Aunt Jane's hero Author:Elizabeth Prentiss Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ( CHAPTER III. HORACE WHEELER had stood up years before, in the little village church, and confessed Christ before men. He was then not much more than a bo... more »y, and had very indefinite notions as to what this step implied and involved. Indeed, he had been urged into it by his mother, whose delicate health made it probable that she would not live to see him safely through the perils of early youth, and who felt that she could die in peace if she could leave him in the sheltering bosom of the Church she loved. She died soon after he entered college, and so he lost the letters that would have counselled and stimulated and blessed him. Shall we say he lost her prayers, also ? God only knows. His father, a grave, hard, good man, prayed for, but rarely wrote to him ; he had never had either sister or brother. Perhaps, all this made old Mrs. Faulkner peculiarly dear to him, when on his establishing himself in this great city, she became to him almost a mother. But all he knew of religion was what his own meagre experience had taught him, and all he knew of young women he had learned in society. And he had, so far, got very little comfort out of either. So now when he marched smarting and stinging out of Miss Fitzsimmons's ceiled house, he never once thought of such a thing as making the pain she had cost him a religious discipline; nor did he fly to the genial presence of other ladies in the hope of finding solace in their society. On the contrary, he fell to generalizing in this style : " They're all alike, and I knew it, and yet have been and made a fool of myself. All they care for or think of is dress and show and fashion. There isn't enough heart in the whole concern to make one warm, manly heart. If you can put diamond rings on their fingers, and give them palaces to li...« less