Mrs. Gresley watched him from her bedroom window, where she was mending the children’s stockings.  At last she laid aside her work and went out.

She might not be his mental equal.  She might be unable, with her small feminine mind, to fathom the depths and heights of that great intelligence, but still she was his wife.  Perhaps, though she did not know it, it troubled her to see him so absorbed in his sister, for she was sure it was of Hester and her book that he was thinking.  “I am his wife,” she said to herself, as she joined him in silence, and passed her arm through his.  He needed to be reminded of her existence.  Mr. Gresley pressed it, and they took a turn in silence.

He had not a high opinion of the feminine intellect.  He was wont to say that he was tired of most women in ten minutes.  But he had learned to make an exception of his wife.  What mind does not feel confidence in the sentiments of its echo?

“I am greatly troubled about Hester,” he said at last.

“It is not a new trouble,” said Mrs. Gresley.  “I sometimes think, dearest, it is we who are to blame in having her to live with us.  She is worldly—­I suppose she can’t help it—­and we are unworldly.  She is irreligious, and you are deeply religious.  I wish I could say I was too, but I lag far behind you.  And though I am sure she does her best—­and so do we—­her presence is a continual friction.  I feel she always drags us down.”

Mr. Gresley was too much absorbed in his own thoughts to notice the diffident plea which his wife was putting forward that Hester might cease to live with them.

“I was not thinking of that,” he said, “so much as of this novel which she has written.  It is a profane, immoral book, and will do incalculable harm if it is published.”

“I feel sure it will,” said Mrs. Gresley, who had not read it.

“It is dreadfully coarse in places,” continued Mr. Gresley, who had the same opinion of George Eliot’s works.  “And I warned Hester most solemnly on that point when I found she had begun another book.  I told her that I well knew that to meet the public taste it was necessary to interlard fiction with risque things in order to make it sell, but that it was my earnest hope she would in future resist this temptation.  She only said that if she introduced improprieties into her book in order to make money, in her opinion she deserved to be whipped in the public streets.  She was very angry, I remember, and became as white as a sheet, and I dropped the subject.”

“She can’t bear even the most loving word of advice,” said Mrs. Gresley.

“She holds nothing sacred,” went on Mr. Gresley, remembering an unfortunate incident in the clergyman’s career.  “Her life here seems to have had no softening effect upon her.  She sneers openly at religion.  I never thought, I never allowed myself to think, that she was so dead to spiritual things as her book forces me to believe.  Even her good people, her heroine, have not a vestige of religion, only a sort of vague morality, right for the sake of right, and love teaching people things; nothing real.”