s own first loyalties, in seeking to save and reform.

Was _true_ love now to deliver her from that sympathy, to deaden in her
that hatred? Her whole soul cried out in denial. By daily life in
natural relations with the poor, by a fruitful contact with fact, by the
clash of opinion in London, by the influence of a noble friendship, by
the education of awakening passion--what had once been mere tawdry and
violent hearsay had passed into a true devotion, a true thirst for
social good. She had ceased to take a system cut and dried from the
Venturists, or any one else; she had ceased to think of whole classes
of civilised society with abhorrence and contempt; and there had dawned
in her that temper which is in truth implied in all the more majestic
conceptions of the State--the temper that regards the main institutions
of every great civilisation, whether it be property, or law, or
religious custom, as necessarily, in some degree, divine and sacred. For
man has not been their sole artificer! Throughout there has been working
with him "the spark that fires our clay."

Yes!--but modification, progress, change, there must be, for us as for
our fathers! Would marriage fetter her? It was not the least probable
that he and she, with their differing temperaments, would think alike in
the future, any more than in the past. She would always be for
experiments, for risks, which his critical temper, his larger brain,
would of themselves be slow to enter upon. Yet she knew well enough that
in her hands they would become bearable and even welcome to him. And for
himself, she thought with a craving, remorseful tenderness of that
pessimist temper of his towards his own work and function that she knew
so well. In old days it had merely seemed to her inadequate, if not
hypocritical. She would have liked to drive the dart deeper, to make him
still unhappier! Now, would not a wife's chief function be to reconcile
him with himself and life, to cheer him forward on the lines of his own
nature, to believe, understand, help?

Yet always in the full liberty to make her own sacrifices, to realise
her own dreamlands! She thought with mingled smiles and tears of her
plans for this bit of earth that fate had brought under her hand; she
pledged herself to every man, woman, and child on it so to live her life
that each one of theirs should be the richer for it; she set out, so far
as in her lay, to "choose equality." And beyond Mellor, in the great
ch