Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/239

Rh. She no longer felt herself predestined to nurse the sick for the rest of her life, and in her inexperience she reproached herself with this instability. Youth and womanhood were in fact crying out in her for their individual satisfaction; but instincts as deep-seated protected her from even a momentary illusion as to the nature of this demand. She wanted happiness, and a life of her own, as passionately as young ﬂesh-and-blood had ever wanted them; but they must come bathed in the light of imagination and penetrated by the sense of larger affinities. She could not conceive of shutting herself into a little citadel of personal well-being while the great tides of existence rolled on unheeded outside. Whether they swept treasure to her feet, or strewed her life with wreckage, she felt, even now, that her place was there, on the banks, in sound and sight of the great current; and just in proportion as the scheme of life at Lynbrook succeeded in shutting out all sense of that vaster human consciousness, so did its voice speak more thrillingly within her.

Somewhere, she felt—but, alas! still out of reach——was the life she longed for, a life in which high chances of doing should be mated with the ﬁner forms of enjoying. But what title had she to a share in such an existence? Why, none but her sense of what it was worth—and what did that count for, in a world which used all its resources to barricade itself against all its [ 223 ]