very picturesque and touching. But Phillida twisted the fingers of her left hand with her right, feeling a little wrench in trying to put herself into sympathy with this movement. It was the philanthropic side of religion rather than the propagandist that appealed to her, and she could hardly feel pity for people whose most imaginary wants were supplied.

The quick instinct for detecting and following the sympathy of an audience is half the outfit for an orator; and Mrs. Frankland felt the need of additional statement to carry the matter rightly to Phillida. She was ever feeling about for the electrical button that would reach a hearer's sympathies, and never content until she had touched it.

"I find the burdens of these wealthy women are as great—even greater than those of others. Many of them are tired of the worldliness, and weary of the utter frivolity, of their pursuits." She put a long, rich, vibrant emphasis on the words "utter frivolity." "Don't you think it a good plan to bring them to the rest of the gospel?"

Certainly," said Phillida, who could not logically gainsay such a statement; but she was convinced rather than touched by any living sympathy with Mrs. Frankland's impulse, and she still twisted the tips of the fingers of her left hand with her right.

"I hope, dear child," Mrs. Frankland went on, in a meditative tone, looking out of the window and steering now upon a home tack"I hope that I can serve in some way the cause of the poor you have so much at heart. Missions like yours languish for funds. If I could be the means of bringing people of great fortune to consecrate their wealth, it might fill many a thirsty channel of benevolence with refreshing streams." Ah, that one could produce here the tone of her voice as of a brook brimming over barriers, and running melodious to the meadows below!

"That is true," said Phillida, remembering how many betterments might be made in the coffee-room and the reading-room if only one had the money, and remembering how her own beloved Charley had helped the Mission and made the lot of the unhappy Wilhelmina Schulenberg less grievous. "I do think it may prove to be a great work," she added thoughtfully, folding her hands upon her lap in unconscious sign that she had reached a conclusion-a logical equilibrium.

"And I want you to go with me to the readings on Thursday. Mrs. Van Horne knows your aunt, Mrs. Gouverneur, and she will be glad to see you."

Phillida looked down and began to pinch the tips of her fingers again. She shrunk a little from Mrs. Van Horne's set; she thought

her dress probably beneath their standard, but with an effort she put away such fears as frivolous, and promised to go.

Thursday afternoon found Phillida sitting by Mrs. Hilbrough in the Van Horne parlor, which was draped with the costly products of distant looms, wrought by the dusky fingers of Orientals inheriting the slowly perfected special skill of generations, and with the fabrics produced by medieval workmen whose artistic products had gathered value as all their fellows had perished; for other races and other ages have contributed their toil to the magnificence of a New York palace. The room was spanned by a ceiling on which the creative imaginations of great artists had lavished rare fancies in gold and ivory, while the costliest, if not the noblest, paintings and sculptures of our modern time were all about a room whose very chairs and ottomans had been designed by men of genius.

Once the words of Mrs. Frankland were heard with these surroundings, one felt that it would be wrong to attribute to ambitious motives her desire for such an environment. She might rather be said to have been drawn here by an aspiration for artistic harmony. The resonant periods of Bossuet would hardly have echoed through the modern centuries if he had not had the magnificent court of Louis the Great for a sounding-board. When Mrs. Frankland spoke in the Van Horne parlor her auditors felt that the mellifluous voice and stately sentences could not have had a more appropriate setting, and that the splendid parlor could not have been put to a more fitting use. Even the simple religious songs used at the beginning and close of the meetings were accompanied upon a grand piano of finest tone, whose richly inlaid case represented the expenditure of a moderate fortune. Mrs. Van Horne could command the best amateur musical talent, so that the little emotional Moodyand-Sankeys that Mrs. Frankland selected were so overlaid and glorified in the performance as to be almost transformed into works of art.

Phillida looked upon these evidences of lavish expenditure with less bedazzlement than one might have expected in a person of her age. For she had grown up under shelter from the world. While she remained in the antipodes her contact with life outside her own family had been small. In Brooklyn her mother's ill health had kept her much at home, and the dominant influence of her father had therefore every chance to make itself felt upon her character, and that influence was all in favor of a self-denying philanthropy. To the last her father was altruistic, finding nothing worth living for but the doing for others. Abiding secluded as Phillida had, the father's stamp remained un

effaced. She saw in all this magnificence a wanton waste of resources. She put it side by side with her sense of a thousand needs of others, and she felt for it more condemnation than admiration. Mrs. Frankland's vocation to the rich was justified in her mind; it was, after all, a sort of mission to the heathen.

