With a heart
full of tender regrets for the mistakes and errors of the past, with
unspeakable contempt for the life she was living, and with vain
yearnings for something better, she rose and determined to join the
throngs that were pressing into the churches. Hastily prepared for the
street, she went out, and soon, her heart responding to the Christmas
music, and her voice to the Christmas utterances from the altar, she
strove to lift her heart in devotion. She felt the better for it. It was
an old habit, and the spasm was over. Having done a good thing, she
turned her ear away from the suggestions of her good angel, and, in
turning away, encountered the suggestions of worldliness from the other
side, which came back to her with their old music. She came out of the
church as one comes out of a theater, where for hours he has sat
absorbed in the fictitious passion of a play, to the grateful rush and
roar of Broadway, the flashing of the lights, and the shouting of the
voices of the real world.
Mr. Belcher called that evening, and she was glad to see him. Arrayed in
all her loveliness, sparkling with vivacity and radiant with health, she
sat and wove her toils about him. She had never seemed lovelier in his
eyes, and, as he thought of the unresponsive and quiet woman he had left
behind him, he felt that his home was not on Fifth Avenue, but in the
house where he then sat.
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