onate and just to those about her, truly religious, and
charitable from her nature; but I doubt whether the thorough
worldliness of the archdeacon's appeal struck her as it will strike
the reader. People are so much more worldly in practice than they
are in theory, so much keener after their own gratification in
detail than they are in the abstract, that the narrative of many an
adventure would shock us, though the same adventure would not shock
us in the action. One girl tells another how she has changed her mind
in love; and the friend sympathises with the friend, and perhaps
applauds. Had the story been told in print, the friend who had
listened with equanimity would have read of such vacillation with
indignation. She who vacillated herself would have hated her own
performance when brought before her judgment as a matter in which
she had no personal interest. Very fine things are written every day
about honesty and truth, and men read them with a sort of external
conviction that a man, if he be anything of a man at all, is of
course honest and true. But when the internal convictions are
brought out between two or three who are personally interested
together,--between two or three who feel that their little gathering
is, so to say, "tiled",--those internal convictions differ very much
from the external convictions. This man, in his confidences, asserts
broadly that he does not mean to be thrown over, and that man has a
project for throwing over somebody else; and the intention of each is
that scruples are not to stand in the way of his success. The "Ruat
coelum, fiat justitia," was said, no doubt, from an outside balcony
to a crowd, and the speaker knew that he was talking buncombe. The
"Rem, si possis recte, si non, quocunque modo," was whispered into
the ear in a club smoking-room, and the whisperer intended that his
words should prevail.

Lady Lufton had often heard her friend the archdeacon preach, and she
knew well the high tone which he could take as to the necessity of
trusting to our hopes for the future for all our true happiness;
and yet she sympathised with him when he told her that he was
broken-hearted because his son would take a step which might possibly
interfere with his worldly prosperity. Had the archdeacon been
preaching about matrimony, he would have recommended young men, in
taking wives to themselves, especially to look for young women who
feared the Lord. But in talking about his son's wife, n