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COMPROMISES

Not so this Quaker girl, reticent even with herself; avoiding, even in the secret pages of her journal, all gossip about her own soul, all spiritual outpourings, all the dear and inexhaustible delights of egotism. She notes down, indeed, every time she goes to meeting, and also the date on which she begins to work "a large worsted Bible cover,"—which Bible cover is in the possession of her great-great-grandchildren to-day; but neither the meetings nor the worsted work betray her into a complacent piety, and she is just as careful to say when she has been drinking tea, or spending the afternoon with any of her young friends. As a matter of fact, tea-drinking and kindred frivolities are evidently more to her liking, though she will not confess it, than serious and improving occupations. Philadelphia, dazzled by Franklin's discoveries, was pleased to think herself scientific in those days; and young men and women were in the habit of attending learned lectures,—or what were then thought learned lectures,—and pretending they understood and enjoyed them,—a mental attitude not wholly unfamiliar to us