"Well, if, after that beginning, he yet brought you home his money, he ought to have had another kind of reception. To think of the wife of a poor man making such a fuss about a silk dress! Why, Eliza, I never had a silk dress in my life; and I don't think I ever shall."
"Laws, grannie! who'd ha' thought that now!"
"You see I have other uses for my money than buying things for show."
"That you do, grannie! But you see," she added, somewhat inconsequently, "we ain't got no child, and Dick he take it ill of me, and don't care to save his money; so he never takes me out nowheres, and I do be so tired o' stopping indoors, every day and all day long, that it turns me sour, I do believe. I didn't use to be cross-grained, miss. But, laws! I feels now as if I'd let him knock me about ever so, if only he wouldn't say as how it was nothing to him if I was dressed ever so fine."
"You run and get his supper."
Eliza went; and Marion, sitting down again to her instrument, improvised for an hour. Next to her New Testament, this was her greatest comfort. She sung and prayed both in one then, and nobody but God heard any thing but the piano. Nor did it impede the flow of her best thoughts, that in a chair beside her slumbered a weary man, the waves of whose evil passions she had stilled, and the sting of whose disappointments she had soothed, with the sweet airs and concords of her own spirit. Who could say what tender influences might not be stealing over him, borne on the fair sounds? for even the formless and the void was roused into life and joy by the wind that roamed over the face of its deep. No humanity jarred with hers. In the presence of the most degraded, she felt God there. A face, even if besotted, was a face, only in virtue of being in the image of God. That a man was a man at all, must be because he was God's. And this man was far indeed from being of the worst. With him beside her, she could pray with most of the good of having the door of her closet shut, and some of the good of the gathering together as well. Thus was love, as ever, the assimilator of the foreign, the harmonizer of the unlike; the builder of the temple in the desert, and of the chamber in the market-place.
As she sat and discoursed with herself, she perceived that the woman was as certainly suffering from ennui as any fine lady in Mayfair.
"Have you ever been to the National Gallery, Richard?" she asked, without turning her head, the moment she heard him move.
"No, grannie," he answered with a yawn. "Don'a' most know what sort of a place it be now. Waxwork, ain't it?"
"No. It's a great place full of pictures, many of them hundreds of years old. They're taken care of by the Government, just for people to go and look at. Wouldn't you like to go and see them some day?"