And who shall say that Mrs. Frankland's missionary impulse was not a true one? Phillida's people were exteriorly more miserable; but who knows whether the woes of a Mulberry street tenement are greater than those of a Fifth Avenue palace? Certainly Mrs. Frankland found wounded hearts enough. The woman with an unfaithful husband, the mother of a reckless son who has been obliged to flee the country, the wife of a runaway cashier, disgraced and dependent upon rich relatives these and a score besides poured into her ear their sorrows, and were comforted by her sympathy cordially expressed, and by her confidence in a consoling divine love and her visions of a future of everlasting rest. Mrs. Frankland had found her proper field - a true mission field indeed, for in this world-out-ofjoint there is little danger of going astray in looking for misery of one sort or another. If the sorrows of the poor are greater, they have, if not consolation, at least a fortunate numbness produced by the never-ending battle for bread; but the canker has time to gnaw the very heart out of the rich woman.

Even on the mind of Phillida, as she now listened to Mrs. Frankland, the accessories made a difference. How many dogmas have lived for centuries, not by their reasonableness but by the impressiveness of trappings! Creeds recited under lofty arches, liturgies chanted by generation following generation, traditions of law, however absurd, uttered by one big-wigged judge following a reverend line of ghostly bigwigs gone before that have said the same foolish things for ages-these all take considerable advantage from the power of accessones to impose upon the human imagination. The divinity that hedges kings is the result of a set of stage-fixings which make the little great, and half the horror inspired by the priest's curse is derived from bell and book and candle. The mystery of print gives weight to small men by the same witchcraft; you would not take the personal advice of so stupid a man as Criticus about the crossing of a t, but when he prints a tirade anonymously in the Philadelphia "Tempus" the condemnation. becomes serious.

Just in this way the imagination of Phillida was affected by the new surroundings in the midst of which Mrs. Frankland spoke. The old addresses in a Bible-class room with four plastered walls, or a modest parlor, did not seem

to have half so much force as these. The weight of a brilliant success was now thrown into the scale, and Mrs. Frankland could speak with an apostolic authority hitherto unknown. The speaker's own imagination felt the influence of her new-found altitude, and she expressed herself with assurance and deliberation, and with more dignity and pathos than ever before.

With all this background, Mrs. Frankland spoke to-day from the twelfth chapter of Romans on personal consecration. But she did not treat the theme as a person of reformatory temperament might have done, by denouncing the frivolity of rich and fashionable lives. It was not in her nature to antagonize an audience. She drew a charming picture of the beauty of a consecrated life, and she embellished it with wonderful instances of devotion, interspersed with touching anecdotes of heroism and self-sacrifice. The impression upon her audience was as remarkable as it was certain to be transient. Women wept at the ravishing vision of a life wholly given to noble ends, and then went their ways to live as before, after the predispositions of their natures, the habits of their lives and the conventional standards of their class.

But in the heart of Phillida the words of the speaker fell upon fertile soil, and germinated, where there was never a stone or a thorn. The insularity of her life had left her very susceptible to Mrs. Frankland's discourses. Old stagers who have been impressed now by this, now by that, speech, writing, or personal persuasion, have suffered a certain wholesome induration. Phillida was a virginal enthusiast.

XV.

TWO WAYS.

It seemed to Millard that Phillida would be the better for seeing more of life. He would not have admitted to himself that he could wish her any whit different from what she was. But he was nevertheless disposed to mold her tastes into some likeness to his own-it is the impulse of all advanced lovers and new husbands. It was unlucky that he should have chosen for the time of beginning his experiment the very evening of the day on which she had heard Mrs. Frankland. Phillida's mind was all aglow with the feelings excited by the address when Millard called with the intention of inviting her to attend the theater with him.

