Mrs. Redwing was an invalid thenceforth; probably it was only the existence of her child that saved her life.  An affection of the heart in course of time declared itself, but, though her existence was believed to hang on a thread, she lived on and on, lived to see Beatrice grow to womanhood.  She kept a small house in London, but spent the greater part of the year at home or foreign health-resorts.  Her relatives had supposed that she would return to her own country, but Mrs. Redwing had tastes which lacked gratification in a provincial manufacturing town.  Without having achieved much positive culture, she had received from her husband an impulse towards the development of certain higher possibilities in her nature, and she liked the society of mentally active people.  The state of her health alone withheld her from a second marriage; she was not a very patient invalid, and suffered keenly in the sense of missing the happiness which life had offered her.  In the matter of her daughter’s education she exercised much care.  Doctrinal religion had a strong hold upon her, and it was her solicitude that Beatrice should walk from the first in the ways of Anglican salvation.  She dreaded the ‘spirit of the age.’  With a better judgment in pure literature than falls to the lot of most women—­or men either—­she yet banished from her abode, wherever it might be anything that remotely savoured of intellectual emancipation; her asthetic leanings she deemed the great temptation of her life, for she frankly owned to her friends that many things powerfully attracted her, which her con science bade her shun as dangerous.  Her generosity made her a shining light in the world which busies itself in the dispensing or receiving of ecclesiastical charity.  The clerical element was very strong in the circle that surrounded her.  At the same time her worldly tastes did not go altogether ungratified.  She was very fond of music, and her unlimited powers in the provision of first-rate musical entertainment brought to her house acquaintances of a kind that would not otherwise have been found there.  The theatre she tabooed, regarding this severity as an acceptable sacrifice, and not troubling to reflect what share her ill-health had in rendering it a fairly easy one.  In brief, she was a woman of a genial nature, whose inconsistencies were largely due to her inability to outgrow early conditions.

Beatrice inherited her mother’s mental restrictions, but was endowed with a subtlety of nature, which, aided by her circumstances, made her yet more a being of inconsistencies and contradictions.  Iii religion it was not enough for her to conform; zeal drove her into the extremest forms of ritualistic observance.  Nor did care for her personal salvation suffice; the logic of a compassionate nature led her on to various forms of missionary activity; she haunted vile localities, ministering alike to soul and body.  At the same time she relished keenly the delights of the masquerading