CHAPTER VII.
GRADUAL ENFRANCHISEMENT.
“If the Commune come, or when it comes,” said Dr. Richards; “and meanwhile ‘Prices’ is acting as training-school, eh? I should like to make Mr. Clare’s acquaintance, Louis. Suppose you tell him that my old enemy, rheumatism, has me by the heels again, so that it is impossible for me to call upon him, and ask him to come and dine with us on Sunday. I’d write a note if I could hold a pen; or you might write for me, Alice.”
“He’s not one to stand on ceremony if he thought you really wanted him to come,” replied Louis. “Don’t bother Mrs. Richards. I’ll tell him.”
“And the little priest,” said Dr. Richards, “Father McClosky. I don’t know a more well-meaning little man; bring him along, my boy. And Harrison and his son”—
“Do you feel quite able for such a large party, Fred?” asked Mrs. Richards gently. She was sewing diligently, and her face had a careworn look, which deepened as her husband enumerated his guests, in a way that did not escape at least one pair of watchful, tender eyes.
“If it puts you out, my dear,” returned her husband, somewhat testily—he was in his great arm-chair, poor man! unable to put a foot to the ground or move a finger without pain—“if it puts you out at all—but I don’t see how it can. Just order the whole dinner bodily from ‘Prices,’ and have done with it.”
Mrs. Richards gave a rather difficult smile. The rules at “Prices” involved strictly cash payments, and cash was just now by no means a drug in the market. But she could not give this reason to her husband.
“There doesn’t seem to be much object,” she said instead, “in asking persons to dine, and ordering exactly the dinner they would have at home.”
“That can’t possibly apply to the Harrisons; but if you are too high-toned to ask a carpenter to your house”—
“She don’t mind a shoemaker,” interposed Louis, smiling. “Dr. Harrison and Mr. Edgar are pretty sure to drop in during the afternoon, you know, doctor; and don’t you think you could study Mr. Clare to better advantage if you had him all to himself?”
“Oh! we couldn’t spare Father McClosky,” said Alice, with a grateful glance at the boy; “he is so merry and good-humored, he puts new life into one.”
“I believe you two are in league,” grumbled the doctor. “Whatever one of you says the other one swears to.”
He would have been thoroughly convinced of it had he been present at an interview that took place between them before Louis went home that night.
“What we are to do, how we are to manage, Louis, I really can’t see,” said poor Alice. “The doctor has some bills out, but I can’t say when they will be paid, and, until then, I have literally not a penny—that I can use—except what I can earn by the sewing you got for me to do.”
“Frau Anna can give you as much as you want,” replied Louis; “her department is doing a big business just now. I hope you won’t be angry, Mrs. Richards, but I talked matters over with Miss Sally, and she made some very practical suggestions.”
“Did she!” replied Alice rather coldly; but Louis was not easily discouraged, and went on to say that Miss Sally had averred that dealing at “Prices” was no economy unless one made a thorough job of it. “Buying a cake here and a loaf of bread there is all nonsense,” Miss Sally had said; “let her shut up her kitchen and discharge her cook, and she’ll see the difference.”
“It will save work as well as money,” said Louis. “By the by, should you mind if Freddy could get some work to do?”
“Freddy! what could he do, poor boy!”
“Well,” replied Louis, reddening deeply, “it seems that the slippers I—we—made for—for—Miss Randolph were very much admired. Miss Dare ordered a pair just like them before she left, to be sent after her to Paris, but her mother will pay for them; and at least twenty pairs have been ordered since then, for Commencement slippers. Annie Rolf, you know, works in the pottery, in the decorating-room; and of course hasn’t time for such a job as that; and if Freddy could do it, we could get a good price for him, for the extra work, and it would be a great accommodation to us.”
“Freddy will be delighted,” said Alice quietly; “and—you know what a help the money will be, Louis.” She stroked the fair hair from his brow with a motherly touch, thinking how much older and paler he had grown in these last weeks. But Alice did not know how her own troubles had helped Louis. His was the temperament to resist the first force of any shock, and sink beneath the consequent re-action. He had not resented or despised Pinkie’s scorn, for there was no anger in his heart towards her; but he had rallied his forces to the defence of a life, a world, which he felt intuitively were in essentials, in aim and possibility, nobler and purer than that from which she ventured to look down upon him. Only when she was far away did he realize that hope, light, and color had gone out of his life so utterly as is only possible at eighteen. Then, he had one day found Alice in tears, and, when his tender questioning had drawn her troubles from her, Louis had gained a new object to live for.
