she married him that he had now grown to be. The longer they lived the
prouder she grew of him and of his work; nor was she the less the
practical wisdom of the house that she looked upon her husband as a
great man. He was not a great man--only a growing man; yet was she
nothing the worse for thinking so highly of him; the object of it was
not such that her admiration caused her to deteriorate.

The daughter of a London barrister, of what is called a good family, she
had opportunity of knowing something of what is called life before she
married, and from mere dissatisfaction had early begun to withdraw from
the show and self-assertion of social life, and seek within herself the
door of that quiet chamber whose existence is unknown to most. For a
time she found thus a measure of quiet--not worthy of the name of rest;
she had not heeded a certain low knocking as of one who would enter and
share it with her; but now for a long time he who thus knocked had been
her companion in the chamber whose walls are the infinite. Why is it
that men and women will welcome any tale of love, devotion, and
sacrifice from one to another of themselves, but turn from the least
hint at the existence of a perfect love at the root of it all? With such
a message to them, a man is a maundering prophet. Is it not that their
natures are yet so far from the ideal, the natural, the true, that the
words of the prophet rouse in them no vision, no poorest perception of
spiritual fact?

Helen Raymount was now a little woman of fifty, clothed in a sweet
dignity, from which the contrast she disliked between her plentiful gray
hair, and her great, clear, dark eyes, took nothing; it was an
opposition without discord. She had but the two daughters and two sons
already introduced, of whom Hester was the eldest.