Before leaving his penitent, the priest proposed to give him Holy Communion the next morning; but Dick hesitatingly objected. “Not that I do not long for it, father,” he made haste to add; “but I wish to recollect myself. Like St. Paul, I desire to be dissolved and be with Christ, but I wish to endure that desire a little longer, till I shall be better prepared to be with him.”
Seeing the priest look at him attentively, he blushed, and added: “Of course I do not mean to compare myself with St. Paul, sir,” and was for a moment mortified and disconcerted at what he supposed Father John would think his presumption.
“There is no reason why you and I may not have precisely the same feelings that St. Paul had,” the priest said quietly.
Edith found letters in her room from Seaton. Her aunt wrote that they were busily making the last arrangements for their moving, and gave her many kind messages from her friends. The house in Seaton had been leased advantageously, and they hoped that the lessee might be able to buy it after a while, as he wished to. They were to bring all their household with them, Betsey, Patrick, and the young Pattens. The prospect of being left behind had so afflicted these faithful creatures that she had not the heart to desert them.
Clara wrote a long, gossiping letter. “I must tell you what an absurd little stale romance is being acted here,” she wrote, “for mamma is sure to tell you nothing about it. Prepare to be astonished by the most surprising, the most bewildering, etc. (see Mme. de Sévigné). Mr. Griffeth has proposed for Melicent, and Melicent is willing, so she says! Papa and mamma are frantic, and Mel goes about with a persecuted, inscrutable look which distracts me. I sometimes think that she is only pretending in order to have a fuss made over her, but one cannot be sure. You know she always prided herself on her good sense and judgment, and my experience is that when such persons do a foolish thing,
‘They are So (ultra) cinian, they shock the Socinians.’
“We highfliers commit follies with a certain grace, and we know when we reach the step between the sublime and the ridiculous; but these clumsy sensible people are like dancing elephants, and have no conception how absurd they are. (Did you ever observe that people who have no uncommon sense always claim to have a monopoly of the common sense?)
“It seems that Mel has had no intercourse with the man lately, except what we have known, but he has been giving her some of those expressive glances which are so effective when one has practised them long enough. ‘Oh! those looks which have so little force in law, but so much in equity!’ Mamma said that she would rather see a daughter of hers married to Mr. Conway than to Mr. Griffeth, for Mr. Conway had principle if he was not clever, and Mel made a pretty good answer. ‘There is always hope,’ she said, ‘that an irreligious person may be converted, but there is no conversion for the commonplace.’ Mel thinks Mr. Griffeth remarkably intellectual, and papa ridiculed the idea. The little man, he said, resembled Cæsar in one respect, for whereas Cæsar wore the laurel wreath to cover his bald pate, the minister took refuge in verbiage to hide his baldness of thought. This having no effect, I gave the ‘most unkindest cut of all.’ I reminded her that he had tried both you and me first, and we didn’t know how many more. Her reply was to hand me a copy of Browning’s Men and Women, open at “Misconceptions.” She had marked the words:
“This is the spray the Bird clung to,
Making it blossom with pleasure,
Ere the high tree-top she sprang to,
Fit for her nest and her treasure.”
“But I thought that her smile was something like that of one who is taking medicine heroically, a sort of quinine-smile.