a person of habitual self-control, are not often betrayed into impulsive thinking, perhaps, and yet I feel that if I could penetrate the secret of the last half-hour's reflection with which your mind has been engaged, I should know you better from that revelation than from all the other intercourse we have had. All this, however, is only on the way to what I wished to say, which is this. You are making a mistake—I am certain of it—in cramping and proscribing yourself as you do. You ought to try your wings a little and go out and see the world. If you had here full employment for your energies it would be different; but it is all wrong that you should be simply stagnating through the best years of your life. I wish you would make up your mind to spend this winter in New York."
"Are these the best years of my life?" said Stella. "Do you really believe that? I always feel as if I were only living through them on the way to something else."
"That is a very delusive feeling, and may go on indefinitely, until some day you may wake to find that youth is gone, with all its possibilities, which cannot come again. Middle age and even old age may be good, but youth is the golden time, and you are letting it slip away from you as if you could recall it any moment at will. If there was work for you here,—work for head and hands and heart,—I should not speak to you in this way: the whole mistake is in the inertia of your existence. And you are not a woman to sleep through life. Sometimes I think perhaps you have dreams, and sometimes I think not. One thing, however, I know without speculation. Somewhere in this world a woman's destiny awaits you,—a destiny you have every requirement for. If ever a woman was made to bless, to purify, to sweeten, to ennoble life for man, you were. I believe you would deny and controvert the idea, but your mission is to marry; and out in the great world the spirit which would emanate from you and such as you is needed by both men and women. I have a feeling that the world has need of you, Miss Stella, and that you are wrong to hide your light. I was thinking just now of what the end of it all would be if you drifted on as now; and you don't know how I recoiled at the thought of your going on through life in your present isolated, passive way, or how strongly I feel it my duty to remonstrate. And now," he said, after pausing slightly, "perhaps you are angry with me, and think I had better have held my tongue."
"I am not angry," Stella answered, in a tone that proved the truth of her words, "and I think you must he very kind, or you would not take interest enough to think out all this for my sake; but I cannot see the thing as you do. The thought of going out into the great world
