Whatever the book lacked it did not lack interest. Still, it bristled with blemishes.

And then what could the Pratts, or indeed any one, make of such a sentence as this:

"When we look back at what we were seven years ago, five years ago, and perceive the difference in ourselves, a difference amounting almost to change of identity; when we look back and see in how many characters we have lived and loved and suffered and died before we reached the character that momentarily clothes us, and from which our soul is struggling out to clothe itself anew; when we feel how the sympathy even of those who love us best is always with our last expression, never with our present feeling, always with the last dead self on which our climbing feet are set—"

"She is hopelessly confused," said Mr. Gresley, without reading to the end of the sentence, and substituting the word ladder for dead self. "Of course, I see what she means, the different stages of life, the infant, the boy, the man, but hardly any one else will so understand it."

The clock struck ten. Mr. Gresley was amazed. The hour had seemed like ten minutes.

"I will just see what happens in the next chapter," he said. And he did not hear the clock when it struck again. The story was absorbing. It was as if through that narrow, shut-up chamber a gust of mountain air were sweeping like a breath of fresh life. Mr. Gresley was vaguely stirred in spite of himself, until he remembered that it was all fantastic, visionary. He had never felt like that, and his own experience was his measure of the utmost that is possible in human nature. He would have called a kettle visionary if he had never seen one himself. It was only saved from that reproach by the fact that it hung on his kitchen hob. What was so unfair about him was that he took gorillas and alligators, and the "wart pig" and all its warts on trust, though he had never seen them. But the emotions which have shaken the human soul since the world began, long before the first "wart pig" was thought of—these he disbelieved.

All the love which could not be covered by his own mild courtship of the obviously grateful Mrs. Gresley, Mr. Gresley put down as exaggerated. There was a good deal of such exaggeration in Hester's book, which could only be attributed to the French novels of which he had frequently expressed his disapproval when he saw Hester reading them. It was given to Mr. Gresley to perceive that the French classics are only read for the sake of the hideous improprieties contained in them. He had explained this to Hester, and was indignant that she had continued to read them just as frequently as before, even translating parts of some of them into English, and back again into the original. She would have lowered the Bishop forever in his Vicar's eyes, if she had mentioned by whose advice and selection she read, so she refrained.