Vavasor was not one of the age who came out with a firm denial of God’s existence. Like his fellows at the bank, he never took the trouble to deny him. They all took their own way and asked no questions. When a man has not the slightest intention that the answer shall influence his conduct, why should he bother to ask whether there be a God or not? Vavasor cared more about the top of his cane than the God whose being he did not take the trouble to deny. He believed a little less than the maiden aunt with whom he lived, she believed less than her mother, and her mother had believed less than hers. For generations the so-called faith of the family had been dying down, simply because all that time it had sent out no fresh root of obedience. It had in truth been no faith at all, only assent. Miss Vavasor went to church because it was the right thing to do. God was one of the heads of society, and his drawing rooms had to be attended. That she should come out of it all as well as other people when this life of family and incomes and matchmaking was over, she saw no reason to doubt. Ranters and canters might talk as they pleased, but God knew better than make the existence of thoroughly respectable people quite unendurable! She was kind-hearted, and treated her maid like an equal up to the moment of offense—then like a dog up to that of atonement. She had the power of keeping her temper even in family differences, and hence was regarded as a very model of wisdom, prudence and tact. She was devoted to her nephew, as she counted devotion, but would make sure that he made a correspondent return.

—Five —

Amy Amber

Some gently gradual crisis had arrived in the history of Hester, for in these days her heart was more sensitive and more sympathetic than ever before. It was ready to wake at every moan of the human sea around her. Unlike most women, she had not needed marriage and motherhood to open the great gate of her heart to her kind. Why the tide of human affliction should have begun to rise so rapidly in her just at this time, there is no need for conjecturing—much of every history must for the long present remain inexplicable.

Ever since her experience at the lecture on “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” she had seen the misery of the low of her kind as in a mirror, including her brother Cornelius. He had never before so plainly revealed to her his heartlessness, and the painful consequence of the revelation was, that now, with all her swelling love for human beings, she felt her heart shrink from him as if he were of another nature. Being several years older than he and having had a good deal to do with him as a baby and child, the infant motherhood of her heart had gathered about him, and nothing could destroy the relation between them. But as he grew up, the boy had undermined and weakened her affection, though hardly her devotion. And now the youth had given it a rude shock. But she did not yield to this decay of feeling, and every day grew more anxious and careful to carry herself toward him as a sister should.