"That may be," replied Hester, "but it does not apply to me. I keep the beam out of my own eye which I have no hope of pulling out of my neighhour's. I do not belong to your set." "But you are about to belong to it, I hope." "I hope not." "You are engaged to marry my nephew." "Not irrevocably, I trust." "You should have thought of all that before you gave your consent. Gartley thought you understood. Certainly our circle is not one for saints." "Honest women would be good enough for me. But I thought I had done and said more than was necessary to make Gartley understand my ideas of what was required of me in life, and I thought he sympathized with me so far at least that he would be what help to me he could. Now I find instead of this, that he never believed I meant what I said, but all the time intended to put a stop to the aspiration of my life the moment he had it in his power to do so." "Ah, my dear young lady, you do not know what love is!" said Miss Vavasor, and sighed again as if _she_ knew what love was. And in truth she had been in love at least once in her youth, but had yielded without word of remonstrance when her parents objected to her marrying three hundred a year, and a curacy of _fifty_. She saw it was reasonable: what fellowship can light have with darkness, or love with starvation? "A woman really in love," she went on, "is ready to give up everything, yes, my dear, _everything_ for the man she loves. She who is not equal to that, does not know what love is." "Suppose he should prove unworthy of her?" "That would be nothing, positively nothing. If she had once learned to love him she would see no fault in him." "_Whatever_ faults he might have?" "Whatever faults: love has no second thoughts." "Suppose he were to show himself regardless of her best welfare--caring for her only as an adjunct to his display?" "If she loved him, I only say _if she loved him_, she would be proud to follow in his triumph. His glory is hers." "Whether it be real or not?" "If he counts it so. A woman who loves gives herself to her husband to be moulded by him." "I fear that is the way men think of us," said Hester, sadly; "and no doubt there are women whose behaviour would justify them in it. With all my heart I say a woman ought to be ready to die for the man she loves; that is a matter of course; she cannot really love him if she would not; but that she should fall in with all his thoughts, feelings, and judgments whatever, even such as in others she would most heartily despise; that she should act as if her husband and not God made her, and his whims, instead of the lovely will of him who created man and woman, were to be to her the bonds of her being--that surely no woman could grant who had not first lost her reason."