When

doubter must cease to exist. once the truths of religion had been clearly set forth in a simple diagram on a blackboard or with equal lucidity in a sermon, doubt, if it persisted, must be regarded as a dangerous madness.

And as you could not doubt and be honest, so, if George Morris's ideas of ritual or interpretation did not satisfy you, you could not be really spiritually minded. There must be no yearnings for what he was not prepared to supply; and where emotion put out a hand a supply was very rarely forthcoming.

Religion wore no veils for him and Life presented no problem and held no secret. A mountain was merely a thing to climb or photograph; a sunset to suggest a simile for his next sermon; and if Death stood in the midst of his parish and cried aloud of the mystery of things and the tears of things, it spoke to him only of the comfort and edification that his professional visits had afforded the deceased.

His wife had gone upstairs and softly locked her bedroom door. When she had undressed, and after she had polished it until it shone again, she held the ikon from her and gazed at it. What strange god was represented in that defaced picture? She wondered if it could be some dreadful monster such as the missionary had talked about. But she decided to put this thought aside; for she was not going to pray to a false god; she was only going to light candles and make an offering of flowers, just in case the real God should be pleased and listen to her prayers, and just in case it should make religion easy. If a misgiving as sailed her as she thought of her husband downstairs, she argued with herself that when religion had once become easy she could put the image away and use the rest of the candles for a Christmas tree.

But when the ikon was placed upon a table in the corner, when the gas was

turned low and the candles were lit, and a little vase of flowers was on the ledge, between the candles, misgivings melted into wonder and delight. How strange, how beautiful it was! The dim gold, the mysterious picture, the little flames of the candles, so steady and solemn, and the flowers like angels' faces. But Phoebe did not see the loveliest thing there: the slender, white-robed figure of the worshipper. the cloud of dark hair falling upon her shoulders and framing the innocent face, the shining eyes full of rapture and awe, with the light of religion in them for the first time.

But as she knelt before the image the mystery and the rapture of mystery faded into human longing, and touching the shrine with her warm young hands, her head laid upon her outstretched arms, "I'll do without the child," she whispered. "I won't ask for that, if I may please him better; if he may love me always."

IV.

There was silence in the vicarage, and a shadow: the shadow that falls on a house when the doctor is saying "Oh, we must not take a hopeless view of the case": the silence that cries aloud in the efforts of the cheerful talk of people who look furtively at the book or the needlework on the table and wonder if the others realize that it will never be taken up again.

Little Mrs. Morris had had a cold; a few days ago pneumonia was declared, and now the chances of her recovery were very slender.

George Morris was very unhappy. Though he knew that his parishioners were saying what a devoted husband he was, yet the thought brought him no consolation. He was as unhappy as his own sense of propriety and really affectionate heart could have demanded him to be, and there was not a touch of self-congratulation in his grief. For

over and above the actual sorrow he was troubled. When he tried to go on with a sermon he had begun before his wife was taken ill--and he must do something--when he seated himself at his desk and drew in his chair his eye would fall on a photograph of the girl whose heart he had won, which had been taken just before their marriage, and it would strike him that the Phoebe in the photograph had a happier face than the Phoebe he had seen dusting his books in that very room a week ago: or if he put that disquieting thought resolutely on one side and took up his Bible and opened his commentary all his interest in an exact rendering of St. Paul's meaning in a difficult passage would be put to flight by a sudden consciousness that for the last six months, for the last year, the girl who was lying upstairs had led a very lonely life.

He was roused from restless pacing about his study by the entrance of the nurse, who said that Mrs. Morris was asking for him and was quite herself, and with tender alacrity he followed her upstairs to the sickroom.

Phoebe's hair was wild about her forehead, and her eyes were bright as stars. When they were alone she was silent for a moment, gazing upon her husband with an expression that was solemn and a little frightened-those beautiful eyes of hers had never seemed to him so tragically childlike as they did then, as they looked up at him from under the shadow of Death's wing.

