peak of these new things, but felt the need of lying back in
twilight to marvel and repeat melodies.

Mrs. Boscobel happened to approach them once whilst this reading was
going on.

'You are educating her?' she said to Stella afterwards.

'Perhaps--a little,' Stella replied absently.

'Isn't it just a trifle dangerous?' suggested the understanding lady.

'Dangerous? How?'

'The wife of the man who makes sparks fly out of iron? The man who is on
no account to learn anything?'

Stella shook her head, saying, 'You don't know her.'

'I should much like to,' was Mrs. Boscobel's smiling rejoinder.

In Stella's company it did not seem very likely that Adela would lose
her social enthusiasm, yet danger there was, and that precisely on
account of Mrs. Westlake's idealist tendencies. When she spoke of the
toiling multitude, she saw them in a kind of exalted vision; she beheld
them glorious in their woe, ennobled by the tyranny under which
they groaned. She had seen little if anything of the representative
proletarian, and perchance even if she had the momentary impression
would have faded in the light of her burning soul. Now Adela was in the
very best position for understanding those faults of the working class
which are ineradicable in any one generation. She knew her husband, knew
him better than ever now that she regarded him from a distance; she knew
'Arry Mutimer; and now she was getting to appreciate with a thoroughness
impossible hitherto, the monstrous gulf between men of that kind and
cultured human beings. She had, too, studied the children and the women
of New Wanley, and the results of such study were arranging themselves
in her mind. All unconsciously, Stella Westlake was cooling Adela's
zeal with every fervid word she uttered; Adela at times with difficulty
restrained herself from crying, 'But it is a mistake! They have not
these feelings you attribute to them. Such suffering as you picture
them enduring comes only of the poetry-fed soul at issue with fate.'
She could not as yet have so expressed herself, but the knowledge was
growing within her. For Adela was not by nature a social enthusiast.
When her heart leapt at Stella's chant, it was not in truth through
contagion of sympathy, but in admiration and love of the noble woman
who could thus think and speak. Adela--and who will not be thankful
for it?--was, before all things, feminine; her true enthusiasms were
personal. It was a necessity of her nature