Red Pottage

The children, who had reached the pear stage, looked with round, awed eyes at "Auntie Hester" as she sat down at the luncheon-table beside the black bottle which marked her place. The Gresleys were ardent total abstainers, and were of opinion that Hester's health would be greatly benefited by following their example. But Hester's doctor differed from them—he was extremely obstinate—with the result that the Gresleys were obliged to tolerate the obnoxious bottle on their very table. It was what Mrs. Gresley called a "cross," and Mr. Gresley was always afraid that the fact of its presence might become known and hopelessly misconstrued in Warpington and the world at large.

The children knew that Hester was in disgrace, as she vainly tried to eat the congealed slice of roast mutton, with blue slides in it, which had been put before her chair half an hour ago, when the joint was sent out for the servants' dinner. The children liked "Auntie Hester," but without enthusiasm, except Regie, the eldest, who loved her as himself. She could tell them stories, and make butterflies and horses and dogs out of paper, but she could never join in their games, not even in the delightful new ones she invented for them. She was always tired directly. And she would never give them rides on her back, as the large, good-natured Pratt girls did. And she was dreadfully shocked if they did not play fair, so much so that on one occasion Mr. Gresley had to interfere, and to remind her that a game was a game, and that it would be better to let the children play as they liked than to be perpetually finding fault with them.

Perhaps nothing in her life at the Vicarage was a greater trial to Hester than to see the rules of fair play broken by the children with the connivance of their parents. Mr. Gresley had never been to a public school, and had thus missed the ABC of what in its later stages is called "honor." He was an admirable hockey-player, but he was not in request at the frequent Slumberleigh matches, for he never hit off fair, or minded being told so.

"Auntie Hester is leaving all her fat," said Mary, suddenly, in a shrill voice, her portion of pear held in her left cheek as she spoke. She had no idea that she ought not to draw attention to the weakness of others. She was only anxious to be the first to offer interesting information.

"Never mind," said Mrs. Gresley, admiring her own moderation. "Finish your pear."

If there was one thing more than another in Hester's behavior that annoyed Mrs. Gresley—and there were several others—it was Hester's manner of turning her food over on her plate and leaving half of it.

Hester did it again now, and Mrs. Gresley, already irritated by her unpunctuality, tried to look away so as not to see her, and prayed for patience. The hundred a year which Hester contributed to the little establishment had eased the struggling household in many ways; but Mrs. Gresley sometimes wondered if the money, greatly needed as it was, counterbalanced the perpetual friction of her sister-in-law's presence.

"Father!"

"Yes, my son."

"Isn't it wrong to drink wine?"

Yes, my son."

"Then why does Auntie Hester drink it?"

Hester fixed her eyes intently on her brother. Would he uphold her before the children?

"Because she thinks it does her good," said Mr. Gresley.

She withdrew her eyes. Her hand, holding a spoonful of cold rice pudding, shook. A delicate color flooded her face, and finally settled in the tip of her nose. In her own way she loved the children.

"Ach, mein Herr," almost screamed Fräulein, who adored Hester, and saw the gravity of the occasion, "aber Sie vergessen that the Herr Doctor Br-r-r-r-r-own has so strong—so very strong command—"

"I cannot allow a discussion as to the merits or demerits of alcohol at my table," said Mr. Gresley. "I hold one opinion, Dr. Brown holds another. I must beg to be allowed to differ from him. Children, say grace."

It was Wednesday and a half-holiday, and Mrs. Gresley had arranged to take the children in the pony-carriage to be measured for new boots. These expeditions to Westhope were a great event. At two o'clock exactly the three children rushed down-stairs, Regie bearing in his hand his tin money-box, in which a single coin could be heard to leap. Hester produced a bright threepenny-piece for each child, one of which was irretrievably buried in Regie's money-box, and the other two immediately lost in the mat in the pony-carriage. However, Hester found them, and slipped them inside their white gloves, and the expedition started, accompanied by Boulou, a diminutive yellow-and-white dog of French extraction. Boulou was a well-meaning, kind little soul. There was a certain hurried arrogance about his hind-legs, but it was only manner. He was not in reality more conceited than most small dogs who wear their tails high.

