ther than the assistant cashier
himself. And she thought what a fine thing it was to have money when
there was so much good to be done with it.

X.

BROKEN RESOLVES.

Once the check was dispatched, Millard's conscience, which had been
aroused--irritated--by the standing rebuke of Phillida's superior
disinterestedness, was in a measure appeased. After sitting an hour in
slippery meditation he resolved to master his inclination toward Miss
Callender's society, for fear of jeopardizing that bachelor ideal of
life he had long cherished. Hilbrough's especial friendship, supported
by Mrs. Hilbrough's gratitude, had of late put him in the way of making
money more rapidly than heretofore; the probable early retirement of
Farnsworth would advance him to the cashiership of the bank, and there
opened before him as much as he had ever desired of business and social
success. It was not exactly that he put advantages of this sort into one
side of the scale and the undefinable charms of Phillida into the other.
But he was restrained by that natural clinging to the main purpose which
saves men from frivolous changes of direction under the wayward impulses
of each succeeding day. This conservative holding by guiding resolutions
once formed is the balance-wheel that keeps a human life from wabbling.
Western hunters used to make little square boxes with their names
graven in reverse on the inside. These they fixed over a young gourd,
which grew till it filled the box. Then the hunter by removing the box
and cutting off the end of the stem of the gourd, to make an opening
like the mouth of a bottle, secured a curious natural powder-flask,
shaped to his fancy and bearing his name in relief on its side. Like the
boxed gourd, the lives of men become at length rigidly shaped to their
guiding purposes, and one may read early resolutions ineffaceably
inscribed upon them. But the irony of it! Here was Millard, for example,
a mature man of affairs, held to a scheme of life adopted almost by
accident when he was but just tottering, callow, from his up-country
nest. What a haphazard world is this! Draw me no Fates with solemn
faces, holding distaffs and deadly snipping shears. The Fates? Mere
children pitching heads and tails upon the paving-stones.

But if the dominant purpose to which the man has fitted himself is not
to be suddenly changed, there are forces that modify it by degrees and
sometimes gradually undermine and then break it