Linnett, as the sunlight
beats upon the coat and the cut-flowers. They did not open their hearts
to it; they made no eager response to it; it was a thing that shone upon
the surface, and that was all. Their lives consequently wilted and
shriveled and grew less beautiful. They were like violets made vile by
the very light that was designed to make them lovely. Mr. Tryan, Mr.
Jerome and Mrs. Pettifer, on the other hand, opened their hearts to the
love of God as the rose opens its petals to the light of the sun. Their
religion was a revelry to them. So far from its merely beating upon the
surface, as the sunlight beats upon the surface of the coat, it
saturated the very depths of their being. They were like the lilies
under my window; the rays that withered the violets in the vase only
make _them_ more graceful and more fair.

III

Here, then, are the two groups; and the central scene of the story is
the transfer of the principal character from the one group to the other.
Janet Dempster, the wife of Robert Dempster, is, like her husband, very
religious, but, like him, she is none the better for her religion. But
matters at home hurry to a climax. Dempster drinks more and more, and,
drinking, goes from bad to worse. He treats his wife, first with
coldness, and then with cruelty. At length comes the dreadful and
dramatic scene that readers of the story will never erase from their
memories. In a fit of drunken savagery he burst into her room at
midnight. He drags her from her bed; pushes her down the stairs and
along the hall; and then, opening the front door, he hurls her by sheer
brute force out into the street. Here is George Eliot's picture: '_The
stony street; the bitter north-east wind and darkness; and in the midst
of them a tender woman thrust out from her husband's home in her thin
nightdress, the harsh wind cutting her naked feet and driving her long
hair away from her half-clad bosom, where the poor heart is crushed with
anguish and despair._' It is in these desperate straits that religion
presents itself to her view in an entirely fresh guise.

In her extremity, poor Janet thinks of little Mrs. Pettifer--a member of
that other group, the group that resembles the lilies under my window,
the group of kindly souls whose lives have been irradiated and
beautified by their faith. She taps at the cottage window; Mrs. Pettifer
hastens to the door; and, as soon as that frightened little body can
recover from the firs