North and South quotes

But as Margaret half suspected, Edith had fallen asleep. She lay curled up on the sofa in the back drawing-room in Harley Street looking very lovely in her white muslin and blue ribbons.

If Titania had ever been dressed in white muslin and blue ribbons, and had fallen asleep on a crimson damask sofa in a back drawing-room, Edith might have been taken for her.

Margaret was struck afresh by her cousin’s beauty. They had grown up together from childhood, and all along Edith had been remarked upon by everyone, except Margaret, for her prettiness;

She had, however, of late settled upon her own health as a source of apprehension; she had a nervous little cough whenever she thought about it; and some complaisant doctor ordered her just what she desired—a winter in Italy.

Mrs. Shaw had as strong wishes as most people, but she never liked to do anything from the open and acknowledged motive of her own good will and pleasure; she preferred being compelled to gratify herself by some other person’s command or desire.

She really did persuade herself that she was submitting to some hard external necessity; and thus she was able to moan and complain in her soft manner, all the time she was in reality doing just what she liked.

Perhaps it was not quite a logical deduction from all these premises, but it was still Mrs. Shaw’s characteristic conclusion, as she thought over her sister’s lot: “

Married for love, what can dearest Maria have to wish for in this world?

” Mrs. Hale, if she spoke truth, might have answered with a ready-made list, “a silver-grey glacé silk, a white chip bonnet, oh! dozens of things for the wedding, and hundreds of things for the house.”

Her keen enjoyment of every sensuous pleasure was balanced finely, if not overbalanced, by her conscious pride in being able to do without them all, if need were.

But the cloud never comes in that quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it.

There had been slight complaints and passing regrets on her mother’s part, over some trifle connected with Helstone, and her father’s position there, when Margaret had been spending her holidays at home before;

Mr. Hale sipped his tea in abstracted silence; Margaret had the responses all to herself. She wondered how her father and mother could be so forgetful, so regardless of their companion through the day, as never to mention his name.

She forgot that he had not made them an offer.

After tea Mr. Hale got up, and stood with his elbow on the chimneypiece, leaning his head on his hand, musing over something, and from time to time sighing deeply. Mrs. Hale went out to consult with Dixon about some winter clothing for the poor.

“No, father,” said Margaret, looking straight at him, and speaking low and steadily. “

It is bad to believe you in error. It would be infinitely worse to have known you a hypocrite.

” She dropped her voice at the last few words, as if entertaining the idea of hypocrisy for a moment in connection with her father savoured of irreverence.

perhaps, after all, more a loss of the fragrance of grass and herbage than any positive taste or smell. Quick they were whirled over long, straight, hopeless streets of regularly-built houses, all small and of brick.

Here and there a great oblong many-windowed factory stood up, like a hen among her chickens, puffing out black “unparliamentary” smoke, and sufficiently accounting for the cloud which Margaret had taken to foretell rain.

As they drove through the larger and wider streets, from the station to the hotel, they had to stop constantly; great loaded lurries blocked up the not over-wide thoroughfares. Margaret had now and then been into the city in her drives with her aunt.

But he will come back almost directly. I am sorry you have had the trouble of calling twice.”

Mr. Thornton was in habits of authority himself, but she seemed to assume some kind of rule over him at once.

He had been getting impatient at the loss of his time on a market-day, the moment before she appeared, yet now he calmly took a seat at her bidding.

but now that he looked eagerly forward to each renewal of his intercourse with Mr. Thornton, she seemed hurt and annoyed, as if he were slighting her companionship for the first time.

Mr. Hale’s overpraise had the usual effect of overpraise upon his auditors; they were a little inclined to rebel against Aristides being always called the Just.

After a quiet life in a country parsonage for more than twenty years, there was something dazzling to Mr. Hale in the energy which conquered immense difficulties with ease;

saw less of power in its public effect, and, as it happened, she was thrown with one or two of those who, in all measures affecting masses of people, must be acute sufferers for the good of many.

The question always is, has everything been done to make the sufferings of these exceptions as small as possible? or, in the triumph of the crowded procession, have the helpless been trampled on, instead of being gently lifted aside out of the roadway of the conqueror, whom they have no power to accompany on his march?

