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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 133 ***
+
+
+
+
+THE DAMNATION OF THERON WARE
+
+
+by Harold Frederic
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+No such throng had ever before been seen in the building during all its
+eight years of existence. People were wedged together most uncomfortably
+upon the seats; they stood packed in the aisles and overflowed the
+galleries; at the back, in the shadows underneath these galleries, they
+formed broad, dense masses about the doors, through which it would be
+hopeless to attempt a passage.
+
+The light, given out from numerous tin-lined circles of flaring gas-jets
+arranged on the ceiling, fell full upon a thousand uplifted faces--some
+framed in bonnets or juvenile curls, others bearded or crowned with
+shining baldness--but all alike under the spell of a dominant emotion
+which held features in abstracted suspense and focussed every eye upon a
+common objective point.
+
+The excitement of expectancy reigned upon each row of countenances, was
+visible in every attitude--nay, seemed a part of the close, overheated
+atmosphere itself.
+
+An observer, looking over these compact lines of faces and noting the
+uniform concentration of eagerness they exhibited, might have guessed
+that they were watching for either the jury's verdict in some peculiarly
+absorbing criminal trial, or the announcement of the lucky numbers in
+a great lottery. These two expressions seemed to alternate, and even to
+mingle vaguely, upon the upturned lineaments of the waiting throng--the
+hope of some unnamed stroke of fortune and the dread of some adverse
+decree.
+
+But a glance forward at the object of this universal gaze would have
+sufficed to shatter both hypotheses. Here was neither a court of justice
+nor a tombola. It was instead the closing session of the annual Nedahma
+Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Bishop was about
+to read out the list of ministerial appointments for the coming year.
+This list was evidently written in a hand strange to him, and the slow,
+near-sighted old gentleman, having at last sufficiently rubbed the
+glasses of his spectacles, and then adjusted them over his nose
+with annoying deliberation, was now silently rehearsing his task to
+himself--the while the clergymen round about ground their teeth and
+restlessly shuffled their feet in impatience.
+
+Upon a closer inspection of the assemblage, there were a great many
+of these clergymen. A dozen or more dignified, and for the most part
+elderly, brethren sat grouped about the Bishop in the pulpit. As many
+others, not quite so staid in mien, and indeed with here and there
+almost a suggestion of frivolity in their postures, were seated on the
+steps leading down from this platform. A score of their fellows sat
+facing the audience, on chairs tightly wedged into the space railed off
+round the pulpit; and then came five or six rows of pews, stretching
+across the whole breadth of the church, and almost solidly filled with
+preachers of the Word.
+
+There were very old men among these--bent and decrepit veterans who
+had known Lorenzo Dow, and had been ordained by elders who remembered
+Francis Asbury and even Whitefield. They sat now in front places,
+leaning forward with trembling and misshapen hands behind their hairy
+ears, waiting to hear their names read out on the superannuated list, it
+might be for the last time.
+
+The sight of these venerable Fathers in Israel was good to the eyes,
+conjuring up, as it did, pictures of a time when a plain and homely
+people had been served by a fervent and devoted clergy--by preachers
+who lacked in learning and polish, no doubt, but who gave their lives
+without dream of earthly reward to poverty and to the danger and wearing
+toil of itinerant missions through the rude frontier settlements. These
+pictures had for their primitive accessories log-huts, rough household
+implements, coarse clothes, and patched old saddles which told of weary
+years of journeying; but to even the least sympathetic vision there
+shone upon them the glorified light of the Cross and Crown. Reverend
+survivors of the heroic times, their very presence there--sitting
+meekly at the altar-rail to hear again the published record of their
+uselessness and of their dependence upon church charity--was in the
+nature of a benediction.
+
+The large majority of those surrounding these patriarchs were
+middle-aged men, generally of a robust type, with burly shoulders, and
+bushing beards framing shaven upper lips, and who looked for the most
+part like honest and prosperous farmers attired in their Sunday clothes.
