The old channels were beginning to fill with the new spirit, the old disused machinery was once more in motion.  In two months’ time every possible form of meeting was in a healthy condition of attendance, prayer-meeting, church-meeting, mothers’ meeting, Bible class, Dorcas society, Band of Hope, Sunday-school, all briskly in motion; and the ladies, led by Jenny, were all as busy as bees over a bazaar.  New Zion had indeed become a veritable merry-go-round of religious and social activities.  Yes, it was beginning to move, indeed, it was almost beginning to hum—­another few months and it would fairly whizz, as Eli Moggridge had foreseen; and the sound of the humming and the speed of the whizzing would grow louder and louder and faster and faster, till not merely Zion Place and Zion Alley and Zion Passage and Zion Street heard it and were caught up in the infectious dance, but the very High Street itself should hum and whizz.

The High Street! what are High Streets to the soul of Theophilus Londonderry?  What is Coalchester itself?—­though that shall soon be humming and whizzing too.  This is but the whirling centre of the ever-spreading wheel of force that has begun to turn at New Zion.  Coalchester will spin soon, and then the disappointed fields around it, then the neighbouring towns would join the reel, and so on and on, faster and faster, madder and madder, till even London itself moves, and the world that changes its axis at the will of any strong spirit will whirl its immeasurable velocities around the vortex pulpit of Theophilus Londonderry.

Yes, the pebble had only been thrown in at New Zion.

CHAPTER VI

OF A WONDERFUL QUALITY IN WOMEN

Darwin expended many years of his life in the study of disagreeable animals, that he might prove the adaptability of organism to environment.  How much pleasanter and briefer had been his task, if he had begun his studies at once with the creature whose long history has been one unbroken succession of inspired and noble adaptations!

Woman’s adaptability to man is one of the most mysterious, as it is perhaps the most pathetic, of all the modes of her mysterious being.  Like certain protection-seeking animals, she is always the colour of the rock, the husband-rock, in whose shadow she lives.  Sometimes, of course, she is her own rock; but in such cases man is never her chameleon to a like degree or indeed in a like manner.  Such adaptability is not one of the forms of his greatness, and even when he achieves it, it is not becoming to him.

For woman’s adaptability is not the domination of a weaker nature by a stronger, it is in itself a noble and world-necessary form of strength.