“You know that it is vitally necessary! It's all the more necessary, if he's so superior to her, as you say. I can't think what's become of your principles, my dear!”
“I do, you've got them,” said Sewell.
“I really believe I have,” said his wife, with that full conviction of righteousness which her sex alone can feel. “I have always heard you say that marriage without love was not only sinful in itself, but the beginning of sorrow. Why do you think now that it makes no difference?”
“I suppose I was trying to adapt myself to circumstances,” answered Sewell, frankly at least. “Let's hope that my facts are as wrong as my conclusions. I'm not sure of either. I suppose, if I saw him idolising so slight and light a person as she seems to be, I should be more disheartened about his future than I am now. If he overvalued her, it would only drag him lower down.”
“Oh, his future! Drag him down! Why don't you think of her, going up there to that dismal wilderness, to spend her days in toil and poverty, with a half-crazy mother-in-law, and a rheumatic brother-in-law, in such a looking hovel?” Mrs. Sewell did not group these disadvantages conventionally, but they were effective. “You have allowed your feelings about that baffling creature to blind you to everything else, David. Why should you care so much for his future, and nothing for hers? Is that so very bright?”
“I don't think that either is dazzling,” sighed the minister. Yet Barker's grew a little lighter as he familiarised himself with it, or rather with Barker. He found that he had a plan for getting a teacher's place in the Academy, if they reopened it at Willoughby Pastures, as they talked of doing, under the impulse of such a course in one of the neighbouring towns, and that he was going home, in fancy at least, with purposes of enlightenment and elevation which would go far to console him under such measure of disappointment as they must bring. Sewell hinted to Barker that he must not be too confident of remodelling Willoughby Pastures upon the pattern of Boston.
“Oh no; I don't expect that,” said Lemuel. “What I mean is that I shall always try to remember myself what I've learnt here—from the kind of men I've seen, and the things that I know people are all the time doing for others. I told you once that they haven't got any idea of that in the country. I don't expect to preach it into them; they wouldn't like it if I did; and they'd make fun of it; but if I could try to live it?”
“Yes,” said Sewell, touched by this young enthusiasm.
“I don't know as I can all the time,” said Lemuel. “But it seems to me that that's what I've learnt here, if I've learnt anything. I think the world's a good deal better than I used to.”
“Do you indeed, my dear boy?” asked Sewell, greatly interested. “It's a pretty well-meaning world—I hope it is.”