So now when she said, “I don’t know what I should do without you, Louis,” he clasped and kissed her like a son.
“I don’t believe I could have loved my own mamma better than I do you,” he said; “why can’t I work for you as a son would do?”
But Alice shook her head. Not while they could keep body and soul together in any other way, she said, and perhaps she judged rightly as to what was best for herself, though Louis’ suggestion might have been best for him. But one cannot receive benefits involving money—or often confer them—under our present social system, without certain moral deterioration; it will be different when the next development of the kingdom has made it impossible to look upon one’s own things without looking also on the things of others.
Louis did not know, however, of the one Tantalus-drop in Alice’s cup. Henry Randolph, upon leaving home, had been careful to inform her of a very liberal sum of money which lay in bank subject to her order. She had told her husband of it; for it was very bitter to her to be obliged to conceal from him even a thought; and—he had left her at liberty to do as she would.
“A useless wretch like me,” he had said, “unable to take care of his own family, has no right to quarrel with the hand that saves them from starvation. Only—don’t tell me, Alice, which loaf of bread is bought with that money, for I think a crumb of it would choke me.”
“I will never touch a penny of it, Fred, until it is a question of starvation,” she had answered quietly. Then he had kissed her, and called her his good little wife, but no power on earth could have kept him in the house that day, though the March wind was keen to the dividing asunder of bone and marrow, and the rain heavy enough to drown a cuttle-fish.
So the consequence had been a sharp attack of rheumatism, from which he was only beginning to recover. And it was only human that, in the first glow of convalescence, he should feel aggrieved at having his social impulses curbed by a pecuniary bridle. For, indeed, never having in his life felt the sting of genuine poortith cauld, it was always difficult for Dr. Richards to remember that five dollars are only equal, after all, to five hundred cents; and that, while actually having nothing, a man cannot, in our present stage of development, virtually possess all things.
The Sunday dinner was a perfect success, Louis having spurred on Miss Sally to the concocting of a new, and, as she called it, “researchy,” bill of fare.
“And if they could have had just the same at ‘Prices’ they’ll never know it,” Louis had said to the giver of the feast; “for they’ve never had just these dishes there yet, and in all probability never will, all at the same time; so you see it will be the same to them as if you had cooked it all yourself.”
“And a good deal better to me,” said Alice, laughing.
The guests were in fine spirits and appetite, and cleared their plates in royal style, Father McClosky averring that preaching was a mighty fine thing for the appetite, av it was bad intirely for the pocketbook.
“On that score, I’ve only a right to half-rations,” said Ernest Clare, laughing; “for though I have offered my services to a certain overworked rector in our neighborhood, he only trusted me to read the lessons this morning.”
“Sure he was afraid ye’d be after preaching Socialism if he let ye into his pulpit, from the text of the eleventh commandment, ‘Thou shalt surely divide,’” said Father McClosky.
“I wouldn’t have done it,” returned the other; “there is only one rich man in the congregation, and it would have been decidedly personal. However, if I had preached from ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ I don’t know that he could have taken offence.”
“And you think they mean the same?” asked Dr. Richards.
“Don’t you?” returned the man who never argued.
“In so far as neither one is practised or practicable, I suppose they do.”
“You are entirely right, Dr. Richards. My text should have been ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy strength;’ then the other would follow as a practical consequence.”
“Humph! I suppose you mean that in a Pickwickian sense?”
“Did you ever know a man who loved God with heart, soul, and strength, and did not love his neighbor as himself?”
“I never knew—anything about it. Great heavens! can I read a man’s heart, and say whom he loves?”
“Only your own,” said Ernest Clare, half smiling, yet meeting the doctor’s eyes with all the full, sweet, solemn power of his own.
The eyes fell, their owner hesitated how to reply. It was impossible to consider the clergyman a presuming meddler; he had pried into no man’s individual consciousness; nay, had even quietly stated his conviction that the sacred penetralia could be entered only by the man himself.
Consciousness.
Did not the word itself—knowing with—imply another Presence within that Holy of holies?
Dr. Richards, as I have said before, was not a practised etymologist.
