The weather is mild and the sky is grey and soft. The keen, salt air of the sea braces and refreshes her tired frame, and languid spirits. Her friend is enchanted with the place, and throws æstheticism to the winds and goes about in a neat tailor-made gown of homespun, and abolishes the nimbus around her fair head, and evinces an energy and alertness that would astonish her admirers of the "lilies-and-languor" class. One closing evening they stand on the summit of the great cliffs, at whose base a wild sea is breaking tempestuously. A wilder sky is above their heads, one that foretells a storm close at hand. Lauraine turns her face seaward, and the fierce wind and dashing spray seem to give it a new and wonderful beauty. "It is glorious!" she murmurs, as she stands there in a sort of rapture. "It seems as if one could move, breathe, be free in a place like this." "Free?" says Lady Etwynde. "Is any one that? As long as life shackles our souls, so long does bondage curb our wishes. I never met a single person, man or woman, who could do exactly as they wished." "Well, you have not much to complain of," laughs Lauraine. "You live as you like, do what you like, go where you like, and have no domestic responsibilities." "True," says her friend, with sudden gravity, "yet for all that I have felt a pang of envy sometimes when I have seen a poor beggar-woman in the streets press her child to her breast, and look with real love at its poor, pale, wizened face." "What a confession for a disciple of Culture--one who has educated her eyes and taste to such perfection that a _criante_ bit of furniture, a false tone of colour, a mistaken arrangement of draperies, will torture her as a discordant note tortures the ear of a musician! So you haven't outlived feminine weakness yet, my dear?" "I suppose Nature always exacts her rights from us at some period or another," answers Lady Etwynde. "I have become accustomed to hear I am passionless and cold, and find it less trouble to live up to the character than to deny it. People are always so sure they know us better than we know ourselves. Being a single woman, it is rather a comfort to have such a reputation, and as I dislike men, and patronize fools, I am safe." "But you are not cold-hearted at all," says Lauraine, turning her face, with its beautiful sea-kissed bloom, to that lovely languid one of her æsthetic friend. "Don't you really care to marry?" "What should I gain?" asks Lady Etwynde, tranquilly. "_Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien_, you know. I am very well off. I can do pretty much--not exactly--as I please. I have no one to control me, or consult. I can follow my own whims and vagaries. Am I not well enough?" "And yet you envied the beggar-woman?" "That was in one of those moments when Nature was whispering at my heart. Nothing touches me like a child's sorrow or love. I have often longed to adopt one, but--well, I suppose the _feeling_ would not be there?"