, seemed to come its maxims and morals,
as artistically indicated for its completeness. So John walked up and
down in his Louis Quinze _salon_, and into his Pompadour _boudoir_,
and out again into the Louis Quatorze dining-rooms, and reflected.
He had had many reflections in those apartments before. Of all
ill-adapted and unsuitable pieces of furniture in them, he had always
felt himself the most unsuitable and ill-adapted. He had never felt
at home in them. He never felt like lolling at ease on any of those
elegant sofas, as of old he used to cast himself into the motherly
arms of the great chintz one that filled the recess. His Lillie, with
her smart paraphernalia of hoops and puffs and ruffles and pinkings
and bows, seemed a perfectly natural and indigenous production there;
but he himself seemed always to be out of place. His Lillie might have
been any of Balzac's charming duchesses, with their "thirty-seven
thousand ways of saying 'Yes;'" but, as to himself, he must have been
taken for her steward or gardener, who had accidentally strayed in,
and was fraying her satin surroundings with rough coats and heavy
boots. There was not, in fact, in all the reorganized house, a place
where he felt _himself_ to be at all the proper thing; nowhere
where he could lounge, and read his newspaper, without a feeling
of impropriety; nowhere that he could indulge in any of the slight
Hottentot-isms wherein unrenewed male nature delights,--without a
feeling of rebuke.

John had not philosophized on the causes of this. He knew, in a
general and unconfessed way, that he was not comfortable in his new
arrangements; but he supposed it was his own fault. He had fallen into
rusty, old-fashioned, bachelor ways; and, like other things that are
not agreeable to the natural man, he supposed his trim, resplendent,
genteel house was good for him, and that he ought to like it, and by
grace should attain to liking it, if he only tried long enough.

Only he took long rests every day while he went to Grace's, on Elm
Street, and stretched himself on the old sofa, and sat in his mother's
old arm-chair, and told Grace how very elegant their house was, and
how much taste the architect had shown, and how much Lillie was
delighted with it.

But this silent walk of John's, up and down his brilliant apartments,
opened his eyes to another troublesome prospect. He was a Christian
man, with a high aim and ideal in life. He believed in the Sermon on
the Mou