close-cropped curls showing up against a background
of thick-set foliage. On the table, too, lay a well-worn, vellum-bound
copy of that holiest of books ever, perhaps, conceived by the heart and
written by the hand of man--Thomas a Kempis' _Imitation of Christ_. It
was open at the chapter which is thus entitled--"Of the Zealous
Amendment of our Whole Life." While close against it was a packet of
Richard's letters--those curt, businesslike communications, faultlessly
punctual in their weekly arrival, which, while they relieved her
anxiety as to his material well-being, stabbed his mother's heart only
less by the little they said, than by all they left unsaid.

And looking upon that mother now, taking cognisance of her
surroundings, Honoria St. Quentin's young indignation, once again,
waxed hot. While, since it was the tendency of her mind to run eagerly
towards theory, to pass from the particular to the general, and
instinctively to apprehend the relation of the individual to the mass,
looking thus upon Katherine, she rebelled, not only against the doom of
this one woman, but against that doom of universal womanhood of which
she offered, just now, only too eloquent an example. And a burning
compassion animated Honoria for feminine as against all masculine
creatures, for the bitter patience demanded of the passive, as against
the large latitude permitted the active principle; for the perpetual
humiliation of the subjective and spiritual under the heavy yoke of the
objective and practical,--for the brief joy and long barrenness of all
those who are condemned to obey and to wait, merely, as against those
who are born to command and to create.

From a child she had been aware of the element of tragedy inherent in
the fact of womanhood. It had quickened exaggerations of sentiment in
her at times, and pushed her into not a little knight-errantry,--witness
the affair of Lady Constance Quayle's engagement. But, though more
sober in judgment than of old and less ready to get her lance in rest,
the existence of that tragic element had never disclosed itself more
convincingly to her than at the present moment, nor had the necessity
to attempt the assuaging of the smart of it called upon her with more
urgent voice. Yet she recognised that such attempt taxed all her
circumspection, all her imaginative sympathy and tact. Very free
criticism of the master of the house, of his sins of omission and
commission alike, were permissible in