Meantime these same publishing houses were exuding cart-loads of marketable abominations, which were scattered in all directions, doing their share in weakening the minds of their unfortunate readers. Life, as depicted by them, was a mere sex-chase, more or less interrupted by the usual difficulties, all of which was quite in accordance with the “existing canons,” so much respected by the young man with the smile. * * * * * Perhaps nothing gives us a lonelier feeling than to be cut off from our field of daily activity, whatever it may have been. Cartice found herself set back to the dreadful days of her beginning in New York. It was as though she had gone steadily up a steep slope, to a respectable height, only to be knocked violently to the bottom by the hand that was helping her upward. “Had I developed the best that was in me--followed my ideals”--she said, “this could not have happened. In that case I should have stood alone long since, leaning on no prop, depending on no person’s caprice. Set-backs and knock-downs are our schoolmasters, and they are ever busy with us until we learn our lessons.” A loneliness assailed her heart, poignant, sharp, deep. All her life its resistless waves had at times rolled over her spirit,--a flood that would not be stayed. It was that kind of loneliness that creates a solitude which is not placed in a densely peopled universe. Then came the comforting reflection that we are never alone, never solitary, however much we may seem to be, and never absolutely on our own hands, in spite of appearances. About us are ever the spiritual hosts, and back of us, within us and about us, the Supreme Self, to which each is both inlet and outlet. * * * * * On the evening of Mrs. Doring’s first day of idleness, Gabriel Norris called to see her. For several years he had been a resident of New York. In the worst of the thick mass of the miserables he had set up his cobbler’s bench, and opened an adjoining reading-room; and there he fished for the souls of men, in the great ocean of wretchedness whose huge waves beat about his door. Cartice told him the story of her summary ejectment from the place that she had so long occupied, and the various shifts that she had been making in her mind for the future. “It’s a good thing,” he said, “when you don’t know just what to do, not to do anything--to wait,--wait without worry or anxiety--wait and trust. Unseen influences are ever at work on our destiny. We can hurry nothing, change nothing. Rest for a time. You have been so busy most of your life that you have had but little chance to get acquainted with yourself. You have a little capital ahead; rest on that. New ideas come in seasons of repose, for then the mind is receptive.”