It fell to Margaret’s share to have to look out for a servant to assist Dixon, who had at first undertaken to find just the person she wanted to do all the rough work of the house.

For instance, one day, after she had passed a number of men, several of whom had paid her the not unusual compliment of wishing she was their sweetheart, one of the lingerers added, “

Your bonny face, my lass, makes the day look brighter.

” And another day, as she was unconsciously smiling at some passing thought, she was addressed by a poorly-dressed, middle-aged workman, with, “You may well smile, my lass; many a one would smile to have such a bonny face.”

“That’s beyond London, I reckon? And I come fro’ Burnleyways, and forty miles to th’ North.

And yet, yo see, North and South has both met and made kind o’ friends in this big smoky place.

”

“

I shall have a spring where I am boun’ to, and flowers, and amaranths, and shining robes besides.

”

“Aye, aye,” said the father, impatiently, “hoo’ll come. Hoo’s a bit set up now, because hoo thinks I might ha’ spoken more civilly; but hoo’ll think better on it, and come.

I can read her proud bonny face like a book.

Come along, Bess; there’s the mill bell ringing.”

Margaret went home, wondering at her new friends, and smiling at the man’s insight into what had been passing in her mind. From that day Milton became a brighter place to her.

It was not the long, bleak sunny days of spring, nor yet was it that time was reconciling her to the town of her habitation. It was that in it she had found a human interest.

“Despise my son! treat him as her vassal, indeed! Humph! I should like to know where she could find such another!

Boy and man, he’s the noblest, stoutest heart I ever knew.

I don’t care if I am his mother; I can see what’s what, and not be blind. I know what Fanny is; and I know what John is. Despise him! I hate her!”

I would rather be a man toiling, suffering—nay, failing and successless—here, than lead a dull prosperous life in the old worn grooves of what you call more aristocratic society down in the South, with their slow days of careless ease.

One may be clogged with honey and unable to rise and fly.

”

“

A more proud, disagreeable girl I never saw. Even her great beauty is blotted out of one’s memory by her scornful ways.

”

“

Papa, I do think Mr. Thornton a very remarkable man; but personally I don’t like him at all.

”

“Don’t think hardly on him—he’s a good man, he is.

I sometimes think I shall be moped wi’ sorrow even in the City of God, if father is not there.

” The feverish colour came into her cheek, and the feverish flame into her eye. “But you will be there, father! you shall! Oh! my heart!” She put her hand to it, and became ghastly pale.

Bessy leant back against her father, who prepared to carry her upstairs; but as Margaret rose to go, he struggled to say something; “

I could wish there were a God, if it were only to ask Him to bless thee.

”

She never called her son by any name but John; “love,” and “dear,” and suchlike terms, were reserved for Fanny.

But her heart gave thanks for him day and night; and she walked proudly among women for his sake.

“Fanny dear! I shall have horses to the carriage today, to go and call on these Hales. Should not you go and see nurse? It’s in the same direction, and she’s always so glad to see you.

But now I’ve had many days o’ idleness, and I’m just as weary ’o them as I was o’ my work. Sometimes I’m so tired out I think I cannot enjoy heaven without a piece of rest first.

I’m rather afeard o’ going straight there without getting a good sleep in the grave to set me up.

”

In the middle of the room, right under the bagged-up chandelier, was a large circular table, with smartly-bound books arranged at regular intervals round the circumference of its polished surface, like gaily coloured spokes of a wheel.

Everything reflected light, nothing absorbed it.

The whole room had a painfully spotted, spangled, speckled look about it, which impressed Margaret so unpleasantly that she was hardly conscious of the peculiar cleanliness required to keep everything so white and pure in such an atmosphere, or of the trouble that must be …

And I would have lifted those heavy stones, and dropped them with as good an aim as the best man there, but that I fainted with the heat I had gone through.

If you live in Milton, you must learn to have a brave heart, Miss Hale.

”

“They are that,” replied Mr. Thornton. “Rose-water surgery won’t do for them.

Cromwell would have made a capital mill-owner, Miss Hale.

I wish we had him to put down this strike for us.”

“He is one of the masters you are striving with, is he not? What sort of a master is he?”

“Did yo’ ever see a bulldog? Set a bulldog on hind legs, and dress him up in coat and breeches, and yo’n just getten John Thornton.”