Hester saw them drive off, and a few minutes later Mr. Gresley started on his bicycle for a ruridecanal chapter meeting in the opposite direction. She heard the Vicarage gate "clink" behind him as she crossed the little hall, and then she suddenly stopped short and wrung her hands. She had forgotten to tell either of them that the Bishop of Southminster was going to call that afternoon. She knew he was coming on purpose to see her, but this would have been incredible to the Gresleys. She had not read Rachel's letter announcing his coming till she had taken refuge in the field where she had fallen asleep, and her mental equilibrium had been so shaken by the annoyance she felt she had caused the Gresleys at luncheon that she had entirely forgotten the subject till this moment.

She darted out of the house and flew down the little drive. But Fortune frowned on Hester to-day. She reached the turn of the road only to see the bent figure of Mr. Gresley whisk swiftly out of sight, his clerical coat-tails flowing gracefully out behind like a divided skirt on each side of the back wheel.

Hester toiled back to the house breathless and dusty, and ready to cry with vexation. "They will never believe I forgot to tell them," she said to herself. "Everything I do is wrong in their eyes and stupid in my own." And she sat down on the lowest step of the stairs and leaned her head against the banisters.

To her presently came a ministering angel in the shape of Fräulein, who had begged an egg from the cook, had boiled it over her spirit-lamp, and now presented it with effusion to her friend on a little tray, with two thin slices of bread-and-butter.

"You are all goodness, Fräulein," said Hester, raising her small, haggard face out of her hands. "It is wrong of me to give so much trouble." She did not want the egg, but she knew its oval was the only shape in which Fräulein could express her silent sympathy. So she accepted it gratefully, and ate it on the stairs, with the tenderly severe Fräulein watching every mouthful.

Life did not seem quite such a hopeless affair when the little meal was finished. There were breaks in the clouds, after all. Rachel was coming to see her that afternoon. Hester was, as Fräulein often said, "easy cast down and easy cast up." The mild stimulant of the egg "cast her up" once more. She kissed Fräulein and ran up to her room, where she divested her small person of every speck of dust contracted on the road, smoothed out an invisible crease in her holland gown, put back the little ring of hair behind her ear which had become loosened in her rush after her brother, and then came down, smiling and composed, to await her friend in the drawing-room.

Hester seldom sat in the drawing-room, partly because it was her sister-in-law's only sitting-room and partly because it was the regular haunt of the Pratt girls, who (with what seemed to Hester dreadful familiarity) looked in at the windows when they came to call, and, if they saw any one inside, entered straightway by the same, making retreat impossible.

The Miss Pratts had been willing, when Hester first came into the neighborhood, to take a good-natured though precarious interest in "their Vicar's sister." Indeed, Mrs. Gresley had felt obliged to warn Hester not to count too much on their attentions, "as they sometimes dropped people as quickly as they took them up."

Hester was ignorant of country life, of its small society, its inevitable relations with unsympathetic neighbors just because they were neighbors; and she was specially ignorant of the class to which Mrs. Gresley and the Pratts belonged, and from which her aunt had in her lifetime unwisely guarded her niece as from the plague. She was amazed at first at the Pratts calling her by her Christian name without her leave, until she discovered that they spoke of the whole county by their Christian names, even designating Lord Newhaven's two younger brothers—with whom they were not acquainted—as Jack and Harry, though they were invariably called by their own family John and Henry.

When, after her aunt's death, she had, by the advice of her few remaining relatives, taken up her abode with her brother, as much on his account as her own, for he was poor and with an increasing family, she journeyed to Warpington accompanied by a pleasant feeling that, at any rate, she was not going among strangers. She had often visited in Middleshire, at Wilderleigh, in the elder Mr. Loftus's time, for whom she had entertained an enthusiastic reverence; at Westhope Abbey, where she had a firm ally in Lord Newhaven, and at several other Middleshire houses. She was silly enough to think she knew Middleshire fairly well, but after she settled at Warpington she gradually discovered the existence of a large undercurrent of society of which she knew nothing at all, in which, whether she were willing or not, she was plunged by the fact that she was her brother's sister.

Hester perceived clearly enough that her brother did not by birth belong to this set, though his profession brought him in contact with it, but he had evidently, though involuntarily, adopted it for better for worse; perhaps because a dictatorial habit is generally constrained to find companionship in a social grade lower than its own, where a loud voice and a tendency to monologue checkered by prehistoric jokes and tortured puns may meet with a more patient audience. Hester made many discoveries about herself during the first months of her life at Warpington, and the first of the series amazed her more than any of the later ones.

