"It is time," she said,
earnestly,
"It is time, O passionate heart and morbid eye,
That old hysterical mock-disease should die."
CHAPTER XXVIII.
I hoped Claudia's plain speaking had made an impression, but for a long
time after that it seemed as if Ideala's interest in life had really
ended, that her sphere of usefulness had contracted, and that she
herself would become like the rest--a doer of unconnected trifles that
have meaning only as the straws have meaning which show which way the
current sets. One cannot help thinking how many of these significant
straws must go down to the ocean and be lost, their little use
unrecognised, their little labour unavailing: because it does so little
good merely to know which way the stream is setting, or what ocean will
receive it at last, if we have no power to profit by the knowledge. At
this time Ideala's own life was not unlike one of these hapless straws,
and it seemed a wretched failure of its early promise, that ending as a
straw on the common stream, when so little might have made her
influence in her own sphere like the river itself, strong and
beautiful.
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