which it would benefit her to have passed.  The second thing done was that her father abandoned his office, and obtained a place in the counting-house of a worsted-mill, under the firm of Dagworthy and Son.  His salary was small, but the blessing of it was its certainty; the precariousness of his existence had all but driven poor Hood mad.  There came a season of calm.  Emily’s sphere of work extended itself; the school only took her mornings, and for the afternoon there was proposed to her the teaching of the little Baxendales.  The Baxendales were well-to-do people; the father was, just then, mayor of Dunfield, the mother was related to the member of Parliament for the town.  We have had mention of them as connections of Beatrice Redwing.

At nineteen she for the first time left home.  Through the Baxendales she obtained the position of governess in a family residing in Liverpool, and remained with them till she went to London, to the Athels.  These three years in Liverpool were momentous for her; they led her from girlhood to womanhood, and established her character.  Her home was in the house of a prosperous ship-owner, a Lancashire man, outwardly a blustering good-tempered animal, yet with an inner light which showed itself in his love of books and pictures, in his easy walking under the burden of self-acquired riches, in a certain generous freedom which marked his life and thoughts.  His forename was Laurence:  Emily, in letters to her father, used to call him Lorenzo the Magnificent, a title which became him well enough.  In the collection of works of art he was really great; he must have spent appalling sums annually on his picture gallery and the minor ornaments scattered about his house.  He had a personal acquaintance, through his pecuniary dealings, with the foremost artists of the day; he liked to proclaim the fact and describe the men.  To Emily the constant proximity of these pictures was a priceless advantage; the years she spent among them were equivalent to a university course.  Moreover, she enjoyed, as with the Athels later, a free command of books; here began her acquaintance with the most modern literature, which was needful to set her thoughts in order, to throw into right perspective her previous miscellaneous reading, and to mark out her way in the future.  Her instinctive craving for intellectual beauty acquired a reflective consistency; she reformed her ideals, found the loveliness of much that in her immaturity had seemed barren, put aside, with gentle firmness, much that had appeared indispensable to her moral life.  The meanings which she attached to that word ‘moral’ largely modified themselves, that they should do so was the note of her progress.  Her prayer was for ‘beauty in the inward soul,’ which, if it grew to be her conviction, was greatly—­perhaps wholly—­dependent on the perception of external beauty.  The development of beauty in the soul would mean a life of ideal purity; all her instincts pointed to such a life; her passionate motives converged on the one end of spiritual chastity.