The Simpsons were more plastic.  Laura had been with them hardly a week before Mrs. Simpson, with touching humility, was trying to remodel her spiritual nature upon the form so fortuitously, if the word is admissible, presented.  The dear lady had never before realised, by her own statement, how terribly her religious feelings were mingled with domestic and social considerations, how firmly her spiritual edifice was based upon the things of this world.  She felt that her soul was honeycombed—­that was her word—­with conventionality and false standards, and she made confessions like these to Laura, sitting in the girl’s bedroom in the twilight.  They were very soothing, these confessions.  Laura would take Mrs. Simpson’s thin, veined, middle-aged hand in hers and seem to charge herself for the moment with the responsibility of the elder lady’s case.  She did not attempt to conceal her pity or even her contempt for Mrs. Simpson’s state of grace, she made short work of special services and ladies’ Bible classes.  The world was white with harvest, and Mrs. Simpson’s chief activity was a recreation society for shop girls.  But it was something, it was everything, to be uneasy, to be unsatisfied, and they would uplift themselves in prayer, and Laura would find words of such touching supplication in which to represent the matter that the burden of her friend and hostess would at once be lessened by the weight of tears.  Mrs. Simpson had never wept so much without perceived cause for grief as since Laura arrived, and this alone would testify, such was the gentle paradox of her temperament, how much she enjoyed Miss Filbert’s presence.

Laura’s room was a temple, for which the gardener daily gave up his choicest blooms, the tenderest interest watched upon her comings and goings, and it was the joy of both the Simpsons to make little sacrifices for her, to desert their beloved vicar on a Sunday evening, for instance, and accompany her to the firemen’s halls and skating rinks lent to the publishing of the Word in the only manner from which their guest seemed to derive benefit.  With all this, the Simpsons were sometimes troubled by the impression that they could not claim to be making their angel in the house completely happy.  The air, the garden, the victoria, the turbot and the whitebait, these were all that has been vaunted, and even to the modesty of the Simpsons it was evident that the intimacy they offered their guest should count for something.  There were other friends too, young friends who tried to teach her to play tennis, robust and silent young persons who threw shy flushed glances at her in the pauses of the games, and wished supremely, without daring to hint it, that she would let fall some word about her wonderful romance—­a hope ever renewed, ever to be disappointed.  And physically Laura expanded before their eyes.  The colour that came into her cheek gave her the look of a person painted by Bouguereau; that artist would have found