“Not at all,” rejoined her friend warmly. “But remember it is three years since Mr. Barton first addressed Fanny, and although she ridiculed him then, she has become attached to him since. His devotion and constancy have really won her.” “If then she is in love with him,” said Sarah, “she should be satisfied with him; and if she is not she should not have married him; so arrange it any way you will, Mary, I do not see that she is deserving of much pity. If she fancies he has grown wiser during the last three years, so much the better for her; and if she knows he has not, so much the worse. Either way I have no sympathy to bestow upon her, Mary.” “Well, I have,” replied Mary. “I always pity a sensible person who does a silly thing. It is laying up themselves such a store of suffering for the future.” “’Pon my word, Mary, you amuse me,” said Sarah, laughing. “Now I might possibly feel for a fool who was committing a folly, as I would for a blind man who walked into the fire, but as to wasting my compassion on those who do such things with their eyes open, is really more than I can undertake. But then,” she continued, half contemptuously, “I have not your stock of sensibilities to go upon, and consequently, perhaps, do well to economize mine, or I certainly should exhaust them before they were called upon for a really deserving object.” “I consider all suffering as deserving pity,” replied Mary quietly. “That is more than I do,” returned Sarah with spirit. “Sin and suffering may go together, but I do not consider them equally deserving of compassion, or I should go to the jails and work-houses to bestow my sympathies.” “And if you did,” replied Mary, “I believe you would go to the places of all others where they would be most called forth. I never pass the city prison without thinking of the many unwritten tragedies it contains. Could we but know the true history of every heart, and the real anguish of every crime that have peopled its walls, I believe we should feel more sorrow than indignation for its unhappy inmates.” “Then,” replied Sarah, almost angrily, “I think it is well we do not. If in your fine sensibilities we are to lose all sense of right and wrong, I think your ‘unwritten tragedies’ had better remain ‘unwritten’ and unread. They would do infinitely more harm than good. ‘Sorrowing for the unhappy inmates of prisons and work-houses!’ Who would imagine you were talking of jail-birds and vagrants! This is the sickly sentimentality of the day, and I am sorry to see you falling into it, Mary. Let sin meet with its due punishment, and crime call forth the righteous indignation it merits, and then we may hope to see them somewhat diminished.” “That sin meets with its punishment, even in this world, there can be no doubt, Sarah,” said Mary.