an organist with, at the highest computation--poor absurd
thing!--fifty-five pounds per annum: additional for singing lessons,
it is true,--but an organist with a bookseller's bill of twenty-three
pounds! Consider!"

"Foreign books, too!" interjected Adela.

"Not so particularly improving to his morals, either!" added Laura.

"You are severe upon the greater part of the human race," said Arabella.

"So are the preachers, dear," returned Laura.

"The men of our religion justify you?" asked Arabella.

"Let me see;--where were we?" Laura retreated in an affected
mystification.

"You had reached the enlightened belief that books written by any but
English hands were necessarily destructive of men's innocence," said
Arabella; and her sisters thrilled at the neatness of the stroke, for
the moment, while they forgot the ignoble object it transfixed.
Laura was sufficiently foiled by it to be unable to return to the
Chips-Barrett theme. Throughout the interview Cornelia had maintained a
triumphant posture, superior to Arabella's skill in fencing, seeing
that it exposed no weak point of the defence by making an attack,
and concealed especially the confession implied by a relish for the
conflict. Her sisters considerately left her to recover herself, after
this mighty exercise of silence.

CHAPTER XXII

Cornelia sat with a clenched hand. "You are rich and he is poor," was
the keynote of her thoughts, repeated from minute to minute. "And it
is gold gives you the right in the world's eye to despise him!" she
apostrophized the vanished Laura, clothing gold with all the baseness of
that person. Now, when one really hates gold, one is at war with one's
fellows. The tide sets that way. There is no compromise: to hate it is
to try to stem the flood. It happens that this is one of the temptations
of the sentimentalist, who should reflect, but does not, that the fine
feelers by which the iniquities of gold are so keenly discerned, are a
growth due to it, nevertheless. Those 'fine feelers,' or antennae of
the senses, come of sweet ease; that is synonymous with gold in our
island-latitude. The sentimentalists are represented by them among the
civilized species. It is they that sensitively touch and reject,
touch and select; whereby the laws of the polite world are ultimately
regulated, and civilization continually advanced, sometimes
ridiculously. The sentimentalists are ahead of us, not by weight of
brain, but through delic