AMAZING GRACE

I took up the first one

AMAZING GRACE

Who Proves That Virtue Has Its Silver Lining

By
KATE TRIMBLE SHARBER
Author of
The Annals of Ann, At the Age of Eve, Etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY
R. M. CROSBY

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1914
The Bobbs-Merrill Company

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

TO

LAURA NORVELL ELLIOTT

WHO HAS THE OLD LETTERS—

AND KEEPS THEM

CONTENTS

AMAZING GRACE

AMAZING GRACE

CHAPTER I
STRAINED RELATIONS

Some people, you will admit, can absorb experience in gentle little homeopathic doses, while others require it to be shot into them by hypodermic injections.

Certainly my Dresden-china mother up to the time of my birth had been forced to take this bitter medicine in every form, yet she had never been known to profit by it. She would not, it is true, fly in the very face of Providence, but she would nag at its coat tails.

"You might as well name this child 'Praise-the-Lord,' and be done with it!" complained the rich Christie connection (which mother had always regarded as outlaws as well as in-laws), shaking its finger across the christening font into mother's boarding-school face on the day of my baptism. "Of course all the world knows you're glad she's posthumous, but—"

"But with Tom Christie only six weeks in spirit-land it isn't decent!" Cousin Pollie finished up individually.

"Besides, good families don't name their children for abstract things," Aunt Hannah put in. "It—well, it simply isn't done."

"A woman who never does anything that isn't done, never does anything worth doing," mother answered, through pretty pursed lips.

"But, since you must be freakish, why not call her Prudence, or Patience—to keep Oldburgh from wagging its tongue in two?" Aunt Louella suggested.

Oldburgh isn't the town's name, of course, but it's a descriptive alias. The place itself is, unfortunately, the worst overworked southern capital in fiction. It is one of the Old South's "types," boasting far more social leaders than sky-scrapers—and you can't suffer a blow-out on any pike near the city's limits that isn't flanked by a college campus.

"Oldburgh knows how I feel," mother replied. "If this baby had been a boy I should have named him Theodore—gift of God—but since she's a girl, her name is Grace."

She said it smoothly, I feel sure, for her Vere de Vere repose always jutted out like an iceberg into a troubled sea when