" he answered. "No great harm."

"Is it true," Cecilia asked, "that here you do no great harm? Is not a
man like you doing harm when he is not doing positive good?"

"Your compliment is ambiguous," said Rowland.

"No," answered the widow, "you know what I think of you. You have a
particular aptitude for beneficence. You have it in the first place in
your character. You are a benevolent person. Ask Bessie if you don't
hold her more gently and comfortably than any of her other admirers."

"He holds me more comfortably than Mr. Hudson," Bessie declared,
roundly.

Rowland, not knowing Mr. Hudson, could but half appreciate the eulogy,
and Cecilia went on to develop her idea. "Your circumstances, in
the second place, suggest the idea of social usefulness. You are
intelligent, you are well-informed, and your charity, if one may call it
charity, would be discriminating. You are rich and unoccupied, so that
it might be abundant. Therefore, I say, you are a person to do something
on a large scale. Bestir yourself, dear Rowland, or we may be taught to
think that virtue herself is setting a bad example."

"Heaven forbid," cried Rowland, "that I should set the examples of
virtue! I am quite willing to follow them, however, and if I don't
do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether
imitative, and that I have not recently encountered any very striking
models of grandeur. Pray, what shall I do? Found an orphan asylum, or
build a dormitory for Harvard College? I am not rich enough to do either
in an ideally handsome way, and I confess that, yet awhile, I feel
too young to strike my grand coup. I am holding myself ready for
inspiration. I am waiting till something takes my fancy irresistibly. If
inspiration comes at forty, it will be a hundred pities to have tied up
my money-bag at thirty."

"Well, I give you till forty," said Cecilia. "It 's only a word to
the wise, a notification that you are expected not to run your course
without having done something handsome for your fellow-men."

Nine o'clock sounded, and Bessie, with each stroke, courted a closer
embrace. But a single winged word from her mother overleaped her
successive intrenchments. She turned and kissed her cousin, and
deposited an irrepressible tear on his moustache. Then she went and
said her prayers to her mother: it was evident she was being admirably
brought up. Rowland, with the permission of his hostess, lighted a cigar
and puffed it aw