Mrs. Dorriman, married so young as to be barely out of childhood, had the tenacity of opinion and the strong bias in favour of her own conclusions always to be found where the mind has dwelt upon itself, and has not been enlarged by friction with other minds, a bias which no amount of reading tends to modify, since each book is read and digested, almost one might say distorted, by the views brought to bear upon it, a mode of reading which may be compared to looking at a bright and a rainy day through the same smoky glass which gives everything its own hue. But the very exception she took at times, served to arouse Margaret's own powers of thought, and to make her reflect upon her reasons for liking and disliking opinions, and the language in which those opinions were put before her. Many fine sounding phrases fell to pieces when treated this way, and many lovely poems became to her so much more when she followed out a thought therein shadowed forth. Grace could in reality do nothing to stop this reading, and, though at first she made many bitter observations, she had not the heart to destroy her sister's comfort in these mornings; and indeed, at certain times, when her own idleness became oppressive, she went and sat with them, preserving her independence by making no remarks, standing, as it were, aside and taking no part in any discussion, as though her own mind had been long made up and that these questions had been grappled with and settled by her long ago. Mrs. Dorriman, who was always more timid when Grace was present, was always relieved when she did not appear, and then took herself to task for the relief. There was no doubt that Mrs. Dorriman brought a great increase of comfort to the place, everything was well looked after, and Mr. Sandford recognised that it was so, without exactly knowing in which way a change had been made.