Elisabeth was very sorry for Christopher at first, and very tender toward him; but after a time the coldness, which he felt it his duty to show toward her in the changed state of affairs, had its natural effect, and she decided that it was foolish to waste her sympathy upon any one who obviously needed and valued it so little. Moreover, she had not forgotten that strange, new feeling which disturbed her heart the morning after Mr. Smallwood was taken ill; and she experienced, half unconsciously, a thoroughly feminine resentment against the man who had called into being such an emotion, and then apparently had found no use for it. So Elisabeth in her heart of hearts was at war with Christopher--that slumbering, smouldering sort of warfare which is ready to break out into fire and battle at the slightest provocation; and this state of affairs did not tend to make life any the easier for him. He felt he could have cheerfully borne it all if only Elisabeth had been kind and had understood; but Elisabeth did not understand him in the least, and was consequently unkind--far more unkind than she, in her careless, light-hearted philosophy, dreamed of. She, too, had her disappointments to bear just then. The artist-soul in her had grown up, and was crying out for expression; and she vainly prayed her cousin to let her go to the Slade School, and there learn to develop the power that was in her. But Miss Farringdon belonged to the generation which regarded art purely as a recreation--such as fancy-work, croquet, and the like--and she considered that young women should be trained for the more serious things of life; by which she meant the ordering of suitable dinners for the rich and the manufacturing of seemly garments for the poor. So Elisabeth had to endure the agony which none but an artist can know--the agony of being dumb when one has an angel-whispered secret to tell forth--of being bound hand and foot when one has a God-sent message to write upon the wall. Now and then Miss Maria took her young cousin up to town for a few weeks, and thus Elisabeth came to have a bowing acquaintanceship with London; but of London as an ever-fascinating, never-wearying friend she knew nothing. There are people who tell us that "London is delightful in the season," and that "the country is very pretty in the summer," and we smile at them as a man would smile at those who said that his mother was "a pleasant person," or his heart's dearest "a charming girl." Those who know London and the country, as London and the country deserve to be known, do not talk in this way, for they have learned that there is no end to the wonder or the interest or the mystery of either.