You forced it out of Eustace, you know," I said, trying to laugh at
her, "you uncompromising young person! Of course, he flattered himself
that you forgot all about his preaching the moment you got home. Men
always make themselves believe what they want to believe."

'"Why should he want to believe so?" she replied quickly. "I had half
foreseen it, I had forced it from him, and yet I felt it like a blow! It
cost me a sleepless night, and some--well, some very bitter tears. Not
that the tears were a new experience. How often, after all that noise at
the theatre, have I gone home and cried myself to sleep over the
impossibility of doing what I wanted to do, of moving those hundreds of
people, of making them feel, and of putting my own feeling into shape!
But that night, and with my sense of illness just then, I saw myself--it
seemed to me quite in the near future--grown old and ugly, a forgotten
failure, without any of those memories which console people who have been
great when they must give up. I felt myself struggling against such a
weight of ignorance, of bad habits, of unfavourable surroundings. How was
I ever to get free and to reverse that judgment of Mr. Kendal's? My very
success stood in my way, How was 'Miss Bretherton' to put herself to
school?"

'"But now," I said to her warmly, "you have got free; or, rather, you are
on the way to freedom."

'She thought a little bit without speaking, her chin resting on her hand,
her elbow on her knee. We were passing the great red-brown mass of the
Armenian convent. She seemed to be drinking in the dazzling harmonies of
blue and warm brown and pearly light. When she did speak again it was
very slowly, as though she were trying to give words to a number of
complex impressions.

'"Yes," she said; "it seems to me that I am different; but I can't tell
exactly how or why. I see all sorts of new possibilities, new meanings
everywhere: that is one half of it! But the other, and the greater,
half is--how to make all these new feelings and any new knowledge which
may come to me tell on my art." And then she changed altogether with one
of those delightful swift transformations of hers, and her face rippled
over with laughter. "At present the chief result of the difference,
whatever it may be, seems to be to make me most unmanageable at home. I
am for ever disagreeing with my people, saying I can't do this and I
won't do that. I am getting to enjoy having my own way in the most
a