But had his emphatic denial of all power to read another man’s heart been entirely sincere? Had not a sudden glory in a pair of liquid brown eyes beside him answered for one at least who loved both God and his neighbor? This thought, it is certain, came to the father’s heart, and, because it came, he could not reply lightly or scoffingly to that sudden argumentum ad hominem.
Mr. Clare did not wait to be answered. When the doctor was again ready to listen, he found a brisk discussion going on of a certain book which had of late appeared, purporting to describe a Socialistic Utopia in the year of our Lord 2000.
“Oh! go away with your Socialism,” Father McClosky was saying vehemently; “sorra a word but ‘the Nation’ is in the man’s mouth from first to last; and a mighty fine word it is, too, with a history and a meaning in the old country, and without the bad associations of Socialism.”
“Right, Father McClosky!” exclaimed the doctor. “When Socialists re-organize under the name of Nationalists, they will play a very strong card.”
“I’m not a particularly brilliant statesman,” said Mr. Clare, “and you may be quite right about the strong card; but, from my point of view, I confess I should be sorry to see it played. There is too much organization now, on that side of the fence.”
Dr. Richards took time for thought before he replied to this. He had come to feel a little shy of contradicting the man who never argued.
“As political parties now stand in this country,” he said slowly, “another one would but add so much more to the corruption and bribery at present existing. Is that what you mean?”
“Precisely. As matters now stand, the ideas which I am quite willing to call National are gaining new adherents every day, irrespective of party. And when a plant has once taken root, it isn’t well to be digging it up every day or two, to see how the process is going on.”
“You are as sanguine as Bellamy himself, Mr. Clare,” said Alice. “I wonder if he really believes in his Boston of the future?”
“He takes care to slur over the embryonic stages,” observed the doctor, laughing, “and present to us his Phœnix, the Nation, fully grown.”
“You must remember we are passing through the embryonic stage now,” said Mr. Clare, “though, I confess, I should have liked a few particulars of our chipping the shell, and just how we looked when we first came out.”
“Ah! there you put your finger on the weak point. He insists that the shell was chipped, not cut by the sword; and I don’t see the slightest possibility of that.”
“One never does till the hour strikes.”
“The hour!” said Father McClosky, “sure, it’s the hour and the Man, too, that we want. Where’s the Man?”
“Perhaps not yet born,” said Ernest Clare, smiling; “perhaps a baby in his mother’s arms; perhaps a schoolboy, studying the Monroe Doctrine and parsing the Declaration of Independence; perhaps working at some trade or profession: guiding the plough, like Cincinnatus; surveying his native land, like Washington; or practising law, like Abraham Lincoln.”
“You are very sanguine,” said Dr. Richards, between a smile and a sigh; “I wish I were half so much so. But, whatever I might wish, I don’t venture to hope for the establishment of a Commune, at least in my time or without violence. It doesn’t seem to me at all a practicable idea.”
“The abolition of slavery was not practicable, Dr. Richards; it was simply done.”
“And done by the sword, Mr. Clare. Although you never argue, you will be able to remember, perhaps,” said the doctor, smiling, “that I don’t dispute the possibility of establishing, by violence, a Commune that should be as short-lived as those Parisian affairs.”
“Our own Republic was founded by the sword,” said Alice.
“But with a difference, and in different times,” returned the clergyman. “One must always take one’s century into account, you know; though in any age it is lawful and right to kick a man out who has broken into one’s house. But, as to slavery, do you call the negro question a settled one?”
“Well, they are legally their own masters, but whether they are better off in essentials is an open question.”
“Some day, Dr. Richards, take up some thoughtful history which you already know pretty thoroughly, and read it with this question in your mind, ‘Is any question ever so decided by the sword as to leave everybody better off all round?’ Isn’t there always a residuum of evil to somebody—and usually to everybody—caused by the very means used to effect a cure?”
“Just as the homœopaths say of allopathic remedies,” interposed Alice roguishly; “one must recover from the disease first, and the medicine afterwards.”
“Passing over that slur on my profession, which I scorn to notice,” said the doctor, with a disdainful glance at his wife, “I agree with you entirely, Mr. Clare; but might not one say the same of everything else in the world, besides war and allopathy? Is not the true reading of the curse laid on Adam, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, and it shall not agree with thee after thou eatest it’?”
