strange insensibility to great things which had moved her own heart to
its depths. But the feeling had never been so strong as it was now; had
never come so near revealing to her the real character of him with whom
her whole life was to be spent; and she was still more bewildered and
perplexed than shocked or distressed. She thought that she must have
misunderstood; that he could not have meant thus to pass over this great
national crisis,--this noble offering of a great man's life to the
service of his country,--in unfeeling haste to grasp some selfish profit
from it. She looked at him wonderingly, with all the light gone out of
her face. Being what she was, she could not see that he was just as true
to his nature as she was to hers; that he was following it with entire
sincerity in looking at the noblest things in life and the greatest
things in the world, solely as they affected himself and his own
interests. It was not for a nature like hers ever to understand that a
nature like his would, if it could, bend the whole universe to his own
ends without a doubt that such was its best possible use.

Philip Alston, also, was regarding William Pressley with rather an
inscrutable look. But his estimate and understanding were fairer than
Ruth's, for the reason that he could come nearer to giving the young man
his due. He knew that William Pressley was honest and sincere in his
vanity and conceit, and was assured that these traits were the worst he
possessed. Philip Alston knew men, and he had found that those who
honestly thought highly of themselves usually had something, more or
less, to found the opinion upon. He had never known a bad man who
sincerely thought himself a good one. He knew that many dull men really
believed themselves to be intelligent,--but that was a comparatively
harmless mistake,--and he had never observed that a woman thought less
of a man who thought well of himself. Aside from this surface weakness
William Pressley was a most worthy young fellow; far more worthy to be