o question it, and I let it go; and so
must you.

"`But who are they?' you want to know. They are distant cousins of
Mr Grey's,--orphans, and in mourning for their father. They are just
above twenty, and their name is Ibbotson. `Are they handsome?' is
your next question. The eldest, Hester, is beautiful as the evening
star. Margaret is very different. It does not matter what she is as
to beauty, for the question seems never to have entered her own mind.
I doubt whether it has often occurred to her whether she can be this,
or that, or the other. She _is_, and there is an end of the matter.
Such pure _existence_, without question, without introspection,
without hesitation or consciousness, I never saw in any one above
eight years old. Yet she is wise; it becomes not me to estimate how
wise. You will ask how I know this already. I knew it the first day
I saw them; I knew it by her infinite simplicity, from which all
selfishness is discharged, and into which no folly can enter. The
airs of heaven must have been about her from her infancy, to nourish
such health of the soul. What her struggle is to be in life I cannot
conceive, for not a morbid tendency is to be discerned. I suppose she
may be destined to make mistakes,--to find her faith deceived, her
affections rebuked, her full repose delayed. If, like the rest of us,
she be destined to struggle, it must be to conflict of this kind; for
it is inconceivable that any should arise from herself. Yet is she as
truly human as the weakest of us,--engrossed by affection, and
susceptible of passion. Her affection for her sister is a sort of
passion. It has some of the features of the serene guardianship of
one from on high; but it is yet more like the passionate servitude--of
the benefited to a benefactor, for instance--which is perhaps the most
graceful attitude in which our humanity appears. Where are the words
that can tell what it is to witness, day by day, the course of such a
life as this?--to see, living and moving before one's eyes, the very
spirit that one had caught glimpses of, wandering in the brightest
vistas of one's imagination, in the holiest hours of thought! Yet is
there nothing fearful, as in the presence of a spirit; there is
scarcely even a sense of awe, so childlike is her deportment. I go,
grave and longing to listen; I come away, and I find I have been
talking more t