He found a far-awayness in her mood which made him keep back his proposal for a while. He did not admire her the less in her periods of exaltation, but he felt less secure of her when she soared into a region whither he could not follow. He hesitated, and discussed the weather of the whole week past, smiting his knee gently

with his gloves in the endeavor to obtain cheerfulness by affecting it. She, on her part, was equally eager to draw Millard into the paths of feeling and action she loved so well, and while he was yet trifling with his gloves and the weather topic she began:

"Charley, I do wish you could have heard Mrs. Frankland's talk to-day." Phillida's hands were turned palms downward on her lap as she spoke; Millard fancied that their lines expressed the refinement of her organization.

"Why does n't she admit men?" he said, smiling. "Here you, who don't need any betterment, will become so good by and by that you'll leave me entirely behind. We men need evangelizing more than women do. Why does Mrs. Frankland shut us out from her good influences?"

"Oh! you know she's an Episcopalian, and Episcopalians don't think it right for women to set up to teach men."

"I'm Episcopalian enough, but if a woman sets up as a preacher at all, I don't see why she should n't preach to those who need it most. It 's only called a Bible reading'"-here Charley carefully spread his gloves across his right knee-"there's no law against reading the Bible to men?" he added, looking up with a quick winning smile. "Now you see she turns the scripture topsy-turvy. Instead of women having to inquire of their husbands at home, men are obliged to inquire of their wives and sweethearts. I don't mind that, though. I'd rather hear it from you than from Mrs. Frankland any day." And he gathered up his gloves, and leaned back in his chair.

Phillida smiled, and took this for an invitation to repeat to him part of what Mrs. Frankland had said. She related the story of Elizabeth Fry's work in Newgate, as Mrs. Frankland had told it, she retold Mrs. Frankland's version of Florence Nightingale in the hospital, and then she paused.

"There, Charley," she said deprecatingly, "I can't tell these things with half the splendid effect that Mrs. Frankland did. But it made a great impression on me. I mean to try to be more useful."

"You? I don't see how you can be any better than you are, my dear. That kind of talk is good for other people, but it is n't meant for you."

"Don't say that; please don't. But Mrs. Frankland made a deep impression on all the people at Mrs. Van Horne's."

"At Mrs. Van Horne's?" he asked, with curiosity mingled with surprise.

"Yes; I went with Mrs. Hilbrough." "Whew! Has Mrs. Frankland got in there?" he said, twirling his cane reflectively. "I had n't heard it."

"It is n't quite fair for you to say got in there,' is it, Charley? Mrs. Frankland was invited by Mrs. Van Horne to give her readings at her house, and she thought it might do good," said Phillida, unwilling to believe that anybody she liked could be more worldly than she was herself.

"I did not mean to speak slightingly of Mrs. Frankland," he said; "I suppose she is a very good woman. But I know she asked Mrs. Hilbrough to let her read in her house. I only guessed that she must have managed Mrs. Van Horne in some way. It is no disgrace for her to seek to give her readings where she thinks they will do good."

"Did she ask Mrs. Hilbrough?" said Phillida. "Mrs. Hilbrough told me so, and the Van Horne opening may have been one of Mrs. Hilbrough's clever contrivances. That woman is a perfect general. This reading at Mrs. Van Horne's must be a piece of her fine work."

Just why this view of the case should have pained Phillida she could hardly have told. She liked to dwell in a region of high ideals, and she hated the practical necessities that oblige high ideals to humble themselves before they can be incarnated into facts. There could be no harm in Mrs. Frankland's seeking to reach the people she wished to address, but the notion of contrivance and management for the promotion of a mission so lofty made that mission seem a little shop-worn and offended Phillida's love of congruity. Then, too, she felt that to Millard Mrs. Frankland was not so worshipful a figure as to herself, and a painful lack of concord in thought and purpose between her lover and herself was disclosed. The topic was changed, but the two did not get into the same groove of thought during the evening.

Even though a lover, Millard did not lose his characteristic thoughtfulness. Knowing that early rest was important for the mother, and conjecturing that she slept just behind the sliding-doors, Charley did not allow himself to outstay his time. It was only when he had taken his hat to leave that he got courage to ask Phillida if she were engaged for the next afternoon. When she said no, he proposed the theater. Phillida would have refused the invitation an hour before, but in the tenderness of parting she had a remorseful sense of pain regarding the whole interview. With a scrupulousness quite characteristic she had begun to blame herself. To refuse the invitation to the Irving matinée would be to add to an undefined estrangement which both felt but refused to admit, and so, with her mind all in a jumble, she said: "Yes; certainly. I'll go if you would like me to, Charley."

