Women are being constantly misled by the fancy and hope of being the saviours of men! It is natural to goodness and innocence, but not the less is the error a disastrous one. There ought surely at least to be some probability of success as well founded as rare, to justify the sacrifices involved. Is it a good thing that a life of supreme suffering should be gone through for nothing but an increase of guilt?

It will be said that patience reaps its reward, but I fear too many patiences fail, and the number of resultant saints is small. The thing once done, the step no longer retrievable, fresh duty is born, and divine good will result from what suffering may arise in its fulfillment. The conceit or ambition itself which led to the fault, may have to be cured by its consequences.

Yet it may well be that a woman does more to redeem a man by declining than by encouraging his attentions. I dare not say how much a woman is capable of for the redemption of a man. But I think one who obeys God will scarcely imagine herself free to lay her person in the arms, and her happiness in the bosom of a man whose being is a denial of him.

Good Christians not Christians enough to understand this, may have to be taught by the change of what they took for love into what they know to be disgust. It is very hard for a woman to know whether her influence has any real power over a man. It is very hard for the man himself to know, for the passion having in itself a betterment, may deceive him as well as her. It might be well that a woman asked herself whether moral laxity or genuine self-devotion was the more persuasive in her to the sacrifice. If her best hope is to restrain the man within certain bounds, she is not one to imagine capable of any noble anxiety.

God cares nothing about keeping a man respectable. He will give his very self to make of him a true man. But that needs God—a woman is not enough for it. This cannot be God’s way of saving bad men.

—Eleven —

The Concert Room

Vavasor at length realized that he must not continue to visit Hester so often, while not ready to go further, and that, much as he was in love—proportionately, that is, to his faculty for loving—he dared not do. But for the unconventionality of the Raymounts he would have reached the point long before. Therefore, he began to lessen the number, and shorten the length of his appearances in Addison Square.

But in so doing he became all the more aware of Hester’s influence on him, and found that he had come to feel differently about certain things. He had not begun to change in a fundamental way, but was only a little infected with her goodness. He took the change, however, as one of great moral significance and was wonderfully pleased with himself. His natural kindness, for instance, toward the poor was quickened, causing him to give out a penny more often to those who begged. It was a good thing, and rooted in a better, but it did not indicate any advanced stage of goodness or any lessening of selfishness. On one occasion he prided himself that he had walked home in order to give his last shilling to a poor woman, whereas in truth he walked home because he found he had given her his last. Yet there was a little more movement of the sap of his nature, as even his behaviour in the bank would have testified.