ing his
thoughts. He seldom considered his daughters. Women had their place
in the world: that place was to obey and bear children: to carry on
the line for men. It was a father's duty to take care that their
husbands should be good men, worthy of the admixture of good blood.
The family which yielded its daughters to this office yielded them as
its surplus. They did not carry on its name, which depended on its
sons. . . . He had three sons: but of all his daughters Hetty had
come nearest to claim a son's esteem. Something masculine in her
mind had encouraged him to teach her Latin and Greek. It had been an
experiment, half seriously undertaken; it had come to be seriously
pursued. Not even John had brought so flexible a sense of language.
In accuracy she could not compare with John, nor in that masculine
apprehension which seizes on logic even in the rudiments of grammar.
Mr. Wesley--a poet himself, though by no means a great one--had
sometimes found John too pragmatical in demanding reasons for this
and that. "Child," he had once protested, "you think to carry
everything by dint of argument; but you will find how little is ever
done in the world by close reasoning": and, turning to his wife in a
pet, "I profess, sweetheart, I think our Jack would not attend to the
most pressing necessities of nature unless he could give a reason for
it." To Hetty, on the other hand, beauty--beauty in language, in
music, in all forms of art, no less than the beauty of a spring day--
was an ultimate thing and lay beyond questions: and Mr. Wesley,
though as a divine he checked her somewhat pagan impulses and
recalled them to give account of their ground of choice, as a scholar
could not help admiring them. For they seldom led her to choose
wrongly. In Hetty dwelt something of the Attic instinct which, in
days of literary artifice and literary fashions from which she could
not wholly escape, kept her taste fresh and guided her at once to
browse on what was natural and health-giving and to reject with
delicate disgust what was rank and overblown. Himself a sardonic
humorist, he could enjoy the bubbling mirth with which she discovered
comedy in the objects of their common derision. Himself a hoplite in
study, laborious, without sense of proportion, he could look on and
smile while she, a woman, walked more nimbly, picking and choosing as
she went.

The manuscript he held was a poem of hers, scored with additions and
alteration