“Nay,” said Margaret, laughing, “I deny that. Mr. Thornton is plain enough, but he’s not like a bulldog, with its short broad nose, and snarling upper lip.”

“I cannot forgive her her pride,” said his mother; “I will befriend her, if there is need, for your asking, John.

I would befriend Jezebel herself if you asked me.

But this girl, who turns up her nose at us all—who turns up her nose at you—”

I mean, I don’t quite understand your application of the word. But I should say that this Morison is no true man. I don’t know who he is; I merely judge him from Mr. Horsfall’s account.”

“I suspect my ‘gentleman’ includes your ‘true man.’ ”

“And a great deal more, you would imply. I differ from you. A man is to me a higher and a completer being than a gentleman.”

“And a great deal more, you would imply. I differ from you.

A man is to me a higher and a completer being than a gentleman.

”

“He is the first specimen of a manufacturer—of a person engaged in trade—that I had ever the opportunity of studying, papa.

He is my first olive: let me make a face while I swallow it.

I know he is good of his kind, and by and by I shall like the kind. I rather think I am already beginning to do so.

She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession.

What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting!

It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, “All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!”

He reddened. “Not many girls would have taken the blows on herself which were meant for me;—meant with right down goodwill, too.”

“A girl in love will do a good deal,” replied Mrs. Thornton, shortly.

“Mother!” He made a step forwards; stood still; heaved with passion.

And now dunnot talk to me, but just read out th’ chapter. I’m easier in my mind for having spit it out; but I want some thoughts of the world that’s far away to take the weary taste of it out of my mouth.

Read me not a sermon chapter, but a story chapter; they’ve pictures in them, which I see when my eyes are shut.

Read about the New Heavens, and the New Earth; and m’appen I’ll forget this.”

“

Mother’s love is given by God, John. It holds fast forever and ever.

A girl’s love is like a puff of smoke—it changes with every wind. And she would not have you, my own lad, would not she?” She set her teeth; she showed them like a dog for the whole length of her mouth.

or I may not. I’ll not be bound to say I shall end in thinking the same as any man. And

I’m not one who think truth can be shaped out in words, all neat and clean, as th’ men at th’ foundry cut out sheet-iron.

Same bones won’t go down wi’ everyone. It’ll stick here i’ this man’s throat, and there i’ t’others. Let alone that, when down, it may be too strong for this one, too weak for that.

Higgins looked at Margaret, doubtfully. Her grave sweet eyes met his; there was no compulsion, only deep interest in them. He did not speak, but he kept his place.

Margaret the Churchwoman, her father the Dissenter, Higgins the Infidel, knelt down together. It did them no harm.

and, to come back to the burden of my ditty, my baby always smiles. I am constantly wanting you to draw him from me, Margaret. It does not signify what he is doing; that very thing is prettiest, gracefullest, best.

I think I love him a great deal better than my husband, who is getting stout, and grumpy⁠—what he calls ‘busy.’

No! he is not. He has just come in with news of such a charming picnic, given by the officers of the Hazard, at anchor in the bay below.

He exulted in the power he showed in compelling himself to face her, whenever he could think of any action which might give her father or mother pleasure. He thought that he disliked seeing one who had mortified him so keenly; but he was mistaken.

It was a stinging pleasure to be in the room with her, and feel her presence.

But he was no great analyser of his own motives and was mistaken, as I have said.

“Come, come, come! Let us go upstairs, and do something, rather than waste time that may be so precious.

Thinking has, many a time, made me sad, darling; but doing never did in all my life.

My theory is a sort of parody on the maxim of ‘Get money, my son, honestly if you can; but get money.’ My precept is, ‘Do something my sister, do good if you can; but, at any rate, do something.’ ”

her son’s strong arms might lift her tenderly up into a comfortable position; her daughter’s hands might bathe her face; but she knew them not. She would never recognise them again, till they met in Heaven.

Before the morning came all was over.

Then Margaret rose from her trembling and despondency, and became as a strong angel of comfort to her father and brother. For Frederick had broken down now, and all his theories were of no use to him.

Although he hated Margaret at times, when he thought of that gentle, familiar attitude and all the attendant circumstances, he had a restless desire to renew her picture in his mind—a longing for the very atmosphere she breathed.

