worldly people call
common sense. She saw through all the illusions of fancy and feeling,
right to the tough material core of things. However soft and
tender and sentimental her habits of speech and action were in her
professional capacity of a charming woman, still the fair Lillie, had
she been a man, would have been respected in the business world, as
one that had cut her eye-teeth, and knew on which side her bread was
buttered.

A husband, she knew very well, was the man who undertook to be
responsible for his wife's bills: he was the giver, bringer, and
maintainer of all sorts of solid and appreciable comforts.

Lillie's bills had hitherto been sore places in the domestic history
of her family. The career of a fashionable belle is not to be
supported without something of an outlay; and that innocence
of arithmetical combinations, over which she was wont to laugh
bewitchingly among her adorers, sometimes led to results quite
astounding to the prosaic, hard-working papa, who stood financially
responsible for all her finery.

Mamma had often been called in to calm the tumult of his feelings on
such semi-annual developments; and she did it by pointing out to him
that this heavy present expense was an investment by which Lillie was,
in the end, to make her own fortune and that of her family.

When Lillie contemplated the marriage-service with a view to going
through it with John, there was one clause that stood out in consoling
distinctness,--"_With all my worldly goods I thee endow_."

As to the other clause, which contains the dreadful word "OBEY," about
which our modern women have such fearful apprehensions, Lillie was
ready to swallow it without even a grimace.

"Obey John!" Her face wore a pretty air of droll assurance at the
thought. It was too funny.

"My dear," said Belle Trevors, who was one of Lillie's incense-burners
and a bridesmaid elect, "_have_ you the least idea how rich he is?"

"He is well enough off to do about any thing I want," said Lillie.

"Well, you know he owns the whole village of Spindlewood, with all
those great factories, besides law business," said Belle. "But then
they live in a dreadfully slow, pokey way down there in Springdale.
They haven't the remotest idea how to use money."

"I can show him how to use it," said Lillie.

"He and his sister keep a nice sort of old-fashioned place there, and
jog about in an old countrified carriage, picking up poor children and
visiting sc