"Come up-stairs, then," said Mrs. Widesworth, taking the decanter from the closet; "you will all catch your deaths of cold, if you stay another minute."
When the three patrons of Progress again appeared among us, they really seemed to have accomplished their transference to an unconventional and pastoral era. The ladies were quite lost in the spacious habits provided for them. Likewise, they were curiously swathed in shawls and scarfs of various make and texture, and might be considered representatives of any age, past, present, or future, to which the beholder might take a fancy. Mr. Stellato had been got into the only article of male attire which the establishment afforded. This was an ancient dressing-gown, very small in the arms, and narrow in the back: it had belonged to Twynintuft himself, who was six feet two, and as thin as a bean-pole. The thickly wadded skirts swept the ground, or clung heavily about the lower limbs. The garment combined every disadvantage of a Roman toga and a fashionable swallow-tail.
Mrs. Romulus and Mr. Stellato, who had not scrupled to avail themselves of the Doctor's prescription, were still noisily progressive. They at once led a moral charge against Professor Owlsdarck and Colonel Prowley.
Miss Hurribattle, refusing such warmth as might be administered internally, was pale and chilly. She separated herself from her companions, and crossed the room to where I stood. Her face was radiant with devout simplicity. To a soul so pure and brave and feminine may I never be guilty of applying a hard and technical criticism! He is little to be envied who reads Don Quixote's assault upon the windmills as a chapter of mad buffoonery. An ideal knight, without fear or reproach, subject to disaster and ridicule, august from his faith in God and the manly consecration of his life,—is he not rather the type of a Christian sanity? No doubt, such a character seems altogether mad to you, my friend, who pass the window as I write these words. You have huckstered away opportunity just upon the edge of indictable knavery; your ambition has been to be well with the wealth and sleek respectability of the day, to make your son begin life the sordid worldling that you end it, to marry your daughter to the richest fool,—and this you call sanity and common sense! Is it not some Devil's subtlety that deludes you? If Man is an immortal soul, to be saved or damned forever, then he only is sane who welcomes privation, toil, contempt, for a spiritual idea. "Attacking windmills!" you say. That is, they seem so to you. But it may be that your brother's clearer eye and practised intelligence show them the giants which they truly are. But, be they giants or windmills, mark you this: his life illustrates some grade of manly worthiness which the world would be poorer without, while to himself the gain of an unselfish activity is a certain blessedness. I hold it, then, of small matter, that, for a time, Miss Hurribattle mistook two charlatans, three-fifths knavery, the rest fanaticism, for honest workers in the Lord's vineyard. Far better such over-faith than the fatal languor which seemed to terminate Clifton's too close scrutiny of life. A buoyant and never-failing enthusiasm is the divine requital of faithful service. "The reward of virtue is perpetual drunkenness!" exclaims the half mythic Musæus; "Crucem hanc inebriari," the Church has responded. It has a flavor as of Paradise when a woman brims over with some fine excitement,—and that among godless, unrepentant men.
"The storm has not prevented the accomplishment of our purpose," said Miss Hurribattle, pleasantly; "we have this day made our protest against the most dangerous form of evil."
"One of the most obvious forms, certainly," I replied; "we might not quite agree about its being the most dangerous."
"I must demand all those republican virtues which should be the fruit of our New-England liberty,—I must be strictly consistent."
I jestingly pleaded the familiar proverb about fools and dead men, and observed that there was great obscurity surrounding the real sources of evil in our social life.
"I once thought as you do," said the lady; "but, from my constant association with philosophical minds like those of Mrs. Romulus and Mr. Stellato, much has been made clear to me. They have devoted their lives to the study of modern civilization, and are skilful in the nice adaptation of remedies to all public disorders."
"How long have you known these two persons?" I asked.