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It is either this, or a sudden accession of ambition, that overcomes her, because, without a moment's notice, she turns gently on her left heel, and executes a tiny pirouette on her small Hessian boots. A frown from her mother suppresses further evolutions, and, with a sigh, she returns to decorum and the family pew.
There, the little pew-opener had left her, having to show the early-comers to their seats; and Joan had found an out-of-the-way pew from where she could command a view of the whole church. They were chiefly poor folk, the congregation; with here and there a sprinkling of faded gentility. They seemed in keeping with the place. The twilight faded and a snuffy old man shuffled round and lit the gas.
"Lost it! to be sure I lost it," replied the sexton, "for I couldna hae played pew upon a dry hemlock; but I might hae dune weel eneugh, for I keepit the wage and the free house, and little to do but play on the fiddle to them, but for Allan, last Lord Ravenswood, that was far waur than ever his father was."
And she evidently considered them to be all one party, for she ushered them all three into a pew; first, Mrs. Hazeldine, then Vera, and next to her the little foreign-looking gentleman who had bustled up so hurriedly.
The farce is fit to make a devil in torment laugh." Once more, Florimel laughed aloud. "Another revolution, Clementina, and we shall have you heading the canaille to destroy Westminster Abbey." "I would follow any leader to destroy falsehood," said Clementina. "No canaille will take that up until it meddles with their stomachs or their pew rents."
The man in the other end of the pew, that Ma sat near, he was a stranger from Racine, who belongs to our church, and he looked at Ma sort of queer, and after the minister prayed, and they got up to sing again, the man took his hat and went out, and when he came by me he said something in a whisper about a female glue factory.
He and his portly wife planted themselves, like two canons of the sanctuary, every Sunday, in the tip-top highest-priced pew of the most orthodox old church in New York; and if the worthy man sometimes indulged in gentle slumbers in the high-padded walls of his slip, it was because he was so well assured of the orthodoxy of his minister that he felt that no interest of society would suffer while he was off duty.
I have been to see her, and she has been thanking me for having suggested the making way for fresh comers in a pew. Otherwise, she says, she could not have withstood the rush. My Dear Charlotte, I decidedly object to the company of a young lady with such a genius for intrigue as Isabel Fulford seems to possess.
I have another half-year of bondage, I am going back to drudgery and self-contempt, to be brow-beaten by Miss Pew, and looked down upon by most of her pupils. The girls in my own class are very fond of me, but I'm afraid their fondness is half pity. The grown-up girls with happy homes and rich fathers despise me. I hardly wonder at it. Genteel poverty certainly is contemptible.
A young woman, with a dazed and startled look in her eyes, rose in the body of the church tremblingly hesitated for a moment, and then, with bowed head and blushing cheeks, pressed her way out from the end of a crowded pew and down the aisle to the rail. A triumphant outburst of welcoming ejaculations swelled to the roof as she knelt there, and under its impetus others followed her example.
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