Elizabeth had gone abroad feeling that she might escape the dissatisfaction that possessed her. This dissatisfaction was so very indefinite that she could not dignify it as a positive trouble, but she took it with her over Europe wherever she went, and she finally decided that it would give her no peace until she took it home again. She could not discuss it with her mother, for Mrs. Ward was impatient of discussion. She could do no more than feel Elizabeth’s dissatisfaction, and she complained of it both abroad and at home. She told her husband and her son that Elizabeth had practically ruined their trip, that Elizabeth hadn’t enjoyed it herself, nor allowed her to enjoy it. Elizabeth, however, if unable to realize the sensations she had anticipated in their travels, gave her mother unexpected compensation by recalling and vivifying for her after they had returned in the fall, all their foreign experiences, so that they enjoyed them in retrospect. Ward, indeed, said that Elizabeth had seen everything there was to see in Europe. He only laughed when Elizabeth declared that, now she was at home again, she intended to do something; just what, she could not determine. "Perhaps I’ll become a stenographer or a trained nurse." "The idea!" exclaimed Mrs. Ward. "To talk like that! You should pay more attention to your social duties." "Why?" demanded Elizabeth, looking at her mother with clear, sober eyes. Mrs. Ward, in her habitual avoidance of reasons, could not think of one instantly. "You owe it to your station," she declared presently, and then, as if this were, after all, a reason, she added, "that’s why." Dick showed all the manly indignation of an elder brother. "You don’t know what you’re talking about, Bess," he said in the husky voice he had acquired. He had not changed; he bore himself importantly, wore a scowl, dressed extravagantly, and always in the extreme of the prevailing fashion; he seemed to have an intuition in such matters; he wore a new collar or a new kind of cravat two weeks in advance of the other young men in town, and they did not seem to follow him so much as he seemed to anticipate them. He lunched at the club, and Elizabeth divined that he spent large sums of money, and yet he was constant in his work; he was always at the Trust Company’s office early; he did not miss a single day. No, Dick had not changed; nothing had changed, and this thought only increased Elizabeth’s discontent, or vague uneasiness, or vague dissatisfaction, or whatever it was.