"
"I am afraid such elevation would chill you."
"Don't you want Mrs. Flaxman to go?"
"I have nothing to say against it, if she has courage to brave public
opinion."
"I did not think you reckoned me such a coward."
"That shows how little we know what our intimate friends think of us; if
there was a general laying bare of hearts, methinks there would be lively
times for a while."
I stood thinking his words over very seriously, and then turning to him
said, gravely:--
"I would be willing for nearly all my friends to see my thoughts
respecting them."
"There would be some exceptions, then. You said nearly all, remember. The
few might be the ones most anxious to know, and upon whom the restriction
would bear most heavily."
"They might not care what I thought," I said with a hot flush; something
in his look making me tremble.
"If we are to be in time for church we should leave very shortly," he
said, looking at his watch.
"And we are really going to Beech Street Church this evening?"
"Yes, really," he said, with that genial smile I was beginning to regard
like a caress.
Mrs. Flaxman and I hastened to our rooms; she nearly as well pleased as
I. It seemed quite too good to be true that we three were to go in
company to those meetings where men and women talked to each other, and
to God, of all the great things He was doing for them. I was very
speedily robed and back in the drawing-room, where Mr. Winthrop was still
sitting gazing into the fire with that indrawn, abstracted expression on
his face which was habitual to it in repose.
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