“Ah, that is because you are young,” she said, “and because you think that any one who feels an impulse must act on it, if she wants to realise her life. It is not so. You know what I have always called you and Martin, the Volcanoes--dear Volcanoes. When you feel pressure you burst, and scatter burning ashes anywhere and everywhere, and say with great good-humour, ‘But I am I. If I want to burst, I must.’ And when you see an old woman like me, just getting through the day’s work, day after day, week after week, with a little dinner-party here, and a little walk there, and a little ordering of the household all through, you think ‘Is that all? Is that life?’ And I answer you, ‘Yes; that is life.’” Helen was silent a moment, suddenly aware that for the time it was perhaps wiser to listen and attend than talk about her own individuality. “Tell me, tell me,” she said. “My dear, there is very little to tell,” she said. “But you in your heyday do not allow, it seems to me, for the fact of other quiet people living and feeling perhaps just as much as you do. Because you feel a thing you scream. You will learn to feel a thing, we hope, without screaming. I think young people tend to scream rather more than we used. They call it living their own lives. That possibly may be a mistaken, or, anyhow, a misleading name for it.” Again Helen had no reply. But this did not seem to her at all like want of individuality. There was no screaming, it is true, and no assertion, but just as certainly there was “something there.” And, to do her justice, she respected that. But her aunt paused also, waiting for her answer, and after a minute she spoke. “Live your own life, then, in talk with me,” she said. “Let me understand it. It is quite true, Aunt Susan, I have judged as if there was no other view than mine, while the whole time my complaint--no, not that exactly, but you understand--has been that other people behave as if there was no other view than theirs! About you, for instance. I didn’t know, I didn’t guess. I thought you were--you were what you appeared.” Lady Susan seemed to repent of her hasty movement, and recaptured Helen’s soft, brown-skinned hand. “Yes, dear, I am,” she said, quietly. “At least, I choose to let that be my outward expression of myself, the expression by which you, Martin, anybody, may judge me. That certainly is my affair, and nobody else’s.” She ceased stroking Helen’s hand a moment and looked up at her. “But, dear, would you like to come inside me a moment? There is only one thing there, but it fills my house. Oh, Helen, if I had had a child!” At that all the girl’s nature rose. “Ah, dear aunt, dear aunt!” she said. Lady Susan’s pretty patient smile did not leave her lips, nor did any tear come to her eyes. The sorrow was too old and too eternally alive for her to weep over it now. And she went on quite quietly: