mately?"

"I assure you I am not maligning 'our set,' only refer to a universal
tendency of this advancing age. I merely strip the outside rind, and
look at the kernel, and therefore I 'see the better, my dear,'
horrified little rustic Red Ridinghood! Now, you are quite in
earnest, and you trudge along carrying your alms to this poor old
Grandmother Charity; but before long you will have your eyes opened
roughly, and learn as I did that the dear pitiful grandmother is
utterly dead and gone; and the fangs and claws of the wolf will show
you which way your cake and honey went. A most voracious wolf, this
same Public Charity, and blessed with the digestion of an ostrich.
But go you to the Cantata, and sing your best, and if you happen to
fall at the feet of pretty little Cecile Brompton, you will hear in
the distance a subdued growl; the first note of the lupine fantasia
that inevitably awaits you. Oh! I wonder if ever this green earth
knew a time when hypocrisy and cant did not prowl even among the
young lambs, pasturing in innocence upon the 'thousand hills' of God?
It seems to me that cant cropped out in the first pair that ever were
born, and Cain has left an immense family. Cant everywhere, in
science and religion; in churches and in courts; cant among lawyers,
doctors, preachers; cant around the hearth; cant even around the
hearse. It is the carnival of cant, this age of ours, and heartily as
I despise it, I too have been duly noosed and collared, and taught
the buttery dialect, and I am meekly willing to confess myself 'born
thrall' of cant."

Regina smiled and shook her head, and tossing her large strong white
hands restlessly over her pillow, Olga continued:

"Indeed, I am desperately in earnest, and it is a melancholy truth
that Longfellow tells us: 'Things are not what they seem.' You appear
disinclined to believe that I am one of those 'whited sepulchres,'
outwardly fair and comely, but filled with unsavoury dust and ugly
grinning skulls? Life is a huge sham, and we are all masked puppets,
jumping grotesquely, just as the strongest hands pull the wires.
Regina, I have gone to and fro upon the earth long enough to learn
that the most acceptable present is never labelled advice;
nevertheless, I would fain warn your unsophisticated young soul
against some of the pitfalls into which I floundered, and got sadly
bruised. Never openly defy or oppose your apparent destiny, so long
as it is in the soft hands of tha