"but has ideas; and
there's not an idea in the town five years old." But generally he
was cordial with them all, going off into rapt admiration of each new
prophet as he arose, and he would willingly have stood cheek by jowl
with them in their planting and watering and increase if they had not
snubbed him from the first. Book-shops full of old plays, and a man
who talked of Scott's width of imagination and Clay's statesmanship,
were indigestible matter which Berrytown would gladly have spewed out
of her mouth. "What have aimless imagination and temporizing policy
to do with the Advancement of Mankind? Dead weight, sir, dead weight!
which but clogs the wheels of the machine." Any schoolboy in Berrytown
could have so reasoned you the matter. While Catharine was growing
up, therefore, the walnut trees had shut the Guinnesses into complete
social solitude until deliverance came in the shape of Mr. Muller.

CHAPTER II.

Besides her supper now, Catharine wanted her share of this visitor.
Nothing else, in fact, came in or went out of her life. Outside lay
emancipated Berrytown, to unemancipated Kitty only a dumb panorama:
inside, her meals, her lessons and perpetual consultations with her
mother on bias folds and gussets while they made their dresses or
sewed for the Indian missions. Kitty was quite willing to believe that
the Berrytown women were mad and unsexed, but ought the events of
life to consist of beef and new dresses and far-off Sioux? She laughed
good-humoredly at her own grumbling, but she looked longingly out of
the window at the girls going by chattering in the evenings with their
sweet-hearts; and certainly the Man coming into her life had affected
her not unpleasantly. Not that the clergyman, with his small jokes and
small enthusiasms, was any high revelation to her mind; but there was
no other.

"It's something to hear a heavy step about the house, and to see the
carpet kicked crooked," she said sometimes. Her mother would shake her
hand gently and smile.

She shook her head and smiled in precisely the same way now. Mr.
Muller, who had grown excited as he talked, felt a wave of insipid
propriety wash over his emotions, bringing them to a dead level.

"However the matter may conclude," said Mrs. Guinness pleasantly, "why
should you and I lose our self-control, Mr. Muller? Now, why should
we? Ah?"

There was something numbing in the very note of prolonged
interrogation. The folds of Mrs. Guinness's gl