tay here forever." Wesley spoke with
fervor, his eyes on the girl.

"Oh, no, you wouldn't."

"I most certainly would, but I can't run in debt, and--I want to
marry some day--like other young men--and I must earn."

The girl bent her head lower. "Why don't you resign and go away, and
get--married, if you want to?"

"Fanny!"

He bent over her. His lips touched her hair. "You know," he
began--then came a voice like the legendary sword which divides
lovers for their best temporal and spiritual good.

"Dinner is ready and the peas are getting cold," said Mrs. Solomon
Black.

Then it happened that Wesley Elliot, although a man and a clergyman,
followed like a little boy the large woman with the water-waves
through the weedage of the pastoral garden, and the girl sat weeping
awhile from mixed emotions of anger and grief. Then she took a little
puff from her bag, powdered her nose, straightened her hair and,
also, went home, bag in hand, to her own noon dinner.

Chapter II

A church fair is one of the purely feminine functions which will be
the last to disappear when the balance between the sexes is more
evenly adjusted. It is almost a pity to assume that it will finally,
in the nature of things, disappear, for it is charming; it is
innocent with the innocence of very good, simple women; it is at the
same time subtle with that inimitable subtlety which only such women
can achieve. It is petty finance on such a moral height that even the
sufferers by its code must look up to it. Before even woman, showing
anything except a timid face of discovery at the sights of New York
under male escort, invaded Wall Street, the church fair was in full
tide, and the managers thereof might have put financiers to shame by
the cunning, if not magnitude, of their operations. Good Christian
women, mothers of families, would sell a tidy of no use except to
wear to a frayed edge the masculine nerves, and hand-painted plates
of such bad art that it verged on immorality, for prices so above all
reason, that a broker would have been taken aback. And it was all for
worthy objects, these pretty functions graced by girls and matrons in
their best attire, with the products of their little hands offered,
or even forced, upon the outsider who was held up for the ticket.
They gambled shamelessly to buy a new carpet for the church. There
was plain and brazen raffling for dreadful lamps and patent rockers
and dolls which did not look fit t