The second Mrs. Eversley did not alter his opinions or his practices, except accidentally by the introduction of an annual infant, and in one year of twins, into the household. She was not young when he sought her hand in marriage; her enemies might perhaps have called her middle-aged. He had become acquainted with her by correspondence in the prosecution of some charitable undertaking, when she had offered to collect money for an evangelical cause which he had at heart; then he had met her, and after a time he had married her. It could hardly be said that she seemed much nearer to him after the marriage than before it. Her affection was indifference with the chill taken off. But then the feelings of a man and a woman in respect of matrimony are not always the same. The man loves the person. The woman sometimes loves the state. The one desires to marry a particular woman, the other desires to be married. It would require a skilful artist to paint the character of the second Mrs. Eversley. Whatever she did she did always from a sense of duty. Duty was the keynote of her life. It did not prevent her doing disagreeable things to other people; but it comforted her (not the other people) when she had done them. If it generally happened that her sense of duty coincided with her inclination, that was only what might naturally be expected in a universe ordered by Providence with due regard to the circumstances of the second Mrs. Eversley. Not that Mrs. Eversley ever looked upon her performance of duty as constituting a title to the divine favour; she knew that her righteousness (like other people’s) was no better than ‘filthy rags.’ She belonged to ‘the elect;’ other people, or nearly all other people, did not belong to ‘the elect,’ but to some other body. Mrs. Eversley’s principal horror was of ‘the world.’ She fought a hand-to-hand fight with that mysterious impersonation, which seems to be the sum total of all that a narrowly minded religious man or woman is unwilling that other people should do. If she spoke of a neighbour as ‘worldly,’ there was no hope for him or her. To save her own soul in the first instance, and in the second the souls of her husband and her family (Gerald being included by a sort of special compliment), and in the third, if the Electing Power were so gracious, the souls of the people of Kestercham, was (in Mrs. Eversley’s eyes) the lifework of Mrs. Eversley. It must not be said that her desire was hypocritical. The motives of human action are always hard to classify. They are generally mixed, partly good and partly bad. Two things only may be said to have been clear about Mrs. Eversley, one, that she was a good woman, the other, that she did not make goodness particularly attractive.