“It has answered beyond my hopes. Ever since I was thirty years of age and had finished with all young ideas and day-dreams, I had one particular ideal of earthly bliss, and that was the position of a country squire’s wife—an energetic, active, well-meaning woman, the central figure in a rural village, having her model cottages and her allotment gardens, her infirmary, her mission-house—the good genius of her little community, a queen in miniature, and without political entanglements, or menace of foreign war. Now it could never be my lot to reign on a landed estate, to build cottages, or cut up fertile meadows for cottagers’ gardens; but I thought by taking up my abode in a poor neighbourhood, and visiting in a friendly, familiar way—no tracts or preachings—among the most respectable of the inhabitants, and slowly feeling my way among the difficult subjects, I might gradually acquire an influence just as strong as that of the Lady Bountiful in a country parish, and might come to be as useful in my small way as the squire’s wife with her larger means. And I have done it,” added Miss Newton, triumphantly. “There are rooms in this street and in other streets that are to me my model cottages. There are overworked, underfed women who look up to me as their Providence. There are children who come and hang to my skirts as I pass along the streets. There are great hulking men who ask my advice and get me to write their letters for them. What could a squire’s wife have more than that? And yet I have only a hundred and fifty pounds a year to spend upon my people.” “You give them something more than money. You give them sympathy—the magnetism of your strong and generous nature.” “Ah, there is something in that. Magnetism is a good word. There must be some reason why people attach themselves so ardently to Mr. Gladstone, don’t you know,—some charm in him that holds them almost in spite of themselves, and makes them think as he thinks, and veer as he veers. Yes, they swing round with him like the boats going round with the tide, and they can’t help it any more than the boats can. And I think, to compare small things with great, there must be some touch of that magnetic power in _me_,” concluded Miss Newton. “I am sure of it,” said Theodore, “and I am sure, too, that you must be like a spot of light in this dark little world of yours.”