or finding the right
word. This gift Hester did not share with him. She often got hold of the
wrong end of the stick. He could hardly refrain from a smile when he
came across the sentence, "He was young enough to know better," as he
substituted in a large illegible hand the word _old_ for _young_. There
were many obvious little mistakes of this kind that he corrected as he
read, but now and then he stopped short.

One of the characters, an odious person, was continually saying things
she had no business to say. Mr. Gresley wondered how Hester had come
across such doubtful women--not under his roof. Lady Susan must have
associated with thoroughly unsuitable people.

"I keep a smaller spiritual establishment than I did," said the odious
person. "I have dismissed that old friend of my childhood, the devil. I
really had no further use for him."

Mr. Gresley crossed through the passage at once. How could Hester write
so disrespectfully of the devil?

"This is positive nonsense," said Mr. Gresley, irritably; "coming as it
does just after the sensible chapter about the new vicar who made a
clean sweep of all the old dead regulations in his parish because he
felt he must introduce spiritual life into the place. Now that is really
good. I don't quite know what Hester means by saying he took exercise in
his clerical _cul-de-sac_. I think she means _surtout_, but she is a
good French scholar, so she probably knows what she is talking about."

Whatever the book lacked it did not lack interest. Still, it bristled
with blemishes.

And then what could the Pratts, or indeed any one, make of such a
sentence as this:

"When we look back at what we were seven years ago, five years ago, and
perceive the difference in ourselves, a difference amounting almost to
change of identity; when we look back and see in how many characters we
have lived and loved and suffered and died before we reached the
character that momentarily clothes us, and from which our soul is
struggling out to clothe itself anew; when we feel how the sympathy even
of those who love us best is always with our last expression, never with
our present feeling, always with the last dead self on which our
climbing feet are set--"

"She is hopelessly confused," said Mr. Gresley, without reading to the
end of the sentence, and substituting the word _ladder_ for _dead self_.
"Of course, I see what she means, the different stages of life, the
infant, the boy, the man, but