She discovered that she was proud. Perhaps she had not the enormous opinion of herself which Mrs. Gresley so frequently deplored, for Hester's thoughts seldom dwelt upon herself. But the altered circumstances of her life forced them momentarily upon herself nevertheless, as a burst pipe will spread its waters down a damask curtain.

So far, during the eight years since she had left the school-room, she had always been "Miss Gresley," a little personage treated with consideration wherever she went, and choyée for her delicate humor and talent for conversation. She now experienced the interesting sensation, as novel to her as it is familiar to most of us, of being nobody, and she disliked it. The manners of the set in which she found herself also grated continually on her fastidious taste. She was first amazed and then indignant at hearing her old Middleshire friends, whose simplicity far surpassed that of her new acquaintance, denounced by the latter—without being acquainted with them except officially—as "fine," as caring only for "London people," and as being "tuft-hunters," because they frequently entertained at their houses persons of rank, to half of whom they were related. All this was new to Hester. She discovered that, though she might pay visits at these houses, she must never mention them, as it was considered the height of vulgarity to speak of people of rank.

Mrs. Gresley, who had been quite taken aback when the first of these invitations came, felt it her duty to warn Hester against a love of rank, reminding her that it was a very bad thing to get a name for running after titled people.

"James and I have always kept clear of that," she remarked, with dignity. "For my part, I dare say you will think me very old-fashioned, but I must own I never can see that people with titles or wealth are one bit nicer or pleasanter than those without them."

Hester agreed.

"And," continued Mrs. Gresley, "it has always been our aim to be independent, not to bow down before any one. If I am unworldly, it is because I had the advantage of parents who impressed on me the hollowness of all social distinctions. If the Pratts were given a title to-morrow I should behave exactly the same to them as I do now."

If Lady Susan Gresley had passed her acquaintance through a less exclusive sieve, Hester might have had the advantage of hearing all these well-worn sentiments, and of realizing the point of view of a large number of her fellow-creatures before she became an inconspicuous unit in their midst.

But if Mrs. Gresley was pained by Hester's predilection for the society of what she called "swells" (the word, though quite extinct in civilized parts, can occasionally be found in country districts), she was still more pained by the friendships Hester formed with persons whom her sister-in-law considered "not quite."

Mrs. Gresley was always perfectly civil, and the Pratts imperfectly so, to Miss Brown, the doctor's invalid sister. But Hester made friends with her, in spite of the warnings of Mrs. Gresley that kindness was one thing and intimacy another.

"The truth is," Mrs. Gresley would say, "Hester loves adulation, and as she can't get it from the Pratts and us, she has to go to those below her in the social scale, like Miss Brown, who will give it to her. Miss Brown may be very cultivated. I dare say she is, but she makes up to Hester."

Sybell Loftus, who lived close at hand at Wilderleigh, across the Prone, was one of the very few besides Miss Brown among her new acquaintances who hailed Hester at once as a kindred spirit, to the unconcealed surprise of the Pratts and the Gresleys. Sybell adored Hester's book, which the Gresleys and Pratts considered rather peculiar "as emanating from the pen of a clergyman's sister." She enthusiastically suggested to Hester several improvements which might easily be made in it, which would have changed its character altogether. She even intrenched on the sacred precinct of a married woman's time to write out the openings of several romances, which she was sure Hester, with her wonderful talent, could build up into magnificent works of art. She was always running over to the Vicarage to confide to Hester the unique thoughts which had been vouchsafed to her while contemplating a rose, or her child, or her husband, or all three together.

Hester was half amused, half fascinated, and ruefully lost many of the mornings still left her by the Pratts and Gresleys in listening to the outpourings of this butterfly soul, which imagined every flower it involuntarily alighted on and drew honey from to be its own special production.

But Hester's greatest friend in Middleshire was the Bishop of Southminster, with whom Rachel was staying, and whom she was expecting this afternoon.

The unbalanced joys and sorrows of emotional natures are apt to arouse the pity of the narrow-hearted and the mild contempt of the obtuse of their fellow-creatures.

But perhaps it is a mistake to feel compassion for persons like Hester, for if they have many evil days and weeks in their usually short lives, they have also moments of sheer bliss, hours of awed contemplation and of exquisite rapture which, possibly, in the long run, equal the more solid joys of a good income and a good digestion, nay, even the perennial glow of that happiest of happy temperaments which limits the nature of others by its own, which sees no uncomfortable difference between a moral and a legal right, and believes it can measure life with the same admirable accuracy with which it measures its drawing-room curtains.

