‘Well, since you will, you must,’ he interrupted. ‘Why do you put “inexperienced?”’
‘Because I am.’
‘Never mind that—scratch out “inexperienced.” We are poor, Cytherea, aren’t we?’ he murmured, after a silence, ‘and it seems that the two months will close my engagement here.’
‘We can put up with being poor,’ she said, ‘if they only give us work to do.... Yes, we desire as a blessing what was given us as a curse, and even that is denied. However, be cheerful, Owen, and never mind!’
In justice to desponding men, it is as well to remember that the brighter endurance of women at these epochs—invaluable, sweet, angelic, as it is—owes more of its origin to a narrower vision that shuts out many of the leaden-eyed despairs in the van, than to a hopefulness intense enough to quell them.
IV. THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
1. AUGUST THE FOURTH. TILL FOUR O’CLOCK
The early part of the next week brought an answer to Cytherea’s last note of hope in the way of advertisement—not from a distance of hundreds of miles, London, Scotland, Ireland, the Continent—as Cytherea seemed to think it must, to be in keeping with the means adopted for obtaining it, but from a place in the neighbourhood of that in which she was living—a country mansion not twenty miles off. The reply ran thus:—
KNAPWATER HOUSE,
August 3, 1864.