+As exceptions to this rule, there were scattered stray specimens of
+a more urban class, worthies with neatly trimmed whiskers, white
+neckcloths, and even indications of hair-oil--all eloquent of citified
+charges; and now and again the eye singled out a striking and scholarly
+face, at once strong and simple, and instinctively referred it to the
+faculty of one of the several theological seminaries belonging to the
+Conference.
+
+The effect of these faces as a whole was toward goodness, candor,
+and imperturbable self-complacency rather than learning or mental
+astuteness; and curiously enough it wore its pleasantest aspect on
+the countenances of the older men. The impress of zeal and moral worth
+seemed to diminish by regular gradations as one passed to younger faces;
+and among the very beginners, who had been ordained only within the past
+day or two, this decline was peculiarly marked. It was almost a relief
+to note the relative smallness of their number, so plainly was it to be
+seen that they were not the men their forbears had been.
+
+And if those aged, worn-out preachers facing the pulpit had gazed
+instead backward over the congregation, it may be that here too their
+old eyes would have detected a difference--what at least they would have
+deemed a decline.
+
+But nothing was further from the minds of the members of the First M. E.
+Church of Tecumseh than the suggestion that they were not an improvement
+on those who had gone before them. They were undoubtedly the smartest
+and most important congregation within the limits of the Nedahma
+Conference, and this new church edifice of theirs represented alike
+a scale of outlay and a standard of progressive taste in devotional
+architecture unique in the Methodism of that whole section of the State.
+They had a right to be proud of themselves, too. They belonged to the
+substantial order of the community, with perhaps not so many very rich
+men as the Presbyterians had, but on the other hand with far fewer
+extremely poor folk than the Baptists were encumbered with. The pews
+in the first four rows of their church rented for one hundred dollars
+apiece--quite up to the Presbyterian highwater mark--and they now had
+almost abolished free pews altogether. The oyster suppers given by their
+Ladies' Aid Society in the basement of the church during the winter
+had established rank among the fashionable events in Tecumseh's social
+calendar.
+
+A comprehensive and satisfied perception of these advantages was
+uppermost in the minds of this local audience, as they waited for the
+Bishop to begin his reading. They had entertained this Bishop and his
+Presiding Elders, and the rank and file of common preachers, in a style
+which could not have been remotely approached by any other congregation
+in the Conference. Where else, one would like to know, could the
+Bishop have been domiciled in a Methodist house where he might have a
+sitting-room all to himself, with his bedroom leading out of it? Every
+clergyman present had been provided for in a private residence--even
+down to the Licensed Exhorters, who were not really ministers at all
+when you came to think of it, and who might well thank their stars
+that the Conference had assembled among such open-handed people. There
+existed a dim feeling that these Licensed Exhorters--an uncouth crew,
+with country store-keepers and lumbermen and even a horse-doctor among
+their number--had taken rather too much for granted, and were not
+exhibiting quite the proper degree of gratitude over their reception.
+
+But a more important issue hung now imminent in the balance--was
+Tecumseh to be fairly and honorably rewarded for her hospitality by
+being given the pastor of her choice?
+
+All were agreed--at least among those who paid pew-rents--upon the great
+importance of a change in the pulpit of the First M. E. Church. A change
+in persons must of course take place, for their present pastor had
+exhausted the three-year maximum of the itinerant system, but there was
+needed much more than that. For a handsome and expensive church building
+like this, and with such a modern and go-ahead congregation, it was
+simply a vital necessity to secure an attractive and fashionable
+preacher. They had held their own against the Presbyterians these past
+few years only by the most strenuous efforts, and under the depressing
+disadvantage of a minister who preached dreary out-of-date sermons, and
+who lacked even the most rudimentary sense of social distinctions. The
+Presbyterians had captured the new cashier of the Adams County Bank, who
+had always gone to the Methodist Church in the town he came from, but
+now was lost solely because of this tiresome old fossil of theirs; and
+there were numerous other instances of the same sort, scarcely less
+grievous. That this state of things must be altered was clear.
