How easy to say that life should mean service for others, but, so far as she was concerned, no one wanted of her more than the cheap small change of daily sociable intercourse, and what she longed to offer was both hands full of gold--pure gold. She thought of the women in the cottages she had passed that day, living hard, toilsome lives, but all for somebody--all working day and night that loved ones might be clothed and fed and comforted. Ah! that was the point, the crux of the whole matter.
And having thus arrived at the nature of her trouble, she turned her mind to finding a remedy. She arraigned herself at the bar of her conscience on a charge of idleness, but justice dismissed the accusation. Idle she was not, she never lacked occupations; her reading, her music, her sewing, for she was a skilled embroideress, more than filled her leisure hours. But who profited? Herself alone!
For a woman of her class what was there--what opening for the willing service of hand and heart? First and foremost, marriage. Well, marriage was, for her at all events, impossible without a great love to sanctify the bond, and love had not come to her. Had her mother spoken truly when she had reproved her for holding an ideal too high for this work-a-day world? Possibly.
Of course she might do as other women she knew of, who gave up their lives of ease and pleasure and spent their days in the crowded courts and alleys of great cities, waging war against the giants of dirt and ignorance and disease. Or, she thought whimsically, she could join the ranks of Women with a capital W, and hurl herself into a vortex of meetings and banner-wavings, like other unemployed. No, anything but that.
Poor souls, clamouring for place and power as they imagine it, without realising that even should they obtain beyond their wildest hopes, they are even now throwing away that priceless heritage of future generations--the dignity of their mothers. Those stately gentlewomen, our mothers and our grandmothers, living decorous and well-ordered lives, busy with manifold duties, wielding an influence impossible to over-estimate for good to their descendants, their country and the nation,--they are gone--their example is unheeded--their teaching is laid aside; but who will make good the loss to children yet unborn?
A log rolled from the fire with a soft crash, and Philippa roused herself. "Well," she said as she rose, "what is the use of thinking and wondering. 'Do the thing that's nearest,' which at the moment, my little dogs, is to go to bed!"