s Pinnegar and Alvina
should move into a small house, Miss Pinnegar keeping the work-room,
Alvina giving music-lessons: that the two women should be partners
in the work-shop.

There were other plans, of course. There was a faction against the
chapel faction, which favoured the plan sketched out above. The
theatre faction, including Mr. May and some of the more florid
tradesmen, favoured the risking of everything in the Endeavour.
Alvina was to be the proprietress of the Endeavour, she was to run
it on some sort of successful lines, and abandon all other
enterprise. Minor plans included the election of Alvina to the post
of parish nurse, at six pounds a month: a small private school; a
small haberdashery shop; and a position in the office of her
cousin's Knarborough business. To one and all Alvina answered with a
tantalizing: "I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know. I
can't say yet. I shall see. I shall see." Till one and all became
angry with her. They were all so benevolent, and all so sure that
they were proposing the very best thing she could do. And they were
all nettled, even indignant that she did not jump at their
proposals. She listened to them all. She even invited their advice.
Continually she said: "Well, what do _you_ think of it?" And she
repeated the chapel plan to the theatre group, the theatre plan to
the chapel party, the nursing to the pianoforte proposers, the
haberdashery shop to the private school advocates. "Tell me what
_you_ think," she said repeatedly. And they all told her they
thought _their_ plan was best. And bit by bit she told every
advocate the proposal of every other advocate "Well, Lawyer Beeby
thinks--" and "Well now, Mr. Clay, the minister, advises--" and so
on and so on, till it was all buzzing through thirty benevolent and
officious heads. And thirty benevolently-officious wills were
striving to plant each one its own particular scheme of benevolence.
And Alvina, naive and pathetic, egged them all on in their strife,
without even knowing what she was doing. One thing only was certain.
Some obstinate will in her own self absolutely refused to have her
mind made up. She would _not_ have her mind made up for her, and she
would not make it up for herself. And so everybody began to say "I'm
getting tired of her. You talk to her, and you get no forrarder. She
slips off to something else. I'm not going to bother with her any
more." In truth, Woodhouse was in a fever, for three