As Hester and Rachel sat together in the Vicarage drawing-room, Rachel's faithful, doglike eyes detected no trace of tears in Hester's dancing, mischievous ones. They were alone, for the Bishop had dropped Rachel on his way to visit a sick clergyman, and had arranged to call at the Vicarage on his way back.

Hester quickly perceived that Rachel did not wish to talk of herself, and drew a quaint picture of her own life at Warpington, which she described "not wisely but too well." But she was faithful to her salt. She said nothing of the Gresleys to which those worthies could have objected had they been present. Indeed, she spoke of them in what they would have termed "a very proper manner," of their kindness to her when she had been ill, of how Mr. Gresley had himself brought up her breakfast-tray every morning, and how, in the spring, he had taught her to bicycle.

"But, oh! Rachel," added Hester, "during the last nine months my self-esteem has been perforated with wounds, each large enough to kill the poor creature. My life here has shown me horrible faults in myself of which I never dreamed. I feel as if I had been ironed all over since I came here, and all kinds of ugly words in invisible ink are coming out clear in the process."

"I am quite alarmed," said Rachel, tranquilly.

"You ought to be. First of all I did think I cared nothing about food. I don't remember ever giving it a thought when I lived with Aunt Susan. But here I—I am difficult about it. I do try to eat it, but often I really can't. And then I leave it on my plate, which is a disgusting habit, which always offends me in other people. Now I am as bad as any of them; indeed, it is worse in me because I know poor James is not very rich."

"I suppose the cooking is vile?"

"I don't know. I never noticed what I ate till I came here, so I can't judge. Perhaps it is not very good. But the dreadful part is that I should mind. I could not have believed it of myself. James and Minna never say anything, but I know it vexes them, as of course it must."

Rachel looked critically at Hester's innocent, childlike face. When Hester was not a cultivated woman of the world she was a child. There was, alas! no medium in her character. Rachel noticed how thin her face and hands had become, and the strained look in the eyes. The faint color in her cheek had a violet tinge.

She did not waste words on the cookery question. She saw plainly enough that Hester's weak health was slipping further down the hill.

"And all this time you have been working?"

"If you call it working. I used to call it so once, but I never do now. Yes, I manage about four hours a day. I have made another pleasant discovery about myself—that I have the temper of a fiend if I am interrupted."

"But surely you told the Gresleys when first you came that you must not be interrupted at certain hours?"

"I did. I did. But, of course—it is very natural—they think that rather self-important and silly. I am thought very silly here, Rachel. And James does not mind being interrupted in writing his sermons. And the Pratts have got the habit of running in in the mornings."

"Who on earth are the Pratts?"

"They are what they call 'county people.' Their father made a fortune in oil, and built a house covered with turrets near here a few years ago. I used to know Captain Pratt, the son, very slightly in London. I never would dance with him. He used to come to our 'At Homes,' but he was never asked to dinner. He is a great 'parti' among a certain set down here. His mother and sisters were very kind to me when I came, but I was not so accustomed then as I am now to be treated familiarly and called 'Hessie,' which no one has ever called me before, and I am afraid I was not so responsive as I see now I ought to have been. Down here it seems your friends are the people whom you live near, not the ones you like. It seems a curious arrangement. And as the Pratts are James's and Minna's greatest friends, I did not wish to offend them. And then, of course, I did offend them mortally at last by losing my temper when they came up to my room to what they called 'rout me out,' though I had told them I was busy in the mornings. I was in a very difficult place, and when they came in I did not know who they were, because only the people in the book were real just then. And then when I recognized them, and the scene in my mind which I had been waiting for for weeks was shattered like a pane of glass, I became quite giddy and spoke wildly. And then—I was so ashamed afterwards—I burst into tears of rage and despair."

Even the remembrance was too much. Hester wiped away two large tears onto a dear little handkerchief just large enough to receive them, and went on with a quaver in her voice.

"I was so shocked at myself that I found it quite easy to tell them next day that I was sorry I had lost my temper; but they have not been the same since. Not that I wanted them to be the same. I would rather they were different. But I was anxious to keep on cordial terms with Minna's friends. She quarrels with them herself, but that is different. I suppose it is inevitable if you are on terms of great intimacy with people you don't really care for."

"At any rate, they have not interrupted you again?"

