His workday labours were rewarded by the praise of the learned world, to which he was indifferent, but by very little money, which he needed more.  For over three years after their marriage, neither of my parents left London for a single day, not being able to afford to travel.  They received scarcely any visitors, never ate a meal away from home, never spent an evening in social intercourse abroad.  At night they discussed theology, read aloud to one another, or translated scientific brochures from French or German.  It sounds a terrible life of pressure and deprivation, and that it was physically unwholesome there can be no shadow of a doubt.  But their contentment was complete and unfeigned.  In the midst of this, materially, the hardest moment of their lives, when I was one year old, and there was a question of our leaving London, my Mother recorded in her secret notes: 

’We are happy and contented, having all things needful and pleasant, and our present habitation is hallowed by many sweet associations.  We have our house to ourselves and enjoy each other’s society.  If we move we shall do longer be alone.  The situation may be more favourable, however, for Baby, as being more in the country.  I desire to have no choice in the matter, but as I know not what would be for our good, and God knows, so I desire to leave it with Him, and if it is not His will we should move, He will raise objections and difficulties, and if it is His will He will make Henry [my Father] desirous and anxious to take the step, and then, whatever the result, let us leave all to Him and not regret it.’

No one who is acquainted with the human heart will mistake this attitude of resignation for weakness of purpose.  It was not poverty of will, it was abnegation, it was a voluntary act.  My Mother, underneath an exquisite amenity of manner, concealed a rigour of spirit which took the form of a constant self-denial.  For it to dawn upon her consciousness that she wished for something, was definitely to renounce that wish, or, more exactly, to subject it in every thing to what she conceived to be the will of God.

This is perhaps the right moment for me to say that at this time, and indeed until the hour of her death, she exercised, without suspecting it, a magnetic power over the will and nature of my Father.  Both were strong, but my Mother was unquestionably the stronger of the two; it was her mind which gradually drew his to take up a certain definite position, and this remained permanent although she, the cause of it, was early removed.  Hence, while it was with my Father that the long struggle which I have to narrate took place, behind my Father stood the ethereal memory of my Mother’s will, guiding him, pressing him, holding him to the unswerving purpose which she had formed and defined.  And when the inevitable disruption came, what was unspeakably painful was to realize that it was not from one, but from both parents that the purpose of the child was separated.