“Not knowingly,” said Miss Vavasor. “We are all liable to mistakes.”

“But God has given the charge of children to mothers and fathers, not hirelings.”

Miss Vavasor began to think it scarcely desirable to bring a woman of such levelling opinions into their quiet circle. She would be preaching next that women were wicked who did not nurse their own brats! But she would be faithful to Gartley!

“To set up as reformers would be to have the whole hive about our ears,” she said.

“That may be,” replied Hester, “but it does not apply to me. I keep the beam out of my own eye which I have no hope of pulling out of my neighhour’s. I do not belong to your set.”

“But you are about to belong to it, I hope.”

“I hope not.”

“You are engaged to marry my nephew.”

“Not irrevocably, I trust.”

“You should have thought of all that before you gave your consent. Gartley thought you understood. Certainly our circle is not one for saints.”

“I thought I had done and said more than was necessary to make Gartley understand my ideas of what was required of me in life. I thought he sympathized with me and even that he would be what help to me he could. Now I find instead that he never believed I meant what I said, but all the time intended to put a stop to the aspiration of my life—ministry to the poor—the moment he had it in his power to do so.”

“Ah, my dear young lady, you do not know what love is!” said Miss Vavasor, as if she knew what love was. “A woman really in love,” she went on, “is ready to give up everything, yes, my dear, everything, for the man she loves. She who is not equal to that does not know what love is.”

“Suppose he should prove unworthy of her?”

“That would be nothing, positively nothing. If she had once learned to love him, she would see no fault in him.”

“Whatever faults he might have?”

“Whatever faults. Love has no second thoughts. A woman who loves gives herself to her husband to be moulded by him.”

“I fear that is the way men think of us,” said Hester sadly. “With all my heart I say a woman ought to be ready to die for the man she loves—she cannot really love him if she would not. But that she should agree with all his thoughts, feelings, and judgments, even those that she would despise in others, is to me something no true woman could do who had not first lost her reason.”

“I see,” Miss Vavasor concluded inwardly, “she is one of the strong-minded who think themselves superior to any man. Gartley will be well rid of her—that is my conviction! I think I have done nearly all he could require of me.”

“I tell you honestly,” continued Hester, “I love lord Gartley so much that I would gladly yield my life to do him any worthy good. Of course I would do that to redeem any human creature from the misery of living without God. Perhaps I would even marry lord Gartley if only I knew that he would not try to prevent me from being the woman I ought to be and have to be. But I could never marry one who opposed my being what I ought to be, what I desire, determine, and with God’s help will be! Certainly a wife must love her husband grandly—passionately. But there is one to be loved immeasurably more grandly, even passionately—he whose love creates all other loves.”