“Do you intend to teach all your days?  Are you going to wear out your life over primers and slates?”

“Perhaps so.  I know not how else I shall more easily earn a subsistence.”

“I trust you will marry, and be exempted from that dull, tedious routine,” said Cornelia, watching her countenance.

Beulah made a gesture of impatience.

“That is a mode of exemption so extremely remote that I never consider it.  I do not find teaching so disagreeable as you imagine, and dare say at fifty (if I live that long) I shall still be in a schoolroom.  Remember the trite line:” 

     “’I dreamed, and thought that life was beauty
       I woke, and found that life was duty’”

“Labor, mental and physical, is the heritage of humanity, and happiness is inseparably bound up with the discharge of duty.  It is a divine decree that all should work, and a compliance with that decree insures a proper development of the moral, intellectual, and physical nature.”

“You are brave, Beulah, and have more of hope in your nature than I. For twenty-three years I have been a petted child; but life has given me little enjoyment.  Often have I asked, Why was I created? for what am I destined?  I have been like a gilded bubble, tossed about by every breath!  Oh, Beulah! often, in the desolation of my heart, I have recalled that grim passage of Pollok’s, and that that verily I was that

                           “’Atom which God
     Had made superfluously, and needed not
     To build creation with, but back again
     To nothing threw, and left it in the void,
     With everlasting sense, that once it was!’”

“My life has not been useful, it has been but joyless, and clouded with the shadow of death from my childhood.”

Her voice was broken, and tears trickled over her emaciated face.  She put up her thin hand and brushed them away, as if ashamed of her emotion.

“Sometimes I think if I could only live, and be strong, I would make myself useful in the world—­would try to be less selfish and exacting, but all regrets are vain, and the indulged child of luxury must take her place in the pale realms of death along with the poverty-stricken and laboring.  Beulah, I was in pain last night, and could not sleep, and for hours I seemed to hear the words of that horrible vision:  ’And he saw how world after world shook off its glimmering souls upon the sea of Death, as a water-bubble scatters swimming lights on the waves.’  Oh! my mind is clouded and my heart hopeless, it is dismal to stand alone as I do, and confront the final issue, without belief in anything.  Sometimes, when the paroxysms are severe and prolonged, I grow impatient of the tedious delay, and would spring, open-armed, to meet Death, the deliverer.”

Beulah was deeply moved, and answered, with a faltering voice and trembling lip: 

“I wish I could comfort and cheer you; but I cannot—­I cannot!  If the hand of disease placed me to-day on the brink beside you, I should be as hopeless as you.  Oh, Cornelia! it makes my heart ache to look at you now, and I would give my life to be able to stand where you do, with a calm trust in the God of Israel; but—­”