s her main preservative
from a tendency to degenerate into a devotee.

While Mrs. Frankland aroused others, her eloquence also influenced the
orator herself. Advocacy increased the force of conviction, and the
growing intensity of conviction in turn reinforced the earnestness of
advocacy. Irreverent people applied an old joke and called her "the
apostle to the genteels," and in the region to which she seemed
commissioned the warmth of her zeal was not likely to work harm. What
effect it had was in the main good. But the material in her hands was
only combustible in a slow way; the plutocratic conscience is rarely
inflammable--for the most part it smolders like punk. Nor was Mrs.
Frankland herself in any danger of being carried by her enthusiasms into
fanaticism of action. However her utterances might savor of ultraism,
she was conservative enough in practical matters to keep a sort of
"Truce of God" with the world as she found it.

But to Phillida, susceptible as a saint on the road to beatification,
the gradually augmented fervor of Mrs. Frankland's declamation worked
evil. It was especially painful to Agatha that her sister was propelled
by this influence farther and farther out of the safe lines of
commonplace feeling and action, and that every wind from Mrs.
Frankland's quarter of the heavens tended to drift her farther and
farther away from her lover. Agatha's indignation broke out into all
sorts of talk against Mrs. Frankland, whom she did not scruple to
denounce for a Pharisee, binding heavy burdens on the back of poor
Phillida, but never touching them with her own little finger.

Mrs. Frankland's discourses on faith reached their zenith on a January
day, when the carriage wheels that rolled in front of Mrs. Van Horne's
made a ringing almost like the breaking of glass in the hard frozen snow
of the streets, and when the luxurious comfort within the house was the
more deliciously appreciable from the deadly frostiness of the
bone-piercing wind without. Only Phillida of all the throng found her
comfort disturbed by remembering the coachmen who returned for their
mistresses before the end of the discourse. It cost those poor fellows a
pang to do despite to their wonted dignity of demeanor by smiting their
arms against their bodies to keep from perishing. But even a coachman
accustomed to regard himself as the main representative of the unbending
perpendicularity of a ten-million family must give way a little befor