"N—no. But still, I was often interrupted. Minna has too much to do, and she is not strong just now, and she often sends up one of the children, and I was so nearly fierce with one of them—poor little things!—that I felt the risk was becoming too great, so I have left off writing between breakfast and luncheon, and I get up directly it is light instead. It is light very early now. Only the worst part of it is that I am so tired for the rest of the day that I can hardly drag myself about."

Rachel said nothing. She seldom commented on the confidences that were made to her. She saw that Hester, always delicate, was making an enormous effort under conditions which would be certain to entail disastrous effects on her health. The book was sapping her strength like a vampire, and the Gresleys were evidently exhausting it still further by unconsciously strewing her path with difficulties. Rachel did not know them, but she supposed they belonged to that large class whose eyes are holden.

"And the book itself? Is it nearly finished?"

Hester's face changed. Eagerly, shyly, enthusiastically she talked to her friend about the book, as a young girl talks of her lover. Everything else was forgotten. Hester's eyes burned. Her color came and went. She was transfigured.

The protecting, anxious affection died out of Rachel's face as she looked at Hester, and gave place to a certain wistful, half-envious admiration. She had once been shaken by all these emotions herself, years ago, when she was in love. She had regarded them as a revelation while they lasted; and afterwards, as a steep step—a very steep step—upon the stair of life. But she realized now that such as Hester live constantly in the world which the greater number of us can only enter when human passion lends us the key; the world at which, when the gates are shut against us, the coarser minded among us are not ashamed to level their ridicule and contempt.

Hester spoke brokenly with awe and reverence of her book, as of some mighty presence, some constraining power outside herself. She saw it complete, beautiful—an entrancing vision, inaccessible, as a sunset.

"I cannot reach up to it. I cannot get near it," she said. "When I try to write it, it is like drawing an angel with spread wings with a bit of charcoal. I understate everything. Yet I labor day by day travestying it, caricaturing the beautiful thoughts that come into my mind. I make everything commonplace and vulgar by putting it into words. I go alone into the woods and sit for hours quite still with the trees. And gradually I understand and know. And I listen, and Nature speaks, really speaks—not a façon de parler, as some people think who explain to you that you mean this or that by your words which you don't mean—and her spirit becomes one with my spirit. And I feel I can never again misunderstand her, never again fail to interpret her, never again wander so far away from her that every white anemone and every seedling fern disowns me, and waits in silence till the alien has gone from among them. And I come home, Rachel, and I try, sometimes I try for half the night, to find words to translate it into. But there are no words, or, if there are, I cannot find them, and at last I fall back on some coarse simile, and in my despair I write it down. And, oh! Rachel, the worst is that presently, when I have forgotten what it ought to have been, when the vision fades, I know I shall admire what I have written. It is that that breaks my heart."

The old, old lament of those who worship art, that sternest mistress in the world, fell into the silence of the little drawing-room. Rachel understood it in part only, for she had always vaguely felt that Hester idealized Nature, as she idealized her fellow-creatures, as she idealized everything, and she did not comprehend why Hester was in despair because she could not speak adequately of Life or Nature as she saw them. Rachel thought, with bewilderment, that that was just what she could do.

At this moment a carriage drew up at the door, and after a long interval, during which the wrathful voice of the cook could be distinctly heard through the kitchen window recalling "Hemma" to a sense of duty from the back yard, "Hemma" breathlessly ushered in the Bishop of Southminster.

The Bishop was an undersized, spare man, with a rugged, weather-beaten face and sinewy frame. If you had seen him working a crane in a stone-mason's yard, or leading a cut-and-thrust forlorn-hope, or sailing paper boats with a child, you would have felt he was the right man in the right place. That he was also in his right place as a bishop had never been doubted by any one. Mr. Gresley was the only person who had occasionally had misgivings as to the Bishop's vocation as a true priest, but he had put them aside as disloyal.

Jowett is believed to have said, "A bishop without a sense of humor is lost." Perhaps that may have been one of the reasons why, by Jowett's advice, the See of Southminster was offered to its present occupant. The Bishop's mouth, though it spoke of an indomitable will, had a certain twist of the lip, his deep-set, benevolent eyes had a certain twinkle which made persons like Lord Newhaven and Hester hail him at once as an ally, but which ought to have been a danger-signal to some of his clerical brethren—to Mr. Gresley in particular.

