 She had a world-nausea upon her, and saw
no reason all through her life why she should wish to live. No religious view of
trouble helped her: her troubles had in her opinion all been caused by other
people's disagreeable or wicked conduct; and there was really nothing pleasant
to be counted on in the world; that was her feeling; everything else she had
heard said about trouble was mere phrase-making not attractive enough for her to
have caught it up and repeated it. As to the sweetness of labour and fulfilled
claims; the interest of inward and outward activity; the impersonal delights of
life as a perpetual discovery; the dues of courage, fortitude, industry, which
it is mere baseness not to pay towards the common burthen; the supreme worth of
the teacher's vocation; - these, even if they had been eloquently preached to
her, could have been no more than faintly apprehended doctrines: the fact which
wrought upon her was her invariable observation that for a lady to become a
governess - to »take a situation« - was to descend in life and to be treated at
best with a compassionate patronage. And poor Gwendolen had never dissociated
happiness from personal pre- and éclat. That where these threatened to forsake
her, she should take life to be hardly worth the having, cannot make her so
unlike the rest of us, men or women, that we should cast her out of our
compassion; our moments of temptation to a mean opinion of things in general
being usually dependent on some susceptibility about ourselves and some dulness
to subjects which every one else would consider more important. Surely a young
creature is pitiable who has the labyrinth of life before her and no clue - to
whom distrust in herself and her good fortune has come as a sudden shock, like a
rent across the path that she was treading carelessly.
    In spite of her healthy frame, her irreconcilable repugnance affected her
even physically: she felt a sort of numbness and could set about nothing; the
least urgency, even that she should take her meals, was an irritation to her;
the speech of others on any subject seemed unreasonable, because it did not
include her feeling and was an ignorant claim on her. It was not in her nature
to busy herself with the fancies of suicide to which disappointed young people
are prone: what occupied and exasperated her was the sense that there was
nothing for her but to live in a way she hated. She avoided going to the Rectory
again: it was too intolerable to have to look and talk as if she were compliant;
and she
