’"Better is it,” said Appollonius, “on entering a small shrine to find there a statue of gold and ivory, than in a large temple to behold only a coarse figure of terra cotta.”  How often, after leaving with disgust the so-called great affairs of men, do we find traces of angels’ visits in quiet scenes of home.

’The Hours and the Graces appear as ornaments on all thrones and shrines, except those of Vulcan and Pluto.  Alas for us, when we become so sunk in utilitarian toil as to be blind to the beauty with which even common cares are daily wreathed!’

And so on and on, with myth and allusion.

Next, Margaret spoke of the friends whose generosity had provided the decorations on her walls, and the illustrated books for her table,—­friends who were fellow-students in art, history, or science,—­friends whose very life she shared.  Her heart seemed full to overflow with sympathy for their joys and sorrows, their special trials and struggles, their peculiar tendencies of character and respective relations.  The existence of each was to her a sacred process, whose developments she watched with awe, and whose leadings she reverently sought to aid.  She had scores of pretty anecdotes to tell, sweet bowers of sentiment to open, significant lessons of experience to interpret, and scraps of journals or letters to read aloud, as the speediest means of introducing me to her chosen circle.  There was a fascinating spell in her piquant descriptions, and a genial glow of sympathy animated to characteristic movement the figures, who in varying pantomime replaced one another on the theatre of her fancy.  Frost-bound New England melted into a dreamland of romance beneath the spice-breeze of her Eastern narrative.  Sticklers for propriety might have found fault at the freedom with which she confided her friends’ histories to one who was a comparative stranger to them; but I could not but note how conscientiousness reined in her sensibilities and curbed their career, as they reached the due bounds of privacy.  She did but realize one’s conception of the transparent truthfulness that will pervade advanced societies of the future, where the very atmosphere shall be honorable faith.

Nearer and nearer Margaret was approaching a secret throned in her heart that day; and the preceding transitions were but a prelude of her orchestra before the entrance of the festal group.  Unconsciously she made these preparations for paying worthy honors to a high sentiment.  She had lately heard of the betrothal of two of her best-loved friends; and she wished to communicate the graceful story in a way that should do justice to the facts and to her own feelings.  It was by a spontaneous impulse of her genius, and with no voluntary foreshaping, that she had grouped the previous tales; but no drama could have been more artistically constructed than the steps whereby she led me onward to the denouement; and the look, tone, words, with which she told it, were fluent with melody as the song of an improvisatrice.