Ellen Streightley had never cooled or wavered in her love for Hester; and her mother liked the girl very much, though she sometimes had an uncomfortable sort of feeling that she did not understand her perfectly, that Hester might perhaps be "too much" for her and Ellen, if she should think it worth her while to be so. But the kind lady was little given to mental exercises of any troublesome description, and never thought of analysing her sensations. That she was an exceptional person, singularly unsuspicious, and unlike mothers in general, may surely be conceded, when it is stated that it never occurred to her to think that Hester might possibly be a dangerous intimate for Robert, her beloved and precious son, or could cherish any design or idea whereof he made part. Mrs. Streightley loved her son better than she loved Ellen; a preference which the girl accepted as a matter of course, and believed to be perfectly just and well founded. He was Robert, their Robert, the most important, the most beloved of men, and of course it was all right; and the two women did but follow the example of thousands of their sex, whose perceptions and ideas are confined within a small circle, and whose social sphere and enjoyments resemble a mill, and the going round therein performed by patient and tolerably well-fed beasts. Robert was an amiable man on the whole; he gave no more trouble in the household than was inseparable from the circumstance that he was a man and "didn't understand things," as the household phrase has it, and he loved his mother devotedly, and Ellen very much indeed. It had never occurred to him that her life was a dull one, and that he was rich enough to make it a very different life, if he would but waken up and look away from his counting-house, learn sympathy, and consider what was the real meaning and worth of money. He had never thought of the light and colour, the stir and healthful pleasure he might diffuse through the decorous, comfortable, neutral-tinted existence of the Brixton Villa; he had never noticed their absence; and as he had no notion of the life led by other girls, on whom money was lavishly expended, and for whose delectation whole household systems were organised, there was no standard of comparison in his mind. He was so much older than his sister, so much nearer his mother's age than hers, that while perfect affection had always subsisted between them, it had not been accompanied with much intimacy, and his confidences, which were wholly confined to business matters, had been restricted to his mother, on whose mind it had never dawned that any improvement in their household affairs could be desirable, who had never looked or desired to look outside the circle in which she moved, and who would have received any suggestion of an increase of Ellen's social opportunities and enjoyments with entire incredulity. To her Ellen was as yet little more than a child; and