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her that she thought too much about herself; you could have
made her colour, any day in the year, by calling her a rank
egoist. She was always planning out her development, desir-
ing her perfection, observing her progress. Her nature had,
in her conceit, a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion
of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and
lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection
was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to
the recesses of one’s spirit was harmless when one returned
from it with a lapful of roses. But she was often reminded
that there were other gardens in the world than those of her
remarkable soul, and that there were moreover a great many
places which were not gardens at allonly dusky pestiferous
tracts, planted thick with ugliness and misery. In the cur-
rent of that repaid episode on curiosity on which she had
lately been floating, which had conveyed her to this beauti-
ful old England and might carry her much further still, she
often checked herself with the thought of the thousands of
people who were less happy than herself—a thought which
for the moment made her fine, full consciousness appear a
kind of immodesty. What should one do with the misery
of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for one’s self? It
must be confessed that this question never held her long.
She was too young, too impatient to live, too unacquainted
with pain. She always returned to her theory that a young
woman whom after all every one thought clever should be-
gin by getting a general impression of life. This impression
was necessary to prevent mistakes, and after it should be se-
cured she might make the unfortunate condition of others

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