+
+The unusually large local attendance upon the sessions of the Conference
+had given some of the more guileless of visiting brethren a high notion
+of Tecumseh's piety; and perhaps even the most sophisticated stranger
+never quite realized how strictly it was to be explained by the anxiety
+to pick out a suitable champion for the fierce Presbyterian competition.
+Big gatherings assembled evening after evening to hear the sermons of
+those selected to preach, and the church had been almost impossibly
+crowded at each of the three Sunday services. Opinions had naturally
+differed a good deal during the earlier stages of this scrutiny, but
+after last night's sermon there could be but one feeling. The man for
+Tecumseh was the Reverend Theron Ware.
+
+The choice was an admirable one, from points of view much more exalted
+than those of the local congregation.
+
+You could see Mr. Ware sitting there at the end of the row inside the
+altar-rail--the tall, slender young man with the broad white brow,
+thoughtful eyes, and features moulded into that regularity of strength
+which used to characterize the American Senatorial type in those
+far-away days of clean-shaven faces and moderate incomes before the War.
+The bright-faced, comely, and vivacious young woman in the second side
+pew was his wife--and Tecumseh noted with approbation that she knew
+how to dress. There were really no two better or worthier people in the
+building than this young couple, who sat waiting along with the rest to
+hear their fate. But unhappily they had come to know of the effort being
+made to bring them to Tecumseh; and their simple pride in the triumph of
+the husband's fine sermon had become swallowed up in a terribly anxious
+conflict of hope and fear. Neither of them could maintain a satisfactory
+show of composure as the decisive moment approached. The vision of
+translation from poverty and obscurity to such a splendid post as
+this--truly it was too dazzling for tranquil nerves.
+
+The tedious Bishop had at last begun to call his roll of names, and the
+good people of Tecumseh mentally ticked them off, one by one, as the
+list expanded. They felt that it was like this Bishop--an unimportant
+and commonplace figure in Methodism, not to be mentioned in the same
+breath with Simpson and Janes and Kingsley--that he should begin with
+the backwoods counties, and thrust all these remote and pitifully rustic
+stations ahead of their own metropolitan charge. To these they listened
+but listlessly--indifferent alike to the joy and to the dismay which he
+was scattering among the divines before him.
+
+The announcements were being doled out with stumbling hesitation. After
+each one a little half-rustling movement through the crowded rows of
+clergymen passed mute judgment upon the cruel blow this brother had
+received, the reward justly given to this other, the favoritism by which
+a third had profited. The Presiding Elders, whose work all this was,
+stared with gloomy and impersonal abstraction down upon the rows of
+blackcoated humanity spread before them. The ministers returned this
+fixed and perfunctory gaze with pale, set faces, only feebly masking the
+emotions which each new name stirred somewhere among them. The Bishop
+droned on laboriously, mispronouncing words and repeating himself as if
+he were reading a catalogue of unfamiliar seeds.
+
+“First church of Tecumseh--Brother Abram G. Tisdale!”
+
+There was no doubt about it! These were actually the words that had been
+uttered. After all this outlay, all this lavish hospitality, all this
+sacrifice of time and patience in sitting through those sermons, to draw
+from the grab-bag nothing better than--a Tisdale!
+
+A hum of outraged astonishment--half groan, half wrathful snort bounded
+along from pew to pew throughout the body of the church. An echo of it
+reached the Bishop, and so confused him that he haltingly repeated the
+obnoxious line. Every local eye turned as by intuition to where the
+calamitous Tisdale sat, and fastened malignantly upon him.
