Her recognition of her cowardly feebleness brought the brood of fatalism.  What was the right of so miserable a creature as she to excite disturbance, let her fortunes be good or ill?  It would be quieter to float, kinder to everybody.  Thank heaven for the chances of a short life!  Once in a net, desperation is graceless.  We may be brutes in our earthly destinies:  in our endurance of them we need not be brutish.

She was now in the luxury of passivity, when we throw our burden on the Powers above, and do not love them.  The need to love them drew her out of it, that she might strive with the unbearable, and by sheer striving, even though she were graceless, come to love them humbly.  It is here that the seed of good teaching supports a soul, for the condition might be mapped, and where kismet whispers us to shut eyes, and instruction bids us look up, is at a well-marked cross-road of the contest.

Quick of sensation, but not courageously resolved, she perceived how blunderingly she had acted.  For a punishment, it seemed to her that she who had not known her mind must learn to conquer her nature, and submit.  She had accepted Willoughby; therefore she accepted him.  The fact became a matter of the past, past debating.

In the abstract this contemplation of circumstances went well.  A plain duty lay in her way.  And then a disembodied thought flew round her, comparing her with Vernon to her discredit.  He had for years borne much that was distasteful to him, for the purpose of studying, and with his poor income helping the poorer than himself.  She dwelt on him in pity and envy; he had lived in this place, and so must she; and he had not been dishonoured by his modesty:  he had not failed of self-control, because he had a life within.  She was almost imagining she might imitate him when the clash of a sharp physical thought, “The difference! the difference!” told her she was woman and never could submit.  Can a woman have an inner life apart from him she is yoked to?  She tried to nestle deep away in herself:  in some corner where the abstract view had comforted her, to flee from thinking as her feminine blood directed.  It was a vain effort.  The difference, the cruel fate, the defencelessness of women, pursued her, strung her to wild horses’ backs, tossed her on savage wastes.  In her case duty was shame:  hence, it could not be broadly duty.  That intolerable difference proscribed the word.

But the fire of a brain burning high and kindling everything lighted up herself against herself.—­Was one so volatile as she a person with a will?—­Were they not a multitude of flitting wishes that she took for a will?  Was she, feather-headed that she was, a person to make a stand on physical pride?—­If she could yield her hand without reflection (as she conceived she had done, from incapacity to conceive herself doing it reflectively) was she much better than purchaseable stuff that has nothing to say to the bargain?