' standing.
Carry Grey was quite this many years over twenty-one, and was going to
emigrate with her husband to Missouri, and to settle in the thriving
young town of St. Louis, fast growing up then into a city. He was to
have a church there, and they might be so happy, she thought, if God
only smiled upon them! But all depended upon that.

It was a wholesome lesson to my morbid discontent and pride to hear what
trials she had surmounted already, and how many more she was ready to
encounter.

She had once been engaged to a very brilliant young man, she told me,
but he was dissipated and careless of her feelings, and she let him go;
since that he had drifted fast to destruction, and sometimes she
reproached herself for not having held to him through thick and thin. It
was just possible she might have saved him, she thought, but her friends
had persuaded her that he would only drag her down, and so she broke
with him forever.

"Did he love you?" I asked, eagerly. "Were you sure that he was not
perfidious?"

"Oh, I believe he was true to me--however false to himself."

"Then you were wrong," I said. "Wrong, believe me. Carry Grey! A woman
should bear every thing but infidelity of heart for the man she
loves--every thing!"

"I am sorry to hear you say so," she replied, somewhat coldly. "There is
a great deal more than blind affection needful for a woman's happiness,
Miss Monfort--so experience tells us. What I mean is, perhaps he _might_
have reformed had I not broken with him; but it was the _merest_
chance--one too feeble to depend on; and I did wisely to discard him, I
am convinced."

"Forgive me! I did not mean to censure you," I said; "I was only
speaking generally--too generally, perhaps, for individual courtesy.
This is a theory of mine which as yet I have had no opportunity to put
in practice, for I have never been attached to a dissipated man." I
smiled. "I dare say I too should drop such a man like a pestilence."

"I hope so. But the best way is to avoid all intimacy with such men from
the first. You are very young. Let me give you my advice on this subject
before you form any attachment: keep your affections for a worthy
object, if you keep them locked up forever. Better be alone than
mismated."

"This is to shut the cage after the bird has flown," I thought, sadly;
but I thanked her, and promised to profit by her good counsel.

We were fast friends ever after, and, when she went away to her distant