Miss Browne drifted from place to place, place to place; there was nothing she was capable of doing really well, and no land has a hospitable welcome for such.
'It is a funny thing,' she said to Challis, 'but, however hard I try, I never seem able to do things like other people can.' Her eyes stared in front of her. 'If it had been your mother now in my place, she could have managed; she is made of the stuff that never goes under. But you would have thought any one like I am would have been sheltered and—cared for—as so many women are cared for.'
Challis stroked her restlessly moving hand.
'Sometimes,' she continued—her voice dropped, her eyes stared straight out before her—'sometimes I can't help feeling as if Providence has pushed me out to the front, and quite forgotten to give me anything to fight with.'
Then she pulled herself together reprovingly.
'Of course, that attitude is very wrong of me,' she said. 'It is only very seldom I think that, my love.'
Challis squeezed her hand sympathetically.
'It will all come right some day,' she said, with the large vague hopefulness of the very young.
'That's what I have always told myself,' said Miss Browne; 'but you must see, my love, if—if it does not come right very soon, it will be too late. I am thirty-eight—there, there is no need to mention it to Hermie or the rest of the family, my love.'
'But thirty-eight is not old,' said Challis, so eager to comfort, she left truth to take care of itself. 'Think what lots of people are fifty, and they don't think themselves a bit old.'