"What do you mean by 'ease'?" "Oh, I should call employment 'ease' now." "Did you ask for more once, then?" "Yes, I used to be more foolish. 'Experience teaches fools.'" "No, it doesn't," said Kincaid. "Experience teaches intelligent people; fools go on blundering to the end. 'Once----?' I interrupted you." "Well, it used to mean a home of my own, and relations to care for me, and money enough to settle the bills without minding if they came to five shillings more than I had expected. It's a beautiful regulation that the less we have, the less we can manage with. But the horse couldn't live on the one straw." "How did you come to this?" asked Kincaid; "couldn't you get different work before the last straw?" "If you knew how I tried! I haven't any friends here; that was my difficulty. I wanted a situation as a companion, but I had to give the idea up at last, and it ended in my going to Pattenden's. Don't think they know! I mean, don't imagine they guess the straits I'm in: that would be unfair. They have been very kind to me." "You've never been a companion, I suppose?" "No; but I hoped, for all that. Everything has to be done for the first time; every adept was a novice once.". "That's true, but there are so many adepts in everything to-day that the novices haven't much chance." "Then how are they to qualify?" "That's the novices' affair. You can't expect people to pay incompetence when skilled labour is loafing at the street corners." "I expect nothing," she answered; "my expectations are all dead and buried. We've only a certain capacity for expectation, I think; under favourable conditions it wears well and we say, 'While there's life there's hope;' but; when it's strained too much, it gives out." "And you drift without a fight in you?" "A woman can't do more than fight till she's beaten." "She shouldn't acknowledge to being beaten." "Theory!" she said between her teeth; "the breakfast-tray is fact!" "What do you reckon is going to become of; you?" "I don't anticipate at all." "Oh, that's all rubbish! Answer straight!" "I shall starve, then," she said. "Sss! You know it?" "I know it, and I'm resigned to it. If I weren't resigned to it, it would be much harder. There's nothing that can happen to provide for me; there isn't a soul in the world I can--'will,' to be accurate--appeal to for help. You've delayed it a little by your kindness, but you can't prevent its coming. Oh, I've hoped and struggled till I am worn out!" she went on, her; voice shaking. "If there were a prospect, I could rouse myself, weak as I am, to reach it; but there isn't a prospect, not the glimmer of a prospect! I'm not cowardly; I'm only rational. I admit what is; I've finished duping myself." She could express her despair, this woman; she had education and manner. He contemplated her attentively; she interested him. "You speak like a fatalist, for all that," he said to her.