Sublime

She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker,5 if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said ‘Exactly’ to

"I'd rather have you, Ellador, than all the children in the world. I'd rather have you with me—on your own terms—than not to have you."

Emma Blake and her offer to accompany the detective, not for his sake, you suspect, but for her own. A desire not to be alone. You sense that she is shaken, unnerved, perhaps, by a premonition of the toll that decades at West Heart, living among these people, could exact on a woman’s spirit.

Sibyl—if