rst of weeping was the one single overflow of long pent
passion, disappointment, and shame.

She had tried, indeed. Ever since Tom's conversation and Frank's sermon
had poured in a flood of new light on the meaning of epidemics, and
bodily misery, and death itself, she had been working as only she could
work; exhorting, explaining, coaxing, warning, entreating with tears,
offering to perform with her own hands the most sickening offices; to
become, if no one else would, the common scavenger of the town. There
was no depth to which, in her noble enthusiasm, she would not have gone
down. And behold, it had been utterly in vain! Ah! the bitter
disappointment of finding her influence fail her utterly, the first time
that it was required for a great practical work! They would let her talk
to them about their souls, then!--They would even amend a few sins here
and there, of which they had been all along as well aware as she. But to
be convinced of a new sin; to have their laziness, pride, covetousness,
touched; that, she found, was what they would not bear; and where she
had expected, if not thanks, at least a fair hearing, she had been met
with peevishness, ridicule, even anger and insult.

Her mother had turned against her. "Why would she go getting a bad name
from every one, and driving away customers?" The preachers, who were (as
is too common in West-country villages) narrow, ignorant, and somewhat
unscrupulous men, turned against her. They had considered the cholera,
if it was to come, as so much spiritual capital for themselves; an
occasion which they could "improve" into a sensation, perhaps a
"revival;" and to explain it upon mere physical causes was to rob them
of their harvest. Coarse viragos went even farther still, and dared to
ask her "whether it was the curate or the doctor she was setting her cap
at: for she never had anything in her mouth now but what they had said?"
And those words went through her heart like a sword. Was she
disinterested? Was not love for Thurnall, the wish to please him,
mingling with all her earnestness? And again, was not self-love mingling
with it? and mingling, too, with the disappointment, even indignation,
which she felt at having failed? Ah--what hitherto hidden spots of
self-conceit, vanity, pharisaic pride, that bitter trial laid bare, or
seemed to lay, till she learned to thank her unseen Guide even for it!

Perhaps she had more reason to be thankful for her humiliation than sh