“Well, no,” replied Ernest Clare, laughing; “bread always agrees with a healthy stomach, I think, when it is pure. The trouble in the slavery business was that the bread was not pure, in fact, was scarcely to be called bread at all, and the stomachs were not healthy.”
“Southern fire-eaters!” observed the doctor with a smile.
“And Northern interference,” said the other. “Of course, the question was not a simple one between slavery and freedom, but was complicated by demagogy and sectional prejudice, as well as the old story of Cavalier and Puritan. But, leaving these points out of sight for the moment, it seems to me that the fault of the war lay chiefly with the side which on other grounds I sympathize with most cordially, the abolition party.”
“Do you think it well to discuss those old questions?” asked Alice. “The war is over and done with, and in my opinion ought to be forgotten.”
“If it were done with,” said Mr. Clare. “But ought the past ever to be forgotten? For my part, I can never look upon it as a ‘dead past,’ but as a wise, living teacher, whose lessons are very necessary and full of significance. But, of course, no subject can be discussed at your table that is disagreeable to you,” he added courteously.
“Oh! I was merely speaking generally,” she said, smiling; “don’t let me interrupt you. Dr. Richards’s pessimism is contagious, perhaps; but if the war can really teach us any valuable lessons, it would be a pity not at least to know what they are.”
Ernest Clare looked at her very gravely, very kindly before he replied. There was to him something infinitely touching in the atmosphere of this home, its intellect, its refinement, purity, and brave self-devotion, and its utter hopelessness. After a moment he said gently,—
“We should be poor indeed without the past, Mrs. Richards; our own individual past, I mean. Don’t you remember Dickens’s ‘Haunted Man’?” Then, with a sudden change of tone,—
“I think I learned my horror of organization from the abolitionists, though I am not sure that that was their mistake. If every man’s motives had been pure, and every man’s heart full of love to white and black brother alike, they might have organized and welcome; but it is hard to have a party without party spirit, and with every member added the difficulty as to loving the sinner and hating the sin increases in a geometrical ratio.”
“That’s because it’s so much aisier to love the sin and hate the sinner,” put in Father McClosky, whose orator’s appetite was, by this time, partially satisfied.
“I should not object to a party,” said Dr. Richards thoughtfully, “nor to party spirit, provided it kept within bounds. But I think we ought to have followed England’s example, and indemnified our slave-holders.”
“Even though they could not show a clear title to human souls?” asked Mr. Clare suggestively.
“Souls! I really can’t say, as I have never dissected one, what a soul is. But, as to title, I might not be able to show a clear title to this house; yet I inherited it from my father, and he built it, or, rather, had it built by another man. Now, suppose the other man stole the materials or the money to buy them; the house would, no doubt, by moral right belong to him from whom the money was stolen. Would the government be, therefore, justified in forcibly ejecting me, for his benefit, I and mine being entirely innocent in the matter?”
“The point is, it seems to me,” said Mr. Clare, “whether we aim to get rid of evil in itself, or only of a wrong to some individual or class. In this case, the wrong to the slave was abolished at the expense of another wrong to the slaveholder, a wrong forbidden by the law which bids us to overcome evil with good, the only method by which it can be overcome. The old abolition party tried to overcome it with evil, by stirring up strife and preaching insurrection; then the Southern pride and obstinacy determined to fight for their peculiar institution, and the result is that the large majority of our negroes are worse off, morally and physically, than they were as slaves; and the negro question is a more puzzling problem to-day than it was in ’61.”
“But would not their condition have been the same had they been set free by purchase?” asked Alice.
“No; for the most thoughtful minds on both sides favored their gradual enfranchisement and colonization in Liberia, which would have been the making of them as a nation. But I see no hope of anything like that now, unless we get the Commune without violence: in which case, among so many sweeping changes, one more or less will not signify materially,” said Mr. Clare.
“We seem to return to our muttons, whether we would or no,” observed the doctor. “Here is Monsieur Tonson come again. But I think I see what you mean by your lessons of the past; only, how the wrongs of the poor man are to be redressed without violence or wrong to the rich, is too hard a nut for me to crack.”
“Gradual enfranchisement,” said Mr. Clare, “and brotherly love on both sides.”
