In the absence of human counsellors she instinctively tried prayer. For a time it would often happen that while the mother was kneeling by her bedside, the daughter knelt also by hers, only a thin wall of lath and plaster dividing them as they sought along the same road for guidance and strength. And without doubt strength was given her – of a kind. Invariably she rose from her prayers happier, more serene, with reinforced endurance. But it was a sacrificial, deathly endurance, full of the exaltation of humility, exuding tenderness, pity and forgiveness towards Louis. And though it lifted and puffed up her spirit, somehow Joanna knew it was not good. She knew that such praying was a subtle indulgence and intoxication that she were better to abstain from. Some day she might learn another way of prayer. Meanwhile she thought she had gained a greater understanding of her mother’s daily failure.

Probing for help in other directions, the girl now applied herself for the first time in her life with real eagerness to the world of books. Not till now had she apprehended the vital relation between that world and the world of actuality. And as it came home to her like a startling discovery she took to searching out in novels and biographies the cases that had anything in common with hers.

Unluckily the men and women in print were either so much nobler than Louis and she, or so much more depraved, or their circumstances were so entirely different, that their experience gave little help. She awoke in the process, however, to what had scarcely existed for her before – human character as distinguished from elementary emotions. It was one of Pender’s fads that he could compose with greater freedom as well as more concentration if some one read aloud while he worked; and Joanna, delighted by every new use he found for her, grew apt in the choice of books for that purpose. He liked her voice, was soothed by it, and often for long stretches she would hardly know how far any of the sense was reaching him through his primary absorption. But she was always re-assured in time by some sceptical or approving interjection. Best of all she was pleased when she could lead him on to the eager discussion of some point of conduct. They quarrelled most deeply over tragedy.

“People are like that,” was his shrugging comment on the catastrophe in Anna Karenina: and he only smiled and went on painting when Joanna, with a whitening face, insisted that Anna could have saved the situation.