He was in the Charybdis of passion, and must perforce circle and circle ever nearer round the fatal centre.

“I dare say, sir, master will see you. He was very sorry to have to deny you the other day; but circumstances was not agreeable just then.”

Margaret turned to the envelope: it was marked “Too late.” The letter had probably been trusted to some careless waiter, who had forgotten to post it.

Oh! what slight cobwebs of chances stand between us and Temptation!

Frederick had been safe, and out of England twenty, nay, thirty hours ago; and it was only about seventeen hours since she had told a falsehood to baffle pursuit, which even then would have been vain. How faithless she had been!

“Strike’s ended. It’s o’er for this time.

I’m out o’ work because I ne’er asked for it. And I ne’er asked for it, because good words is scarce, and bad words is plentiful.

”

“I cannot say. It’s a new regulation at ours; and I reckon they’ll find that they cannot stick to it. But it’s in force now.

By-and-by they’ll find out, tyrants makes liars.

”

“I like her,” said Higgins, suddenly. “

Hoo speaks plain out what’s in her mind.

Hoo doesn’t comprehend th’ Union for all that. It’s a great power: it’s our only power. I ha’ read a bit o’ poetry about a plough going o’er a daisy, as made tears come into my eyes, afore I’d other cause for crying.

But the chap ne’er stopped driving the plough, I’se warrant, for all he was pitiful about the daisy. He’d too much mother-wit for that.

Th’ Union’s the plough, making ready the land for harvest-time.

Such as Boucher—’twould be settin’ him up too much to liken him to a daisy; he’s liker a weed lounging over the ground—mun just made up their mind to be put out o’ the way. I’m sore vexed wi’ him just now.

Neither of them spoke for a moment or two. Then Mrs. Boucher began in a low growling tone, gathering in wildness as she went on: “He is his father’s darling, I say.

Poor folk can love their childer as well as rich.

Why dunno yo’ speak? Why dun yo’ stare at me wi’ your great pitiful eyes? Where’s John?” Weak as she was, she shook Margaret to force out an answer. “Oh, my God!” said she, understanding the meaning of that tearful look.

“And yet we dare not leave her without our efforts, although they may seem so useless.

Oh papa! it’s a hard world to live in!

”

“The childer could work at that,” said he. “

I’m sick o’ Milton anyways, and Milton is sick o’ me.

”

but I do know, that you of all men are not one to bear a life among such labourers.

What would be peace to them, would be eternal fretting to you.

Think no more of it, Nicholas, I beg. Besides, you could never pay to get mother and children all there—that’s one good thing.”

pay for that out of your ten shillings, and keep those poor children if you can. I owe it to you—since it’s my way of talking that has set you off on this idea—to put it all clear before you.

You would not bear the dullness of the life; you don’t know what it is; it would eat you away like rust.

Those that have lived there all their lives, are used to soaking in the stagnant waters. They labour on from day to day, in the great solitude of steaming fields—never speaking or lifting up their poor, bent, downcast heads.

God help ’em!” said he, more convinced by his own presentation of the facts than by all Margaret had said, and suddenly renouncing the idea, which had but recently formed itself in a brain worn out by the day’s fatigue and anxiety. “God help ’em!

North an’ South have each getten their own troubles.

If work’s sure and steady theer, labour’s paid at starvation wages; while here we’n rucks o’ money coming in one quarter, and ne’er a farthing th’ next. For sure, th’ world is in a confusion that passes me or any other man to understand;

“I thank yo’ kindly, sir, but I’d as lief stand on my own bottom. I dunnot stomach the notion of having favour curried for me, by one as doesn’t know the ins and outs of the quarrel.

Meddling ’twixt master and man is liker meddling ’twixt husband and wife than aught else: it takes a deal of wisdom to do ony good.

I’ll stand guard at the lodge door. I’ll stand there fro’ six in the morning till I get speech on him. But I’d liefer sweep th’ streets, if paupers had na’ got hold on that work. Dunna yo’ hope, miss.

I’ll stand guard at the lodge door. I’ll stand there fro’ six in the morning till I get speech on him. But I’d liefer sweep th’ streets, if paupers had na’ got hold on that work. Dunna yo’ hope, miss.

