"What an idea it will be for me to go blundering through the city, hunting up people whom I shall not know when I find."
This she said as she read it over; then she laid it aside, and made ready to go out to dinner with her father, to meet two judges and their wives and daughters who were stopping in town.
During that day she thought many times of the sentences that had been read to her out of that plain-looking, much-worn Bible on Dr. Dennis' study-table. The only effect they had on her was to make her smile at the thought of the impossibility of anything like a religious conversation in such society as that!
"How they would stare," she said to herself, "if I should ask them about a prayer-meeting! I have half a mind to try it. If father were not within hearing I would, just to see what these finished young ladies would say."
But she did not try it; and the evening passed, as so many evenings had, without an attempt on her part to carry out any of the thoughts which troubled her. She looked forward to one bit of work which she expected to fall to her share, at least she liked to call it work.
That card-party to which she had been invited; she would be expected to attend in company with Mr. Wayne; she meant to decline, and her father would be surprised and a trifle annoyed, for it was at a place where, not liking the people well enough himself to be social, he desired his daughter to atone for his deficiency. But she would steadily refuse. She did not shrink from this effort as Flossy did; on the contrary, she half enjoyed the thought of being a calm and composed martyr.
But, quite to her discomfort, the martyrdom was not permitted; at least it took a different form. Mr. Wayne was obliged to be out of town, and sent profuse regrets, assuming that, of course, it would be a sore disappointment to her.
Her father took sufficient notice of it to make one or two efforts to agreeably supply his place, and failing in that, assured his daughter that rather than have her disappointed, he would have planned to accompany her himself if he had known of Mr. Wayne's absence in time. The actual cross that it would have been to explain to her father that she did not desire to go, and the reasons therefor, she did not take up; but the occurrence served to annoy her.
Two days afterward she was busy all the morning with her dressmaker, getting a special dress ready for a wedding among the upper circles. She had been hurried and worried, and was as nearly out of patience as her calmness ever allowed her to be. Still she remembered that it was the prayer-meeting evening, that she should see Dr. Dennis, and that he would be likely to ask her about the people on that list. She ought to go that afternoon, and try what she could do.
Once since her call on Dr. Dennis she had met him as he was going down Clinton Street, and he had turned and joined her for a few steps, while he said: