notice of you, talked to you, and taught you so
much."

"He never was fond of me; he never professed to be fond of me. He took
pains to prove that he only just tolerated me."

Caroline, determined not to err on the flattering side in estimating her
cousin's regard for her, always now habitually thought of it and
mentioned it in the most scanty measure. She had her own reasons for
being less sanguine than ever in hopeful views of the future, less
indulgent to pleasurable retrospections of the past.

"Of course, then," observed Miss Keeldar, "you only just tolerated him
in return?"

"Shirley, men and women are so different; they are in such a different
position. Women have so few things to think about, men so many. You may
have a friendship for a man, while he is almost indifferent to you. Much
of what cheers your life may be dependent on him, while not a feeling or
interest of moment in his eyes may have reference to you. Robert used to
be in the habit of going to London, sometimes for a week or a fortnight
together. Well, while he was away, I found his absence a void. There
was something wanting; Briarfield was duller. Of course, I had my usual
occupations; still I missed him. As I sat by myself in the evenings, I
used to feel a strange certainty of conviction I cannot describe, that
if a magician or a genius had, at that moment, offered me Prince Ali's
tube (you remember it in the 'Arabian Nights'?), and if, with its aid, I
had been enabled to take a view of Robert--to see where he was, how
occupied--I should have learned, in a startling manner, the width of the
chasm which gaped between such as he and such as I. I knew that, however
my thoughts might adhere to him, his were effectually sundered from me."

"Caroline," demanded Miss Keeldar abruptly, "don't you wish you had a
profession--a trade?"

"I wish it fifty times a day. As it is, I often wonder what I came into
the world for. I long to have something absorbing and compulsory to fill
my head and hands and to occupy my thoughts."

"Can labour alone make a human being happy?"

"No; but it can give varieties of pain, and prevent us from breaking our
hearts with a single tyrant master-torture. Besides, successful labour
has its recompense; a vacant, weary, lonely, hopeless life has none."

"But hard labour and learned professions, they say, make women
masculine, coarse, unwomanly."

"And what does it signify whether unmarried and never-to-be-married
women