"When he comes home be good enough to tell him that I wish to see him."
"Very well, my dear." Mrs. Graham left the room, followed by her husband and niece.
For some time Cornelia sat just as they left her; the diamond necklace slipped down and lay a glittering heap on the carpet, and the delicate waxen hands drooped listlessly over the arms of the chair. Her profile was toward Beulah, who stood looking at the regular, beautiful features, and wondering how (with so many elements of happiness in her home) she could seem so discontented. She was thinking, too, that there was a certain amount of truth in that persecuted and ignored dictum, "A man only sees that which he brings with him the power of seeing," when Cornelia raised herself, and, turning her head to look for her companion, said slowly:
"Where are you? Do you believe in the Emersonian 'law of compensation,' rigid and inevitable as fate? I say, Beulah, do you believe it?"
"Yes; I believe it."
"Hand me the volume there on the table. His exposition of 'the absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that everything has its price,' is the grandest triumph of his genius. For an hour this sentence has been ringing in my ears: 'In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of condition.' We are samples of the truth of this. Ah, Beulah, I have paid a heavy, heavy price! You are destitute of one, it is true, but exempt from the other. Yet, mark you, this law of 'compensation' pertains solely to earth and its denizens; the very existence and operation of the law precludes the necessity, and I may say the possibility, of that future state, designed, as theologians argue, for rewards and punishments." She watched her visitor very closely.
"Of course it nullifies the belief in future adjustments, for he says emphatically, 'Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life.' 'What will you have? Pay for it, and take it. Nothing venture, nothing have.' There is no obscurity whatever in that remarkable essay on compensation." Beulah took up one of the volumes, and turned the pages carelessly.
"But all this would shock a Christian."
"And deservedly; for Emerson's works, collectively and individually, are aimed at the doctrines of Christianity. There is a grim, terrible fatalism scowling on his pages which might well frighten the reader who clasped the Bible to his heart."
"Yet you accept his 'compensation.' Are you prepared to receive his deistic system?" Cornelia leaned forward and spoke eagerly. Beulah smiled.