Now she alights! It wont do. There's a tall man in front of her; she is always fated to sit behind a tall man. She tries another; there's the phantom pillar again. Yet another; that's the end seat, and every horrid man that comes along will be treading on her dress and knocking her bonnet over her eyes all the evening. Meantime John gets redder in the face; he can't even ease himself with a customary growl. Ah! now she has got the seat at last, and stands beckoning to John to follow. Her friend Miss Frizzle is beside her, and she is happy. There is only one seat, to be sure, but "John can find one somewhere else, or perhaps he would like to take a walk outside and call for her when lecture is over—only he must be sure to be back in time." So down she sits, while John wanders off for a possible stray seat. Now she draws off the glove that hides her one diamond ring, and settles the bracelet on the wrist of that hand. Then she tumbles up her front hair, lest it might have got smooth coming. Then she picks out the bows of the natty little ribbon under her dimpled chin. It was that chin that victimized John! Then she draws from her pocket her scented pocket-handkerchief and gives it a little incense-waft into the air, magnetizing a young man in front, who turns round to find the owner of that delicious gale from Araby the blest. Then she takes out her opera-glass and peeps about, not so much that her sight is defective, but that her diamond-ring and gold bracelets gleam prettily in the operation. John, meantime, has found a seat in a draft, and is sitting with bent brows and a turned-up coat-collar—which last is sufficient to make a ruffian of a man without any woman's help—in the back part of the house. Confidences, millinery, mantua-makery, and matinée-y are meanwhile exchanged between his wife and dear Miss Frizzle, who is an acknowledged man-killer, and keeps a private grave-yard of her own for deceased lovers.
Now the lecturer rises. "Pooh! he's an ugly man. Well, they need't look at him; and perhaps he'll be funny—who knows?" He isn't funny. He is talking about Plato and Epictetus; who the goodness are they? But there's an end to all things, and so there is to the lecture. Now, John is wanted, and, to tell the truth, for the first time thought of! Ah, there he is! but how sulky, and how ugly he looks with his coat-collar turned up! He might have some regard to appearances when he goes with her. People will think she has such a horrid taste in husbands.
"Why don't you talk?" says the little woman, when they get outside. "It was too bad you couldn't sit by me, John; I missed you so! but, you see, there was but one seat."—"Not just in that locality, I suppose," muttered John. But the street-lamp just then shone on that cunning little dimpled chin, and its owner said, coaxingly, "O-o-h, now, John! don't be cross with its little wife!" and it's my private opinion he wasn't. Would you have been, sir?
[CAN'T BE SUITED.]
LOOK at those long-faced Christians coming home from church, says Find-Fault; "it is enough to make one sick—gloomy, morose-looking beings. I wonder do they think there is any religion in that? The fact is, religion is played out." Now, Find-Fault wants religion to be played out, so he looks at it always through that pair of spectacles. If he sees a mistake in that direction, he never thinks, as in other cases, of making reasonable allowance for it. He can understand how really good men may have narrow views of business, or of politics, or of any such secular matters; but if they blunder through narrowness of view on the religious question, he immediately sets them down as hypocrites and pretenders. Now I believe that there is many a "Worthy the Lamb" being sung heartily in heaven to-day, by those mistaken Christians who thought it right to groan and sigh all the time they were on earth. It is a pity, to be sure, especially in view of such people as Find-Fault, that they had not occasionally given us a cheerful chirp before they went, but "religion" still lives all the same.
Then Find-Fault is not very consistent, even on his own showing.
"There's a pretty minister for you," he says, as he comes out of the Rev. Mr. Spring-morning's church; "there's a pretty minister for you—making his congregation smile during the services! A clergyman shouldn't let himself down that way. It is undignified." You tell him that the clergyman in question believes in a cheerful religion, and wishes to do away with the long-faced Christianity which brings religion into disrepute with just such people as himself. Finding himself in a corner, he only gives you his stereotyped answer, that "religion is played out, anyhow."