;--if she shall have recognised the necessity of
truth and honesty for the purposes of her life, I do not know that
she need ask herself many questions as to what she will do with it.

Alice Vavasor was ever asking herself that question, and had by
degrees filled herself with a vague idea that there was a something
to be done; a something over and beyond, or perhaps altogether beside
that marrying and having two children;--if she only knew what it was.
She had filled herself, or had been filled by her cousins, with an
undefined ambition that made her restless without giving her any real
food for her mind. When she told herself that she would have no scope
for action in that life in Cambridgeshire which Mr Grey was preparing
for her, she did not herself know what she meant by action. Had any
one accused her of being afraid to separate herself from London
society, she would have declared that she went very little into
society and disliked that little. Had it been whispered to her that
she loved the neighbourhood of the shops, she would have scorned the
whisperer. Had it been suggested that the continued rattle of the big
city was necessary to her happiness, she would have declared that she
and her father had picked out for their residence the quietest street
in London because she could not bear noise;--and yet she told herself
that she feared to be taken into the desolate calmness of
Cambridgeshire.

When she did contrive to find any answer to that question as to what
she should do with her life,--or rather what she would wish to do
with it if she were a free agent, it was generally of a political
nature. She was not so far advanced as to think that women should be
lawyers and doctors, or to wish that she might have the privilege of
the franchise for herself; but she had undoubtedly a hankering after
some second-hand political manoeuvering. She would have liked, I
think, to have been the wife of the leader of a Radical opposition,
in the time when such men were put into prison, and to have kept up
for him his seditious correspondence while he lay in the Tower. She
would have carried the answers to him inside her stays,--and have
made long journeys down into northern parts without any money, if the
cause required it. She would have liked to have around her ardent
spirits, male or female, who would have talked of "the cause," and
have kept alive in her some flame of political fire. As it was, she
had no cause. Her father'