Yet she was not over-meek or unpleasantly amiable; there was a liveliness and even briskness about her, as if the every day wine of her life had a spice of Champagniness, not frothiness but natural effervescence of spirit, meant to "cheer but not inebriate" a household.
And in her own household this gift was most displayed.

No centre of a brilliant, admiring circle could be more charming, more witty, more irresistibly amusing than was Hilary sitting by the kitchen fire, with the cat on her knee, between her two sisters, and the school-boy Ascott Leaf, their nephew--which four individuals, the cat being not the least important of them, constituted the family.
In the family, Hilary shone supreme.

All recognized her as the light of the house, and so she had been, ever since she was born, ever since her "Dying mother mild, Said, with accents undefiled, 'Child, be mother to this child.'" It was said to Johanna Leaf--who was not Mrs.Leaf's own child.

But the good step-mother, who had once taken the little motherless girl to her bosom, and never since made the slightest difference between her and her own children, knew well whom she was trusting.
From that solemn hour, in the middle of the night, when she lifted the hour-old baby out of its dead mother's bed into her own, it became Johanna's one object in life.

Through a sickly infancy, for it was a child born amidst trouble, her sole hands washed, dressed, fed it; night and day it "lay in her bosom, and was unto her as a daughter." She was then just thirty: not too old to look forward to woman's natural destiny, a husband and children of her own.