One day he proposed to read something, and she consented. I will not say what he read, for I would avoid waking controversy as to fitness. He thought he knew what he was about. The good in a _true_ book, he would say, is the best protection against what may not be so good in it; its wrong as well as its right may wake the conscience: the thoughts of a book accuse and excuse one another. In saying so, he took the true reader for granted; to an untrue reader the truth itself is untrue. The general sense of honour, he would say, has been stimulated not a little by the story of the treachery of Jael. Nor was it any wonder he should succeed in interesting Mrs. Wylder, for she had a strong brain as well as a big heart. More than half her faults came of an indignant sense of wrong. She had passionately loved her husband once, but he had soon ceased even the show of returning her affection, And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain. After a fierce struggle against the lessons life would have her taught, a struggle continued to her fortieth year, she was now at length a pupil in another school, where the schoolroom was her bed, the book of Quiet her first study, her two attendants a clergyman and her own daughter, and her one teacher, God himself. In that schoolroom, the world began to open to her a little. Among men who could, without seeming to aim at it, make another think, I have not met the equal of Wingfold. His mode was that of the open-hearted apostle, who took men by guile. He called out the thoughts lurking in their souls, and set them dealing with those thoughts, not with him: they were slow to discover that he was a divine musician, playing upon the holy strings of their hearts; they thought the tunes came alive in their own air--as indeed they did, only another hand woke them. To work thus, he had to lay bare not a little of his own feeling, but where it was brotherly to show feeling, he counted it unchristian to hide it. Feeling by itself, however, that came and went without correspondent action, he counted not only weak and mawkish, but tending to the devilish.