"I am quite sure you ought," answered Worse, who soon became quiet again. "You have so much originality and so much energy, that you will be able to overcome every difficulty, and in courage you are certainly not wanting."
Amid the whirl of the dance around them, these encouraging words sounded doubly strange in her ears, and seemed to open out new vistas before her.
"But what have I got to write about? What do I know that the world does not know already? No, you really must be wrong, Mr. Worse. It is beyond me;" and she looked down at her dress, and could not help feeling that Worse was becoming rather dull.
"It is not very easy to say beforehand what your subject ought to be," said he; "but it is clear that there are endless things that the world can only learn from a woman, and which it seems to be expecting to hear. For you it is but to have the will. You are now passing through a crisis in your life, and you have such a fund of energy--"
"You seem to be treating me more like a chemical equivalent than like a human being, not to say like a lady," said Rachel, laughing.
"Let us be thankful that you have so little of the lady about you," said Jacob Worse, bluntly.
The dance now began for which Rachel was otherwise engaged, and her partner came and carried her off.
Jacob Worse stood watching her for a few minutes. He then got his coat and went home.
He perfectly understood that by awakening these thoughts in her, he would make the fulfilment of what was really the dream of his life become more distant than ever. But he felt convinced that Rachel's splendid abilities would be entirely thrown away in her present narrow sphere; and he felt, too, that he was perfectly honest to himself, when he said that he would not hinder her from taking the path she ought to follow, even if he thereby destroyed his own greatest happiness. But when he got home and was alone in his own quiet room, he was even more dispirited. He could not but see that when Rachel came to have a proper estimate of her own powers, she would find her present home too narrow for her, and a marriage such as he could offer would be quite unworthy of her.
He saw a light in the rooms at the back of the house. It was not much past eleven; so he went over to his mother, whom he found in her dressing-gown, busied in arranging her small remnant of hair for the night.