"I have something to tell you. George," she said; the pretty little voice was low and breathless. "I talk nonsense sometimes, I know, and don't know what I am saying, but this is quite true. I have been very wicked for three months. I want to tell you what I have done. I have never

been religious. I got very tired of it at home. I oughtn't to have married you;

was so tiny to bring, she'd no business to do it .. and I used to think how I'd have dressed my child; but he shouldn't have had a stitch of machine in his smock and smaller pearl buttons at the back. And I got to hate going to church, and religion was so difficult. And then there was the missionary meeting and the lantern slides. There was one-oh, you must remember itit was called "the saddest sight in India"; there was a shrine and a mother and a baby putting flowers on to an image. And I wished I could do something like that. And I saw a painted wooden picture with gold on it in a shop, and I bought it, and I took it home and hid it in my bedroom. And I lit candles and put flowers before it. and it was very wonderful, and I said my prayers and God seemed nearer than He used to be. But I know it must have been a false god, and that all the time I was a heathen. And if I heard you coming upstairs I used to blow the candles out and hide the image away. I know it was very wrong; but, you see I wanted so much to be religious, because I knew you were disappointed that I was only pretty; and indeed I meant to leave it off when I had got to like going to church and could understand your sermons. ... And if I die I want you to marry someone else-someone who could talk to you about the sermon and speak at mothers' meetings. I don't mind who it is. Oh, don't cry, George. I'm so sorry I've been a heathen, but it can't be helped now; and if I get better I'll put it away in the box-room... . . And, dear, I said that I didn't want to be prayed for in

church; it always sounds as if someone was going to die; but if you think it would look odd, as I'm a clergyman's wife, I don't mind. I daresay it's silly of me to be frightened about it. And now kiss me, and say you forgive me, and I'll go to sleep."

Phoebe slept off and on all through the afternoon, and Morris began to indulge a hope that she might pull through after all. But about two o'clock in the morning, as he sat miserable and exhausted by the fire downstairs, the nurse came to him.

"She's delirious again," she said, "and keeps talking about some candles she wants lighted. She says she wants you to bring the taper they light the gas with. Perhaps it would quiet her." When he entered the sick-room with the long taper in his hand, it seemed a lovely ghost with wild eyes and querulous rose-leaf mouth that beckoned him to her side. "I thought you would never come," she said, in eager, breathless tones. "Take it out of the cupboard; it's behind my muslin dress. I must light the candles, for I'm going to die, and I want God to come near me just for the last time."

As if he were moving in some awful nightmare he unlocked the wardrobe and lifted out the ikon, and brought it to the girl.

"No, put it at the bottom of the bed, please, where I can look at it. Get your photograph, the one before we were married-it's in my handkerchief case in the little drawer nearest the window-and put these flowers on the ledge under the picture."

Her bidding was done with a trembling and tender obedience. The ikon was placed at the foot of the bed, the photograph was put on the ledge, and the still white narcissus and lily of the valley stood before the shrine, and George Morris watched her eyes fill The Cornhill Magazine.

with pleasure and excitement and with a gleam of childlike mysteriousness.

"Now light the long taper quick, and lift me up, and let me light the candles." And he lifted her up and gave her the taper, but her hand was much too weak to hold it. "Light them for me," she said; and he took the taper from her and lit the candles one by one. "Now say a prayer," she whispered, "and then we shall see."

With her hand in his, and with his eyes fixed on a brilliant mist in front of him, he faltered forth the Lord's Prayer.

There was silence: a silence which seemed to brood over them with bowed head and folded wings.

"George!" in a broken whisper; "there is someone coming; there is really someone. Is it my God who has come for the flowers?" Then with a fluttering cry: "But it's dark; it's all dark! Oh, why have you put my candles out?"

V.

The vicarage was full of the bustle which follows upon death: feet coming and going, subdued voices, rings at the bell; and through everything the weary, faint odor of lilies and moss. But George Morris was only conscious of these things as of something unholy, unnecessary and unsuitable, but far away. For the first time for many years he was thinking deeply; for the first time in his life he was dissatisfied with himself, and what was more, he knew that it was the first time. Across his complacent soul there had flashed the light of a misgiving: Death had made him pause and wonder.

In his study, with the door locked, he stood with the "heathen image" in his hands and looked at it by the light of day; and beneath the use of years and the neglect of years, through the tarnished gold and the defaced color, he saw the Christ.

Newton Adams.

We live in an age of wonders. New discoveries are being announced daily, usually from the United States of America. The latest is not the least remarkable. Some Americans have actually found out that American manners need improvement. The discovery applies only to the manners of the male sex: since it is a national superstition that the American woman is for all practical purposes perfect. and none of her countrymen would venture to hint a doubt on the subject in public. In private they do sometimes; but that is another story. According to the popular convention America is the land of chivalry, where Woman, old or young, ill-favored or beautiful, is protected from insult or even discourtesy as she is not in the effete countries of Europe. Like the Queen of France, in Burke's famous apostrophe, she is surrounded by an atmosphere of delicate and respectful homage, so that "ten thousand swords would leap from their scabbards," or ten thousand revolvers from hip-pockets, at the suggestion of an affront to her majestic purity. And the poor working-girl is treated with the politeness and consideration not always shown to highborn dames in less favored lands.

