The return journey seemed short,
and with glad heart-beating she hastened from the City to Hanover
Street.
Well, well; of course it would all begin over again; Jane herself
knew it. But is not all life a struggle onward from compromise to
compromise, until the day of final pacification?
Through that winter she lived with a strange secret in her mind, a
secret which was the source of singularly varied feelings--of
astonishment, of pain, of encouragement, of apprehension, of grief.
To no one could she speak of it; no one could divine its existence--no
one save the person to whom she owed this surprising novelty in her
experience. She would have given much to be rid of it; and yet, again,
might she not legitimately accept that pleasure which at times came
of the thought?--the thought that, as a woman, her qualities were of
some account in the world.
She did her best to keep it out of her consciousness, and in truth
had so many other things to think about that it was seldom she
really had trouble with it. Life was not altogether easy; regular
work was not always to be kept; there was much need of planning and
pinching, that her independence might suffer no wound, Bessie Byass
was always in arms against that same independent spirit; she scoffed
at it, assailed it with treacherous blandishment, made direct
attacks upon it.
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