Of course she would have thought it unworthy of her to mention the things she had done and could do. Moreover, for reasons given above, she was spending a minimum of money, and vulgar schoolgirls drew their own conclusions. She sometimes admits with remorse that she was hasty and unjust in little things,[34] and, although there is no indication that she ever fell into the tempests of passion that characterized her girlhood, she owns that she often assumed a stony indifference, which, of course, though she did not know it, was a great deal worse. All the time (so her diary shows) she was almost agonizing over these children, longing really to get into touch and fire them with her own zeal; she did not scruple to talk to them seriously and individually about the great issues of life; but when the magnetic influence of the interview was over, they felt a certain inconsistency in her, a hastiness, a failure to conform to conventional standards of right and wrong, a want of equity, or at least of equableness, of which she herself was almost unaware. “But oh, where is the special flaw?” she cries in her diary. “Lord help me! ‘Thou wilt not pity us the _less_’—that fault of my own forms my cross.” Footnote 34: “I an’t _just_. There’s a fact. I’m sorry for it, but it’s true. As my sky is bluer or greyer, as I see, or think I see, more or less into a child’s character, the scale varies. Justice is blind no longer, but gives a chuck to one side or the other.” In any case her pupils felt the flaw. Her conscientiousness, her zeal, her fine uprightness were more or less lost on them, or so it seemed. A cheaper form of goodness would have appealed to them more. She never spoke of her home life and circumstances, and probably even Frl. von Palaus had very little idea that the English governess was a woman of family and position. “Oh, how weary I am after those hours of struggle internal and external!” writes S. J.-B. in her diary. “Almost like being tied to a stake,—so suffering, so helpless. And this I?—who used to fancy I had power to rule! Two months more will see me well nigh home I trust. Some faint foreshadowing of ‘Then are they glad because they are at rest.’ The thoughts of my green nest, and of the ruddy firelight, and the hymns at Mother’s knee very frequent in these days of struggle.” She poured out the story of her failure to her Mother, and delightful were the letters she got in reply: “(Miss v. Palaus) will miss my darling and her unselfish love terribly when she leaves.... Without any great vanity you must know that your hearty ready help must be most refreshing to her, and your wide-awake state must have a great influence over the Girls.”