To know something which those about you do not know--to keep something secret which would interest them above measure, and affect their conduct; but which you, in your superior wisdom, believe it better they should not know--this is to play a very difficult part, one of the most difficult in life. And if you undertake it without possessing the necessary qualities of reticence and self-control, with, on the contrary, all the habits of an innocent life, the traditions of family frankness and inter-communication of everything, great or small; and if to add to all these difficulties you have been in the habit of living with one other close companion as if you and she had possessed between you but one soul--it may be imagined how hard the task will be. This was what Lucy Curtis had undertaken to do. She had no idea when she undertook it how hard it was. In a glow of determined generosity and good meaning towards the woman of whom, in her inmost soul, she felt jealous as receiving regard and attention to which she had no right, she had taken this Herculean task upon her shoulder--and now she would not shrink from it; but it was hard beyond all belief to carry it out. A hundred times a day the name of Nancy was trembling on her lips. Between her mother and herself, the conversation was not talking so much as thinking aloud. Everything was common between them, their thoughts, the occurrences of their life, their reading, their speculations--they did everything _à deux_, as even husband and wife cannot do, as perhaps only mother and daughter ever succeed in doing. The differences of character between them, the difference between Lady Curtis’s experience, and those touches of the world which inevitably in nearly fifty years of living modify the character, and Lucy’s youthfulness of certainty--her stronger convictions and more absolute perceptions of good and evil--these gave the necessary tinge of individuality to their utterances. But there had never been any reserves between these two.