as if she were being unexpectedly pelted with fine, cold rain.

"So, because your friend is dishonorable in a superlative degree, you are going to make it justify you in being dishonorable in a comparative?"

"I Aunt Miriam, what do you mean?"

"That because she is dishonorable as regards her indefinite engagement, therefore you are justified in telling on her?' "I am under no promise of secrecy," returned Adela quickly.

"Precisely; but the unspoken, understood confidence is all the more to be respected."

Miss Hatley's beautiful voice was like a soft bell buoy sounding a note of danger. There was another long silence, during which they looked steadily at each other, - two fine spirits struggling for the mastery.

"The conditions on which we are willing to accept life make life," said Miss Miriam. "I don't wish to persuade you, Adela; I wish simply that you should see the truth so clearly as to be able rightly to guide yourself. Are you willing to win Stanley Hewes on such terms as these, that, in order to detach him from Ethel, you shall tell him the truth? Suppose it had the effect of turning his heart to you: would you not wince always at the thought of the means you had used? Can you do it? Can you forfeit your own self-respect?"

Her voice broke on the last word, and she hid her face. Miss Hatley quietly waited. The Hatleys were not demonstrative people; with them comprehension was demonstration enough.

In an altered voice, however, Miss Miriam presently said, "Will it be of any help, Adela, to know that in my youth I had a like experience?"

Adela started, and lifted her bowed head.

"I need n't tell you the particulars," continued Miss Hatley, "they were more marked than yours; for I was actually engaged to the man whose affection I saw pass from me." She drew a long, deep breath. "I had my dark hour. I made my choice. And I learned that a clean-cut sorrow is far better than a mangled joy. I let life go, as I thought, and yet it all came back to me a thousandfold in other ways. What have you thought of doing, my Adela?" she asked tenderly.

The young girl rose and stood close to her aunt, and looked down on her with a face pale as it was resolute. “I can catch the early morning express at the Water Station," she said briefly. "I think I had better put myself beyond the reach of temptation. They won't miss me, or know or care why I've gone; and you can explain my absence, and apologize for it, just as you see fit, will you, aunt Miriam ?"

Miss Hatley took both the young hands in hers. "I respect you, Adela. I'll see that everything is ready, and will drive you over to the station myself." She drew her niece down, and for a moment held her close. Then Adela, without a word, went away. But Miss Miriam sat on, until a thrill of coolness stole into the room, a gray light shone through the east window, and the birds began to pipe up into song. Then she rose suddenly, swept off her books, put out the lamp, noiselessly closed the shutters, and went softly upstairs.

Ellen Duvall.

A CERTAIN provincialism has always been recognized as attaching to American history and life. It is a provincialism, as Lowell put it, more than thirty years ago, in A Great Public Character, due to the lack of "any great and acknowledged centre of national life," and hence to the lack of "the varied stimulus, the inexorable criticism, the manysided opportunity, of a great metropolis, the inspiring reinforcement of an undivided national consciousness." Noting the persistence of American traditions and habits, the small and slow impressions of foreign contacts, Lowell surmises that " we shall have to be content for a good while yet with our provincialism; "querying, still farther on, Is it "in some great measure due to our absorption in the practical, as we politely call it, meaning the material"?

Thus far Lowell is discussing the long familiar notion of provincialism, the notion associated with a rural habitat, as when Shakespeare describes "home-keeping youth" as having "homely wits," or as when Professor Barrett Wendell detects a note of provincialism in Emerson, paradoxical as that may seem in a Transcendentalist. The notion is that of the 66

narrowness or localism of thought or interest," as the Century Dictionary defines it for us, "characteristic of the inhabitants of a province as distinguished from the metropolis, or of the smaller cities and towns as distinguished from the larger." So geographical is still this notion as to lend subtle point to-day to the excuse for failing to visit his mother given by the man of fashion in The Wanderer, Madame d'Arblay's forgotten story of perhaps a hundred years ago, that it is "so rustic to have a mother." It remains true that demonstrative or conspicuous display of homely "old-fashioned " virtues, however spontaneous or

