which, true enough in fact, will no more make a man
honest than the economic aphorism, _The supply equals the demand_, will
teach him the niceties of social duty. Whoever makes policy the ground
of his honesty will discover more and more exceptions to the rule. The
career, therefore, of Turnbull of the high notions had been a gradual
descent to the level of his present dishonesty and vulgarity; nothing
is so vulgarizing as dishonesty. I do not care to follow the history of
any man downward. Let him who desires to look on such a panorama,
faithfully and thoroughly depicted, read Auerbach's "Diethelm von
Buchenberg."

Things went a little more quietly in the shop after this for a while:
Turnbull probably was afraid of precipitating matters, and driving Mary
to seek counsel--from which much injury might arise to his condition
and prospects. As if to make amends for past rudeness, he even took
some pains to be polite, putting on something of the manners with which
he favored his "best customers," of all mankind in his eyes the most to
be honored. This, of course, rendered him odious in the eyes of Mary,
and ripened the desire to free herself from circumstances which from
garments seemed to have grown cerements. She was, however, too much her
father's daughter to do anything in haste.

She might have been less willing to abandon them, had she had any
friends like-minded with herself, but, while they were all kindly
disposed to her, none of the religious associates of her father, who
knew, or might have known her well, approved of her. They spoke of her
generally with a shake of the head, and an unquestioned feeling that
God was not pleased with her. There are few of the so-called religious
who seem able to trust either God or their neighbor in matters that
concern those two and no other. Nor had she had opportunity of making
acquaintance with any who believed and lived like her father, in other
of the Christian communities of the town. But she had her Bible, and,
when that troubled her, as it did not a little sometimes, she had the
Eternal Wisdom to cry to for such wisdom as she could receive; and one
of the things she learned was, that nowhere in the Bible was she called
on to believe in the Bible, but in the living God, in whom is no
darkness, and who alone can give light to understand his own intent.
All her troubles she carried to him.

It was not always the solitude of her room that Mary sought to get out
of the wind