her, always now habitually thought of it and mentioned it in
the most scanty measure. She had her own reasons for being less sanguine than
ever in hopeful views of the future: less indulgent to pleasurable
retrospections of the past.
    »Of course, then,« observed Miss Keeldar, »you only just tolerated him, in
return?«
    »Shirley, men and women are so different: they are in such a different
position. Women have so few things to think about - men so many: you may have a
friendship for a man, while he is almost indifferent to you. Much of what cheers
your life may be dependent on him, while not a feeling or interest of moment in
his eyes may have reference to you. Robert used to be in the habit of going to
London, sometimes for a week or a fortnight together; well, while he was away, I
found his absence a void: there was something wanting; Briarfield was duller. Of
course, I had my usual occupations; still I missed him. As I sat by myself in
the evenings, I used to feel a strange certainty of conviction I cannot
describe: that if a magician or a genius had, at that moment, offered me Prince
Ali's tube (you remember it in the Arabian Nights?), and if, with its aid, I had
been enabled to take a view of Robert - to see where he was, how occupied - I
should have learned, in a startling manner, the width of the chasm which gaped
between such as he and such as I. I knew that, however my thoughts might adhere
to him, his were effectually sundered from me.«
    »Caroline,« demanded Miss Keeldar, abruptly, »don't you wish you had a
profession - a trade?«
    »I wish it fifty times a-day. As it is, I often wonder what I came into the
world for. I long to have something absorbing and compulsory to fill my head and
hands, and to occupy my thoughts.«
    »Can labour alone make a human being happy?«
    »No; but it can give varieties of pain, and prevent us from breaking our
hearts with a single tyrant master-torture. Besides, successful labour has its
recompense; a vacant, weary, lonely, hopeless life has none.«
    »But hard labour and learned professions, they say, make women masculine,
coarse, unwomanly.«
    »And what does it signify, whether unmarried and never-to-be-married women
are unattractive and inelegant,