natural, suggests provincialism and provokes a smile, even when one at heart shares the sympathetic popular approval, - this, whether it be the case of President Garfield, who, in the presence of the immense throng at his inauguration, kissed his mother before he took the oath of office, or of President Loubet, who, on the day he first entered his native town as chief magistrate of the republic, stopped the procession on chancing to see his mother, descended from the carriage of state, and tenderly saluted her. This still persisting tradition of provincialism, which associates it with the "bringing up" of the "country boy" who became the American President, or of the "peasant boy" who became the French President, may soon be forced to give place to a new conception, that of the provincialism distinguishing the life of the metropolis and city even more than of the country. This new provincialism is hinted at by Lowell, in the essay already quoted, when he notes that "the stricter definition and consequent seclusion from each other of the different callings in modern times" obviously tend toward narrowing "the chance of developing and giving variety to character," and toward lessening "the interest in biography,” on another side, — the interest which the people of any one calling feel in those of other callings. The trend of modern life, by the pressure of competition demanding expert skill as the price of great success, is clearly away from mutuality of contact and interest. The pressure being strongest in the largest centre, it is in the metropolis or city that one is most struck by those conditions which constitute" the social menace of specialism."

Perhaps the first conspicuous reference in current comment to the new provincialism is to be found in the lament of a

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leading Boston paper over the decline in the art of club dining as practiced in that city, an editorial jeremiad published some years ago. The critic describes these club dinners as functions “highly formal in character," given up to "speeches and oratorical efforts," and lacking all "originality and spontaneity." On account of their sameness and tameness," their survival can only be attributed to those "gregarious feelings which so many men entertain, and which induce them to put themselves out, as cattle will, for the pleasure merely of rubbing their noses against each other." The attraction secured for these dinners is almost exclusively "exotic talent," for "exotic talent," for "few, if any, of the members have anything to impart; or if they have, their associates have no desire to hear it." While most careful observers of urban social life would hardly risk going the length of this Boston editor in severe and sweeping arraignment, all would doubtless testify to a like general indifference to what concerns a calling not one's own. Even eminence in one calling may fail of recognition among educated men of other callings. And this is one of the more hopeless aspects of the situation. The broadening influence of a higher education seems so often lost after but a few years of absorption in some special career, more particularly in a large city; the once intelligent interest in other kinds of careers having suffered apparent atrophy. The average college man of business or the money-getting profession -some professions are still left to us where money-getting is counted as secondary — is so close a copy of any other business or professional man that, in talk and point of view, a stranger would never guess his "superior education" but for a chance allusion. Take, for illustration, a university club in a large city, perhaps it would not be unfair to take the largest city, New York, from its size and opportunity drawing to it men of brains and ambition from every

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section and of every calling, thus "setting the pace" for, and in a growing sense representative of, American metropolitan and city life, and do we find there evidence of that acquaintance with the best thinking of the day which, by Matthew Arnold's standard, should mark a club of cultured men? Is it not often true that the one obvious distinguishing mark is the comparative emptiness of the really attractive club library? Is it not also often true that one may there encounter the most surprising ignorance of names which the magazine editor would call "household words"? It was at a dinner party at the University Club of New York, to cite a personal experience, that some one passed on a good story ("good" because of the person whom it concerned) of a well-known man of letters, a constant contributor to the magazines, one who has been talked of for the presidency of more than one leading university in the East, only to have the question asked, after the acquiescently polite laugh had subsided, "And who is Mr. Blank?" The man who had passed on the story had himself to give the answer, after a short but hopeless pause, a case of humiliation in a way like explaining the point of one's joke. It was on a "Story-Tellers' Night" at the same club, when one of the best known writers in New York itself arose to speak,