“And so affectionate!  Don’t you think so?” continued John.  “She’s a person that you can do any thing with through her heart.  She’s all heart, and very little head.  I ought not to say that, either.  I think she has fair natural abilities, had they ever been cultivated.”

“My dear John,” said Grace, “you forget what time it is.  Good-night!”

CHAPTER VII.

WILL SHE LIKE IT?

“John,” said Grace, “when are you going out again to our Sunday school at Spindlewood?  They are all asking after you.  Do you know it is now two months since they have seen you?”

“I know it,” said John.  “I am going to-morrow.  You see, Gracie, I couldn’t well before.”

“Oh!  I have told them all about it, and I have kept things up; but then there are so many who want to see you, and so many things that you alone could settle and manage.”

“Oh, yes!  I’ll go to-morrow,” said John.  “And, after this, I shall be steady at it.  I wonder if we could get Lillie to go,” said he, doubtfully.

Grace did not answer.  Lillie was a subject on which it was always embarrassing to her to be appealed to.  She was so afraid of appearing jealous or unappreciative; and her opinions were so different from those of her brother, that it was rather difficult to say any thing.

“Do you think she would like it, Grace?”

“Indeed, John, you must know better than I. If anybody could make her take an interest in it, it would be you.”

Before his marriage, John had always had the idea that pretty, affectionate little women were religious and self-denying at heart, as matters of course.  No matter through what labyrinths of fashionable follies and dissipation they had been wandering, still a talent for saintship was lying dormant in their natures, which it needed only the touch of love to develop.  The wings of the angel were always concealed under the fashionable attire of the belle, and would unfold themselves when the hour came.  A nearer acquaintance with Lillie, he was forced to confess, had not, so far, confirmed this idea.  Though hers was a face so fair and pure that, when he first knew her, it suggested ideas of prayer, and communion with angels, yet he could not disguise from himself that, in all near acquaintance with her, she had proved to be most remarkably “of the earth, earthy.”  She was alive and fervent about fashionable gossip,—­of who is who, and what does what; she was alive to equipages, to dress, to sightseeing, to dancing, to any thing of which the whole stimulus and excitement was earthly and physical.  At times, too, he remembered that she had talked a sort of pensive sentimentalism, of a slightly religious nature; but the least idea of a moral purpose in life—­of self-denial, and devotion to something higher than immediate self-gratification—­seemed never to have entered her head.  What is more, John had found his attempts to introduce such topics with her always unsuccessful.  Lillie either gaped in his face, and asked him what time it was; or playfully pulled his whiskers, and asked him why he didn’t take to the ministry; or adroitly turned the conversation with kissing and compliments.