hanges, the religious
part along with the rest. He worked his religions hard, and changed them
with his shirt.

The liberal spendings of the Fosters upon their fancies began early
in their prosperities, and grew in prodigality step by step with their
advancing fortunes. In time they became truly enormous. Aleck built
a university or two per Sunday; also a hospital or two; also a Rowton
hotel or so; also a batch of churches; now and then a cathedral; and
once, with untimely and ill-chosen playfulness, Sally said, "It was
a cold day when she didn't ship a cargo of missionaries to persuade
unreflecting Chinamen to trade off twenty-four carat Confucianism for
counterfeit Christianity."

This rude and unfeeling language hurt Aleck to the heart, and she went
from the presence crying. That spectacle went to his own heart, and in
his pain and shame he would have given worlds to have those unkind words
back. She had uttered no syllable of reproach--and that cut him. Not one
suggestion that he look at his own record--and she could have made, oh,
so many, and such blistering ones! Her generous silence brought a swift
revenge, for it turned his thoughts upon himself, it summoned before
him a spectral procession, a moving vision of his life as he had been
leading it these past few years of limitless prosperity, and as he
sat there reviewing it his cheeks burned and his soul was steeped in
humiliation. Look at her life--how fair it was, and tending ever upward;
and look at his own--how frivolous, how charged with mean vanities,
how selfish, how empty, how ignoble! And its trend--never upward, but
downward, ever downward!

He instituted comparisons between her record and his own. He had found
fault with her--so he mused--HE! And what could he say for himself?
When she built her first church what was he doing? Gathering other blase
multimillionaires into a Poker Club; defiling his own palace with it;
losing hundreds of thousands to it at every sitting, and sillily vain of
the admiring notoriety it made for him. When she was building her
first university, what was he doing? Polluting himself with a gay
and dissipated secret life in the company of other fast bloods,
multimillionaires in money and paupers in character. When she was
building her first foundling asylum, what was he doing? Alas! When she
was projecting her noble Society for the Purifying of the Sex, what was
he doing? Ah, what, indeed! When she and the W. C. T. U. and the