What an extraordinary thing! Any one, be they who they might, would naturally have thought that if the book were dedicated to any one it would be to her only brother. But Hester, it seemed, thought nothing of blood relations. She disregarded them entirely.
The blood relation began to read. He seemed to forget to skip. Page after page was slowly turned. Sometimes he hesitated a moment to change a word. He had always been conscious of a gift for finding the right word. This gift Hester did not share with him. She often got hold of the wrong end of the stick. He could hardly refrain from a smile when he came across the sentence, "He was young enough to know better," as he substituted in a large illegible hand the word old for young. There were many obvious little mistakes of this kind that he corrected as he read, but now and then he stopped short.
One of the characters, an odious person, was continually saying things she had no business to say. Mr. Gresley wondered how Hester had come across such doubtful women—not under his roof. Lady Susan must have associated with thoroughly unsuitable people.
"I keep a smaller spiritual establishment than I did," said the odious person. "I have dismissed that old friend of my childhood, the devil. I really had no further use for him."
Mr. Gresley crossed through the passage at once. How could Hester write so disrespectfully of the devil?
"This is positive nonsense," said Mr. Gresley, irritably; "coming as it does just after the sensible chapter about the new vicar who made a clean sweep of all the old dead regulations in his parish because he felt he must introduce spiritual life into the place. Now that is really good. I don't quite know what Hester means by saying he took exercise in his clerical cul-de-sac. I think she means surtout, but she is a good French scholar, so she probably knows what she is talking about."
Whatever the book lacked it did not lack interest. Still, it bristled with blemishes.
And then what could the Pratts, or indeed any one, make of such a sentence as this:
"When we look back at what we were seven years ago, five years ago, and perceive the difference in ourselves, a difference amounting almost to change of identity; when we look back and see in how many characters we have lived and loved and suffered and died before we reached the character that momentarily clothes us, and from which our soul is struggling out to clothe itself anew; when we feel how the sympathy even of those who love us best is always with our last expression, never with our present feeling, always with the last dead self on which our climbing feet are set—"
"She is hopelessly confused," said Mr. Gresley, without reading to the end of the sentence, and substituting the word ladder for dead self. "Of course, I see what she means, the different stages of life, the infant, the boy, the man, but hardly any one else will so understand it."