Bernardine saw that she had come a long journey.  She saw what the Traveller saw.  That was all she saw at first.  Then she remembered that she had done the journey entirely for her own sake.  Perhaps it might not have looked so dreary if it had been undertaken for some one else.

She had claimed nothing of any one; she had given nothing to any one.  She had simply taken her life in her own hands and made what she could of it.  What had she made of it?

Many women asked for riches, for position, for influence and authority and admiration.  She had only asked to be able to work.  It seemed little enough to ask.  That she asked so little placed her, so she thought, apart from the common herd of eager askers.  To be cut off from active life and earnest work was a possibility which never occurred to her.

It never crossed her mind that in asking for the one thing for which she longed, she was really asking for the greatest thing.  Now, in the hour of her enfeeblement, and in the hour of the bitterness of her heart, she still prided herself upon wanting so little.

“It seems so little to ask,” she cried to herself time after time.  “I only want to be able to do a few strokes of work.  I would be content now to do so little, if only I might do some.  The laziest day-labourer on the road would laugh at the small amount of work which would content me now.”

She told the Disagreeable Man that one day.

“So you think you are moderate in your demands,” he said to her.  “You are a most amusing young woman.  You are so perfectly unconscious how exacting you really are.  For, after all, what is it you want?  You want to have that wonderful brain of yours restored, so that you may begin to teach, and, perhaps, write a book.  Well, to repeat my former words:  you are still at phase one, and you are longing to be strong enough to fulfil your ambitions and write a book.  When you arrive at I phase four, you will be quite content to dust one of your uncle’s books instead:  far more useful work and far more worthy of encouragement.  If every one who wrote books now would be satisfied to dust books already written, what a regenerated world it would become!”

She laughed good-temperedly.  His remarks did not vex her; or, at least, she showed no vexation.  He seemed to have constituted himself as her critic, and she made no objections.  She had given him little bits of stray confidence about herself, and she received everything he had to say with that kind of forbearance which chivalry bids us show to the weak and ailing.  She made allowances for him; but she did more than that for him:  she did not let him see that she made allowances.  Moreover, she recognized amidst all his roughness a certain kind of sympathy which she could not resent, because it was not aggressive.  For to some natures the expression of sympathy is an irritation; to be sympathized with means to be pitied, and to be pitied means to be looked down upon.  She was sorry for him, but she would not have told him so for worlds; he would have shrunk from pity as much as she did.  And yet the sympathy which she thought she did not want for herself, she was silently giving to those around her, like herself, thwarted, each in a different way perhaps, still thwarted all the same.