"You must. It'll amuse you to have her look at you with her grave, quiet eyes, and call you Harry Henderson. What an effect it has to hear one's simple, common name, without fuss or title!"
"Yes," said I, "I remember how long I called you Eva in my heart, while I was addressing you at arm's length as Miss Van Arsdel."
"It was in the Park, Harry, that we lost the Mr. and Miss, never to find them again."
"I've often thought it strange," said I, "how these unworldly modes of speaking among the Quakers seem to have with them a certain dignity. It would be an offense, a piece of vulgar forwardness, in most people to address you by your Christian name. But, with them it seems to be an attempt at realizing a certain ideal of Christian simplicity and sincerity, which one almost loses sight of in the conventional course of life."
"I was very much amused," said my wife, "at her telling me of one of her visits of Christian love to a Jew family, living on this street. And really, Harry, she has learned an amount of good about the Jews, from cultivating an intimacy with this family, that is quite astonishing. I'd no idea how good the Jews were."
"Well, my little High-Church darling," said I, "you're in a fair way to become ultra-liberal, and to find that what you call the Church doesn't come anywhere near representing the whole multitude of the elect in this world. I comfort myself with thinking, all the time, how much more good there is in the world and in human nature than appears on the surface."
"And, now, Harry, that you and I have this home of our own, we can do some of those things with it that our friends next door seem to be doing. I thought we might stir about and see if we couldn't get up a class for this poor Frenchman, and I'm going to call on his wife. In fact, Harry, I've been thinking that it must be one's own fault if one has no friends in one's neighborhood. I can't believe in living on a street, and never knowing or caring whether your next-door neighbor is sick or dead, simply because you belong to a circle up at the other end of the city."
"Well, dear, you know that I am a democrat by nature. But I am delighted to have you make these discoveries for yourself. It was bad enough, in the view of your friends, presume, for me to have come between you and a fashionable establishment, and a palace on the Park, without being guilty of introducing you into such very mixed society as the course that you're falling into seems to promise. But wherever you go I'll follow."