Thus Baptista had sense enough to see the retributive fairness of this issue.  For some time, whenever conversation arose between her and Heddegan, which was not often, she always said, ’I am miserable, and you know it.  Yet I don’t wish things to be otherwise.’

But one day when he asked, ’How do you like ’em now?’ her answer was unexpected.  ‘Much better than I did,’ she said, quietly.  ’I may like them very much some day.’

This was the beginning of a serener season for the chastened spirit of Baptista Heddegan.  She had, in truth, discovered, underneath the crust of uncouthness and meagre articulation which was due to their Troglodytean existence, that her unwelcomed daughters had natures that were unselfish almost to sublimity.  The harsh discipline accorded to their young lives before their mother’s wrong had been righted, had operated less to crush them than to lift them above all personal ambition.  They considered the world and its contents in a purely objective way, and their own lot seemed only to affect them as that of certain human beings among the rest, whose troubles they knew rather than suffered.

This was such an entirely new way of regarding life to a woman of Baptista’s nature, that her attention, from being first arrested by it, became deeply interested.  By imperceptible pulses her heart expanded in sympathy with theirs.  The sentences of her tragi-comedy, her life, confused till now, became clearer daily.  That in humanity, as exemplified by these girls, there was nothing to dislike, but infinitely much to pity, she learnt with the lapse of each week in their company.  She grew to like the girls of unpromising exterior, and from liking she got to love them; till they formed an unexpected point of junction between her own and her husband’s interests, generating a sterling friendship at least, between a pair in whose existence there had threatened to be neither friendship nor love.

George Moore

A FAITHFUL HEART

(The Speaker, 16 April 1892)

Part I

It was a lovely morning, and Major Shepherd walked rapidly, his toes turned well out, his shoulders set well back.  Behind him floated the summer foliage of Appleton Park—­the family seat of the Shepherds—­and at the end of the smooth, white road lay the Major’s destination—­the small town of Branbury.

The Major was the medium height; his features were regular and cleanly cut.  He would have been a handsome man if his eyes had not been two dark mud-coloured dots, set close together, wholly lacking in expression.  A long brown moustache swept picturesquely over bright, smoothly shaven cheeks, and the ends of this ornament were beginning to whiten.  The Major was over forty.  He carried under his arm a brown-paper parcel (the Major was rarely seen without a brown-paper parcel), and in it were things he could not possibly