and had found herself at Baker Street instead of Sloane Square.  These things tried her beyond reason with the sense of loneliness, of incapacity, of uncertainty.  Then she had thought that, with very quiet black clothes, she could go anywhere, but her mother had discovered that she sometimes came back from the Girls’ Club in Bermondsey as late as ten o’clock at night, and there had been a fuss.  Rose had forgotten the fact that she was very fair and very good to look at; she found, half-consciously, that her beauty had its drawbacks.  There did not seem to be any reason why she should spare her strength in any way.  So, a little wan and tremulous, she appeared at the early morning service, and then, after walking back in any weather, there was a dull little breakfast, and soon after that she got to work.  Every post brought begging letters in crowds, and these hurt her dreadfully.  It was her wish to live for God and the poor, and every day she had to write:  “Lady Rose Bright much regrets that she is quite unable,” etc., etc.  Then, after those, she would begin another trial—­begging letters to her rich friends to help her poor ones, or letters trying to get interest and influence.  The difficulties and the confusion of life in the modern Babylon weighed on Rose in something of the same way that they tried Mark Molyneux.  It seemed to her that it must be safe and right to be doing so many disagreeable things and to be very tired, too tired to enjoy pleasures when they came her way.  Constantly, one person was trying to throw pleasures in her way; one person reminded old friends that Rose was in town; one person suggested that Rose Bright, although she did not go to parties, might come in to hear some great musician at a friend’s house; one person wanted to know her opinion on the last book; one person tried to find out when he could take her anywhere in his motor.  And this very morning Rose had asked herself if this one friend ought to be allowed to do all these things?  Was she sure that she was quite fair to Edmund Grosse?

It had been a day of fears and scruples.  She had been unnerved when the clergyman had called just to let her realise that the withdrawal of her subscription had, in the end, meant the collapse of his little orphanage; and when she was breaking down under this, Edmund had come in, and how soothed and comforted she had felt by his presence!  And then the joy of his proposal as to the yacht!  Her pulses beat with delight; she felt a positive hunger for blue skies, blue water, blue shores; a longing to get away from cares and muddles and badly-done jobs and being misunderstood.  Was it not horribly selfish, horribly cowardly?  Was it not the longing to stifle the sounds of pain, to shut her eyes to the gloom of the misery about her, to shut her mind to the effort to understand what was of practical good, and what was merely quack in the remedies offered?  Still, she realised to-night that she must get some sort of rest; that part of all this gloom was physical.  She would understand and feel things more rightly if she went away for a bit.