"I can't have taking ways: some people think I'm superior and crushing, father says I'm selfish;" and yet she could not think of any great pleasures which she had longed for and claimed. Gerty had never hidden her wishes or sacrificed anything to others, and she always got everything she fancied; yet she was not selfish. Then the old utter dejection came over her as she thought of her life; if no one should love her, and she should grow old and fixed in desolation? This was no sorrow at an unfortunate circumstance, but a dejection so far-reaching that its existence seemed to her more real than her own; it must have existed in the world before she was born, it must have been since the beginning. The smaller clouds which had darkened her day were forced aside, and the whole heaven was black with this great hopelessness. If any sorrow had struck her, death, disgrace, crime, that would have been a laughing matter compared with this. Perhaps life would be better when she was a governess; she would be doing something, moulding her own life, ill-treated with actual wrongs perhaps. In the darkness of her heaven there came a little patch of blue sky, the hopefulness which was always there behind the cloud, and she fell asleep, dreamily looking forward to a struggle, to real life with possibilities--dim pictures. III A month afterwards, on a bitterly cold February day, Janet was wandering miserably about the house. She was to start in a few days for Bristol, where she had got a place as governess to two little girls, the daughters of a widower, a house-master at the school. Her father had left the day before. Janet could not help crying as she sat desolately in her cold bedroom trying to concern herself with packing and the arrangements for her journey. She was to dine that evening with Lady Beamish, to meet Gerty and her husband and say good-bye. She did not want to go a bit, she would rather have stayed at home and been miserable by herself. She had, as usual, asked nothing of any of her friends; she felt extraordinarily alone, and she grew terrified when she asked herself what connected her with the world at all, how was she going to live and why? What hold had she on life? She might go on as a governess all her life and who would care? What reason had she to suppose that anything would justify her living? From afar the struggle had looked attractive, there was something fine and strong in it; that would be life indeed when she would have to depend entirely upon herself and work her way; but now that the time was close at hand, the struggle only looked very bitter and prosaic. In her imagination beforehand she had always looked on at herself admiringly as governess and been strengthened by the picture. Now she was acting to no gallery. Whatever strength and virtue there was in her dealing met no one's approval; and all she had before her in the immediate