That is the convention. It does not quite correspond to the facts. Mr. Stafford, "a St. Louis millionaire," has found that out and published his discovery. Most people who have been about in American cities and kept their eyes open must have made it for themselves. In the "rush hour" at the underground and elevated railway-stations, in the swarming turmoil of the Brooklyn Bridge, in the crowded ferryboats, above all in the brutal struggle for sitting or standing or hanging room in the street cars women take their chances with the men and fare as they LIVING AGE. VOL. XLV 2380

do. They expect--or at any rate receive--no consideration on the ground of their sex. Like their male companions and competitors they push and jostle and use their heels and elbows. If they can get a seat by force or fraud, so to speak, they take it; if not, they cling to straps or perch unsteadily on the platforms of the cars wedged in amid the throng. We are tending that way ourselves, thanks to our adoption of the inconvenient and dangerous American methods of construction and arrangement on our local railways and tramways. But here the equality of the sexes is not yet quite established. A gentleman or a working-man will often give up his seat to a woman. In chivalrous Chicago, in luxurious New York, even in high-toned Boston, it would seldom occur to him to perform that little act of courteous self-sacrifice. This has shocked the St. Louis millionaire, who has devised appropriate means for putting it right. In America you practise virtue in a club or association, and remind yourself that you are doing so by wearing a distinctive button. There must be many good young men in the land of freedom who break out in an "eruption of buttons," like Dickens' page-boy. They wear one button to signify that they do not take alcoholic liquors, another to show that they avoid tobacco, a third to remind them that they belong to a "Smile Club" and must not give way to depression; and so on. Mr. Stafford, the St. Louis gentleman, proposes to add another adornment to this haberdasher's shop. There is to be a League of Politeness, the member whereof will wear a large blue button suitably inscribed, his test of enrolment being a pledge that he will "see that women are seated before men." Thus the distressed and wearied female entering à

public conveyance will only need to glance round at the nearest sitting blue-button-holder, and she will find herself, in the police-court reporter's phrase "accommodated with a seat." She ought to reply with a Shakespearean formula: "For this relief much thanks." It is far from certain that she will; the American woman too often accepts attentions from the other sex and does not even trouble to acknowledge them. So ladies will be provided with a white button which will bear the legend. "Thank you," by way both of reminder and of reward to the knights of the cerulean badge. From which it would appear that "casual" manners are not confined to the Transatlantic male. The demeanor of the divine American woman also leaves something to be desired at times. Those who have made her acquaintance in European hotels-have seen her scolding servants, badgering officials, bullying tradesmen, and screaming down conversation in public places, which things she does too often-may have their doubts as to her emollient influence at home.

The fact is that Woman-even American Woman-cannot have it both ways, as some New Yorkers who object to the blue button from St. Louis have already pointed out. The equality of the sexes is more clearly recognized in practice in the United States than in any country in the world. "Where thou goest," the American woman says to the male of her species, "I go"; and in effect she does. No avenues are closed to her on the ground of sex; she may hustle with the men in almost any sphere of activity, except politics, which oddly enough she hardly touches. In business she has a fair field, and she pushes her way in everywhere, from the clerk's desk to the general-manager's office, often thrusting out her masculine competitors in the process; and in the struggle

for success she is just as energetic and just as remorseless as they are, and quite as formidably egotistical. Confronted with this side of the feminine character, man is apt to exhibit the angles of his own. He finds it hard to be deferential and respectful towards a being who is neither his charmer nor his helpmate, but his assiduous rival, busily seeking an opportunity to push him from his stool if she wishes to oc

cupy it herself. He can hardly be expected to keep the goddess on her pedestal when she is so actively engaged in knocking him off his own. The participation of the two sexes in commerce, industry, and financial enterprise may lead to a rough camaraderie, but hardly to a protective chivalry. Men treat women as they treat one another, and see no reason why they should make social concessions to persons apparently so well able to take care of themselves. But women are still feminine enough to be inconsistent; and so while demanding and obtaining all the rights of equality they expect to receive those attentions which derive their whole meaning from a condition of inequality. If there is no stronger sex and no weaker, a generous forbearance seems out of place on either side. The store clerk, who has just lost a post because a woman has got it, may well feel unwilling to surrender his seat in the tramcar to one of his mercilessly successful rivals. In the universal struggle and drive of American life, men and women scrambling together in the dust for what they can get, the fine flowers of urbanity and cultured politeness do not come to blossom.

We need not be pharisaical about it. Our own manners are not so perfect that we can afford to be too scornful about those of our kinsfolk. Probably there is more true courtesy, in spite of a certain bluntness of outward bearing and a crude plainness of speech, among the