from the want of some one whose
superiority she could feel, and her old presumptions withered up to
nothing when she measured her own powers with those of a highly educated
man, while all the time he gave her thanks and credit for all she had
effected, but such as taught her humility by very force of infection.

Working in earnest at his visitation sermon, she was drawn up into the
real principles and bearings of the controversy, and Mr. Clare failed
not to give full time and patience to pick out all her difficulties,
removing scruples at troubling him, by declaring that it was good for
his own purpose to unwind every tangle even if he did not use every
thread. It was wonderful how many puzzles were absolutely intangible,
not even tangled threads, but a sort of nebulous matter that dispersed
itself on investigation. And after all, unwilling as she would have
been to own it, a woman's tone of thought is commonly moulded by the
masculine intellect, which, under one form or another, becomes the
master of her soul. Those opinions, once made her own, may be acted
and improved upon, often carried to lengths never thought of by their
inspirer, or held with noble constancy and perseverance even when he
himself may have fallen from them, but from some living medium they are
almost always adopted, and thus, happily for herself, a woman's efforts
at scepticism are but blind faith in her chosen leader, or, at the
utmost, in the spirit of the age. And Rachel having been more than
usually removed from the immediate influence of superior man, had been
affected by the more feeble and distant power, a leading that appeared
to her the light of her independent mind; but it was not in the nature
of things that, from her husband and his uncle, her character should
not receive that tincture for which it had so long waited, strong
and thorough in proportion to her nature, not rapid in receiving
impressions, but steadfast and uncompromising in retaining and working
on them when once accepted, a nature that Alick Keith had discerned and
valued amid its worst errors far more than mere attractiveness, of which
his sister had perhaps made him weary and distrustful. Nor, indeed,
under the force of the present influences, was attractiveness wanting,
and she suited Alick's peculiarities far better than many a more
charming person would have done, and his uncle, knowing her only by her
clear mellow voice, her consideration, helpfulness, and desire to