.' Believe me, all of you, the best way
to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there."

He stopped, and a murmur of emotion and surprise ran through the
audience. It was not in the least what they had expected, but it moved
them more than what they had expected would have moved them. "Hear,
hear!" a voice cried out in the middle of the hall. An outburst of
cheers caught up the cry, and as they subsided Charity heard Mr. Miles
saying to someone near him: "That was a MAN talking----" He wiped his
spectacles.

Mr. Royall had stepped back from the desk, and taken his seat in the row
of chairs in front of the harmonium. A dapper white-haired gentleman--a
distant Hatchard--succeeded him behind the goldenrod, and began to
say beautiful things about the old oaken bucket, patient white-haired
mothers, and where the boys used to go nutting... and Charity began again
to search for Harney....

Suddenly Mr. Royall pushed back his seat, and one of the maple branches
in front of the harmonium collapsed with a crash. It uncovered the end
of the first row and in one of the seats Charity saw Harney, and in the
next a lady whose face was turned toward him, and almost hidden by the
brim of her drooping hat. Charity did not need to see the face. She knew
at a glance the slim figure, the fair hair heaped up under the hat-brim,
the long pale wrinkled gloves with bracelets slipping over them. At the
fall of the branch Miss Balch turned her head toward the stage, and in
her pretty thin-lipped smile there lingered the reflection of something
her neighbour had been whispering to her....

Someone came forward to replace the fallen branch, and Miss Balch and
Harney were once more hidden. But to Charity the vision of their two
faces had blotted out everything. In a flash they had shown her the
bare reality of her situation. Behind the frail screen of her lover's
caresses was the whole inscrutable mystery of his life: his relations
with other people--with other women--his opinions, his prejudices, his
principles, the net of influences and interests and ambitions in which
every man's life is entangled. Of all these she knew nothing, except
what he had told her of his architectural aspirations. She had always
dimly guessed him to be in touch with important people, involved in
complicated relations--but she felt it all to be so far beyond her
understanding that the whole subject hung like a luminous mist on the
farthest verge of her tho