The actual truth was that if she had been a housemaid, the room she set in order would have taken a character under her touch; if she had been a seamstress, her work would have been swiftly done, her imagination would have invented for her combinations of form and colour; if she had been a nursemaid, the children under her care would never have been sufficiently bored to become tiresome or intractable, and they also would have gained character to which would have been added an undeniable vividness of outlook.

She could not have left them alone, so to speak.

In obeying the mere laws of her being, she would have stimulated them.

Unconsciously she had stimulated her fellow pupils at school; when she was his companion, her father had always felt himself stirred to interest and enterprise.
"You ought to have been a man, Betty," he used to say to her sometimes.
But Betty had not agreed with him.
"You say that," she once replied to him, "because you see I am inclined to do things, to change them, if they need changing.

Well, one is either born like that, or one is not.