"I have overheard painful comparisons, Miss Torrington, between times past and present, and I am sorry for it. I really would not willingly add to the sorrow and suffering my race has brought upon you. Do not go and sit by yourself and weep till you are sick, as I have done many's the time and oft. Let us take a very slow ramble into that very thickest part of the Reverend Mr. Cartwright's shrubbery, where the sun never enters--shall we? We are quite fine enough for such godly people, without any more dressing for dinner. So we can sit in the shade till the last bell rings." "I should like nothing so well," replied Rosalind: and hastily skirting the sunny lawn, they took their stations on a seat which the morning sun visited as if on purpose to prevent its being dark and damp, but which for the rest of the twenty-four hours remained almost as cool as if there were no such globe in the heavens. "We are growing very seriously gay, Rosalind,--are we not?" said Henrietta in a lighter tone than she usually indulged in. "Fancy-fairs used to be the exclusive property of the worldlings; but it seems that we are now to come in for a share of their fraudulent charity,--and their vain benevolence:--not a bad pun that, Rosalind, if I had but intended to make one? But do tell me if you do not think Mr. Cartwright has a magnificent taste?" "Very--for a person who professes himself so given to the contemplation of things above the world. But to tell you the truth, Henrietta, I am much less surprised at the vain-glorious manner in which he displays his newly-acquired riches, than at the continuance of his saintly professions. I expected that the Vicarage of Wrexhill would have been resigned, and all the world peaceably permitted to be just as wicked as they liked, without Mr. Cartwright of Cartwright Park giving himself the least trouble concerning it." "You little know the nature of the clique to which he belongs. That they value pleasure fully as much as other men, is quite certain; that they struggle for riches with anxiety as acute, and hold it with a grasp as tight, as any human beings can do, it were equally impossible to doubt: but that power is dearer to them than either, is a truth well known to all who have sat within the conventicle, and watched its professors, as I have done." "But how can a man so addicted to self-indulgence, as it is evident Mr. Cartwright is, endure the sort of trouble which the charge of a living must inevitably bring with it?--especially in the style so universally practised, I believe, by all serious ministers--that of interfering with the affairs of every individual in their parish."