She had been in her girlhood a martyr to this malady of youth; it had tied her to the stake and enveloped her in flames for no accountable reason, causing her to suffer cruelly and feel humiliated.

She knew the pangs of it in public, and in private as well.

And she had not conquered it yet.

She was angered to find herself such a merely physical victim of the rushing blood: which condition of her senses did not immediately restore her natural colour.
'They mean nobly,' she said, to fill an extending gap in the conversation under a blush; and conscious of an ultra-swollen phrase, she snatched at it nervously to correct it: 'They are becoming alive to the necessity for action.' But she was talking to a soldier! 'I mean, their heads are opening.' It sounded ludicrous.

'They are educating themselves differently.' Were they?
'They wish to take their part in the work of the world.' That was nearer the proper tone, though it had a ring of claptrap rhetoric hateful to her: she had read it and shrunk from it in reports of otherwise laudable meetings.
'Well, spirited, yes.