The Maiden's Choice - Page 2

respecting the gold chains."

"But they were inanimate substances. They were not faces, where thoughts, feelings, and principles find expression."

"Do you suppose, Annette, that bad gold would ever have been coloured so as to look even more beautiful than that which is genuine, if there had not been men who assumed exterior graces and virtues that were not in their minds? No. The very fact you adduce strengthens my position. The time was, in the earlier and purer ages--the golden ages of the world's existence--when the countenance was the true index to the mind. Then it was a well-tuned instrument, and the mind within a skilful player; to whose touch every muscle, and chord, and minute fibre gave answering melody. That time has passed. Men now school their faces to deception; it is an art which nearly all practise--I and you too often. We study to hide our real feelings; to appear, in a certain sense, what we are not. Look at some men whom we meet every day, with faces whose calmness, I should rather say rigidity, gives no evidence that a single emotion ever crosses the waveless ocean of their minds. But it is not so; the mind within is active with thought and feelings; but the instrument formed for it to play upon has lost its tune, or bears only relaxed or broken chords."

"You have a strange, visionary way of talking sometimes, Rose," replied Annette, as her friend ceased speaking. "All that may do for your transcendentalists, or whatever you call them; but it won't do when you come down to the practical matter-of-fact business of life."

"To me, it seems eminently a practical principle, Annette. We must act, in all important matters in life, with a just discrimination; and how can we truly discriminate, if we are not versed in those principles upon which, and only upon which, right discriminations can be made?"

"I must confess, Rose," replied her young friend, "that I do not see much bearing that all this has upon the matter under discussion; or, at least, I cannot see the truth of its application. Gold never assumes a leaden exterior."

"Well?"

"We need not be very eminent philosophers to tell one from the other."

"No, of course not."

"Very well. Here is Marcus Gray, with a genuine golden exterior, and James Hambleton with a leaden one."

"I do not grant the position, Annette. It is true that Mr. Hambleton is not so brilliant and showy; but I have found in him one quality that I have not yet discovered in the other."

"What is that?"

"Depth of feeling, and high moral principle."

"You certainly do not pretend to affirm that Mr. Gray has neither feeling nor principle?"

"Of course I do not. I only say that I have never yet perceived any very strong