You may well say 'Oh, Ideala!'"
"And Mr. Lloyd was so very good as to take me to the station, and see
me into the train," Ideala murmured; "and he gave me his bank-book to
amuse me on the journey, and carried Huxley's _Elementary Physiology_,
which I had come in to buy, off in triumph!"
But with all her self-forgetfulness there were moments in which she
showed that she must have thought deeply about herself, weighing her
own individuality against others, to see what place she occupied in her
own age, and how she stood with regard to the ages that had gone
before; yet even this she seemed to have done in a selfless way, having
apparently examined herself coolly, critically, fairly, as she might
have examined any other specimen of humanity in which she felt an
interest, unbiassed by any special regard.
"People always want to know if I write, or paint, or play, or what I
do," she once said to me. "They all expect me to do something. My
function is not to do, but to be. I make no poetry. I am a poem--if you
read me aright."
And again, in a moment of despondency, she said, "I am one of the weary
women of the nineteenth century.
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