(Mrs. Baxendale was, in truth, a grandmother by this time, and professed to appreciate the authority she derived from the circumstance.)

That had drawn Beatrice out.

‘She was strong-minded?’

‘Or very weak, I really don’t know which.’

‘Yes,’ mused Beatrice, ’she was a problem to you.  You never troubled yourself to puzzle over my character, aunt.’

’When a stream is of lovely clearness, Beatrice, we do not find it hard to determine the kind of ground it flows over.’

‘I will owe you a kiss for that,’ said the girl, blushing hot with very joy.  ’But you are a flatterer, dear aunt, and just now I am very humble in spirit.  I think great happiness should make us humble, don’t you?  I find it hard to make out my claim to it.’

‘Be humble still, dear, and the happiness will not be withdrawn.’

‘I do like to talk with you,’ Beatrice replied.  ’I never go away without something worth thinking of.’

Humility she strove to nourish.  It was a prime virtue of woman, and ’would sweeten her being.  Unlike Emily, she was not inspired with an ardent idealism independently of her affections; with love had begun her conscious self-study, and love alone exalted her.  Her many frivolous tendencies she had only overcome by dint of long endeavour to approach Wilfrid’s standard.  If in one way this was an item of strength, in another it indicated a very real and always menacing weakness.  Having gained that to which her every instinct had directed itself, she made the possession of her bliss an indispensable factor of life; to lose it would be to fall into nether darkness, into despair of good.  So widowed, there would be no support in herself; she knew it, and the knowledge at moments terrified her.  Even her religious convictions, once very real and strong, had become subordinate; her creed—­though she durst not confess it—­was that of earthly love.  Formerly she had been thrown back on religious emotion as a solace, an anodyne; for that reason the tendencies inherited from her mother had at one time reached a climax of fanaticism.  Of late years, music had been her resource, the more efficient in that it ministered to hope.  By degrees even her charitable activity had diminished; since her mother’s death she had abandoned the habit of ‘district visiting.’  As confidence of the one supreme attainment grew in her, the mere accessories of her moral life were allowed to fall away.  She professed no change of opinion, indeed under. went none, but opinion became, as with most women, distinct from practice.  She still pretended to rejoice as often as she persuaded Wilfrid to go to church, but it was noticeable that she willingly allowed his preference for the better choral services, and seemed to take it for granted that the service was only of full efficacy when performed together with her....

‘Let me die now!  It is only for this that I have lived!’