that Theodore keeps his patience with me. His education since we parted should tend logically to make him despise me. He has studied, thought, suffered, loved—loved those very plain sisters and nieces. Poor me! how should I be virtuous? I have no sisters, plain or pretty!—nothing to love, work for, live for. Friend Theodore, if you are going one of these days to despise me and drop me in the sacred name of comfort, come to the point at once, and make an end of our common agony!
He is troubled, too, about Mr. Sloane. His attitude towards the bonhomme quite passes my comprehension. It's the queerest jumble of contraries. He penetrates him, contemns him—yet respects and admires him. It all comes of the poor boy's shrinking New England conscience. He's afraid to give his perceptions a fair chance, lest, forsooth, they should look over his neighbor's wall. He'll not understand that he may as well sacrifice the old man for a lamb as for a sheep. His view of the gentleman, therefore, is a perfect tissue of cobwebs—a jumble of half-way sorrows, and wide-drawn charities, and hair-breadth 'scapes from utter damnation, and sudden platitudes of generosity; fit, all of it, to make an angel curse!
"The man's a perfect egotist and fool," say I, "but I like him." Now Theodore likes him—or
