erhaps all the more confidently upon its power. She was far from
thinking meanly of any one who thought highly of her for it; that seemed
so natural a result as to be amiable, even admirable; she was willing
that any such person should get all the good there was in such an
attitude toward her.

They discussed the matter that night at dinner before their father
and mother, who mostly sat silent at their meals; the father frowning
absently over his plate, with his head close to it, and making play into
his mouth with the back of his knife (he had got so far toward the use
of his fork as to despise those who still ate from the edge of their
knives), and the mother partly missing hers at times in the nervous
tremor that shook her face from side to side.

After a while the subject of Mela's hoarse babble and of Christine's
high-pitched, thin, sharp forays of assertion and denial in the field
which her sister's voice seemed to cover, made its way into the old
man's consciousness, and he perceived that they were talking with Mrs.
Mandel about it, and that his wife was from time to time offering an
irrelevant and mistaken comment. He agreed with Christine, and silently
took her view of the affair some time before he made any sign of having
listened. There had been a time in his life when other things besides
his money seemed admirable to him. He had once respected himself for the
hard-headed, practical common sense which first gave him standing
among his country neighbors; which made him supervisor, school trustee,
justice of the peace, county commissioner, secretary of the Moffitt
County Agricultural Society. In those days he had served the public with
disinterested zeal and proud ability; he used to write to the Lake Shore
Farmer on agricultural topics; he took part in opposing, through the
Moffitt papers, the legislative waste of the people's money; on the
question of selling a local canal to the railroad company, which killed
that fine old State work, and let the dry ditch grow up to grass,
he might have gone to the Legislature, but he contented himself with
defeating the Moffitt member who had voted for the job. If he opposed
some measures for the general good, like high schools and school
libraries, it was because he lacked perspective, in his intense
individualism, and suspected all expense of being spendthrift. He
believed in good district schools, and he had a fondness, crude but
genuine, for some kinds of reading--hi