she spoke,—­to him she told all her troubles—­but to no one else did she ever breathe her thoughts, or disclose a line of what she had written.  She had often wondered whether, if she sent these struggling literary efforts to a magazine or newspaper, they would be accepted and printed.  But she never made the trial, for the reason that such newspaper literature as found its way into Briar Farm filled her with amazement, repulsion and disgust.  There was nothing in any modern magazine that at all resembled the delicate, pointed and picturesque phraseology of the Sieur Amadis!  Strange, coarse slang-words were used,—­and the news of the day was slung together in loose ungrammatical sentences and chopped-up paragraphs of clumsy construction, lacking all pith and eloquence.  So, repelled by the horror of twentieth-century “style,” she had hidden her manuscripts deeper than ever in the old bureau, under little silk sachets of dried rose-leaves and lavender, as though they were love-letters or old lace.  And when sometimes she shut herself up and read them over she felt like one of Hamlet’s “guilty creatures sitting at a play.”  Her literary attempts seemed to reproach her for their inadequacy, and when she made some fresh addition to her store of written thoughts, her crimes seemed to herself doubled and weighted.  She would often sit musing, with a little frown puckering her brow, wondering why she should be moved to write at all, yet wholly unable to resist the impulse.

To-night, however, she scarcely remembered these outbreaks of her dreaming fancy,—­the sordid, hard, matter-of-fact side of life alone presented itself to her depressed imagination.  She pictured herself going into service—­as what?  Kitchen-maid, probably,—­she was not tall enough for a house-parlourmaid.  House-parlourmaids were bound to be effective,—­even dignified,—­in height and appearance.  She had seen one of these superior beings in church on Sundays—­a slim, stately young woman with waved hair and a hat as fashionable as that worn by her mistress, the Squire’s lady.  With a deepening sense of humiliation, Innocent felt that her very limitation of inches was against her.  Could she be a nursery-governess?  Hardly; for though she liked good-tempered, well-behaved children, she could not even pretend to endure them when they were otherwise.  Screaming, spiteful, quarrelsome children were to her less interesting than barking puppies or squealing pigs;—­besides, she knew she could not be an efficient teacher of so much as one accomplishment.  Music, for instance; what had she learned of music?  She could play on an ancient spinet which was one of the chief treasures of the “best parlour” of Briar Farm, and she could sing old ballads very sweetly and plaintively,—­but of “technique” and “style” and all the latter-day methods of musical acquirement and proficiency she was absolutely ignorant.  Foreign languages were a dead letter to her—­except old French.  She could understand that; and Villon’s