+
+Could anything be worse? This Brother Tisdale was past fifty--a
+spindling, rickety, gaunt old man, with a long horse-like head and
+vacantly solemn face, who kept one or the other of his hands continually
+fumbling his bony jaw. He had been withdrawn from routine service for a
+number of years, doing a little insurance canvassing on his own account,
+and also travelling for the Book Concern. Now that he wished to return
+to parochial work, the richest prize in the whole list, Tecumseh, was
+given to him--to him who had never been asked to preach at a Conference,
+and whose archaic nasal singing of “Greenland's Icy Mountains” had made
+even the Licensed Exhorters grin! It was too intolerably dreadful to
+think of!
+
+An embittered whisper to the effect that Tisdale was the Bishop's cousin
+ran round from pew to pew. This did not happen to be true, but indignant
+Tecumseh gave it entire credit. The throngs about the doors dwindled as
+by magic, and the aisles cleared. Local interest was dead; and even some
+of the pewholders rose and made their way out. One of these murmured
+audibly to his neighbors as he departed that HIS pew could be had now
+for sixty dollars.
+
+So it happened that when, a little later on, the appointment of Theron
+Ware to Octavius was read out, none of the people of Tecumseh either
+noted or cared. They had been deeply interested in him so long as
+it seemed likely that he was to come to them--before their clearly
+expressed desire for him had been so monstrously ignored. But now what
+became of him was no earthly concern of theirs.
+
+After the Doxology had been sung and the Conference formally declared
+ended, the Wares would fain have escaped from the flood of handshakings
+and boisterous farewells which spread over the front part of the church.
+But the clergymen were unusually insistent upon demonstrations of
+cordiality among themselves--the more, perhaps, because it was evident
+that the friendliness of their local hosts had suddenly evaporated--and,
+of all men in the world, the present incumbent of the Octavius pulpit
+now bore down upon them with noisy effusiveness, and defied evasion.
+
+“Brother Ware--we have never been interduced--but let me clasp your
+hand! And--Sister Ware, I presume--yours too!”
+
+He was a portly man, who held his head back so that his face seemed all
+jowl and mouth and sandy chin-whisker. He smiled broadly upon them with
+half-closed eyes, and shook hands again.
+
+“I said to 'em,” he went on with loud pretence of heartiness, “the
+minute I heerd your name called out for our dear Octavius, 'I must go
+over an' interduce myself.' It will be a heavy cross to part with those
+dear people, Brother Ware, but if anything could wean me to the notion,
+so to speak, it would be the knowledge that you are to take up my labors
+in their midst. Perhaps--ah--perhaps they ARE jest a trifle close in
+money matters, but they come out strong on revivals. They'll need a good
+deal o' stirrin' up about parsonage expenses, but, oh! such seasons
+of grace as we've experienced there together!” He shook his head, and
+closed his eyes altogether, as if transported by his memories.
+
+Brother Ware smiled faintly in decorous response, and bowed in silence;
+but his wife resented the unctuous beaming of content on the other's
+wide countenance, and could not restrain her tongue.
+
+“You seem to bear up tolerably well under this heavy cross, as you call
+it,” she said sharply.
+
+“The will o' the Lord, Sister Ware--the will o' the Lord!” he responded,
+disposed for the instant to put on his pompous manner with her, and then
+deciding to smile again as he moved off. The circumstance that he was to
+get an additional three hundred dollars yearly in his new place was not
+mentioned between them.
+
+By a mutual impulse the young couple, when they had at last gained the
+cool open air, crossed the street to the side where over-hanging trees
+shaded the infrequent lamps, and they might be comparatively alone. The
+wife had taken her husband's arm, and pressed closely upon it as they
+walked. For a time no word passed, but finally he said, in a grave
+voice,--
+
+“It is hard upon you, poor girl.”
+
+Then she stopped short, buried her face against his shoulder, and fell
+to sobbing.
+
+He strove with gentle, whispered remonstrance to win her from this mood,
+and after a few moments she lifted her head and they resumed their walk,
+she wiping her eyes as they went.
+
+“I couldn't keep it in a minute longer!” she said, catching her breath
+between phrases. “Oh, WHY do they behave so badly to us, Theron?”
