"You would like your's amazingly," said Catherine, "if you had ever been to mine."
"Was your's worse?"
"If Mrs. Murray hadn't improved my manners so much, I should smile. Was mine worse? I wish you and Mr. Hazard would try it for a change. Mrs. Dyer would like to see you both undergoing discipline. Never joke about serious matters! You had better hold your tongue and be glad to live in a place where your friends let your soul alone."
"But I can't sit still and hear myself turned into a show! I can't share him with all Fifth Avenue. I want no one else to have him. To see him there devoting himself and me to a stupid crowd of people, who have as much right to him as I have, drives religion out of my head."
Catherine treated this weakness with high contempt.
"I might as well be jealous," said she, "of the people who look at Mr.
Wharton's pictures, or read Petrarch's sonnets in my sweet translation.
Did you ever hear that Laura found fault with Petrarch, or, if she did,
that any one believed she was in earnest?"
"It is not the same thing," said Esther. "He believes in his church more than he does in me. If I can't believe in it, he will have to give me up."
"He, give you up!" said Catherine. "The poor saint! You know he is silly about you."
"He must give me up, if I am jealous of his congregation, and won't believe what he preaches," replied Esther mournfully.
"Why should you care what he preaches?" asked Catherine; "you never heard your aunt troubling her head about what Mr. Murray says when he goes to court."