"And the whole thing--your life, yourself," Winifred went on--"it is like the realisation of a dream to me. Your splendid independence and freedom. Just think of the contrast between you and an ordinary girl living at home in slavery, or at least in a sort of prolonged childhood, with no personal standing, no liberty to follow her own intuitions." A shadow crossed Hertha's beautiful forehead. "I have not always lived alone like this," she said. "Not, indeed, for very long. This house is endeared to me by having spent several years in it with my two,"--her voice faltered a little--"my mother and my brother. I have never wished for what you call `independence.' I was too happy while I had one or two who cared to direct me. I loved being treated like a child." "You must have been _most_ fortunately placed," said Winifred. "I was," replied Hertha. "My parents were just _perfect_. It was circumstances and,"--she hesitated, for she was touching on uncertain ground--"a good deal, perhaps, the fact of my having a voice, a talent, which led me to leave the beaten path. No desire to throw off the dear home ties. I have often wondered what I should have done with my voice had I not _needed_ to utilise it; how far it would have been right to give up time to cultivating it; how far, so to say, the possession of a voice means `a vocation.' That sounds like a poor attempt at a pun," she ended off with a smile. But Winifred did not notice her little piece of fun. "You would have done just what you have done," she burst out. "You would never have been content in the beaten track--in the narrow, hedged-in life, which is what most women lead." "I'm afraid I should have been very content," said Hertha. "I am not at all sure that I am not by nature very lazy. The energy of many--I think I might say of most women now-a-days--appals me. I don't agree with you that the `narrow, hedged-in lives' are the lot of the `most,' not in London, anyhow." "Well, no, perhaps not in London," Winifred agreed. "That is why I want to come here." "And, oh dear!" said Miss Norreys with again a little smile that seemed more of the nature of a sigh, "you don't know how I long sometimes for that sort of life. Fancy, with parents and sisters and an old-fashioned home in the country--the sort of place that has not changed much for hundreds of years, where you can distil your own lavender-water and make great jars full of pot-pourri, where there is a lady's walk and a ghost, and where you know every saint's face in the windows at church--oh, what a lovely life it might be! If my lot had fallen in such lines, I hope I should have had the energy to cultivate my voice and to use it to give pleasure to others, to poor folk above all; but oh, how joyfully I should have hurried home from my enforced visits to London! I used to dream of such a life," she added. "Now it is different. I am alone. No place could be much `home' to me."