It was as if this recognition had been threshed out between them as fundamental to the honest view of their success.

"Well," she continued, "I recall how I felt, about Kitty and Dotty, that even if we had already then been more 'placed,' or whatever you may call what we are now, it still wouldn't have been an excuse for wondering why others couldn't obligingly leave me more exalted by having, themselves, smaller ideas.

For those," she said, "were the feelings we used to have." "Oh yes," he responded philosophically--"I remember the feelings we used to have." Maggie appeared to wish to plead for them a little, in tender retrospect--as if they had been also respectable.

"It was bad enough, I thought, to have no sympathy in your heart when you HAD a position.

But it was worse to be sublime about it--as I was so afraid, as I'm in fact still afraid of being--when it wasn't even there to support one." And she put forth again the earnestness she might have been taking herself as having outlived; became for it--which was doubtless too often even now her danger--almost sententious.