Before sending Robinson’s _After Office Hours_ to the binder, Clara looked at it. It was made up of short essays, about twenty altogether, bound in dark-green cloth, lettered at the side, and published in 1841. They were upon the oddest subjects: such as, _Ought Children to learn Rules before Reasons_? _The Higher Mathematics and Materialism_. _Ought We to tell Those Whom We love what We think about Them_? _Deductive Reasoning in Politics_. _What Troubles ought We to Make Known and What ought We to Keep Secret_: _Courage as a Science and an Art_. Clara did not read any one essay through, she had no time, but she was somewhat struck with a few sentences which caught her eye; for example—‘A mere dream, a vague hope, ought in some cases to be more potent than a certainty in regulating our action. The faintest vision of God should be more determinative than the grossest earthly assurance.’ ‘I knew a case in which a man had to encounter three successive trials of all the courage and inventive faculty in him. Failure in one would have been ruin. The odds against him in each trial were desperate, and against ultimate victory were overwhelming. Nevertheless, he made the attempt, and was triumphant, by the narrowest margin, in every struggle. That which is of most value to us is often obtained in defiance of the laws of probability.’ ‘What is precious in Quakerism is not so much the doctrine of the Divine voice as that of the preliminary stillness, the closure against other voices and the reduction of the mind to a condition in which it can _listen_, in which it can discern the merest whisper, inaudible when the world, or interest, or passion, are permitted to speak.’ ‘The acutest syllogiser can never develop the actual consequences of any system of policy, or, indeed, of any change in human relationship, man being so infinitely complex, and the interaction of human forces so incalculable.’ ‘Many of our speculative difficulties arise from the unauthorised conception of an _omnipotent_ God, a conception entirely of our own creation, and one which, if we look at it closely, has no meaning. It is because God _could_ have done otherwise, and did not, that we are confounded. It may be distressing to think that God cannot do any better, but it is not so distressing as to believe that He might have done better had He so willed.’ Although these passages were disconnected, each of them seemed to Clara to be written in a measure for herself, and her curiosity was excited about the author. Perhaps the man who called would say something about him.