She did not know, nobody could know, how steadily, how silently all this artificial life was draining the veins and blanching the cheek of her daughter Bathsheba, one of the everyday, air-breathing angels without nimbus or aureole who belong to every story which lets us into a few households, as much as the stars and the flowers belong to everybody's verses.
Bathsheba's devotion to her mother brought its own reward, but it was not in the shape of outward commendation.

Some of the more censorious members of her father's congregation were severe in their remarks upon her absorption in the supreme object of her care.

It seems that this had prevented her from attending to other duties which they considered more imperative.

They did n't see why she shouldn't keep a Sabbath-school as well as the rest, and as to her not comin' to meetin' three times on Sabbath day like other folks, they couldn't account for it, except because she calculated that she could get along without the means of grace, bein' a minister's daughter.

Some went so far as to doubt if she had ever experienced religion, for all she was a professor.