you ought to have no troubles at all. I heard that you weren't going to travel with your father, but begin work on your own account: it seems to me you're quite right, and I admire your courage."
Janet was surprised that Lady Beamish should show so much interest.
"My courage somehow doesn't make me feel cheerful," Janet answered, laughing, "and I can't see anything hopeful in the future to look forward to———" "Why am I saying all this to her?" she wondered.
"No? And the consciousness of doing right as an upholding power - that is generally a fallacy. I think you are certainly right there."
Janet looked at Lady Beamish, astonished and comforted to hear these words from the lips of an old experienced woman.
"I 'am grateful to you for saying that?"
"It must be a hard wrench to begin a new kind of life."
"It's not the work or even the change which I mind; if only there were some assurance in life, something certain and hopeful: I feel so miserably alone, acting on my own responsibility in the only way possible, and yet for no reason———"
"My poor girl———" and she stretched out her arms. Janet rose from her chair and took both her hands and sat down on the footstool at her feet. She looked up at her handsome face; it seemed divine to her lighted by that smile, and the wrinkles infinitely touching and beautiful. There was an intimate air about the room.
"You've decided to go away to Bristol?"
"I thought I'd be thorough: I might stay in London and get work; a friend of mine is editor of a lady's paper, and I suppose she could give me something to do; and there are other things I could do; but that doesn't seem to me thorough enough———"