There’ll be more chance o’ getting milk out of a flint.

I wish yo’ a very good night, and many thanks to yo’.”

“

There’s granite in all these northern people, papa, is there not?

”

She exerted herself to find subjects of interest for conversation; praised Martha, the servant whom Mrs. Thornton had found for them: had asked Edith for a little Greek air, about which she had spoken to Miss Thornton. Mrs. Thornton was fairly discomfited.

Her sharp Damascus blade seemed out of place, and useless among rose-leaves.

She was silent because she was trying to task herself up to her duty.

asked Margaret, throwing her head back with proud disdain, till her throat curved outwards like a swan’s. “You can say nothing more, Mrs. Thornton. I decline every attempt to justify myself for anything. You must allow me to leave the room.”

And she swept out of it with the noiseless grace of an offended princess.

Mrs. Thornton had quite enough of natural humour to make her feel the ludricrousness of the position in which she was left. There was nothing for it but to show herself out. She was not particularly annoyed at Margaret’s way of behaving.

“

I’ve getten enemies and backbiters, like my betters; but I ne’er heerd o’ ony of them calling me o’er-modest,

” said Higgins. His blood was a little roused by Mr. Thornton’s manner, more than by his words.

“Tell her to mind her own business the next time, instead of taking up your time and mine too.

I believe women are at the bottom of every plague in this world.

Be off with you.”

I must give way sometimes. No, I will not though,” said she, springing to her feet. “I will not—I will not think of myself and my own position. I won’t examine into my own feelings. It would be of no use now.

Some time, if I live to be an old woman, I may sit over the fire, and looking into the embers, see the life that might have been.

”

What do I mean? Why do I care what he thinks, beyond the mere loss of his good opinion as regards my telling the truth or not? I cannot tell. But I am very miserable! Oh, how unhappy this last year has been!

I have passed out of childhood into old age.

I have had no youth—no womanhood; the hopes of womanhood have closed for me—for I shall never marry; and I anticipate cares and sorrows just as if I were an old woman, and with the same tearful spirit.

“To be sure. I knew he’d do it all along.

It’s no good expecting marcy at the hands o’ them measters.

Yo’r a stranger and a foreigner, and aren’t likely to know their ways; but I knowed it.”

“Well!” said Mr. Thornton, half-laughing, “it was not my proposal that we should go together. But there’s one comfort on your own showing.

We neither of us can think much worse of the other than we do now.

”

“That’s true,” said Higgins, reflectively. “

I’ve been thinking ever sin’ I saw you, what a marcy it were yo’ did na take me on, for that I ne’er saw a man whom I could less abide.

But that’s maybe been a hasty judgment; and work’s work to such as me. So, measter, I’ll come; and what’s more, I thank yo’; and that’s a deal fro’ me,” said he, more frankly, suddenly turning round and facing Mr.

“

I shall need a deal o’ brains to settle where my business ends and yo’rs begins.

”

Mr. Thornton at first was puzzled to account for her silence; and then he remembered the lie she had told, and all that was foregone. “The exact truth!” said he. “

Very few people do speak the exact truth. I have given up hoping for it.

Miss Hale, have you no explanation to give me? You must perceive what I cannot but think.”

“I don’t believe they would. It’s the bustle and the struggle they like. As for sitting still, and learning from the past, or shaping out the future by faithful work done in a prophetic spirit—Why! Pooh!

I don’t believe there’s a man in Milton who knows how to sit still; and it is a great art.

”

we retain much of their language; we retain more of their spirit; we do not look upon life as a time for enjoyment, but as a time for action and exertion.

Our glory and our beauty arise out of our outward strength, which makes us victorious over material resistance, and over greater difficulties still.

We are Teutonic up here in Darkshire in another way. We hate to have laws made for us at a distance. We wish people would allow us to right ourselves, instead of continually meddling, with their imperfect legislation.

which is full of difficulties to be encountered; and upon the mode in which they are met and conquered—not merely pushed aside for the time—depends our future. But no!

People can speak of Utopia much more easily than of the next day’s duty;

and yet when that duty is all done by others, who so ready to cry, ‘Fie, for shame!’ ”

I was thinking of the strikes we have gone through, which are troublesome and injurious things enough, as I am finding to my cost. And yet this last strike, under which I am smarting, has been respectable.”

