 hardness, and to require nothing. That is the path we
all like when we set out on our abandonment of egoism - the path of martyrdom
and endurance, where the palm-branches grow, rather than the steep highway of
tolerance, just allowance, and self-blame, where there are no leafy honours to
be gathered and worn.
    The old books, Virgil, Euclid, and Aldrich - that wrinkled fruit of the tree
of knowledge - had been all laid by; for Maggie had turned her back on the vain
ambition to share the thoughts of the wise. In her first ardour she flung away
the books with a sort of triumph that she had risen above the need of them; and
if they had been her own, she would have burned them, believing that she would
never repent. She read so eagerly and constantly in her three books, the Bible,
Thomas-à-Kempis, and the »Christian Year« (no longer rejected as a »hymn-book«),
that they filled her mind with a continual stream of rhythmic memories; and she
was too ardently learning to see all nature and life in the light of her new
faith, to need any other material for her mind to work on, as she sat with her
well-plied needle, making shirts and other complicated stitchings, falsely
called »plain« - by no means plain to Maggie, since wristband and sleeve and the
like had a capability of being sewed in wrong side outwards in moments of mental
wandering.
    Hanging diligently over her sewing, Maggie was a sight any one might have
been pleased to look at. That new inward life of hers, notwithstanding some
volcanic upheavings of imprisoned passions, yet shone out in her face with a
tender soft light that mingled itself as added loveliness with the gradually
enriched colour and outline of her blossoming youth. Her mother felt the change
in her with a sort of puzzled wonder that Maggie should be »growing up so good;«
it was amazing that this once »contrairy« child was become so submissive, so
backward to assert her own will. Maggie used to look up from her work and find
her mother's eyes fixed upon her: they were watching and waiting for the large
young glance, as if her elder frame got some needful warmth from it. The mother
was getting fond of her tall, brown girl, the only bit of furniture now on which
she could bestow her anxiety and pride; and Maggie, in spite of her own ascetic
wish to have no personal adornment, was obliged to give way to her mother about
her hair