The Bishop respected and upheld Mr. Gresley as a clergyman, but as a conversationalist the young vicar wearied him. If the truth were known (which it never was), he had arranged to visit Hester when he knew Mr. Gresley would be engaging the reluctant attention of a ruridecanal meeting.

He gave a sigh of relief as he became aware that Hester and Rachel were the only occupants of the cool, darkened room. Mrs. Gresley, it seemed, was also out.

Hester made tea, and presently the Bishop, who looked much exhausted, roused himself. He had that afternoon attended two death-beds—one the death-bed of a friend, and the other that of the last vestige of peace, expiring amid the clamor of a distracted Low Church parish and High Church parson, who could only meet each other after the fashion of cymbals. For the moment even his courageous spirit had been disheartened.

"I met a son of Anak the other night at the Newhavens'," he said to Hester, "who claimed you as a cousin—a Mr. Richard Vernon. He broke the ice by informing me that I had confirmed him, and that perhaps I should like to know that he had turned out better than he expected."

"How like Dick!" said Hester.

"I remembered him at last. His father was the squire of Farlow, where I was rector before I came to Southminster. Dick was not a source of unmixed pleasure to his parents. As a boy of eight he sowed the parental billiard-table with mustard and cress in his father's absence, and raised a very good crop, and performed other excruciating experiments. I believe he beat all previous records of birch rods at Eton. I remember while he was there he won a bet from another boy who could not pay, and he foreclosed on the loser's cricketing trousers. His parents were distressed about it when he brought them home, and I tried to make him see that he ought not to have taken them. But Dick held firm. He said it was like tithe, and if he could not get his own in money, as I did, he must collect it in trousers. I must own he had me there. I noticed that he wore the garment daily as long as any question remained in his parents' minds as to whether they ought to be returned. After that I felt sure he would succeed in life."

"I believe he is succeeding in Australia."

"I advised his father to send him abroad. There really was not room for him in England, and, unfortunately for the army, the examiners jibbed at his strictly phonetic spelling. He tells me he has given up being an A.D.C. and has taken to vine-growing, because if people are up in the world they always drink freely, and if they are 'down on their luck' they drink all the more to drown care. The reasoning appeared to me sound."

"He and James used to quarrel frightfully in the holidays," said Hester. "It was always the same reason, about playing fair. Poor James did not know that games were matters of deadly importance, and that a rule was a sacred thing. I wonder why it is that clergymen so often have the same code of honor as women; quite a different code from that of the average man."

"I think," said the Bishop, "it is owing to that difference of code that women clash so hopelessly with men when they attempt to compete or work with them. Women have not to begin with the esprit de corps which the most ordinary men possess. With what difficulty can one squeeze out of a man any fact that is detrimental to his friend, or even to his acquaintance, however obviously necessary it may be that the information should be asked for and given. Yet I have known many good and earnest and affectionate women, who lead unselfish lives, who will 'give away' their best woman friend at the smallest provocation, or without any provocation at all; will inform you, à propos of nothing, that she was jilted years ago, or that her husband married her for her money. The causes of humiliation and disaster in a woman's life seem to have no sacredness for her women friends. Yet if that same friend whom she has run down is ill, the runner down will nurse her day and night with absolutely selfless devotion."

"I have often been puzzled by that," said Rachel. "I seem to be always making mistakes about women, and perhaps that is the reason. They show themselves capable of some deep affection or some great self-sacrifice, and I respect and admire them, and think they are like that all through. And the day comes when they are not quite straightforward, or are guilty of some petty meanness, which a man who is not fit to black their boots would never stoop to."

Hester's eyes fixed on her friend.

"Do you tell them? Do you show them up to themselves," she asked, "or do you leave them?"

"I do neither," said Rachel. "I treat them just the same as before."

"Then aren't you a hypocrite, too?"

Hester's small face was set like a flint.

"I think not," said Rachel, tranquilly, "any more than they are. The good is there for certain, and the evil is there for certain. Why should I take most notice of the evil, which is just the part which will be rubbed out of them presently, while the good will remain?"

"I think Rachel is right," said the Bishop.

"I don't think she is, at all," said Hester, her plumage ruffled, administering her contradiction right and left to her two best friends like a sharp peck from a wren. "I think we ought to believe the best of people until they prove themselves unworthy, and then—"

"Then what?" said the Bishop, settling himself in his chair.

"Then leave them in silence."

"I only know of a woman's silence by hearsay. I have never met it. Do you mean bitterly reproach the thistle for not bearing grapes?"

