Thomas Wingfold, Curate | Page 2

but one who has made no discovery.
She had just finished the novel of the day, and was suffering a mild
reaction--the milder, perhaps, that she was not altogether satisfied with
the consummation. For the heroine had, after much sorrow and patient
endurance, at length married a man whom she could not help knowing
to be not worth having. For the author even knew it, only such was his
reading of life, and such his theory of artistic duty, that what it was a
disappointment to Helen to peruse, it seemed to have been a comfort to
him to write. Indeed, her dissatisfaction went so far that, although the
fire kept burning away in perfect content before her, enhanced by the
bellowing complaint of the wind in the chimney, she yet came nearer
thinking than she had ever been in her life. Now thinking, especially to
one who tries it for the first time, is seldom, or never, a quite
comfortable operation, and hence Helen was very near becoming
actually uncomfortable. She was even on the borders of making the
unpleasant discovery that the business of life--and that not only for
North Pole expeditions, African explorers, pyramid-inspectors, and
such like, but for every man and woman born into the blindness of the
planet--is to discover; after which discovery there is little more comfort
to be had of the sort with which Helen was chiefly conversant. But she
escaped for the time after a very simple and primitive fashion, although
it was indeed a narrow escape.
Let me not be misunderstood, however, and supposed to imply that
Helen was dull in faculty, or that she contributed nothing to the
bubbling of the intellectual pool in the social gatherings at Glaston. Far
from it. When I say that she came near thinking, I say more for her than
any but the few who know what thinking is will understand, for that
which chiefly distinguishes man from those he calls the lower animals
is the faculty he most rarely exercises. True, Helen supposed she could
think--like other people, because the thoughts of other people had

passed through her in tolerable plenty, leaving many a phantom
conclusion behind; but this was THEIR thinking, not hers. She had
thought no more than was necessary now and then to the persuasion
that she saw what a sentence meant, after which, her acceptance or
rejection of what was contained in it, never more than lukewarm,
depended solely upon its relation to what she had somehow or other,
she could seldom have told how, come to regard as the proper style of
opinion to hold upon things in general.
The social matrix which up to this time had ministered to her
development, had some relations with Mayfair, it is true, but scanty
ones indeed with the universe; so that her present condition was like
that of the common bees, every one of which Nature fits for a queen,
but its nurses, prevent from growing one by providing for it a cell too
narrow for the unrolling of royalty, and supplying it with food not
potent enough for the nurture of the ideal--with this difference,
however, that the cramped and stinted thing comes out, if no queen,
then a working bee, and Helen, who might be both, was neither yet. If I
were at liberty to mention the books on her table, it would give a few of
my readers no small help towards the settling of her position in the
"valued file" of the young women of her generation; but there are
reasons against it.
She was the daughter of an officer, who, her mother dying when she
was born, committed her to the care of a widowed aunt, and almost
immediately left for India, where he rose to high rank, and somehow or
other amassed a considerable fortune, partly through his marriage with
a Hindoo lady, by whom he had one child, a boy some three years
younger than Helen. When he died, he left his fortune equally divided
between the two children.
Helen was now three-and-twenty, and her own mistress. Her
appearance suggested Norwegian blood, for she was tall, blue-eyed,
and dark-haired--but fair-skinned, with regular features, and an over
still-some who did not like her said hard--expression of countenance.
No one had ever called her NELLY; yet she had long remained a girl,
lingering on the broken borderland after several of her school

companions had become young matrons. Her drawing-master, a man of
some observation and insight, used to say Miss Lingard would wake up
somewhere about forty.
The cause of her so nearly touching the borders of thought this
afternoon, was, that she became suddenly aware of feeling bored. Now
Helen was even seldomer bored than merry, and this time she saw no
reason for it, neither