“A respectable strike!” said Mr. Bell. “That sounds as if you were far gone in the worship of Thor.”

Margaret felt, rather than saw, that Mr. Thornton was chagrined by the repeated turning into jest of what he was feeling as very serious.

“To tell the truth,” said he, “he fairly bamboozles me.

He’s two chaps. One chap I knowed of old as were measter all o’er. T’other chap hasn’t an ounce of measter’s flesh about him.

How them two chaps is bound up in one body, is a craddy for me to find out. I’ll not be beat by it, though. Meanwhile he comes here pretty often; that’s how I know the chap that’s a man, not a measter.

“Well! I’ll not say th’ advantage is all on his side, for all I take credit for improving him above a bit.

Sometimes he says a rough thing or two, which is not agreeable to look at at first, but has a queer smack o’ truth in it when yo’ come to chew it.

He’ll be coming tonight, I reckon, about them childer’s schooling. He’s not satisfied wi’ the make of it, and wants for t’ examine ’em.”

or wisdom either. I know I have not that much; and yet men set me down in their fool’s books as a wise man; an independent character; strong-minded, and all that cant.

The veriest idiot who obeys his own simple law of right, if it be but in wiping his shoes on a doormat, is wiser and stronger than I.

But what gulls men are!”

“What will become of her—I often think? I suppose the Lennoxes will ask her to live with them. I try to think they will.

Her Aunt Shaw loved her very well in her own quiet way; but she forgets to love the absent.

”

Though I believe—in fact I know, she would have rejected you, still to have loved her without return would have lifted you higher than all those, be they who they may, that have ever known her to love. ‘Beautiful creature’ indeed!

Do you speak of her as you would of a horse or a dog?

”

“

Nothing like the act of eating for equalising men. Dying is nothing to it.

The philosopher dies sententiously—the pharisee ostentatiously—the simple-hearted humbly—the poor idiot blindly, as the sparrow falls to the ground; the philosopher and idiot, publican and pharisee, all eat after the same fashion—given an equally good digestion. There’s theory for theory for you!”

It hurt her to see the Helstone road so flooded in the sunlight, and every turn and every familiar tree so precisely the same in its summer glory as it had been in former years.

Nature felt no change and was ever young.

Mr. Bell knew something of what would be passing through her mind, and wisely and kindly held his tongue. They drove up to the Lennard Arms;

“Yes!” said Mr. Bell. “

It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young, afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious.

I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive.”

“Don’t scold, Margaret. It was all because of you. If she had not shown you every change with such evident exultation in their superior sense, in perceiving what an improvement this and that would be, I could have behaved well.

But if you must go on preaching, keep it till after dinner, when it will send me to sleep, and help my digestion.

”

And, somehow, this visit to Helstone had not been all—had not been exactly what she had expected. There was change everywhere; slight, yet pervading all.

Households were changed by absence, or death, or marriage, or the natural mutations brought by days and months and years, which carry us on imperceptibly from childhood to youth, and thence through manhood to age, whence we drop like fruit, fully ripe, into the quiet mother earth.

Places were changed—a tree gone here, a bough there, bringing in a long ray of light where no light was before—a road was trimmed and narrowed, and the green straggling pathway by its side enclosed and cultivated. A great improvement it was called;

You know who is the father of lies, Margaret? Well! a great number of folk, thinking themselves very good, have odd sorts of connection with lies, left-hand marriages, and second-cousins-once-removed.

The tainting blood of falsehood runs through us all.

I should have guessed you as far from it as most people. What! crying, child? Nay, now we’ll not talk of it, if it ends in this way.

“What other people may think of the rightness or wrongness is nothing in comparison to my own deep knowledge, my innate conviction that it was wrong. But we will not talk of that any more, if you please.

It is done⁠—my sin is sinned. I have now to put it behind me, and be truthful forevermore, if I can.

”

“Very well. If you like to be uncomfortable and morbid, be so.

I always keep my conscience as tight shut up as a jack-in-a-box, for when it jumps into existence it surprises me by its size.

