arried, and his wife, who had been a
doctor's daughter and a national schoolmistress, had the same ardours as
himself. They lived in one of the dismal little squares near the Goswell
Road, and had two children. The wife, as a Positivist mother is bound to
do, tended and taught her children entirely herself. She might have been
seen any day wheeling their perambulator through the dreary streets of a
dreary region; she was their Providence, their deity, the representative
to them of all tenderness and all authority. But when her work with them
was done, she would throw herself into charity organisation cases, into
efforts for the protection of workhouse servants, into the homeliest
acts of ministry towards the sick, till her dowdy little figure and her
face, which but for the stress of London, of labour, and of poverty,
would have had a blunt fresh-coloured dairymaid's charm, became symbols
of a divine and sacred helpfulness in the eyes of hundreds of straining
men and women.

The husband also, after a day spent in chambers, would give his evenings
to teaching or committee work. They never allowed themselves to breathe
even to each other that life might have brighter things to show them
than the neighbourhood of the Goswell Road. There was a certain
narrowness in their devotion; they had their bitternesses and ignorances
like other people; but the more Robert knew of them the more profound
became his admiration for that potent spirit of social help which in our
generation Comtism has done so much to develop, even among those of us
who are but moderately influenced by Comte's philosophy, and can make
nothing of the religion of Humanity.

Wardlaw has no large part in the story of Elsmere's work in North R----.
In spite of Robert's efforts, and against his will, the man of meaner
gifts and commoner clay was eclipsed by that brilliant and persuasive
something in Elsmere which a kind genius had infused into him at birth.
And we shall see that in time Robert's energies took a direction which
Wardlaw could not follow with any heartiness. But at the beginning
Elsmere owed him much, and it was a debt he was never tired of
honouring.

In the first place, Wardlaw's choice of the Elgood Street room as a
fresh centre for civilising effort had been extremely shrewd. The
district lying about it, as Robert soon came to know, contained a number
of promising elements.

Close by the dingy street which sheltered their schoolroom rose the