one who would do much of either harm or good. Familiarity with
the insincerities of fashionable life had blurred her sense of
truthfulness in little things, and in matters of policy she could
hide her meaning or express another as well as her veteran mother.

And yet there were great possibilities of good in her character.
She had a substratum of sound common sense; was wholesomely averse
to meanness, cowardice, and temporizing; best of all, she was not
shallow and weak. She could appreciate noble action, and her mind
could kindle at great thoughts if presented clearly and strongly.

She could scarcely be blamed severely for being what she was, for
she had only responded to the influences that had ever surrounded
her, and been moulded by them. Her character was rapidly forming,
but not as yet fixed. Therefore her best chance of escaping a moral
deformity as marked as her external beauty was the coming under an
entirely different class of influences.

However earthly parents may wrong their children by neglect, or
by permitting in themselves characters that react ruinously upon
those sacredly intrusted to their training, the Divine Father seems
to give all a chance sometime in life for the achievement of the
grandest of all victories, the conquest of self. Whatever abstract
theories dreamers may evolve secluded from the world, those who observe
closely--who KNOW humanity from infancy to age--are compelled to
admit, however reluctantly, that the inner self of every heart is
tainted and poisoned by evil. The innocence of childhood is too
much like the harmlessness of the lion's whelps. However loftily and
plausibly some may assert the innate goodness and self-rectifying
power of humanity, as Tom Paine wrote against the Bible without