"I do not. It is my own fault if I idealize a thistle until the thistle and I both think it is a vine. But if people appear to love and honor certain truths which they know are everything to me, and claim kinship with me on that common ground, and then desert when the pinch comes, as it always does come, and act from worldly motives, then I know that they have never really cared for what they professed to love, that what I imagined to be a principle was only a subject of conversation—and—I withdraw."

"You withdraw!" echoed the Bishop. "This is terrible."

"Just as I should," continued Hester, "if I were in political life. If a man threw in his lot with me, and then, when some means of worldly advancement seemed probable from the other side, deserted to it, I should not in consequence think him incapable of being a good husband and father and landlord. But I should never again believe that he cared for what I had staked my all on. And when he began to talk as if he cared (as they always do, as if nothing had happened) I should not show him up to himself. I have tried that and it is no use. I should—"

"Denounce him as an apostate?" suggested the Bishop.

"No. He should be to me thenceforward as a heathen."

"Thrice miserable man!"

"You would not have me treat him as a brother after that?"

"Of course not, because he would probably dislike that still more."

At this moment a hurricane seemed to pass through the little house, and the three children rushed into the drawing-room, accompanied by Boulou, in a frantic state of excitement. Boulou, like Hester, had no happy medium in his character. He was what Mrs. Gresley called "very Frenchy," and he now showed his Frenchyness by a foolish exhibition of himself in coursing round and round the room with his silly foreign tail crooked the wrong way.

"Mother got out at Mrs. Brown's," shrieked Regie, in his highest voice, "and I drove up."

"Oh, Regie!" expostulated Mary the virtuous, the invariable corrector of the statements of others. "You held the reins, but William walked beside."

Hester made the children shake hands with her guests, and then they clustered round her to show what they had bought.

Though the Bishop was fond of children, he became suddenly restive. He took out his watch, and was nervously surprised at the lapse of time. The carriage was sent for, and in a few minutes that dignified vehicle was bowling back to Southminster.

"I am not satisfied about Hester," said the Bishop. "She looks ill and irritable, and she has the tense expression of a person who is making a colossal effort to be patient, and whose patience, after successfully meeting twenty calls upon it in the course of the day, collapses entirely at the twenty-first. That is a humiliating experience."

"She spoke as if she were a trial to her brother and his wife."

"I think she is. I have a sort of sympathy with Gresley as regards his sister. He has been kind to her according to his lights, and if she could write little goody-goody books he would admire her immensely, and so would half the neighborhood. It would be felt to be suitable. But Hester jars against the preconceived ideas which depute that clergymen's sisters and daughters should, as a matter of course, offer up their youth and hair and teeth and eyesight on the altar of parochial work. She does and is nothing that long custom expects her to do and be. Originality is out of place in a clergyman's family, just because it is so urgently needed. It is a constant source of friction. But, on the other hand, the best thing that could happen to Hester is to be thrown for a time among people who regard her as a nonentity, who have no sense of humor, and to whom she cannot speak of any of the subjects she has at heart. If Hester had remained in London after the success of her Idyll she would have met with so much sympathy and admiration that her next book would probably have suffered in consequence. She is so susceptible, so expansive, that repression is positively necessary to her to enable her, so to speak, to get up steam. There is no place for getting up steam like a country vicarage with an inner cordon of cows round it and an outer one of amiable country neighbors, mildly contemptuous of originality in any form. She cannot be in sympathy with them in her present stage. It is her loss, not theirs. At forty she will be in sympathy with them, and appreciate them as I do; but that is another story. She has been working at this new book all winter with a fervor and concentration which her isolation has helped to bring about. She owes a debt of gratitude to her surroundings, and some day I shall tell her so."

"She says her temper has become that of a fiend."

"She is passionate, there is no doubt. She nearly fell on us both this afternoon. She is too much swayed by every little incident. Everything makes a vivid impression on her and shakes her to pieces. It is rather absurd and disproportionate now, like the long legs of a foal, but it is a sign of growth. My experience is that people without that fire of enthusiasm on the one side and righteous indignation on the other never achieve anything except in domestic life. If Hester lives, she will outgrow her passionate nature, or at least she will grow up to it and become passive, contemplative. Then, instead of unbalanced anger and excitement, the same nature which is now continually upset by them will have learned to receive impressions calmly and, by reason of that receptiveness and insight, she will go far."