“Auntie, you are scarcely warranted in using such strong language.  Because a man refrains from the public avowal of faith, incident to church membership, he is not necessarily godless; nor inevitably devoid of true religious feeling.  Mr. Dunbar has a strong, reticent nature, habituated to repression of all evidences of emotion, but of the depth and earnestness of his real feeling, I entertain no doubt.”

“I fear your line and plummet will never sound his depth.  You often speak of his strength; but, Leo, hardness is not always strength; and he is hard, hard.  I never saw a man with a chin like his, who was not tyrannical, and idolatrous of his own will.  My dear, such men are as uncomfortable to live in the same house with, as a smoky chimney, or a woman with shattered nerves, or creaking doors, or draughty windows.  They are a sort of everlasting east wind that never veers, blowing always to the one point, attainment of their own ends, mildewing all else.  Ugh!”

Miss Patty shivered, and her companion smiled.

“What a grewsome picture, Auntie dear!  Fortunately human taste is as diverse and catholic as the variety of human countenances.  For example:  Clara Morse raves over Mr. Dunbar’s ’clear-cut features, so immensely classical’; and she pronounces his offending ’chin simply perfect! fit for a Greek God!’”

“A very thin and gauzy partition divides Clara Morse’s brains from idiocy.  In my day, all such feeble watery minds as hers were regarded as semi-imbecile, pitied as intellectual cripples, and wisely kept in the background of society; but, bless me! in this generation they skip and prance to the very edge of the front, pose in indecent garments without starch, or crinoline, or even the protection of pleats and gathers; and insult good, sound, wholesome common sense with the sickening affectations they are pleased to call ‘aesthetics.’  Don’t waste your time, and dilute your own mind by quoting the silly twaddle of a poor girl who was turned loose too early on society, who falls on her knees in ecstasies before a hideous broken-nose tea-pot from some filthy hovel in Japan; and who would not dare to admire the loveliest bit of Oiron pottery, or precious old Chelsea claret-colored china in Kensington Museum, until she had turned it upside down, and hunted the potter’s mark with a microscope.  I say Mr. Dunbar has a domineering and tyrannical chin, and five years hence, if you do not agree with me, it will be because ’Ephraim is joined to his idols’—­clay feet and all.”

“Then follow the Bible injunction to ‘let him alone.’  I see Lennox through neither Clara’s rosy lenses, nor your jaundiced glasses; and these circular discussions are as fruitless as they are unpleasant.  Let us select some more agreeable topic.  I gave you Leighton’s letter.  What think you of his scheme?”

“That it is admirable, worthy of the brain that conceived it.  What a wonderful man he is, considering his age?  Such a devout and fervent spirit, and withal such a marvel of executive ability.  Ah! happy the woman who can command his wise guardianship, and renew her aspirations after holiness, in his spiritual society.  I honor, even more than I love, Leighton Douglass.”