isabeth: "I was thinking
of other people; and they love you much more if you are pretty than if
you aren't."

"That is not so," said Miss Farringdon--and she believed she was
speaking the truth; "if you serve God and do your duty to your
neighbour, you will find plenty of people ready to love you; and
especially if you carry yourself well and never stoop." Like many
another elect lady, Cousin Maria regarded beauty of face as a vanity,
but beauty of figure as a virtue; and to this doctrine Elisabeth owed
the fact that her back always sloped in the opposite direction to the
backs of the majority of people.

But it would have surprised Miss Farringdon to learn how little real
effect her strict Methodist training had upon Elisabeth; fortunately,
however, few elder people ever do learn how little effect their training
has upon the young committed to their charge; if it were so, life would
be too hard for the generation that has passed the hill-top. Elisabeth's
was one of those happy, pantheistic natures that possess the gift of
finding God everywhere and in everything. She early caught the Methodist
habit of self-analysis and introspection, but in her it did not
develop--as it does in more naturally religious souls--into an almost
morbid conscientiousness and self-depreciation; she merely found an
artistic and intellectual pleasure in taking the machinery of her soul
to pieces and seeing how it worked.

In those days--and, in fact, in all succeeding ones--Elisabeth lived in
a world of imagination. There was not a nook in the garden of the
Willows which was not peopled by creatures of her fancy. At this
particular time she was greatly fascinated by the subject of heathen
mythology, as set forth in Mangnall's Questions, and had devoted herself
to the service of Pallas Athene, having learned that that goddess was
(like herself) not surpassingly beautiful, and was, moreover,
handicapped by the possession of gray eyes. Miss Farringdon would have
been horrified had she known that a portion of the wood was set apart by
Elisabeth as "Athene's Grove," and that the contents of the waste-paper
basket were daily begged from the servants by the devotee, and offered
up, by the aid of real matches, on the shrine of the goddess.

"Have you noticed, sister," Miss Anne remarked on one occasion, "how
much more thoughtful dear Elisabeth is growing?" Miss Anne's life was
one long advertisement of other people's virtues. "She used to be
some