arm through his. He needed to be reminded of her existence. Mr. Gresley
pressed it, and they took a turn in silence.

He had not a high opinion of the feminine intellect. He was wont to say
that he was tired of most women in ten minutes. But he had learned to
make an exception of his wife. What mind does not feel confidence in the
sentiments of its echo?

"I am greatly troubled about Hester," he said at last.

"It is not a new trouble," said Mrs. Gresley. "I sometimes think,
dearest, it is we who are to blame in having her to live with us. She is
worldly--I suppose she can't help it--and we are unworldly. She is
irreligious, and you are deeply religious. I wish I could say I was too,
but I lag far behind you. And though I am sure she does her best--and so
do we--her presence is a continual friction. I feel she always drags us
down."

Mr. Gresley was too much absorbed in his own thoughts to notice the
diffident plea which his wife was putting forward that Hester might
cease to live with them.

"I was not thinking of that," he said, "so much as of this novel which
she has written. It is a profane, immoral book, and will do incalculable
harm if it is published."

"I feel sure it will," said Mrs. Gresley, who had not read it.

"It is dreadfully coarse in places," continued Mr. Gresley, who had the
same opinion of George Eliot's works. "And I warned Hester most solemnly
on that point when I found she had begun another book. I told her that I
well knew that to meet the public taste it was necessary to interlard
fiction with _risque_ things in order to make it sell, but that it was
my earnest hope she would in future resist this temptation. She only
said that if she introduced improprieties into her book in order to make
money, in her opinion she deserved to be whipped in the public streets.
She was very angry, I remember, and became as white as a sheet, and I
dropped the subject."

"She can't bear even the most loving word of advice," said Mrs. Gresley.

"She holds nothing sacred," went on Mr. Gresley, remembering an
unfortunate incident in the clergyman's career. "Her life here seems to
have had no softening effect upon her. She sneers openly at religion. I
never thought, I never allowed myself to think, that she was so dead to
spiritual things as her book forces me to believe. Even her good people,
her heroine, have not a vestige of religion, only a sort of vague
morality, right for the sake of right, and love tea