I
should think,--a very sweet, pale woman,--daughter of the usual
country-clergyman,--thrown on her own resources from an early age, and
the rest: a common story, but an uncommon person,--very. All conscience
and sensibility, I should say,--a cruel worker,--no kind of regard for
herself, seems as fragile and supple as a young willow-shoot, but try her
and you find she has the spring in her of a steel cross-bow. I am glad I
happened to come to this place, if it were only for her sake. I have
saved that girl's life; I am as sure of it as if I had pulled her out of
the fire or water.

Of course I'm in love with her, you say,--we always love those whom we
have benefited; "saved her life,--her love was the reward of his
devotion," etc., etc., as in a regular set novel. In love, Philip? Well,
about that,--I love Helen Darley--very much: there is hardly anybody I
love so well. What a noble creature she is! One of those that just go
right on, do their own work and everybody else's, killing themselves inch
by inch without ever thinking about it,--singing and dancing at their
toil when they begin, worn and saddened after a while, but pressing
steadily on, tottering by and by, and catching at the rail by the
way-side to help them lift one foot before the other, and at last
falling, face down, arms stretched forward.

Philip, my boy, do you know I am the sort of man that locks his door
sometimes and cries his heart out of his eyes,--that can sob like a woman
and not be ashamed of it? I come of fighting-blood on one side, you
know; I think I could be savage on occasion. But I am tender,--more and
more tender as I come into my fulness of manhood. I don't like to strike
a man, (laugh, if you like,--I know I hit hard when I do strike,)--but
what I can't stand is the sight of these poor, patient, toiling women,
who never find out in this life how good they are, and never know what it
is to be told they are angels while they still wear the pleasing
incumbrances of humanity. I don't know what to make of these cases. To
think that a woman is never to be a woman again, whatever she may come to
as an unsexed angel,--and that she should die unloved! Why does not
somebody come and carry off this noble woman, waiting here all ready to
make a man happy? Philip, do you know the pathos there is in the eyes of
unsought women, oppressed with the burden of an inner life unshared? I
can see into them now as I could not in those 'earlier