"Now, Jim," she said at last, "you are very provoking."
"I'm sure I give in to everything you say," said Jim, in an injured tone.
"But you act just as if you were making fun all the time; and you know you are."
"Upon my word I don't know what you mean. I have assented to every word you said--given up to you hook and line--and now you're not pleased. I tell you it's rough on a fellow."
"Oh, come," said Alice, laughing at the absurdity of the quarrel; "there's no use in scolding you."
Jim laughed too, and felt triumphant; and just then they turned a corner and met Aunt Maria coming from church.
When Mrs. Wouvermans met our young friends, she was just returning home after performing her morning devotions in one of the most time-honored churches in New York. She was as thorough and faithful in her notions of religion as of housekeeping. She adhered strictly to _her own_ church, in which undeniably none but ancient and respectable families worshiped, and where she was perfectly sure that whatever of dress or deportment she saw was certain to be the correct thing.
It was a church of eminent propriety. It was large and lofty, with long-drawn aisles and excellent sleeping accommodations, where the worshipers were assisted to dream of heaven by every appliance of sweet music, and not rudely shaken in their slumbers by any obtrusiveness on the part of the rector.
In fact, everything about the services of this church was thoroughly toned down by good breeding. The responses of the worshipers were given in decorous whispers that scarcely disturbed the solemn stillness; for when a congregation of the best-fed and best-bred people of New York on their knees declare themselves "miserable sinners," it is a matter of delicacy to make as little disturbance about it as possible. A well-paid choir of the finest professional singers took the whole responsibility of praising God into their own hands, so that the respectable audience were relieved from any necessity of exertion in that department. As the most brilliant lights of the opera were from time to time engaged to render the more solemn parts of the service, flocks of sinners who otherwise would never have entered a church crowded to hear these "morning stars sing together;" let us hope, to their great edification. The sermons of the rector, delivered in the dim perspective, had a plaintive, far-off sound, as a voice of one "crying in the wilderness," and crying at a very great distance. This was in part owing to the fact that the church, having been built after an old English ecclesiastical model in days when English churches were used only for processional services, was entirely unadapted for any purposes of public speaking, so that a man's voice had about as good chance of effect in it as if he spoke anywhere in the thoroughfares of New York.