Church, strongly
advising him to enter it. For all my broad views"--Aunt Bell sighed
here--"I really and truly believe, child, that no one not an Episcopalian
is ever thoroughly at ease in this world."

Aunt Bell was beautifully, girlishly plump, with a sophisticated air of
smartness--of coquetry, indeed--as to her exquisitely small hands and
feet; and though a certain suggestion of melancholy in her tone
harmonised with the carefully dressed gray hair and with her apparent
years, she nevertheless breathed airs of perfect comfort.

"Of course this young chap could see at once," she went on, "what
immensely better form it is than Calvinism. _Dear_ me! Imagine one being a
Presbyterian in this day!" It seemed here that the soul of Aunt Bell
poised a disdainful lorgnette before its eyes, through which to survey in
a fitting manner the unmodish spectacle of Calvinism.

"And he tells me that he has his grandfather's consent. Really, my dear,
with his physique and voice and manner that fellow undoubtedly has a
future in the Episcopal Church. I dare say he'll be wearing the lawn
sleeves and rochet of a bishop before he's forty."

"Did it ever occur to you, Aunt Bell, that he is--well, just the least
trifle--I was going to say, vain of his appearance--but I'll make it
'self-conscious'?"

"Child, don't you know that a young man, really beautiful without being
effeminate, is bound to be conscious of it. But vain he is not. It
mortifies him dreadfully, though he pretends to make light of it."

"But why speak of it so often? He was telling me to-day of an elderly
Englishman who addressed him on the train, telling him what a striking
resemblance he bore to the Prince of Wales when he was a youth."

"Quite so; and he told me yesterday of hearing a lady in the drug-store
ask the clerk who 'that handsome stranger' was. But, my dear, he tells
them as jokes on himself, and he's so sheepish about it. And he's such a
splendid orator. I persuaded him to-day to read me one of his college
papers. I don't seem to recall much of the substance, but it was full of
the most beautiful expressions. One, I remember, begins, 'Oh, of all the
flowers that swing their golden censers in the parterre of the human
heart, none so rich, so rare as this one flower of--' you know I've
forgotten what it was--Civilisation or Truth or something. Anyway,
whatever it was, it had like a giant engine rolled the car of Civilisation
out from the maze of antiquity