She hardly dared to think of it—­of the poor mite and the hopes she had built on him.  As she had told Charles, she was sorry, but not penitent—­at least not wholly penitent.  Once she had been wholly penitent:  but the tyrannous compulsion of her marriage had eased or deadened her sense of responsibility.  Henceforth she had no duty but to make the best of it.  So she told herself, and had conscientiously striven to make the best of it.  She had even succeeded, up to a point; by shutting herself within doors and busily, incessantly, spinning a life of illusion.  She was a penitent—­a woman in a book—­ redeeming her past by good conduct.  The worst of it was that her husband declined to help the cheat.  He was proud of her, honest man! and had no fancy at all for the role assigned to him, of “all for love, and the world well lost.”  That she refused to be shown off he set down to sulkiness; and went off of an evening to taverns and returned fuddled.  She studied, above all things, to make home bright for him, and ever met him with a smile:  and this was good enough, yet not (as it slowly grew clear to her) precisely what he wanted.  So she had been driven to build fresh hopes on the unborn babe. He would make all the difference:  would win his father back, or at worst give her own life a new foundation for hope.  Her son should be a gentleman:  she would deny herself and toil and live for him.

And now God had resumed His gift, and her life was blank indeed.  She might have another—­and another might die.  She had never supposed that this one could die, and its death gave her a dreadful feeling of insecurity—­as if no child of hers could ever be reared.  What then?  The prospect of pardon by continued good conduct seemed to her shadowy indeed.  Something more was needed.  Yes, penitence was needed; real penitence:  urgently, she felt the need of it and yet for the life of her could not desire it as she knew it ought to be desired.

She turned from the thought and let her mind dwell on the sentence or two quoted by Charles from Molly’s letter.  They were peevish sentences, and she did not doubt that the letter to John had been yet more peevish.  Life had taught her what some never learn, that folks are not to be divided summarily into good and bad, right and wrong, pleasant and unpleasant.  Men and women are not always refined or ennobled by unmerited suffering.  They are soured often, sometimes coarsened.  Hetty loved Molly far better than she loved John:  but in a flash she saw that, not Molly only, but all her sisters who had suffered for John’s advancement, would exact the price of their sacrifices in a consuming jealousy to be first in his favour.  She saw it so clearly that she pitied him for what would worry him incessantly and be met by him with a patient conscientiousness.  He would never understand—­could never understand—­on what these jealous sisters of his based their claims.