Dr. Richards shrugged his shoulders. “It is a question of ‘next things,’” said the clergyman. “Some day I will read you a little poem, if you like, about that. The idea is, that we can see only one step at a time, can live but one moment at a time; and that, if each of these is clearly right, the end must be the same. Of course, the application is only to individual life, but I think it is also true of nations; we can see but one step at a time. It has been objected to Socialism that no practicable plan for securing it has ever been suggested. To my mind, that is its most hopeful feature.”
“My dear sir, do you wish to stun us with your paradoxes?”
“The kingdom of God cometh as a thief in the night,” said Mr. Clare earnestly. “I think though—in fact, I am sure—that we can see the next step clearly enough,” he added.
“And that is?”—
“A more equitable division of profits between employer and employed, which, by the definition, would certainly wrong nobody, and could not be carried out by violence,” he added, smiling. “Public opinion is steadily growing in that direction, and by and by it will become a matter for legislation; for one good result of our election-machine is that if the great mass of the people want any definite thing they will infallibly get it.”
“And the result will be that most of the employers and stockholders will find out that the change has been to their interest as well as that of their employés,” said the doctor. “Go on, Mr. Clare; you would convert me to optimism if—I had a leetle more confidence in human nature.”
“Sure, human nature is capable of infinite pawsibilitees,” said Father McClosky; “though, when it comes to probabilitees,” he added thoughtfully, “a man must look out for storms.”
“I don’t overlook the danger of storms,” said Mr. Clare; “on the contrary, I have pointed it out.”
“Well, well, meteorology notwithstanding,” interposed Dr. Richards, “when you had secured your division of profits, Mr. Clare, and thus, we will say, obviated all future strikes and commercial crises, as, I presume, would be the result”—
“I suppose it would, Dr. Richards.”
“Well, what would you do next?”
If he hoped to catch Ernest Clare tripping, he missed his mark.
“I’ll tell you, when it is next,” the other replied, smiling. “Perhaps, some restriction upon the amount of property which a man may leave by will to any one heir”—
“Would that be equitable?” asked Alice.
“If the law claims—as it does—the right to regulate testamentary dispositions at all, I don’t see why one should draw the line just here,” replied Mr. Clare. “However, I don’t lay much stress on such a regulation as that; there would be so many ways of evading it, unless it were so worded as to be tyrannous. The next step that I fancy I see sometimes, when the clouds lift a little, is a modified and modern version of the old Jewish land-laws; the main principle of which was that the land belonged, not to individuals, but to the nation or tribe.”
“Eh? I might be better up than I am in Hebrew antiquities, but I thought that at the Jubilee the land, if it had been sold, reverted to the heirs of the original possessor,” said the doctor.
“The fact that he was unable to alienate the land shows that he possessed merely a life-interest. And you know that not one inch of ground was allowed to pass from one tribe to another.”
“I see,” said Dr. Richards; “well! but if the step from the present régime to your modified Hebraism equals one hundred, from modified Hebraism to Socialism equals only about one. I see only a solitary obstacle; but that will make one equal to the m’th power of one hundred.”
“An impossible equation,” said Mr. Clare, smiling. “What is the obstacle?”
“This. Given your equitable division and your Jewish land-laws—why, the people would be too well contented to take any more steps until that state of society had become as rotten as the present.”
“Revolutions never go backward,” returned the other, “and, rotten as our present state of society may be, we are farther on than any nation of the world, and our real progress so far has been steadily in the right direction.”
“Humph! as you never argue, I suppose you can’t prove that.”
“Oh, no! but I can give you a few instances,” said the clergyman, laughing. “Take the idea of duty or allegiance to a man—or woman—who claims it simply as his birthright, because his ancestors oppressed ours, whom they allowed only such rights as were actually extorted from them. Unless your mother was an Englishwoman, as mine was, Dr. Richards, you can hardly realize how utterly obsolete such an idea has become in America. I don’t deny that we feel a sneaking kindness for the royal family of Great Britain; but anything like duty or loyalty”—
“Why should we be loyal to Queen Victoria or Kaiser Wilhelm, either?” asked Louis, speaking for the first time. “She’s a good woman, and he’s a great soldier; but that has nothing to do with us.”
