A new resolve glowed in her eyes. To be thwarted in a thing was touching upon an acutely sensitive nerve. She would not rest until she had beaten down every obstacle between her and her hope of attainment. She would free herself of these maddeningly narrow surroundings. Glenn Andrews immediately answered her letter, found upon his arrival in New York. He said: “You have lived among the flowers, had great grief, and now the flowers do not console you. And yet, if you only knew it, nature is a thousand times better at consolation than human beings. I long ago gave up looking for consolation from people--I can get it from flowers. Maybe it is because I don’t live among them. In lieu of flowers, I take work, and the grind I go through takes the edge off griefs, joys and ambitions. It reduces one to the dead level of passiveness, which is not ecstatic, but which does not hurt. So I might say to you: ‘If the flowers do not console you, try work’--but, doubtless, you have been working. I know that you are capable of it. Perhaps time has worn off the brunt of your sorrow and you are feeling the after pain of loneliness--which is even worse to bear, because less vivid and more constant. “You ought to do something some day with your art. If you only know it, you are not unfortunately situated as regards your future. Try and look at it that way. Lift up your head and throw your shoulders back. Go and look in the looking-glass and make a face at yourself, and remember you are not an editor, that your nose is not on the grind-stone and that you have, after all, something to thank God for.” Esther had been faithful to the impulse of that day. She slaved with a resolution painful to see. In that year she had changed, developed greatly. The kindly old professor regarded her with pride as he sat listening to her, after she had conquered the music Glenn Andrews had sent to her. There was a sweep of magnificence in it. At the last of the year there came a change. The old professor was leaving for a broader field. He encouraged her to make an effort for the highest mark; her next step, in his opinion, should be New York. Of course, it would take self-sacrifice, he told her; “but what is sacrifice when one is at the center of the world?”