become bearable and even welcome to him.  And for himself, she thought with a craving, remorseful tenderness of that pessimist temper of his towards his own work and function that she knew so well.  In old days it had merely seemed to her inadequate, if not hypocritical.  She would have liked to drive the dart deeper, to make him still unhappier!  Now, would not a wife’s chief function be to reconcile him with himself and life, to cheer him forward on the lines of his own nature, to believe, understand, help?

Yet always in the full liberty to make her own sacrifices, to realise her own dreamlands!  She thought with mingled smiles and tears of her plans for this bit of earth that fate had brought under her hand; she pledged herself to every man, woman, and child on it so to live her life that each one of theirs should be the richer for it; she set out, so far as in her lay, to “choose equality.”  And beyond Mellor, in the great changing world of social speculation and endeavour, she prayed always for the open mind, the listening heart.

“There is one conclusion, one cry, I always come back to at last,” she remembered hearing Hallin say to a young Conservative with whom he had been having a long economic and social argument. “Never resign yourself!—­that seems to be the main note of it.  Say, if you will—­believe, if you will, that human nature, being what it is, and what, so far as we can see, it always must be, the motives which work the present social and industrial system can never be largely superseded; that property and saving—­luck, too!—­struggle, success, and failure, must go on.  That is one’s intellectual conclusion; and one has a right to it—­you and I are at one in it.  But then—­on the heels of it comes the moral imperative!  ’Hold what you please about systems and movements, and fight for what you hold; only, as an individual—­never say—­never think!—­that it is in the order of things, in the purpose of God, that one of these little ones—­this Board-School child, this man honestly out of work, this woman “sweated” out of her life—­should perish!’ A contradiction, or a commonplace, you say?  Well and good.  The only truths that burn themselves into the conscience, that work themselves out through the slow and manifold processes of the personal will into a pattern of social improvement, are the contradictions and the commonplaces!”

So here, in the dark, alone with the haunting, uplifting presences of “admiration, hope, and love,” Marcella vowed, within the limits of her personal scope and power, never to give up the struggle for a nobler human fellowship, the lifelong toil to understand, the passionate effort to bring honour and independence and joy to those who had them not.  But not alone; only, not alone!  She had learnt something of the dark aspects, the crushing complexity of the world.  She turned from them to-night, at last, with a natural human terror, to hide herself in her own passion, to make of love her guide and shelter.  Her whole rich being was wrought to an intoxication of self-giving.  Oh! let the night go faster! faster! and bring his step upon the road, her cry of repentance to his ear.