"
"I should think you would value his acquaintance beyond anything,"
said the girl. "Is he just as earnest and simple as he is in the
pulpit?"
"He's just the same, every way." Lemuel went a little further; "I
knew him before I came to Boston. He boarded one summer where we
lived." As he spoke he thought of the grey, old, unpainted house,
and of his brother-in-law with his stocking-feet on the stove-
hearth, and his mother's bloomers; he thought of his arrest, and his
night in the police-station, his trial, and the Wayfarer's Lodge;
and he wondered that he could think of such things and still look
such a girl in the face. But he was not without that strange joy in
their being unknown to her which reserved and latent natures feel in
mere reticence, and which we all experience in some degree when we
talk with people and think of our undiscovered lives.
They went on a long time, matching their opinions and feelings about
many things, as young people do, and fancying that much of what they
said was new with them. When he came away after ten o'clock, he
thought of one of the things that Sewell had said about the society
of refined and noble women: it was not so much what they said or did
that helped; it was something in them that made men say and do their
best, and help themselves to be refined and noble men, to make the
most of themselves in their presence.
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