The group crossed the street, but paused a few yards lower down. There was a house whose door was open, and there they went in. That was where Jane had found a place! That was the “country situation” in favour of which she had given her abrupt notice! It was Mrs. Challoner’s own neighbours who had received her servant without the slightest reference to her. Lucy felt stung. She knew nothing of these people, except that their name was Marvel, and that the family seemed to consist of father, mother, and two or three daughters. She had constantly seen them going out, in evening dress, in cabs. But how discourteous was their present action! If, as it seemed, they had made up their minds to take Jane under any circumstances, they might at least have made formal recognition of her last employer’s existence. The only inference Lucy could draw was that her late servant had managed to put her so thoroughly in the wrong that the Marvels believed hers to be no standard to which they need refer, and herself a person to whom no civility was due. It vexed Lucy to find how this thought hurt her. She knew that, in ordinary parlance, she “ought to be above feeling such things.” Once upon a time she would have laughed at such a matter as affecting herself, though she might have recognised its significance socially. She could not understand her greater weakness now. She said to herself that often in her life she had found pleasure in setting herself harder tasks than any she was now accomplishing; for she had taken youth’s athletic joy in pedestrian feats and in working against time. She was still unable to realise that it is one thing to court fatigue and excitement with unimpaired vigour and high-strung nerves, and quite another matter to accept these when one is already worn out with anxieties and fears. Also that it is one thing to live even the most laborious days in at atmosphere of love and appreciation, and another to toil in so much risk of carping and misunderstanding that one is thankful if one can but escape notice altogether. There is repose and refreshment beforehand in the very consciousness that there exists somebody who will say presently, “You must rest; you must have a holiday;” and who possesses both the will and the power to enforce the words, just as we often feel so much assurance in an outstretched helping hand, that we can jump safely, without availing ourself of its help. Fond mother Lucy could not be expected to understand that there had been a perpetual strain in having for so long had no household companionship but that of her little laddie. If it is tiring to stretch ever upwards to minds above our own, speaking of things we do not understand, and in a language we scarcely know, it is equally exhausting to the mind to be for ever stooping, and never able fully to express its deepest thoughts and feelings.