uch women in religion is that it
gives them at last an object for love without criticism, and for whom
the utmost degree of self-abandonment is not idolatry, but worship.

Mrs. Pennel would gladly have placed herself and all she possessed at
the disposition of the children; they might have broken her china, dug
in the garden with her silver spoons, made turf alleys in her best room,
drummed on her mahogany tea-table, filled her muslin drawer with their
choicest shells and seaweed; only Mrs. Pennel knew that such kindness
was no kindness, and that in the dreadful word responsibility, familiar
to every New England mother's ear, there lay an awful summons to deny
and to conflict where she could so much easier have conceded.

She saw that the tyrant little will would reign without mercy, if it
reigned at all; and ever present with her was the uneasy sense that it
was her duty to bring this erratic little comet within the laws of a
well-ordered solar system,--a task to which she felt about as competent
as to make a new ring for Saturn. Then, too, there was a secret feeling,
if the truth must be told, of what Mrs. Kittridge would think about it;
for duty is never more formidable than when she gets on the cap and gown
of a neighbor; and Mrs. Kittridge, with her resolute voice and
declamatory family government, had always been a secret source of
uneasiness to poor Mrs. Pennel, who was one of those sensitive souls who
can feel for a mile or more the sphere of a stronger neighbor. During
all the years that they had lived side by side, there had been this
shadowy, unconfessed feeling on the part of poor Mrs. Pennel, that Mrs.
Kittridge thought her deficient in her favorite virtue of "resolution,"
as, in fact, in her inmost soul she knew she was;--but who wants to have
one's weak places looked into by the sharp eyes of a neighbor who is
strong precisely where we are weak? The trouble that one neighbor may
give to another, simply by living within a mile of one, is incredible;
but until this new accession to her family, Mrs. Pennel had always been
able to comfort herself with the idea that the child under her
particular training was as well-behaved as any of those of her more
demonstrative friend. But now, all this consolation had been put to
flight; she could not meet Mrs. Kittridge without most humiliating
recollections.

On Sundays, when those sharp black eyes gleamed upon her through the
rails of the neighboring pew, her very s