ings spoke
to her more loudly or more subtly than these things. In view of what
happened, poor dear Alicia Livingstone's anticipation that the Simpsons
and their circle would have a radical personal effect upon Laura
Filbert, became ludicrous. They had no effect at all. She took no tint,
no curve. She appeared not to see that these precious things were to be
had for the assimilation. Her grace remained exclusively that of
holiness and continued to fail to have any relation to the common little
things she did and said.

The Simpsons were more plastic. Laura had been with them hardly a week
before Mrs. Simpson, with touching humility, was trying to remodel her
spiritual nature upon the form so fortuitously, if the word is
admissible, presented. The dear lady had never before realised, by her
own statement, how terribly her religious feelings were mingled with
domestic and social considerations, how firmly her spiritual edifice was
based upon the things of this world. She felt that her soul was
honeycombed--that was her word--with conventionality and false
standards, and she made confessions like these to Laura, sitting in the
girl's bedroom in the twilight. They were very soothing, these
confessions. Laura would take Mrs. Simpson's thin, veined, middle-aged
hand in hers and seem to charge herself for the moment with the
responsibility of the elder lady's case. She did not attempt to conceal
her pity or even her contempt for Mrs. Simpson's state of grace: she
made short work of special services and ladies' Bible classes. The world
was white with harvest, and Mrs. Simpson's chief activity was a
recreation society for shop-girls. But it was something, it was
everything, to be uneasy, to be unsatisfied, and they would uplift
themselves in prayer, and Laura would find words of such touching
supplication in which to represent the matter that the burden of her
friend and hostess would at once be lessened by the weight of tears.
Mrs. Simpson had never wept so much without perceived cause for grief as
since Laura arrived, and this alone would testify, such was the gentle
paradox of her temperament, how much she enjoyed Miss Filbert's
presence.

Laura's room was a temple, for which the gardener daily gave up his
choicest blooms, the tenderest interest watched upon her comings and
goings, and it was the joy of both the Simpsons to make little
sacrifices for her, to desert their beloved vicar on a Sunday evening,
for instance, and