Lavinia by Rhoda Broughton — Read

Féodorovna has ejected her so early that she need not go home at once. This is Lavinia's first thought on getting outside the house. It is but rarely that Miss Carew is not wanted in her own little _milieu_; but to-day she would be superfluous. Her uncle and Rupert are busy with the lawyer, who has come down from London -- busy over settlements: a settlement upon herself; provision for the younger children -- her younger children, hers and Rupert's! If she walk very fast, perhaps she may outwalk this last thought. But it is a good walker; it keeps up with her. Possibly she might lose it in the wood. The idea results in a _détour_, which will involve passing through a portion of it. The word "wood" is perhaps a misnomer, for the grown trees are few and sparse; and yet by what other name can you describe these silvan miles of young chestnut, oak, and birch growths, that every ten years fall beneath the hatchet, to continually renew their tireless upspringing? Where only recently amputated stumps remain, the flowers grow far the lushest.

She pauses on reaching a spot where a quarter-acre of ground is utterly given over to the innocent loveliness of the cuckoo-flower, dog-violet, primrose, "firstborn child of Ver," and purpling wood anemone. She stands looking down at them, as if she had never seen them before; as if these lowly, lifelong friends were the new-seen blossoms of a nobler planet. What has happened to her senses, that she sees and hears and smells with such three-fold keenness? Why does she feel so startlingly alive? The wonder drives Rupert's younger children successfully into the background of her mind. Yet this bounding new consciousness of the splendour of life -- life actual, this bursting irrepressible life of the field and the woodland -- and life possible -- cannot answer, when the roll-call of emotions is called, to the name of pleasure.