It was good to earn her bread and to go back in the evening to the joyful shouts of two well and happy children.

She saw it all as an adventure--the whole of life--and the imperative necessity was to keep to the last the ardent heart of the true adventurer.

While she stitched with flying fingers, there passed before her the pale sad line of the victims--of those who had resigned themselves to unhappiness.

She saw her mother, anxious, pensive, ineffectual, with her widow's veil, her drooping eyelids, and her look of mournful acquiescence, as of one who had grown old expecting the worst of life; she saw poor Jane, tragic, martyred, with the feeble virtue and the cloying sweetness of all the poor Janes of this world; and she saw Uncle Meriweather wearing his expression of worried and resentful helplessness, as if he had been swept onward against his will by forces which he did not understand.

All these people were victims, and from these people she had sprung.