They were yesterday for love; partly for distinction, for a woman having beauty to shine in the sphere of beauty; but chiefly to love and be loved, therefore to live.  She had yesterday read letters of a man who broke a music from the word—­about as much music as there is in a tuning —­fork, yet it rang and lingered; and he was not the magical musician.  Now those letters were as dust of the road.  The sphere of beauty was a glass lamp-globe for delirious moths.  She had changed.  Belief in the real change gave her full view of the compliant coward she had been.

Her heart assured her she had natural courage.  She felt that it could be stubborn to resist a softness.  Now she cared no more for the hackneyed musical word; friendship was her desire.  If it is not life’s poetry, it is a credible prose; a land of low undulations instead of Alps; beyond the terrors and the deceptions.  And she could trust her friend:  he who was a singular constancy.  His mother had told her of his preserving letters of a girl he loved when at school; and of his journeys to an empty house at Dover.  That was past; but, as the boy, so the man would be in sincerity of feeling trustworthy to the uttermost.

She mused on the friend.  He was brave.  She had seen how he took his blow, and sorrow as a sister, conquering emotion.  It was not to be expected of him by one who knew him when at school.  Had he faults?  He must have faults.  She, curiously, could see none.  After consenting to his career as a schoolmaster, and seeing nothing ludicrous in it, she endowed him with the young school-hero’s reputation, beheld him with the eyes of the girl who had loved him—­and burnt his old letters!—­bitterly regretted that she burnt his letters!—­and who had applauded his contempt of ushers and master opposing his individual will and the thing he thought it right to do.

Musing thus, she turned a corner, on a sudden, in her mind, and ran against a mirror, wherein a small figure running up to meet her, grew large and nodded, with the laugh and eyes of Browny.  So little had she changed!  The stedfast experienced woman rebuked that volatile, and some might say, faithless girl.  But the girl had her answer:  she declared they were one and the same, affirmed that the years between were a bad night’s dream, that her heart had been faithful, that he who conjures visions of romance in a young girl’s bosom must always have her heart, as a crisis will reveal it to her.  She had the volubility of the mettled Browny of old, and was lectured.  When she insisted on shouting ’Matey!  Matey!’ she was angrily spurned and silenced.

Aminta ceased to recline in her carriage.  An idea that an indolent posture fostered vapourish meditations, counselled her sitting rigidly upright and interestedly observing the cottages and merry gutter-children along the squat straight streets of a London suburb.  Her dominant ultimate thought was, ‘I, too, can work!’ Like her courage, the plea of a capacity to work appealed for confirmation to the belief which exists without demonstrated example; and as she refrained from probing to the inner sources of that mental outcry, it was allowed to stand and remain among the convictions we store—­wherewith to shape our destinies.