"`But who are they?' you want to know. They are distant cousins of Mr Grey's,--orphans, and in mourning for their father. They are just above twenty, and their name is Ibbotson. `Are they handsome?' is your next question. The eldest, Hester, is beautiful as the evening star. Margaret is very different. It does not matter what she is as to beauty, for the question seems never to have entered her own mind. I doubt whether it has often occurred to her whether she can be this, or that, or the other. She _is_, and there is an end of the matter. Such pure _existence_, without question, without introspection, without hesitation or consciousness, I never saw in any one above eight years old. Yet she is wise; it becomes not me to estimate how wise. You will ask how I know this already. I knew it the first day I saw them; I knew it by her infinite simplicity, from which all selfishness is discharged, and into which no folly can enter. The airs of heaven must have been about her from her infancy, to nourish such health of the soul. What her struggle is to be in life I cannot conceive, for not a morbid tendency is to be discerned. I suppose she may be destined to make mistakes,--to find her faith deceived, her affections rebuked, her full repose delayed. If, like the rest of us, she be destined to struggle, it must be to conflict of this kind; for it is inconceivable that any should arise from herself. Yet is she as truly human as the weakest of us,--engrossed by affection, and susceptible of passion. Her affection for her sister is a sort of passion. It has some of the features of the serene guardianship of one from on high; but it is yet more like the passionate servitude--of the benefited to a benefactor, for instance--which is perhaps the most graceful attitude in which our humanity appears. Where are the words that can tell what it is to witness, day by day, the course of such a life as this?--to see, living and moving before one's eyes, the very spirit that one had caught glimpses of, wandering in the brightest vistas of one's imagination, in the holiest hours of thought! Yet is there nothing fearful, as in the presence of a spirit; there is scarcely even a sense of awe, so childlike is her deportment. I go, grave and longing to listen; I come away, and I find I have been talking more than any one; revealing, discussing, as if I were the teacher and not the learner,--you will say the worshipper. Say it if you will. Our whole little world worships the one or the other. Hester is also well worthy of worship. If there were nothing but her beauty, she would have a wider world than ours of Deerbrook at her feet. But she has much more. She is what you would call a true woman. She has a generous soul, strong affections, and a susceptibility which interferes with her serenity. She is not exempt