“No, I know you didn’t,” she said, struggling to smile and to speak cheerfully. “I am very silly. I can’t help it. I have got so silly and touchy lately, the least thing seems to vex me. But you did hurt me a little, Gerald. I was in earnest in what I said, though you thought it missyish and contemptible. I have been trying to see how I could grow better and less selfish, and you don’t know how hard it is, for no one seems to understand. And, oh you don’t know, you who are so strong and wise, you don’t know how hard it is to be good when one is very unhappy.”
“Don’t I?” muttered he, but she did not catch the words.
“If I could be of use,” she went on again, after a little pause. “And why can’t I be? There must be plenty of misery in the world. Why can’t I make some of it a little less?”
“You can,” he answered, gently. “I don’t think I quite understood you. I thought you were envying men’s work and despising your own sphere—a very common and often excusable mistake. I see now there was a more unselfish spirit in what you meant.”
“I don’t know that,” she answered, doubtfully, but brightening up nevertheless. “I do think I should like to make some people happier, or a little less unhappy, and in some ways perhaps better too. For surely very often being happier would make people better, would it not? But I am selfish too—I want to get something to take me out of myself—something that I can get interested in by feeling it is of use.”
“Don’t you help your father sometimes?” inquired Gerald. “Haven’t you a good deal to do in looking after things at home?”
“No—very little indeed. The house has got into a jog-trot way of going on, and papa won’t have changes. What little there has been to do hitherto, I am afraid Sydney has done,” said Eugenia, blushing a little. “Of course I don’t intend to neglect that sort of thing, but there is very little to do. I do help my father whenever he will let me, by copying out things and hunting up references and quotations. But it isn’t often he wants help.”
“And would he not let you help him more if you asked him?”
“He might, but it would only be to please me,” replied Eugenia, despondingly. “No, I am afraid it is true—I am no use to anybody. Once, I remember, ever, ever so long ago,” she went on, as if ten or twenty years at least were within easy grasp of her memory, “I had visions of becoming frightfully learned, of studying all my life long, and getting to the bottom of everything. What a little goose I was! Just because I had learnt Latin and German and a few other things more thoroughly than most girls! I wonder sometimes if, after all, all the trouble papa took with us has been much good to us. Look at Sydney; what will be the use of it to her, marrying at eighteen? And as for me, if I were really clever I suppose I should go on working away, absorbed in the work without thinking of any result. But I can’t, Gerald. It doesn’t satisfy me. I want to see and feel a result.”
She looked up in his face, her bright, earnest eyes full of inquiry. “Can’t you help me?” they seemed to say.