on to the spiritual life. She had no other
measure of their excellence. She had found profit for her soul in its
divorce from her husband. She had persuaded herself that since she could
not raise him, she herself would have sunk if she had clung to him or let
him cling. She had felt that their tragic rupture strengthened the tie
between her soul and God. But more than once lately, she had experienced
difficulty in reaching her refuge, her place of peace. Something
threatened her former inviolable security. The ramparts of the spiritual
life were shaken. Her prayers, that were once an ascension of flamed and
winged powers carrying her to heaven, had become mere clamorous
petitions, drawing down the things of heaven to earth. Night and morning
the same passionate prayer for herself and her child, the same prayer for
her husband, painful and perfunctory; but not always now the same sense
of absolution, of supreme and intimate communion. It was as if a veil,
opaque but intangible, were drawn between her spirit and the Unseen. She
thought it had come of living in perpetual contact with Walter's
deterioration.

Yet Anne was softer.

Her love for Peggy had become more and more an engrossing passion, as
Majendie left her more and more to the dominion of her motherhood. He had
seen enough of the effect of rivalry. It was Anne's pleasure to take
Peggy from her nurse and wash her and dress her, to tend her fine limbs,
and comb her pale soft hair. It was as if her care for the little tender
body had taught her patience and gentleness towards flesh and blood; as
if, through the love it invoked, some veil was torn for her, and she saw,
wrought in the body of her child, the wonder of the spirit's fellowship
with earth.

She dreaded the passing of the seasons, as they would take with them each
some heart-rending charm of Peggy's infancy. Now it would be the ceasing
of her pretty, helpless cry, as Peggy acquired mastery over things; now
the repudiation of her delicious play, as Peggy's intellect perceived its
puerility; and now the leaving off for ever of the speech that was
Peggy's own, as Peggy adopted the superstition of the English language.
A few years and Peggy would have cast off pinafores, a very few more, and
Peggy would be at a boarding-school; and before she left it she would
have her hair up. There was a pang for Peggy's mother in looking
backward, and in looking forward pang upon intolerable pang.

But Peggy was in no h