Today's Stichomancy for Julia Roberts

with me he took your father. Mrs. Bates took me to do some shopping, and to see about some houses. They are very desirous we should be in their neighborhood, in Portland Place, but I have a fancy myself for the new part of town. I have been so used all my life to see things fresh and clean-looking, that I cannot get accustomed to the London dinge, and some of the finest houses look to me as though I would like to give them a good scouring. Tell Cousin M. never to come to England, she would be shocked every minute, with all the grandeur. A new country is cleaner-looking, though it may not be so picturesque.

I got your letters when I arrived here, and I wish this may give you

napkin under his arm, meets you as you enter his shop, may be worth his fifty thousand francs a year; the waiter in a restaurant is eligible for the Chamber; the man you take for a beggar in the street carries a hundred thousand francs worth of unset diamonds in his waistcoat pocket, and didn't steal them either."

The three inseparables (for one day at any rate) now crossed the Place de la Bourse in a way to intercept a man about forty years of age, wearing the Legion of honor, who was coming from the boulevard by way of the rue Neuve-Vivienne.

"Hey!" said Leon, "what are you pondering over, my dear Dubourdieu? Some fine symbolic composition? My dear cousin, I have the pleasure to

very ancient rituals in the past--such as sacred stones, old and rude images of the gods, magic nature-symbols, like that half-disclosed ear of corn above-mentioned (Ch. V.). "In the Temple of Isis at Philae," says Dr. Cheetham, "the dead body of Osiris is represented with stalks of corn springing from it, which a priest waters from a vessel. An inscription says: 'This is the form of him whom we may not name, Osiris of the Mysteries who sprang from the returning waters' [the Nile]." Above all, no doubt, there were images of the phallus and the vulva, the great symbols of human fertility. We have seen (Ch. XII) that

Pagan and Christian Creeds

and flow down over her drawn cheeks; and he must have seen them too, for he laid his hand on hers, and said in a low voice: "Won't you tell me what is troubling you?"

She shook her head, and he did not insist: but after a while he said, in the same low tone, so that they should not be overheard: "Charity, what do you know of your childhood, before you came down to North Dormer?"

She controlled herself, and answered: "Nothing only what I heard Mr. Royall say one day. He said he brought me down because my father went to prison."