very steep and precipitous road, set with sharp flints that cut the
feet, and make the blood flow.

I think the second falsehood was almost harder to utter than the first:
but, indeed, they were both very disagreeable. I cannot think why any
one should have thought it necessary to invent the doctrine of a future
retribution for sin.

It appears to me that, in this very life of the present, each little
delinquency is so heavily paid for--so exorbitantly overpaid, indeed.
Look, for instance, at my own case. I told a lie--a lie more of the
letter than the spirit--and since then I have spent six months of my
flourishing youth absolutely devoid of pleasure, and largely penetrated
with pain.

I have stood just outside my paradise, peeping under and over the
flaming sword of the angel that guards it. I have been near enough to
smell the flowers--to see the downy, perfumed fruits--to hear the song
of the angels as they go up and down within its paths; but I have been
outside.

Now I have told another lie, and I suppose--nay, what better can I
hope?--that I shall live in the same state of weary, disproportioned
retribution to the end of the chapter.

These are the thoughts, interspersed and diversified with loud sighs,
that are employing my mind one ripe and misty morning a few days later
than the incidents last detailed.

Barbara is to arrive to-day. She is coming to pay us a visit--coming,
like the lady mentioned by Tennyson, in "In Memoriam"--not, indeed, "to
bring her babe," but to "make her boast." And how, pray, am I to listen
with complacent congratulation to this boast? For the first time in my
life I dread the coming of Barbara. How am I, whose acting, on the few
occasions when I have attempted it, has been of the most improbably
wooden description--how am I, I say, to counterfeit the extravagant joy,
the lively sympathy, that Barbara will expect--and naturally
expect--from me?

I get up and look at myself in the glass. Assuredly I shall have to take
some severe measures with my countenance before it falls under my
sister's gaze. Small sympathy and smaller joy is there in it now--it
wears only a lantern-jawed, lack-lustre despondency. I practise a
galvanized smile, and say out loud, as if in dialogue with some
interlocutor:

"Yes, _delightful_!--I am _so_ pleased!" but there is more mirth in the
enforced grin of an unfleshed skull than in mine.

That will never take in Barbara. I try again--once, twice--each