Of course this loss, as in her love for Bob, would mean practically nothing to any one else, not even to her parents, and the realization only added to her bitterness and resentment. The callousness of the world to the greater part of human suffering struck her for the first time. But there was nothing to be done about that and she herself remained profoundly indifferent to all the hidden sources of grief that people around her concealed daily. She cultivated the belief that the beauty of the world is always in some sense marred, that we must all expect to lose what we most cling to, and therefore that it is our own fault if we let ourselves in for disappointment. For a year or so Megan constrained herself into the pattern of the cynic, astounding when she could by bitter speeches and pleased only when she created a flutter of alarm. Then at the moment when she felt she had established the fact that she had nothing to live for, Bob, who had come back from two years as interne in a Boston hospital, made two astonishing statements: one that he was going out to China as a medical missionary and the other that he loved her and wanted to marry her. The young cynic vanished as quickly as she had come. The sterility of that attitude had always repelled her, even while she had taken a perverse enjoyment in its repellent effect on others. She now unconditionally renounced it. Bob was in love with her. They would be married as soon as he was settled in China and was able to send for her. Megan underwent one of those irrational and complete changes that happiness will produce in nearly any one. She was herself astonished at the change. She not only loved Bob, but some emotion had been released in her which welled up irresistibly and for which Bob alone was not enough. Up to now she had treated her religious beliefs with some indifference, sometimes with scorn, but Bob's orthodoxy, his desire to serve, seemed to her now to have the only beauty and dignity. She was going to be a part of his life, which was a life for the relief of suffering. Her part would be to bring happiness. All the misery of humanity, by which she had been only vaguely irritated when she felt herself to be a part of it, she now looked on with the sensations of a man cured of a disease who is impelled to testify to the remedy before others. She knew that no one should be unhappy, that evil, sickness, poverty, injustice, all demanded one treatment. No man would be unhappy if love for his fellow man filled his heart. During the time before Bob left for China Megan lived in a period of exultant joyousness. There were no problems, there was nothing that was not fundamentally right. She even looked at herself in the glass. She was no longer beautiful. Good. She instantly accepted humility, and she discovered that even humility may always be accepted by the proud when it is acknowledged to be a grace and ornament of the spirit.