+
+He smiled down momentarily upon her as they moved along, and patted her
+hand.
+
+“Somebody must have the poor places, Alice,” he said consolingly. “I am
+a young man yet, remember. We must take our turn, and be patient. For
+'we know that all things work together for good.'”
+
+“And your sermon was so head-and-shoulders above all the others!” she
+went on breathlessly. “Everybody said so! And Mrs. Parshall heard it so
+DIRECT that you were to be sent here, and I know she told everybody how
+much I was lotting on it--I wish we could go right off tonight without
+going to her house--I shall be ashamed to look her in the face--and
+of course she knows we're poked off to that miserable Octavius.--Why,
+Theron, they tell me it's a worse place even than we've got now!”
+
+“Oh, not at all,” he put in reassuringly. “It has grown to be a large
+town--oh, quite twice the size of Tyre. It's a great Irish place, I've
+heard. Our own church seems to be a good deal run down there. We must
+build it up again; and the salary is better--a little.”
+
+But he too was depressed, and they walked on toward their temporary
+lodging in a silence full of mutual grief. It was not until they had
+come within sight of this goal that he prefaced by a little sigh of
+resignation these further words,--
+
+“Come--let us make the best of it, my girl! After all, we are in the
+hands of the Lord.”
+
+“Oh, don't, Theron!” she said hastily. “Don't talk to me about the Lord
+tonight; I can't bear it!”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+“Theron! Come out here! This is the funniest thing we have heard yet!”
+
+Mrs. Ware stood on the platform of her new kitchen stoop. The bright
+flood of May-morning sunshine completely enveloped her girlish form,
+clad in a simple, fresh-starched calico gown, and shone in golden
+patches upon her light-brown hair. She had a smile on her face, as she
+looked down at the milk boy standing on the bottom step--a smile of a
+doubtful sort, stormily mirthful.
+
+“Come out a minute, Theron!” she called again; and in obedience to the
+summons the tall lank figure of her husband appeared in the open doorway
+behind her. A long loose, open dressing-gown dangled to his knees,
+and his sallow, clean-shaven, thoughtful face wore a morning undress
+expression of youthful good-nature. He leaned against the door-sill,
+crossed his large carpet slippers, and looked up into the sky, drawing a
+long satisfied breath.
+
+“What a beautiful morning!” he exclaimed. “The elms over there are full
+of robins. We must get up earlier these mornings, and take some walks.”
+
+His wife indicated the boy with the milk-pail on his arm, by a wave of
+her hand.
+
+“Guess what he tells me!” she said. “It wasn't a mistake at all, our
+getting no milk yesterday or the Sunday before. It seems that that's the
+custom here, at least so far as the parsonage is concerned.”
+
+“What's the matter, boy?” asked the young minister, drawling his words
+a little, and putting a sense of placid irony into them. “Don't the cows
+give milk on Sunday, then?”
+
+The boy was not going to be chaffed. “Oh, I'll bring you milk fast
+enough on Sundays, if you give me the word,” he said with nonchalance.
+“Only it won't last long.”
+
+“How do you mean--'won't last long'?”, asked Mrs. Ware, briskly.
+
+The boy liked her--both for herself, and for the doughnuts fried with
+her own hands, which she gave him on his morning round. He dropped his
+half-defiant tone.
+
+“The thing of it's this,” he explained. “Every new minister starts in
+saying we can deliver to this house on Sundays, an' then gives us notice
+to stop before the month's out. It's the trustees that does it.”
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware uncrossed his feet and moved out on to the stoop
+beside his wife. “What's that you say?” he interjected. “Don't THEY take
+milk on Sundays?”
+
+“Nope!” answered the boy.
+
+The young couple looked each other in the face for a puzzled moment,
+then broke into a laugh.
+
+“Well, we'll try it, anyway,” said the preacher. “You can go on bringing
+it Sundays till--till--”
+
+“Till you cave in an' tell me to stop,” put in the boy. “All right!” and
+he was off on the instant, the dipper jangling loud incredulity in his
+pail as he went.
