d rendered her cousin--to
rouse her indignation and not her strength; to wake horror without
hinting at remedy; to give knowledge of impending doom, without poorest
suggestion of hope, or vaguest shadow of possible escape. It is one
thing to see things as they are; to be consumed with indignation at the
wrong; to shiver with aversion to the abominable; and quite another to
rouse the will to confront the devil, and resist him until he flee. For
this the whole education of Hesper had tended to unfit her. What she
had been taught--and that in a world rendered possible only by the
self-denial of a God--was to drift with the stream, denying herself
only that divine strength of honest love, which would soonest help her
to breast it.

For the earth, it is a blessed thing that those who arrogate to
themselves the holy name of society, and to whom so large a portion of
the foolish world willingly yields it, are in reality so few and so
ephemeral. Mere human froth are they, worked up by the churning of the
world-sea--rainbow-tinted froth, lovely thinned water, weaker than the
unstable itself out of which it is blown. Great as their ordinance
seems, it is evanescent as arbitrary: the arbitrary is but the slavish
puffed up--and is gone with the hour. The life of the people is below;
it ferments, and the scum is for ever being skimmed off, and cast--God
knows where. All is scum where will is not. They leave behind them
influences indeed, but few that keep their vitality in shapes of art or
literature. There they go--little sparrows of the human world,
chattering eagerly, darting on every crumb and seed of supposed
advantage! while from behind the great dustman's cart, the huge
tiger-cat of an eternal law is creeping upon them. Is it a spirit of
insult that leads me to such a comparison? Where human beings do not,
will not _will_, let them be ladies gracious as the graces, the
comparison is to the disadvantage of the sparrows. Not time, but
experience will show that, although indeed a simile, this is no
hyperbole.

"I will leave your father to deal with you, Hesper," said her mother,
and rose.

Up to this point, Mortimer children had often resisted their mother;
beyond this point, never more than once.

"No, please, mamma!" returned Hesper, in a tone of expostulation. "I
have spoken my mind, but that is no treason. As my father has referred
Mr. Redmain to me, I would rather deal with him."

Lady Malice was herself afraid of he