dge taken off. It served to direct her choice of topics, but not to
give asperity or polemical form to her discourses. Suddenly introduced
to the very heart of Vanity Fair, she had caught her first inspiration
by opposition, and this led her to hold forth on such themes as
consecration. But as her acquaintance with people of wealth extended she
found that even they, conservative by very force of abundance, were
affected by the unbelieving spirit of a critical age. The very
prosperous are partly under shelter from the prevailing intellectual
currents of their time. Those whose attention is engrossed by things
are in so far shut out from the appeal of ideas. But thought is very
penetrating; it will reach by conduction what it can not attain by
radiation. An intellectual movement touches the highest and the lowest
with difficulty, but it does at length affect in a measure even those
whose minds are narcotized by abundance as well as those whose brains
are fagged by too much toil and care. When Mrs. Frankland became aware
that there was unbelief, latent and developed, among her hearers, the
prow of her oratory veered around, and faith became now, as consecration
had been before, the pole-star toward which this earnest and clever
woman aimed. With such a mind as hers the topic under consideration
becomes for the time supreme. Solemnly insisting on a renunciation of
all possibility of merit as a condition precedent to faith, she
proceeded to exalt belief itself into the most meritorious of acts. This
sort of paradox is common to all popular religious teachers.

Mrs. Frankland's new line of talk about the glories of faith had a
disadvantage for Phillida in that it also fell in with a tendency of her
nature and with the habits nourished in her by her father. Millard
thought he had reached the depths of her life in coming to know about
her work among the poor, but a woman's motives are apt to be more
involved than a man imagines or than she can herself quite understand.
Below the philanthropic Phillida lay the devout Phillida, who believed
profoundly that in her devotions she was able to touch hands with the
ever-living God himself. Under the stimulus of Mrs. Frankland's words
this belief became so absorbing that the common interests of life became
to her remote and almost unreal. Her work in the Mission was more and
more her life, and perhaps the necessity for accommodating herself a
little to the habits and tastes of a lover wa