of her fortunes. He had paid her considerable attention, and
she had thought once or twice, with momentary bitterness, that, like the
rest, he had not cared to find out what had become of her. She greeted
him with shy but evident pleasure. She took for granted he had come to
see her, and he allowed her to remain under that delusion. In reality he
had been hunting up an old model whom he wanted for his next picture,
and who had silently left Museum Buildings some months before without
leaving his address. He had genuinely admired her, though he