when we are ill no longer; when there is no excuse for being idle and
listless; when, in fact, we could work if we would: then is the moment
for us to begin on anything which presents itself, until we have the
courage and the inclination to go back to our own particular work: that
which we have longed to do, and about which we now care nothing.
So Bernardine dusted books and sometimes sold them. All the time she
thought of the Disagreeable Man. She missed him in her life. She had
never loved before, and she loved him. The forlorn figure rose before
her, and her eyes filled with tears. Sometimes the tears fell on the
books, and spotted them.
Still, on the whole she was bright; but she found things difficult. She
had lost her old enthusiasms, and nothing yet had taken their place.
She went back to the circle of her acquaintances, and found that she
had slipped away from touch with them. Whilst she had been ill, they
had been busily at work on matters social and educational and political.
She thought them hard, the women especially: they thought her weak.
They were disappointed in her; she was now looking for the more human
qualities in them, and she, too, was disappointed.
"You have changed," they said to her: "but then of course you have been
ill, haven't you?"
With these strong, active people, to be ill and useless is a reproach.
And Bernardine felt it as such. But she had changed, and she herself
perceived it in many ways. It was not that she was necessarily better,
but that she was different; probably more human, and probably less self-
confident. She had lived in a world of books, and she had burst through
that bondage and come out into a wider and a freer land.
New sorts of interests came into her life. What she had lost in
strength, she had gained in tenderness. Her very manner was gentler,
her mode of speech less assertive. At least, this was the criticism of
those who had liked her but little before her illness.
"She has learnt," they said amongst themselves. And they were not
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