Adolph Grey wandered listlessly through that brilliant ball-room. There were sweet voices, and sweeter faces, and graceful, floating forms; but his eye rested on none of them.
“Pray, where is Lady Helen?” said he, wandering up to his gay hostess, with a slight shade of embarrassment.
“Ah, you may well ask that! I’m so vexed at her! Every man in the room is as savage as a New Zealander. She has turned Methodist, that’s all. Just imagine; our peerless Helen thumbing greasy hymn-books at vestry meetings, listening to whining preachers, and hunting up poor dirty beggar children! I declare, I thought she had too much good sense. Well, there it is; and you may as well hang your harp on the willows. She’ll have nothing to say to you now; for you know you are a sinner, Grey.”
“Very true,” said Grey, as he went into the ante-room to cloak himself for a call upon Helen; “I am a sinner; but if any woman can make a saint of me, it is Lady Helen. I have looked upon women only as toys to pass away the time; but under that gay exterior of Helen’s there was always something to which my better nature bowed in reverence. ‘A Methodist,’ is she? Well, be it so. She has a soul above yonder frivolity, and I respect her for it.”
If in after years the great moral questions of the day had more interest for Adolph Grey than the pleasures of the turf, the billiard room, or the wine party, who shall say that Lady Helen’s influence was not a blessed one?
Oh, if woman’s beauty, and power, and witchery were oftener used for a high and holy purpose, how many who now bend a careless knee at her shrine, would hush the light laugh and irreverent jest, and almost feel, as she passed, that an angel’s wing had rustled by!