“I don’t think Reverend McAllister has read them all,” said Miss Pride with a malicious glint in her eyes. “As for their being worn, my dear, haven’t you heard of second-hand shops? But I’m not singling him out. I think the clergy has fallen into the sere and yellow leaf where learning is concerned. Last New Year’s Eve, I went to Estelle Hornblower’s at home and was literally forced by Lincoln Nephews to go into the little white parlor where six ministers were sitting about like a plenary council. Lincoln had said, ‘Lucy, I want to show you something straight out of Trollope.’ Three of the creatures were Anglo-Catholics and were, I do believe, the poorest Latinists I have ever seen. They were talking about On the Sublime and the Beautiful by Theophrastus! Well, the Reverend was there. ‘Hold on,’ says he, ‘Theophrastus isn’t your man. He wrote those little vignettes you call characters.’ ‘Nonsense,’ said one of the Anglicans, ‘I’m not so rusty on my English as not to know those little things—sometimes I believe they’re called hornbooks—were a seventeenth-century invention. But if Theophrastus didn’t write On the Sublime and the Beautiful, who did, pray?’ Do you know not one of them knew and Lincoln Nephews had to set them right?”

“Well, I wouldn’t have known,” said Miss Pride’s friend. “I’m so ignorant I would never be able to criticize the clergy in that way. But in case I’m some time asked, who did write it?”

There was an imperceptible pause. “Why, Lucretius,” said Miss Pride. “I thought everyone took that in with his mother’s milk.” But a little later on, she interrupted an anecdote her friend was telling to say, “You’ll tell me that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Didn’t I just say Lucretius wrote On the Sublime and the Beautiful? I must have been asleep, for as I perfectly well know it was Longinus.”

However much she deprecated in private his want of education, she was so cordial to the minister when he took a meal with her that I began to wonder if the old ladies’ conjecture had not been in part correct, that is, that she was anxious to make a match between her niece and his son. For it was only in the presence of these two men that she had nothing but good to say of the girl. Hopestill’s defiance of convention was transformed at these luncheons into her “high spirits, her vigor.” Her beauty, ordinarily spoken of as “something about her that her extreme clothes brings out which I find very strange,” was alluded to with respect. She became “intelligent” instead of “foxy.” But the Reverend was deaf to all these virtues of Miss Mather because he wanted to inform the company that some things had not changed with the times at all, that in reading Emerson’s letters he had discovered that the train fare from Concord to Boston was exactly the same in 1860 as it was today. The young man, to whom Hope’s graces were not news, as soon as possible effected a transition to another subject, less, I thought out of embarrassment than annoyance because he knew Miss Pride spoke with shameless insincerity. Usually, he would inquire of her how she was progressing with her memoirs. “Hush!” she would say in real consternation. “You must not broadcast that. I’d be the laughing-stock of Boston if anyone knew. But since you ask, I’ll tell you quite frankly that at times I despair. There is more to writing even of this sort than meets the eye. If I had a secretary, I feel that I could simply fly through them. The difficulty is that my sentences look so undistinguished when I see them in my own handwriting.” She would glance at me as though to say that she had not forgotten our conversation in her library, and the young doctor, following her eyes, would briefly ponder me.