and that the fundamental principle is the same whatever the station or class.
I spoke firmly and directly, but as kindly as I could, and ended by saying cheerfully, "Now, Charlotte, suppose you go on with your usual duties for the present. Think it all over not so much from the point of whether you go or stay, but whether you are giving as good and faithful service as it is in your power to give, and becoming as good a woman as it is in you to be."
Charlotte went silently out and I sat on in the gathering dusk with a touch of that glow in the heart which comes when for the moment we put personal interests aside, and let fundamentals surge up and speak for themselves. Of course I knew I had flung discretion to the winds so far as our summer was concerned, and I could not help a sinking of the heart when I reflected what our probable fate would be if she kept her resolve to leave on the twentieth. I had no clue to her real mind or disposition. She had been impenetrable from the beginning. She was a product of the English system, velvet-footed, detached, a silent cog in the domestic machinery. Probably she never had been approached on the
