One of the characters, an odious person, was continually saying things she had no business to say.  Mr. Gresley wondered how Hester had come across such doubtful women—­not under his roof.  Lady Susan must have associated with thoroughly unsuitable people.

“I keep a smaller spiritual establishment than I did,” said the odious person.  “I have dismissed that old friend of my childhood, the devil.  I really had no further use for him.”

Mr. Gresley crossed through the passage at once.  How could Hester write so disrespectfully of the devil?

“This is positive nonsense,” said Mr. Gresley, irritably; “coming as it does just after the sensible chapter about the new vicar who made a clean sweep of all the old dead regulations in his parish because he felt he must introduce spiritual life into the place.  Now that is really good.  I don’t quite know what Hester means by saying he took exercise in his clerical cul-de-sac.  I think she means surtout, but she is a good French scholar, so she probably knows what she is talking about.”

Whatever the book lacked it did not lack interest.  Still, it bristled with blemishes.

And then what could the Pratts, or indeed any one, make of such a sentence as this: 

“When we look back at what we were seven years ago, five years ago, and perceive the difference in ourselves, a difference amounting almost to change of identity; when we look back and see in how many characters we have lived and loved and suffered and died before we reached the character that momentarily clothes us, and from which our soul is struggling out to clothe itself anew; when we feel how the sympathy even of those who love us best is always with our last expression, never with our present feeling, always with the last dead self on which our climbing feet are set—­”

“She is hopelessly confused,” said Mr. Gresley, without reading to the end of the sentence, and substituting the word ladder for dead self.  “Of course, I see what she means, the different stages of life, the infant, the boy, the man, but hardly any one else will so understand it.”

The clock struck ten.  Mr. Gresley was amazed.  The hour had seemed like ten minutes.

“I will just see what happens in the next chapter,” he said.  And he did not hear the clock when it struck again.  The story was absorbing.  It was as if through that narrow, shut-up chamber a gust of mountain air were sweeping like a breath of fresh life.  Mr. Gresley was vaguely stirred in spite of himself, until he remembered that it was all fantastic, visionary.  He had never felt like that, and his own experience was his measure of the utmost that is possible in human nature.  He would have called a kettle visionary if he had never seen one himself.  It was only saved from that reproach by the fact that it hung on his kitchen hob.  What was so unfair about him was that he took gorillas and alligators, and the “wart pig” and all its warts on trust, though he had never seen them.  But the emotions which have shaken the human soul since the world began, long before the first “wart pig” was thought of—­these he disbelieved.