and gone out sick and
disgusted. Your face has risen up calm and white and still, between the
faces of poor lost creatures who know no better way of life than to
tempt us to sin. And sometimes, Mary, when I have seen girls that, had
they been cared for by good pious mothers, might have been like you, I
have felt as if I could cry for them. Poor women are abused all the
world over; and it's no wonder they turn round and revenge themselves
on us.

"No, I have not been bad, Mary, as the world calls badness. I have been
kept by you. But do you remember you told me once, that, when the snow
first fell and lay so dazzling and pure and soft, all about, you always
felt as if the spreads and window-curtains that seemed white before
were dirty? Well, it's just like that with me. Your presence makes me
feel that I am not pure,--that I am low and unworthy,--not worthy to
touch the hem of your garment. Your good Dr. H. spent a whole half-day,
the other Sunday, trying to tell us about the beauty of holiness; and
he cut, and pared, and peeled, and sliced, and told us what it wasn't,
and what was _like_ it, and wasn't; and then he built up an exact
definition, and fortified and bricked it up all round; and I thought to
myself that he'd better tell 'em to look at Mary Scudder, and they'd
understand all about it. That was what I was thinking when you talked
to me for looking at you in church instead of looking towards the
pulpit. It really made me laugh in myself to see what a good little
ignorant, unconscious way you had of looking up at the Doctor, as if he
knew more about that than you did.

"And now as to your Doctor that you think so much of, I like him for
certain things, in certain ways. He is a great, grand, large pattern of
a man,--a man who isn't afraid to think, and to speak anything he does
think; but then I do believe, if he would take a voyage round the world
in the forecastle of a whaler, he would know more about what to say to
people than he does now; it would certainly give him several new points
to be considered. Much of his preaching about men is as like live men
as Chinese pictures of trees and rocks and gardens,--no nearer the
reality than that. All I can say is, 'It isn't so; and you'd know it,
Sir, if you knew men.' He has got what they call a _system_--just so
many bricks put together just so; but it is too narrow to take in all I
see in my wanderings round this world of ours. Nobody that has a soul,
and goes r