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MacDonald, George, 1824-1905

"Weighed and Wanting"

And if it is a fine thing to thrill with delight the audience of a
concert-room--well-dined, well-dressed people, surely it was not a
little thing to hand God's gift of sleep to a poor woman weary with the
lot of women, and having so little, as Hester thought, to make life a
pleasure to her!
Mrs. Franks would doubtless have differed from Hester in this judgment
of her worldly condition, on the ground that she had a good husband, and
good children. Some are always thinking others better off than
themselves: others feel as if the lot of many about them must be
absolutely unbearable, because they themselves could never bear it, they
think. But things are unbearable just until we have them to bear; their
possibility comes with them. For we are not the roots of our own being.


CHAPTER XIV.
VAVASOR AND HESTER.

The visits of Vavasor, in reality to Hester, continued. For a time they
were more frequent, and he stayed longer. Hester's more immediate
friends, namely her mother and Miss Dasomma, noted also, and with some
increase of anxiety, that he began to appear at the church they
attended, a dull enough place, without any possible attraction of its
own for a man like Vavasor: they could but believe he went thither for
the sake of seeing Hester.


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