"But why did you go?"
"They said they would send Miss Spare if I didn't, and in common humanity I couldn't leave that old creature to the tender mercies of Miss Spare."
"What did you say?"
The face of Miss Morison lighted with mocking amusement.
"That's the beauty of it," she cried, bursting into a low laugh which was full of the keenest fun. "I began with the things I'd been told to say; but the old woman said that all her life long she had wanted a bonnet with red feathers, but that she had never expected to have one. When she got this money, she went out to buy clothing, and in a window she saw this bonnet marked five dollars. She piously remarked that it seemed providential. She's like the rest of the world in finding what she likes to be providential."
"Yes," murmured Maurice, half under his breath; "like my meeting you."
Miss Morison looked surprised, but she ignored the words, and went on with her story.
"She said she concluded she'd rather go without the clothes, and have the bonnet; and by the time we were through I had weakly gone back on all the instructions I'd received, and told her she was right. She knew what she wanted, and I don't blame her for getting it when she could. I'm sick of seeing the poor treated as if they were semi-idiots that couldn't think without leave from the Associated Charities."
The whole tone of the conversation was so much more frank than anything to which Wynne was accustomed that he felt bewildered. This freedom of criticism of the powers, this want of reverence for conventionalities, gave him a strange feeling of lawlessness. He felt as if he had himself been wonderfully and almost culpably daring in listening. He wondered that he was not more shocked, being sure that it was his duty to be. There was about the young man's mental condition a sort of infantile unsophistication. The New England mind often seems to inherit from bygone Puritanism a certain repellent quality through which it takes long for anything savoring of worldliness or worldly wisdom to penetrate. When once this covering is broken, it may be added, the result is much the same as in the case of the cracking of other glazes.
After he had parted from Miss Morison, Maurice walked on in a blissful state of conscious sinfulness. He understood himself well enough to know that before him lay repentance, but this did not dampen his present enjoyment. He had not so far outgrown his New England conscience as to escape remorse for sin, but he had become so accustomed to the belief that absolution removed guilt that there was in his cup of self-reproach little abiding bitterness.