"On a mission!" how the thought had
tickled my fancy and roused my warmest enthusiasm but a few short days
before! Indeed, I had not been yet a week in Wallencamp, and now, as I
walked up the lane in a mood quite the reverse of enthusiastic, I was
painfully trying to gather from my small and scattered sources of
information what the exact meaning of the phrase might be.
I had entered on the performance of my errand to Wallencamp under
circumstances not usual, perhaps, among propagandists; nevertheless, I
had been singularly free from misgivings.
A girl of nineteen years, I had a home endowed with every luxury; a
circle of family acquaintance, which, I admitted, did me great
credit; congenial companions; while as for my education, I was pleased
to call it completed. My career at boarding-schools had been of a
delightfully varied and elective nature, for I had not deigned to toil
with squalid studiousness, or even to sail with politic and inglorious
ease through the prescribed course of study at any institution. Any
misadventures necessarily following from this course my friends had
gilded over with the flattering insinuation that I was "too vivacious"
for this sort of discipline, or "too fragile" for that, though I am
bound to say that, in such cases, my "vivacity" had generally sealed my
fate before the delicacy of my constitution became too alarmingly
apparent.
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