So I coax it down again, as the fisherman coaxed the genii. ‘Wonderful,’ says I, ‘to think that you have been concealed so long, and in so small a compass, that I really did not know of your existence.

a candle in her old bedroom, which was the nursery with the present inhabitants of the parsonage, until the new one was built. A sense of change, of individual nothingness, of perplexity and disappointment, overpowered Margaret.

Nothing had been the same; and this slight, all-pervading instability, had given her greater pain than if all had been too entirely changed for her to recognise it.

“I begin to understand now what heaven must be—and, oh! the grandeur and repose of the words—‘The same yesterday, today, and forever.’ Everlasting! ‘From everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God.’

the grandeur and repose of the words—‘The same yesterday, today, and forever.’ Everlasting! ‘From everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God.’ That beautiful sky above me looks as though it could not change, and yet it will.

I am so tired⁠—so tired of being whirled on through all these phases of my life, in which nothing abides by me, no creature, no place; it is like the circle in which the victims of earthly passion eddy continually.

I am in the mood in which women of another religion take the veil. I seek heavenly steadfastness in earthly monotony. If I were a Roman Catholic and could deaden my heart, stun it with some great blow, I might become a nun.

it is like the circle in which the victims of earthly passion eddy continually. I am in the mood in which women of another religion take the veil.

I seek heavenly steadfastness in earthly monotony.

If I were a Roman Catholic and could deaden my heart, stun it with some great blow, I might become a nun. But I should pine after my kind;

“After all it is right,” said she, hearing the voices of children at play while she was dressing. “

If the world stood still, it would retrograde and become corrupt, if that is not Irish.

Looking out of myself and my own painful sense of change, the progress of all around me is right and necessary.

“And I too change perpetually—now this, now that—now disappointment and peevish because all is not exactly as I had pictured it, and now suddenly discovering that the reality is far more beautiful than I had imagined it.

Oh, Helstone! I shall never love any place like you.

”

there was no understanding him, he was so particular; if he had come himself it would have been all right, but letters always were and always will be more puzzling than they are worth. Dixon had not much to tell about the Higginses.

Her memory had an aristocratic bias, and was very treacherous whenever she tried to recall any circumstance connected with those below her in life.

Nicholas was very well she believed. He had been several times at the house asking for news of Miss Margaret—the only person who ever did ask, except once Mr. Thornton. And Mary? oh! of course she was very well, a great, stout, slatternly thing!

“

Then I’m afraid I must say, that my soul is dearer to me than even Master Frederick, his own dear self.

I should be in a perpetual terror, Miss, lest I should be converted.”

and on Captain Lennox’s reply, that he had quite enough to live upon, she had seen Mr. Lennox’s curl of the lip as he said, “And is that all you live for?”

But the brothers were much attached to each other, in the way that any two persons are, when the one is cleverer and always leads the other, and this last is patiently content to be led.

Mr. Lennox was pushing on in his profession; cultivating, with profound calculation, all those connections that might eventually be of service to him; keen-sighted, farseeing, intelligent, sarcastic, and proud.

the hidden, sacred fire, exhausted itself in sparkle and crackle. They talked about art in a merely sensuous way, dwelling on outside effects, instead of allowing themselves to learn what it has to teach.

They lashed themselves up into an enthusiasm about high subjects in company, and never thought about them when they were alone; they squandered their capabilities of appreciation into a mere flow of appropriate words.

One day, after the gentlemen had come up into the drawing-room, Mr. Lennox drew near to Margaret, and addressed her in almost the first voluntary words he had spoken to her since she had returned to live in Harley Street.

These dinners were delightful; but even here Margaret’s dissatisfaction found her out.

Every talent, every feeling, every acquirement; nay, even every tendency towards virtue, was used up as materials for fireworks; the hidden, sacred fire, exhausted itself in sparkle and crackle.

They talked about art in a merely sensuous way, dwelling on outside effects, instead of allowing themselves to learn what it has to teach. They lashed themselves up into an enthusiasm about high subjects in company, and never thought about them when they were alone;

Ask whom you choose. It may not be very civil, Edith, but if you meddle in it you will mar it. She has been very farouche with me for a long time; and is only just beginning to thaw a little from her Zenobia ways.

She has the making of a Cleopatra in her, if only she were a little more pagan.

”

“For my part,” said Edith, a little maliciously, “

I am very glad she is a Christian. I know so very few!

”