“You are right perhaps. The mother struck me as by no means a pleasant character, always supposing that Mrs. Porter is her mother, of which I myself have very little doubt.” Theodore made no further effort to bring mother and daughter together, but he met Marian from time to time at Miss Newton’s tea-parties, and acquaintance ripened into friendship. Her refinement and her musical talent sustained his interest in her. He talked to her of books sometimes when they happened to be sitting side by side at the tea-table, and he was surprised at the extent of her reading. She confessed, when he questioned her, that she was in the habit of stealing two or three hours from the night for her books. “I find that I can do with a few hours’ sleep,” she said, “if I lie down happy in my mind after being absorbed in a delightful book. My books are my life. They give me the whole universe for my world, though I have to live in one room, and to follow a very monotonous calling.” He admired the refinement of that purely intellectual nature, but he admired still more that admirable tact which regulated her intercourse with Miss Newton’s homelier friends. Never by word or tone or half-involuntary glance did Marian betray any consciousness of superiority to the uncultivated herd. She shared their interests, she sympathized with their vexations, she neither smiled nor shuddered at Cockney twang or missing aspirate. Winter brightened into spring, with all its varieties of good and evil; east winds rushing round street-corners, and cutting into the pedestrian like a knife; west winds enfolding him like a balmy caress, and bringing the perfume of violets, the vivid yellow of daffodils into the wilderness of brick and stone; rainy days, grey, monotonous, dismal, hanging on the soul like a curtain of gloom and hopelessness. These made up the sum of Theodore’s outer life. Within he had his books, his ambition, and his faithful love. He told himself that it was a hopeless love; but there are many things which a man tells himself, and tries to believe, and yet does not believe. The very human longing for blessedness is too strong for human wisdom. Where there is love, there is always hope.