now by this
unconsciously hypocritical and nauseous letter. He's what the
commonplace American egotist must come to more and more in finance, now
that he is abandoning the career of politics, and wants to be rich
instead of great."

"Really?" said the Englishman.

Among Hilary's guests was Charles Bellingham, a bachelor of pronounced
baldness, who said he would come to meet Hilary's belated Englishman, in
quality of bear-leader to his cousin-in-law, old Bromfield Corey, a
society veteran of that period when even the swell in Boston must be an
intellectual man. He was not only old, but an invalid, and he seldom
left town in summer, and liked to go out to dinner whenever he was
asked. Bellingham came to the rescue of the national repute in his own
fashion. "I can't account for your not locking up your spoons, Hilary,
when you invited me, unless you knew where you could steal some more."

"Ah, it isn't quite like a gentleman's stealing a few spoons," old Corey
began, in the gentle way he had, and with a certain involuntary
sibilation through the gaps between his front teeth. "It's a much more
heroic thing than an ordinary theft; and I can't let you belittle it as
something commonplace because it happens every day. So does death; so
does birth; but they're not commonplace."

"They're not so frequent as defalcation with us, quite--especially
birth," suggested Bellingham.

"No," Corey went on, "every fact of this sort is preceded by the slow
and long decay of a moral nature, and that is of the most eternal and
tragical interest; and"--here Corey broke down in an old man's queer,
whimpering laugh, as the notion struck him--"if it's very common with
us, I don't know but we ought to be proud of it, as showing that we
excel all the rest of the civilized world in the proportion of decayed
moral natures to the whole population. But I wonder," he went on, "that
it doesn't produce more moralists of a sanative type than it has. Our
bad teeth have given us the best dentists in the world; our habit of
defalcation hasn't resulted yet in any ethical compensation. Sewell,
here, used to preach about such things, but I'll venture to say we shall
have no homily on Northwick from him next Sunday."

The Rev. Mr. Sewell suffered the thrust in patience. "What is the use?"
he asked, with a certain sadness. "The preacher's voice is lost in his
sounding-board nowadays, when all the Sunday newspapers are crying aloud
from twenty-eight pages il