“If Mrs. Murray hadn’t improved my manners so much, I should smile.  Was mine worse?  I wish you and Mr. Hazard would try it for a change.  Mrs. Dyer would like to see you both undergoing discipline.  Never joke about serious matters!  You had better hold your tongue and be glad to live in a place where your friends let your soul alone.”

“But I can’t sit still and hear myself turned into a show!  I can’t share him with all Fifth Avenue.  I want no one else to have him.  To see him there devoting himself and me to a stupid crowd of people, who have as much right to him as I have, drives religion out of my head.”

Catherine treated this weakness with high contempt.

“I might as well be jealous,” said she, “of the people who look at Mr. Wharton’s pictures, or read Petrarch’s sonnets in my sweet translation.  Did you ever hear that Laura found fault with Petrarch, or, if she did, that any one believed she was in earnest?”

“It is not the same thing,” said Esther.  “He believes in his church more than he does in me.  If I can’t believe in it, he will have to give me up.”

“He, give you up!” said Catherine.  “The poor saint!  You know he is silly about you.”

“He must give me up, if I am jealous of his congregation, and won’t believe what he preaches,” replied Esther mournfully.

“Why should you care what he preaches?” asked Catherine; “you never heard your aunt troubling her head about what Mr. Murray says when he goes to court.”

“She is not forced to go to court with him,” said Esther; “nor to be a mother to all the old women in the court-room; nor to say that she believes—­believes—­believes—­when in her heart she doesn’t believe a word.”

Hazard appeared in the middle of this dispute, and Esther, troubled as she was, could not bear to distress him.  She still meant to accept every thing and force herself to follow him in silence; she would go where he led, and never once raise her eyes to look for the horizon.  As she said to herself quite seriously, though with a want of reverence that augured ill; “I will go down on my knees and help him, though he turn Bonze and burn incense to Buddha in my very studio!” His presence always soothed her.  His gayety and affection never failed to revive her spirits and confidence.

“Wasn’t it a good sermon?” said he to Catherine as he came in, with his boyish laugh of triumph.  “Give me a little praise!  I never got a word of encouragement from you in my life.”

“I should as soon think of encouraging a whole herd of Texas cattle,” answered Catherine.  “What good can my praise do you?”

“You child of nature, don’t you know that children of nature like you always grow wild and need no cultivation, but that we artificial flowers can’t live without it?”

“I don’t know how to cultivate,” answered Catherine; “it is Esther you are thinking about.”

Having announced this self-evident fact, Catherine walked off and left him to quiet Esther’s alarms as he could.  As she went she heard him turn to Esther and repeat his prayer that she should be gentle with him and give his sermon a word of praise.