y, what would you have thought?"

"I don't know as I understand you," faltered Mrs. Lapham.

Sewell repeated his words, and added, "I mean, what do you think some
one else ought to do in your place?"

"Was there ever any poor creatures in such a strait before?" she asked,
with pathetic incredulity.

"There's no new trouble under the sun," said the minister.

"Oh, if it was any one else, I should say--I should say--Why, of
course! I should say that their duty was to let----" She paused.

"One suffer instead of three, if none is to blame?" suggested Sewell.
"That's sense, and that's justice. It's the economy of pain which
naturally suggests itself, and which would insist upon itself, if we
were not all perverted by traditions which are the figment of the
shallowest sentimentality. Tell me, Mrs. Lapham, didn't this come into
your mind when you first learned how matters stood?"

"Why, yes, it flashed across me. But I didn't think it could be right."

"And how was it with you, Mr. Lapham?"

"Why, that's what I thought, of course. But I didn't see my way----"

"No," cried the minister, "we are all blinded, we are all weakened by a
false ideal of self-sacrifice. It wraps us round with its meshes, and
we can't fight our way out of it. Mrs. Lapham, what made you feel that
it might be better for three to suffer than one?"

"Why, she did herself. I know she would die sooner than take him away
from her."

"I supposed so!" cried the minister bitterly. "And yet she is a
sensible girl, your daughter?"

"She has more common-sense----"

"Of course! But in such a case we somehow think it must be wrong to use
our common-sense. I don't know where this false ideal comes from,
unless it comes from the novels that befool and debauch almost every
intelligence in some degree. It certainly doesn't come from
Christianity, which instantly repudiates it when confronted with it.
Your daughter believes, in spite of her common-sense, that she ought to
make herself and the man who loves her unhappy, in order to assure the
life-long wretchedness of her sister, whom he doesn't love, simply
because her sister saw him and fancied him first! And I'm sorry to say
that ninety-nine young people out of a hundred--oh, nine hundred and
ninety-nine out of a thousand!--would consider that noble and beautiful
and heroic; whereas you know at the bottom of your hearts that it would
be foolish and cruel and revolting. You know what marriage is!