Hester herself was annoyed to find how soon the idea of his lordship came to be altogether a thing of her past. But she was able to look on the whole blunder with calmness, and a thankfulness that kept growing as the sting of her fault lost its burning, lenified in the humility it brought.

There was nothing left her now, she said to herself, but the best of all—a maiden life devoted to the work of her master. She was not willing any more to run the risk of loosing her power to help the Lord’s creatures, down trodden of devils, well-to-do people, and their own miserable weaknesses and vices. Now she would hold herself free! What a blessed thing it was to be her own mistress and the slave of the Lord, externally free! To be the slave of a husband was the worst of all slavery except self-slavery!

Nor was there in her conclusion anything of disappointment or self-humiliation. St. Paul abstained from marriage that he might the better do the work given him by the Lord. For his perilous and laborious work it was better, he judged, that he should not be married. It was for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.

Her spirits soon returned more buoyant than before. Her health was better. She found she had been suffering from an oppression she had refused to recognize—already in no small measure yoked, and right unequally. Only a few weeks passed, and, in the prime of health and that glorious thing feminine strength, she looked a yet grander woman than before. There was greater freedom in her carriage, and she seemed to have grown. The humility that comes with the discovery of error had made her yet more dignified. True dignity comes only of humility. Pride is the ruin of dignity, for it is a worshipping of self, and that involves a continuous sinking. Humility, the worship of the Ideal—that is, of the man Christ Jesus, is the only lifter-up of the head.