A pleasanter and saner woman than Mary Datchet was never seen within a committee-room.

She seemed a compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine; less poetically speaking, she showed both gentleness and strength, an indefinable promise of soft maternity blending with her evident fitness for honest labor.

Nevertheless, she had great difficulty in reducing her mind to obedience; and her reading lacked conviction, as if, as was indeed the case, she had lost the power of visualizing what she read.

And directly the list was completed, her mind floated to Lincoln's Inn Fields and the fluttering wings of innumerable sparrows.

Was Ralph still enticing the bald-headed cock-sparrow to sit upon his hand?
Had he succeeded?
Would he ever succeed?
She had meant to ask him why it is that the sparrows in Lincoln's Inn Fields are tamer than the sparrows in Hyde Park--perhaps it is that the passers-by are rarer, and they come to recognize their benefactors.