As for Henry, it was not only activity of intelligence, but activity of spirituality, that made it impossible for him to embrace any such narrow creed as that proposed to him; and, for the present, that spiritual activity found ample scope for itself in poetry.
Dot's, however, was an intermediate case. With an intelligence active too, she united a spirituality torturingly intense, but for which she had no such natural creative outlet as Henry. With her loss of the old creed,--in discarding which these three sisters had followed the lead of their brother with a curious instinctiveness, almost, it would seem, independent of reasoning,--her spirituality had been left somewhat bleakly houseless, and she had often longed for some compromise by which she could reconcile her intelligence to the acceptance of some established home of faith, whose kindly enclosing walls should be more genially habitable to the soul than the cold, star-lit spaces which Henry declared to be sufficient temple.
Perhaps Esther's commiseration of her sisters' narrow opportunities was, so far as it related to Dot, a little unnecessary, for indeed Dot's ambitions were not social. By nature shy and meditative, and with her religious bias, had she been born into a Catholic family, she might not improbably have found the world well lost in a sisterhood. The Puritan conscience had an uncomfortable preponderance in the deep places of her nature, and, far down in her soul, like her father, she would ask herself if pleasure could be the end of life--was there not something serious each of us could and ought to do, to justify his place in the world? Were we not all under some mysterious solemn obligation to do something, however little, in return for life?
Mat, on the other hand, had no such scruples. She was more like Esther in nature, with a touch of cynicism curling her dainty lip, arising, perhaps, from an early divination that she was to lack Esther's opportunities. Perhaps it was because she was the pessimist--the quite cheerful pessimist--of the family, that she was by far the cleverest and most industrious at the housework. If it was her fate to be Cinderella, she might as well make the best of it, with a cynical endurance and good-humour, and be Cinderella with a good grace. Probably the only glass slipper in the family had already fallen to Esther. Never mind, though her good looks might fade with being a good girl at home, year by year, what did it matter, after all? Nothing mattered in the end. And thus, out of a great indifference, Mat developed a great unselfishness; and if you could name one special angel in the house of the Mesuriers, she was unmistakably Mat.