was to him most suitable. By a rare chance, she was the
broader-minded of the two, the more truly impartial. Her
emancipation from dogma had been so gradual, so unconfused by
external pressure, that from her present standpoint she could look
back with calmness and justice on all the stages she had left
behind. With her cousin Miriam she could sympathize in a way
impossible to Spence, who, by-the-bye, somewhat misrepresented his
wife in the account he gave to Mallard of their Sunday experiences.
Puritanism was familiar to her by more than speculation; in the
compassion with which she regarded Miriam there was no mixture of
contempt, as in her husband's case. On the other hand, she did not
pretend to read completely her con sin's heart and mind; she knew
that there was no simple key to Miriam's character, and the quiet
study of its phases from day to day deeply interested her.

Cecily Doran had been known to Spence from childhood; her father was
his intimate friend. But Eleanor had only made the girl's
acquaintance in London, just after her marriage, when Cecily was
spending a season there with her aunt, Mrs. Lessingham. Mallard's
ward was then little more than fifteen; after several years of weak
health, she had entered upon a vigorous maidenhood, and gave such
promise of free, joyous, aspiring life as could not but strongly
affect the sympathies of a woman like Eleanor. Three years prior to
that, at the time of her father's death, Cecily was living with Mrs.
Elgar, a widow, and her daughter Miriam, the latter on the point of
marrying (at eighteen) one Mr. Baske, a pietistic mill-owner, aged
fifty. It then seemed very doubtful whether Cecily would live to
mature years; she had been motherless from infancy, and the
difficulty with those who brought her up was to repress an activity
of mind which seemed to be one cause of her bodily feebleness. In