rdship's" inability to do the shaving properly.

As David thought over his mother's words--her outlook on life--his
sister's idle aims--the companionships she must have and the kind of
talk to which she must listen--he grew more and more annoyed. He
contrasted it all with the past. His mother, who had been so noble and
fine, seemed to have lost individuality, to have become only a segment
of a circle which it was henceforth to be her highest care to keep
intact. Laura must become a part of the same sacred ring, and he, too,
must join hands with those who formed it and make it his duty to keep
others out.

There were also other circles guarded and protected by this one--circles
within circles--each smaller and more exclusive than the last. The
object of the huge game of life over here seemed to be to keep the great
mass of those whom they regarded as commonalty out of any one of the
circles, while striving individually each to climb into the one next
above, and more contracted. The most maddening thing of all was to find
his grave, dignified mother drawn in and made a partaker in this
meaningless strife.

Still essentially an outsider, David could look with larger vision--the
far-seeing vision of the western land, the hilltops and the dividing
sea,--and to him now the circles seemed verily the concentric rings of
the maelstrom into which events were hurrying him. Would he be able to
rise from the swirling flotsam and ride free?

The deeper philosophy underlying it all he as yet but vaguely
understood; that the highest good for all could only be maintained by
stability in the commonwealth; as the tremendous rock foundations of the
earth are a support for the growth thereon of all perfection, all grace
and beauty; that the concentric rings, when rightly understood, should
become a means of purification--of reward for true worth--of power for
noblest service, and not for personal ambition and the unmolested
gratification of vicious tastes.

David did not as yet know that his clear-seeing wife could help him to
the attainment of his greatest possibilities, right here where he feared
to bring her--the wife of whom he dare not tell his mother. Blinded by
the world's estimates which he still had sense enough to despise, he did
not know that the key to its deepest secrets lay in her heart, nor that
of the two, her heritage of the large spirit and the inward-seeing eye
direct to the Creator's meanings was the greater heritag