"Dear Doris! don't you think I know it all? But you must not say no fate could have been worse. The worst fate is moral wrong, and there is no moral wrong where our will is not concerned."
"Wrong!" repeated Doris scornfully. "Moral wrong! Is it nothing then for a girl to lose her bloom?" Her face was burning, and her breath came fast. "Young men," she said, scarcely above a whisper, "and all those students—mere boys! It drives me mad!"
Mona rose and kissed her.
"Dearest," she said, "you are the preux chevalier of your sex, and I love you for it with all my heart. I feel the force of what you say, though one learns in time to be silent, and not even to think of it more than need be. But indeed, you make yourself more unhappy than you should. Some of the young men of whom you speak so scornfully are truly scientific, and many of them have infinite kindness of heart."
"Don't let us talk of it. I cannot bear it. But oh, Mona, go on with your work—go on!" She kissed her friend almost passionately and left the room.
"There goes," thought Mona, "a woman with a pure passion for an abstract cause—a woman whose shoe-latchets I am not worthy to unloose."
CHAPTER X.
BORROWNESS.
The next afternoon the grey ponies trotted Mona down to Granton.
It was strange to find herself on the deck of a steamer once more; the same experience as that of yesterday, and yet how different! Yesterday she had been the centre of her little circle—admired, flattered, indulged by every one; to-day she was nothing and nobody—a young woman travelling alone. And yesterday, she kept assuring herself, was the anomaly, the exception; to-day was in the ordinary course of things—a fair average sample of life.