As a child she had once walked in her sleep, had gone forth from the house, and had, before she was awakened, crossed the narrow footing of a canal-lock, a thing her nervousness would not allow her to do at other times.

This became to her a figure.
The feat she had performed when mere vital instinct guided her, she would have failed in when attempting it with the full understanding of its danger.

Suppose something happened which put an end to her independence--failure of health, some supreme calamity at home--could she hold on in the way of salvation?
Was she capable of conscious heroism?
Could her soul retain its ideal of beauty if environed by ugliness?
The vice of her age--nay, why call it a vice ?--the necessary issue of that intellectual egoism which is the note of our time, found as good illustration in this humble life as in men and women who are the mouthpieces of a civilisation.

Pre occupied with problems of her own relation to the world, she could not enjoy without thought in the rear, ever ready to trouble her with suggestions of unreality.

Her distresses of conscience were all the more active for being purely human; in her soul dwelt an immense compassion, which, with adequate occasion, might secure to itself such predominance as to dwarf into inefficiency her religion of culture.