comes--when an inward necessity for independent action arises, which is
superior to all outward conventionalities."

She stopped here, and pushed the volume away from her. It was the only
passage in it which she cared to remember.

She had lost the confidence of the child by this time, and become humbly
doubtful of her own opinion; and instead of summing up "Ruth" boldly, as
she would have done the year before, she paused now a moment to reflect
before she wrote with diffidence:

"The principal impression this book has made upon me is that Mrs. Gaskell
must have been a very lovable woman."

[Footnote: George Eliot thought so too, years before Evadne was born, and
expressed the thought in a letter in which she also prophesied that "Ruth"
would not live through a generation. The impression the book made upon
Evadne is another proof of prescience in the great writer.]

"The story seems to me long drawn out, and of small significance. It is
full of food for the heart, but the head goes empty away, and both should
be satisfied by a work of fiction, I think. But perhaps it is my own mood
that is at fault. At another time I might have found gems in it which now
in my dulness I have failed to perceive."

Somebody knocked at the door as she blotted the words.

"Come in, auntie," she said, as if in answer to an accustomed signal; and
Mrs. Orton Beg entered in a long, loose, voluminously draped white
wrapper.