But she lay awake long that night in dissatisfaction with herself. She had gained noth

ing with Charley, her ideals had been bruised and broken, her visions of future personal excellence were now confused, and she was committed to give valuable time to what seemed to her a sort of dissipation. Should she never be able to emulate Mrs. Fry? Would the lofty aspiration she had cherished prove beyond her reach? And then, once, just once, there intruded the unwelcome thought that her engagement with Millard was possibly a mistake, and that it might defeat the great ends she had in view. The thought was too painful for her; she banished it instantly, upbraiding herself for her disloyalty, and replacing the image of her lover on its pedestal again. Was not Charley the best of men? Had he not been liberal to the Mission and generous to Mina Schulenberg? Then she planned again the work they would be able to accomplish together, she diligent, and he liberal, until thoughts of this sort mingled with her dreams. She went to see Irving's Shylock. The spectacular street scenes interested her; the boat that sailed so gracefully on the dry land of the stage excited her curiosity; and she felt the beauty and artistic delicacy of the Portia. But she was ill at ease through it all. She was too much in the mood of a moralist to see the play merely as a work of art. The players were to her human beings leading rather frivolous lives. And she could not but feel that in so far as the play diverted her, it did so at the expense of that strenuousness of endeavor for extraordinary usefulness which her mind had taken under the spell of Mrs. Frankland's speech.

"Did n't you like it?" said Millard, when they had reached the fresh air of the street and disentangled themselves from the debouching crowd a noble pair to look upon as they walked thus in the late afternoon.

"Yes," said Phillida, spreading her parasol against the slant beams of the setting sun, which illuminated the red brick walls and touched the lofty cornices and the worn stones of the driveway with high lights, while now this and now that distant window seemed to burn with ruddy fire"yes; I could n't help enjoying Miss Terry's Portia. I am no judge, but as a play I think it must have been good."

"Why do you say as a play'?" he asked. "What could it be but a play?" He punctuated his question by tapping the pavement with his cane.

Phillida laughed a little at herself, but added with great seriousness: "Would you think worse of me, Charley, if I should tell you that I don't quite like plays?" And she looked up at him in a manner at once affectionate and protesting.

Millard could not help giving her credit for

the delicacy she showed in her manner of differing from him.

66

No," he said; "I could n't but think the best of you in any case, Phillida, but you might make me think worse of myself, you know, for I do like plays. And more than that," he said, turning full upon her, "you might succeed in making me think that you thought the worse of me, and that would be the very worst of all." This was said in a half-playful tone, but to Phillida it opened again the painful vision of a possible drawing apart through a contrariety of tastes. She therefore said no more in that direction, but contented herself with some general criticisms on Irving's Shylock, the incongruities in which she pointed out, and her criticisms, which were tolerably acute, excited Millard's admiration; and it is not to be expected that a lover's admiration should maintain any just proportion to that which calls it forth.

Again the Thursday sermon at Mrs. Van Horne's came around, and again Phillida was restored to a white heat of zeal mingled with a rueful distrust of her own power to hold herself to the continuous pursuit of her ideal. Millard, perceiving that she dreaded to be invited again, refrained from offering to take her to the theater. He waited several weeks, and then ventured, with some hesitation, to ask her to go with him to see one of the Wagner operas. He was frightened at his own boldness in asking, and he kept his eyes upon the ferule of his cane with which he was tapping the toe of his boot, afraid to look up while she answered. She saw how timidly he asked, and her heart was cruelly wounded by the necessity she felt to refuse; but she had fortified herself to resist just such a temptation.

"I'd rather not go, Charley," she said slowly, in accents so pleading and so full of pain that Millard felt remorse that he should have suggested such a thing.

But this traveling on divergent lines could not but have its effect upon them. He was too well-mannered, she was too good, both were too affectionate, for them to quarrel easily. But there took place something that could hardly be called estrangement; it was rather what a Frenchman might, with a refinement not possible in our idiom, call an éloignement. In spite of their exertions to come together. they drew apart. This process was interrupted by seasons of renewed tenderness. But Phillida's zeal, favored by Mrs. Frankland's meetings, held her back from those pursuits into which Millard would have drawn her, and only a general interest in her altruistic aims was possible to him. Again and again he made some exertion to enter into her pursuits, but he could never get any farther than he could go by the

aid of his check-book. Once or twice she went with him to some public entertainment, but those social pursuits to which he was habituated she avoided as dissipations. Thus they loved each other, but it is pitiful to love as they did, while unable to conceal from themselves that a gulf lay between the main tastes and pursuits of the one and the other.

