a wife.' If
that were true the world would have to get on without sympathy, for no
two people have the same experience. Only a shallow nature believes
that a resemblance in two cups means that they both contain the same
wine. Sybell believes it, and you would have been very much the same,
not from lack of perception, as in her case, but from want of using your
powers of perception. If you had not undergone an agonized awakening,
all the great realities of life--love, hatred, temptation,
enthusiasm--would have remained for you as they have remained for
Sybell, merely pretty words to string on light conversation. That is why
I can't bear to hear her speak of them, because every word she says
proves she has not known them. But the sword that pierced your heart
forced an entrance for angels, who had been knocking where there was no
door--until then."

Silence.

"Since when is it that people have turned to you for comfort and
sympathy?"

No answer.

"Rachel, on your oath, did you ever really care for the London poor
until you became poor yourself, and lived among them?"

"No."

"But they were there all the time. You saw them in the streets. It was
not as if you only heard of them. You saw them. Their agony, their vice,
was written large on their faces. There was a slum almost at the back of
that great house in Portman Square where you lived many years in luxury
with your parents."

"Don't," said Rachel, her lip trembling.

"I must. You did not care then. If a flagrant case came before you you
gave something like other uncharitable people who hate feeling
uncomfortable. But you care _now_. You seek out those who need you.
Answer me. Were they cheaply bought or not, that compassion and love for
the degraded and the suffering which were the outcome of your years of
poverty in Museum Buildings?"

"They were cheaply bought," said Rachel, with conviction, speaking with
difficulty.

"Would you have learned them if you had gone on living in Portman
Square?"

"Oh, Hester! would anybody?"

"Yes, they would. But that is not the question. Would _you?_"

"N--no," said Rachel.

There was a long silence.

Rachel's mind took its staff and travelled slowly, humbly, a few more
difficult steps up that steep path where "Experience is converted into
thought as a mulberry-leaf is converted into satin."

At last she turned her grave eyes upon her friend.

"I see what you mean," she said; "I have not reached the place yet;