“I should like you to map them.  Shut up all day with a parcel of rude, stupid children, and released only to be caged again in a small room in a second-rate boarding house.  Really, I should fancy they were limited indeed.”

“No; I enjoy my brisk walk to school in the morning; the children are neither so dull nor so bearish as you seem to imagine.  I am attached to many of them, and do not feel the day to be very long.  At three I hurry home, get my dinner, practice, and draw or sew till the shadows begin to dim my eyes; then I walk until the lamps are lighted, find numberless things to interest me, even in a winter’s walk, and go back to my room refreshed and eager to get to my books.  Once seated with them, what portion of the earth is there that I may not visit, from the crystal Arctic temples of Odin and Thor to the groves of Abyssinia?  In this age of travel and cheap books I can sit in my room in the third story, and, by my lamplight, see all, and immeasurably more, than you, who have been traveling for eighteen months.  Wherever I go I find sources of enjoyment; even the pictures in bookstores give me pleasure and contribute food for thought; and when, as now, I am surrounded by all that wealth can collect, I admire, and enjoy the beauty and elegance as much as if I owned it all.  So you see that my enjoyments are as varied as the universe itself.”

“Eureka!” murmured Cornelia, eying her companion curiously, “Eureka! you shall have the tallest case in the British Museum, or Barnum’s, just as your national antipathies may incline you.”

“What impresses you as so singular in my mode of life?” asked Beulah rather dryly.

“Your philosophic contentment, which I believe you are too candid to counterfeit.  Your easy solution of that great human riddle given the world, to find happiness.  The Athenian and Alexandrian schools dwindle into nothingness.  Commend me to your ‘categories,’ O Queen of Philosophy.”  She withdrew her searching eyes, and fixed them moodily on the fire, twirling the tassel of her robe as she mused.

“You are most egregiously mistaken, Cornelia, if you have been led to suppose, from what I said a moment since, that I am never troubled about anything.  I merely referred to enjoyments derived from various sources, open alike to rich and poor.  There are Marahs hidden in every path; no matter whether the draught is taken in jeweled goblets or unpolished gourds.”

“Sometimes, then, you are ‘blued’ most dismally, like the balance of unphilosophic men and women, eh?”

“Occasionally my mind is very much perplexed and disturbed; not exactly ‘blued,’ as you express it, but dimmed, clouded.”

“What clouds it?  Will you tell me?” said Cornelia eagerly.

“The struggle to see that which I suppose it never was intended I should see.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Cornelia, knitting her brows.

“Nor would you even were I to particularize.”