XVI.

A SÉANCE AT MRS. VAN HORNE'S. THE Bible reader was no polemic. People of every sect were gathered under the wings of her sympathies. In vain dogmatic advisers warned her against Unitarians who believe too little, and Swedenborgians who believe too much. Mrs. Frankland's organ of judgment lay in her affections and emotions, and those who felt as she felt were accepted without contradiction, or, as she put it, mostly in Scripture phrase, which she delivered in a rich orotund voice: "Let us receive him that is weak in the faith, but not to doubtful disputation."

A certain sort of combativeness she had, but it was combativeness with the edge taken off. It served to direct her choice of topics, but not to give asperity or polemical form to her discourses. Suddenly introduced to the very heart of Vanity Fair, she had caught her first inspiration by opposition, and this led her to hold forth on such themes as consecration. But as her acquaintance with people of wealth extended she found that even they, conservative by very force of abundance, were affected by the unbelieving spirit of a critical age. The very prosperous are partly under shelter from the prevailing intellectual currents of their time. Those whose attention is engrossed by things are in so far shut out from the appeal of ideas. But thought is very penetrating; it will reach by conduction what it cannot attain by radiation. An intellectual movement touches the highest and the lowest with difficulty, but it does at length affect in a measure even those whose minds are narcotized by abundance as well as those whose brains are fagged by too much toil and care. When Mrs. Frankland became aware that there was unbelief, latent and developed, among her hearers, the prow of her oratory veered around, and faith became now, as consecration had been before, the pole-star toward which this earnest and clever woman aimed. With such a mind as hers the topic under consideration becomes for the time supreme. Solemnly insisting on a renunciation of all possibility of merit as a condition precedent to faith, she proceeded to exalt belief itself into. the most meritorious of acts. This sort of paradox is common to all popular religious teachers. Mrs. Frankland's new line of talk about the

glories of faith had a disadvantage for Phillida in that it also fell in with a tendency of her nature and with the habits nourished in her by her father. Millard thought he had reached the depths of her life in coming to know about her work among the poor, but a woman's motives are apt to be more involved than a man imagines or than she can herself quite understand. Below the philanthropic Phillida lay the devout Phillida, who believed profoundly that in her devotions she was able to touch hands with the ever-living God himself. Under the stimulus of Mrs. Frankland's words this belief became so absorbing that the common interests of life became to her remote and almost unreal. Her work in the Mission was more and more her life, and perhaps the necessity for accommodating herself a little to the habits and tastes of a lover was her main preservative from a tendency to degenerate into a devotee.

While Mrs. Frankland aroused others, her eloquence also influenced the orator herself. Advocacy increased the force of conviction, and the growing intensity of conviction in turn reinforced the earnestness of advocacy. Irreverent people applied an old joke and called her "the apostle to the genteels," and in the region to which she seemed commissioned the warmth of her zeal was not likely to work harm. What effect it had was in the main good. But the material in her hands was only combustible in a slow way; the plutocratic conscience is rarely inflammable - for the most part it smolders like punk. Nor was Mrs. Frankland herself in any danger of being carried by her enthusiasms into fanaticism of action. However her utterances might savor of ultraism, she was conservative enough in practical matters to keep a sort of "Truce of God" with the world as she found it.

But to Phillida, susceptible as a saint on the road to beatification, the gradually augmented fervor of Mrs. Frankland's declamation worked evil. It was especially painful to Agatha that her sister was propelled by this influence farther and farther out of the safe lines of commonplace feeling and action, and that every wind from Mrs. Frankland's quarter of the heavens tended to drift her farther and farther away from her lover. Agatha's indignation broke out into all sorts of talk against Mrs. Frankland, whom she did not scruple to denounce for a Pharisee, binding heavy burdens on the back of poor Phillida, but never touching them with her own little finger.

Mrs. Frankland's discourses on faith reached their zenith on a January day, when the carriage wheels that rolled in front of Mrs. Van Horne's made a ringing almost like the break