“That is exactly what I mean,” said Ernest Clare. “The idea of superiority of birth is rapidly decaying, Dr. Richards; we have almost come to believe that all men are created free and equal; after a bit, we shall come to the ‘inalienable rights.’ I am not at all afraid but that the Declaration will take care of itself. As for your impossible equation, you must bear in mind the conditions of the problem. If ‘gradual enfranchisement’ equal x, and brotherly love on both sides equal y, then, indeed, 1 + y = x + 100m might be possible and welcome! I won’t stickle for the form of a commune, so long as I have the spirit.”
“Ah—h!” cried Father McClosky, “ye’ve got to firm ground at last, ye bog-trotter! the very ground where the Church has been intrenched for eighteen hundred years!”
“And high time,” said Ernest Clare with quiet intensity, “that she should take up the ark of the Lord, and bear it across Jordan into the Promised Land.”
“I don’t quite understand you,” said the doctor curiously. He was intensely interested in the theories and beliefs of his new friend, which, as the reader may have observed, he only opposed to draw out more fully.
“Why, you know, of course, that communism is the theory of the Church,” said Mr. Clare. “Marion Crawford brings that out very well in his ‘Saracinesca;’ but Crawford—I hope I don’t do him injustice—seems to me a dilettante in religion and politics, who doesn’t believe anything deeply enough to fight for it.”
“Aha!” cried Father McClosky, “there’s the blood of ould Ireland at last!”
“Fighting with one’s pen is quite in accordance with the spirit of the age,” replied Mr. Clare calmly.
“But not argument, hey?”
“Not unless you are sure of convincing your man,” was the reply. “Well, Dr. Richards, to take up our subject where it was broken off by this discourteous Irishman, I have sometimes fancied that one of the differences of opinion between St. Paul and the Church of Jerusalem may have been that they wished to insist on the Gentile converts holding all their possessions in common, as did those at Jerusalem, while St. Paul, as a man of the world, saw that this was inexpedient, if not impossible, at that time.”
“A bit of original exegesis that is truly edifying,” observed Father McClosky.
“I don’t preach it as truth, only suggest it as an hypothesis,” said Mr. Clare good-humoredly; “but, there is some authority for it, ’tis of a piece with his treatment of the slave question, and—not impossible, which, I suppose, is the most one can say for it. He was not one to throw an unnecessary stumbling-block in a weak brother’s path; and, besides, it is only the spirit of Communism that is essential to Christianity.”
“Do you ever contradict yourself just a little bit?” asked the doctor.
“As an Irishman, no doubt I do,” was the reply, “but in this case the contradiction is only in seeming. For I believe—though perhaps wrongly—that the time is at hand when we may have both the form and the spirit. Nay, I think—I am sure—that if the human race is to advance much farther than it has done, money must be abolished, the temple of Mammon overthrown, and the Almighty Dollar perish in the ruins. That is the crusade in which I would engage every man, woman, and child who bears the name of Christian, officered by those who call themselves God’s ambassadors.”
“I don’t know,” said Alice doubtfully; “one can do so much good with money.”
“One must do harm with it,” was the reply. “Besides, there ought not to be the need of doing good—of that sort; and under the Commune, where alone it would be possible to dispense with money, there would be no good to be done except with love.”
“Mr. Clare,” said Alice, “what would you do if you were a rich man?”
“I thank God I am not,” he replied; “but if I had inherited wealth that was honestly come by in the first instance, I hope I should do my duty in that state of life unto which it had pleased God to call me.”
“And if the money were coined from the blood and tears of your fellow-beings,” asked the doctor, “would you take it, or starve?”
“Starve!” said Ernest Clare. “Ah! Mrs. Richards shakes her head, she thinks me a terrible fanatic; but only because she doesn’t understand that every age has its own battles to fight, and this against Mammon is ours. I see a very pretty little bronze statuette of the flying Mercury on the bracket yonder, Mrs. Richards, and there is a head of the Capitoline Jove on my own mantel-piece, which I value exceedingly. Yet what would a Christian of the first century have thought of possessing such images? they who would not sit at meat in an idol’s temple, and died in agony rather than offer one grain of incense before an idol’s altar! That, you see, was their battle. Mammon is our enemy. Truly ‘an idol is nothing in this world; and there is none other God but one’; yet, ‘if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend.’”
He was silent for a moment; for the look exchanged between husband and wife told him that he had spoken more wisely than he knew. Then Dr. Richards said lightly,—
“Well, if ever I turn Christian, Mr. Clare, you shall have the glory of my conversion.”