"I really don't know. I have not seen him for several months--not
since August, I believe."
"So I supposed, as I questioned him about you; and he seemed
ignorant of your movements. Beulah, does not life look dreary and
tedious when you anticipate years of labor and care? Teaching is not
child's sport. Are you not already weary in spirit?"
"No, I am not weary; neither does life seem joyless. I know that I
shall have to labor for a support; but necessity always supplies
strength. I have many, very many sources of happiness, and look
forward, hopefully, to a life of usefulness."
"Do you intend to teach all your days? Are you going to wear out
your life over primers and slates?"
"Perhaps so. I know not how else I shall more easily earn a
subsistence."
"I trust you will marry, and be exempted from that dull, tedious
routine," said Cornelia, watching her countenance.
Beulah made a gesture of impatience.
"That is a mode of exemption so extremely remote that I never
consider it. I do not find teaching so disagreeable as you imagine,
and dare say at fifty (if I live that long) I shall still be in a
schoolroom. Remember the trite line:"
"'I dreamed, and thought that life was beauty
I woke, and found that life was duty'"
"Labor, mental and physical, is the heritage of humanity, and
happiness is inseparably bound up with the discharge of duty. It is
a divine decree that all should work, and a compliance with that
decree insures a proper development of the moral, intellectual, and
physical nature."
"You are brave, Beulah, and have more of hope in your nature than I.
For twenty-three years I have been a petted child; but life has
given me little enjoyment. Often have I asked, Why was I created?
for what am I destined? I have been like a gilded bubble, tossed
about by every breath! Oh, Beulah! often, in the desolation of my
heart, I have recalled that grim passage of Pollok's, and that that
verily I was that "'Atom which God
Had made superfluously, and needed not
To build creation with, but back again
To nothing threw, and left it in the void,
With everlasting sense, that once it was!'"
"My life has not been useful, it has been but joyless, and clouded
with the shadow of death from my childhood."
Her voice was broken, and tears trickled over her emaciated face.
She put up her thin hand and brushed them away, as if ashamed of her
emotion.