Nelly was, if possible, still more painfully divorced from her old gentle ease and sprightly quiet. She had begun life for herself, and the beginning was, like all beginnings, a fight and struggle. The new required her to be faithless and disloyal to the old; the old could not conceal a certain grudge and painful antagonism to the new. She was placed between, feeling herself dragged on either side--dragged asunder, the peaceful unity of her existence turned into a perpetual struggle to please both parties, to serve two masters, to be loyal at once to her lover and to her mother. Nay, the struggle was still more complicated: for Nelly had not only to serve two masters, but to content and satisfy a third party, a new being altogether--herself--another Nelly, who had risen up and sat in judgment upon her. No inquisitor was ever so hard upon a poor girl as was this other self--this new, severe, enlightened Nelly, who sat, as it were, at the very springs of her life, and watched them from their earliest outflow. Even when the poor Nelly in the flesh had made what seemed to her a very successful compromise, when she had done her very best, and had pleased both sides, and served both masters, the spiritual Nelly would come down upon her like a wolf on the fold--would convict her of falsehood, of paltering with what she knew to be right, of mean expedients, and a base policy of time-serving. Poor child! it was true she had become a time-server. She said one thing to the one, another to the other. She tried in a hundred little stealthy ways to “bring them together,” to resuscitate the ancient friendship between them. She told each of pretty speeches the other had made, and kept a dead silence as to the speeches, anything but pretty, which she had often enough to listen to. Not only was her heart torn asunder, but her mind was confused in its sense of right and wrong. Many things which seemed abstractly right had become impossible to her; and some that were wrong were so natural, so necessary! She was unhappy in her home, and, with cruel mortification, she perceived that the other home, to which she had naturally looked forward, was receding into the distance. It was to be purchased only by despoiling the present. A certain impatience, almost by moments, ripening into disgust, sometimes moved her in respect to her betrothed. Her heart sickened sometimes at his suggestions--at the tone in which he spoke. He wanted all the rest of the world to bestir themselves on his behalf; but he himself had no idea of bestirring himself. He thought it natural that sacrifices of all sorts should be made to bring about his happiness--only not by him. “But we are young,” poor Nelly would say; “we can put up with anything. What does it matter?”