When the family separated for the night and Hester reached her room, she
sat down and fell a thinking, not more earnestly but more continuously.

She was one of those women--not few in number, I have good reason to
think, though doubtless few comparatively, who from the first dawn of
consciousness have all their lives endeavored, with varying success,
with frequent failure of strength, and occasional brief collapse of
effort, to do the right thing. Therein she had but followed in the
footsteps of her mother, who, though not so cultivated as she, walked no
less steady in the true path of humanity. But the very earnestness of
Hester's endeavor along with the small reason she found for considering
it successful; the frequent irritation with herself because of failure;
and the impossibility of satisfying the hard master Self, who, while he
flatters some, requires of others more than they can give--all tended to
make her less evenly sympathetic with those about her than her heart's
theory demanded. Willing to lay down her life for them, a matchless
nurse in sickness, and in trouble revealing a tenderness perfectly
lovely, she was yet not the one to whom first either of the children was
ready to flee with hurt or sorrow: she was not yet all human, because
she was not yet at home with the divine.

Thousands that are capable of great sacrifices are yet not capable of
the little ones which are all that are required of them. God seems to
take pleasure in working by degrees; the progress of the truth is as the
permeation of leaven, or the growth of a seed: a multitude of successive
small sacrifices may work more good in the world than many a large one.
What would even our Lord's death on the cross have been, except as the
crown of a life in which he died daily, giving himself, soul, body and
spirit, to his men and women? It is the _Being_ that is the
precious thing. Being is the mother to all little Doings as well as the