Page:Arminell, a social romance (1896).djvu/88

80 that. Her wage was not high, but it was as much as she was likely to get in a farm-house, and a small wage there with freedom was better than a big wage in a gentleman's family with restraint. She knew that. Yet she was not content. She wanted something, and she did not know what. She would give her mistress notice and go elsewhere. Whither? She did not know. At any rate it would be elsewhere, a change; and she craved for a change, for she had been a twelvemonth in one place. Would she like her new situation? She did not know. Would she, when in a town, look back on the healthy life at Court? Possibly; she did not know. But she could not stay, because as the passion for roving is in the gipsy blood, so was the fever of unrest in hers. She was tired of life as it presented itself to her, uniform, commonplace, unsensational.

There was a period in European history when all was change, when every people plucked itself out of its ancestral ground and went a wandering; when the whole of the continent was trampled over by races galloping west, like cattle and wild beasts disturbed by a prairie fire. What was the cause? We hardly know, but we know that there was not a people, a race, a class which was not thus inspired with the passion for change of domicile. The Germans entitle that period the time of the great Folk-wandering. We are in the midst of such another Folk-wandering, but it is not now the migration of races and nations, but of classes and individuals; the passion for change drives the men and women out of the country to towns, and the young out of their situations. It is in the air, it is in their blood.

The evening sun touched the western sea, and flared up in a spout of fire. Then Thomasine rose to her feet. Her red hair had fallen, and she bent her arms behind her, to do it up. Gorgeous that hair was in the evening sun, it seemed itself to be on fire, to be incandescent in every hair, and her attitude as she stood on the step was grand, her