It was a good half-hour’s walk, and during it Clementina held what conversation she might with her companion. It was not much the woman had to say of a general sort. She knew little beyond her own troubles and the help that met them, but what else are the two main forces whose composition results in upward motion? Her world was very limited--the houses in which she went charing, the chapel she swept and dusted, the neighbours with whom she gossipped, the little shops where she bought the barest needs of her bare life; but it was at least large enough to leave behind her; and if she was not one to take the kingdom of heaven by force, she was yet one to creep quietly into it. The earthly life of such as she-- immeasurably less sordid than that of the poet who will not work for his daily bread, or that of the speculator who, having settled money on his wife, risks that of his neighbour--passing away like a cloud, will hang in their west, stained indeed, but with gold, blotted, but with roses. Dull as it all was now, Clementina yet gained from her unfoldings a new out-look upon life, its needs, its sorrows, its consolations, and its hopes; nor was there any vulgar pity in the smile of the one, or of degrading acknowledgment in the tears of the other, when a piece of gold passed from hand to hand, as they parted. The Sunday-sealed door of the stationer’s shop--for there was no private entrance to the house--was opened by another sad-faced woman. What a place to seek the secret of life in! Lovelily enfolds the husk its kernel; but what the human eye turns from as squalid and unclean may enfold the seed that clasps, couched in infinite withdrawment, the vital germ of all that is lovely and graceful, harmonious and strong, all without which no poet would sing, no martyr burn, no king rule in righteousness, no geometrician pore over the marvellous _must_. The woman led her through the counter into a little dingy room behind the shop, looking out on a yard a few feet square, with a water-butt, half-a-dozen flower-pots, and a maimed plaster Cupid perched on the window-sill. There sat the schoolmaster, in conversation with a lady, whom the woman of the house, awed by her sternness and grandeur, had, out of regard to her lodger’s feelings, shown into her parlour and not into his bedroom.