ch a friend. "A breath of summer wind!" she
said, repeating with scorn her friend's somewhat high-flown words.
"I cannot but say that, like Martha, you have chosen the worser
part," continued the letter. "The things of the world, which are in
themselves but accidents, have been for a moment all in all to you;
but knowing you as I do, I am aware how soon they will fade away,
and have no more than their proper weight. Then you will wake some
day, and feel that you have devoted yourself to the mending of his
stockings and the feeding of his babies." There was something in this
which stirred Cecilia to absolute wrath. If there were babies would
they not be her babies as well as his? Was it not the intention of
the Lord that the world should be populated? The worser part, indeed!
Then she took up the cudgels in her own mind on behalf of Martha, as
she had often done before. How would the world get on unless there
were Marthas? And was it not more than probable that a self-dubbed
Mary should fall into idle ways under the pretence that she was
filled with special inspiration? Looking at Miss Altifiorla as a
Mary, she was somewhat in love with the Marthas.

"I do not doubt that Mr. Western is what he should be," the letter
went on, "but even judging him by your letter, I find that he is
autocratic and self-opinioned. It is his future life and not yours of
which he is thinking, his success and not yours, his doings and not
your doings." "How does she know?" exclaimed Cecilia. "She has only
my account of him, and not his of me." "And he is right in this,"
went on the letter, "because the ways of the world allow such
privileges to men. What would a man be unless he took the place
which his personal strength has obtained for him? For women, in the
general, of course matrimony is fit. They have to earn their bread,
and think of little else. To be a man's toy and then his slave, with
due allowance for food and clothes, suffices for them. But I had
dreamed a dream that it would not suffice for you. Alas, alas! I
stand alone now in the expression of my creed. You must excuse me if
I repine, when I find myself so cruelly deserted."

All this Cecilia felt to be as absurd as it was ill-timed;--and
to be redeemed, as it were, from its ill-nature by its ridiculous
philosophy. But at last there came a paragraph which admitted of
no such excuse. "What has Mr. Western said as to the story of Sir
Francis Geraldine? Of course you have told him