+
+The Wares exchanged another glance as he disappeared round the corner
+of the house, and another mutual laugh seemed imminent. Then the wife's
+face clouded over, and she thrust her under-lip a trifle forward out of
+its place in the straight and gently firm profile.
+
+“It's just what Wendell Phillips said,” she declared. “'The Puritan's
+idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.'”
+
+The young minister stroked his chin thoughtfully, and let his gaze
+wander over the backyard in silence. The garden parts had not been
+spaded up, but lay, a useless stretch of muddy earth, broken only by
+last year's cabbage-stumps and the general litter of dead roots and
+vegetation. The door of the tenantless chicken-coop hung wide open.
+Before it was a great heap of ashes and cinders, soaked into grimy
+hardness by the recent spring rains, and nearer still an ancient
+chopping-block, round which were scattered old weather-beaten
+hardwood knots which had defied the axe, parts of broken barrels and
+packing-boxes, and a nameless debris of tin cans, clam-shells, and
+general rubbish. It was pleasanter to lift the eyes, and look across the
+neighbors' fences to the green, waving tops of the elms on the street
+beyond. How lofty and beautiful they were in the morning sunlight, and
+with what matchless charm came the song of the robins, freshly installed
+in their haunts among the new pale-green leaves! Above them, in the
+fresh, scented air, glowed the great blue dome, radiant with light and
+the purification of spring.
+
+Theron lifted his thin, long-fingered hand, and passed it in a slow arch
+of movement to comprehend this glorious upper picture.
+
+“What matter anyone's ideas of hell,” he said, in soft, grave tones,
+“when we have that to look at, and listen to, and fill our lungs with?
+It seems to me that we never FEEL quite so sure of God's goodness at
+other times as we do in these wonderful new mornings of spring.”
+
+The wife followed his gesture, and her eyes rested for a brief moment,
+with pleased interest, upon the trees and the sky. Then they reverted,
+with a harsher scrutiny, to the immediate foreground.
+
+“Those Van Sizers ought to be downright ashamed of themselves,” she
+said, “to leave everything in such a muss as this. You MUST see about
+getting a man to clean up the yard, Theron. It's no use your thinking of
+doing it yourself. In the first place, it wouldn't look quite the thing,
+and, second, you'd never get at it in all your born days. Or if a man
+would cost too much, we might get a boy. I daresay Harvey would come
+around, after he'd finished with his milk-route in the forenoon. We
+could give him his dinner, you know, and I'd bake him some cookies. He's
+got the greatest sweet-tooth you ever heard of. And then perhaps if we
+gave him a quarter, or say half a dollar, he'd be quite satisfied. I'll
+speak to him in the morning. We can save a dollar or so that way.”
+
+“I suppose every little does help,” commented Mr. Ware, with a doleful
+lack of conviction. Then his face brightened. “I tell you what let's
+do!” he exclaimed. “Get on your street dress, and we'll take a long
+walk, way out into the country. You've never seen the basin, where they
+float the log-rafts in, or the big sawmills. The hills beyond give
+you almost mountain effects, they are so steep; and they say there's a
+sulphur spring among the slate on the hill-side, somewhere, with trees
+all about it; and we could take some sandwiches with us--”
+
+“You forget,” put in Mrs. Ware,--“those trustees are coming at eleven.”
+
+“So they are!” assented the young minister, with something like a sigh.
+He cast another reluctant, lingering glance at the sunlit elm boughs,
+and, turning, went indoors.
+
+He loitered for an aimless minute in the kitchen, where his wife, her
+sleeves rolled to the elbow, now resumed the interrupted washing of the
+breakfast dishes--perhaps with vague visions of that ever-receding
+time to come when they might have a hired girl to do such work. Then
+he wandered off into the room beyond, which served them alike as
+living-room and study, and let his eye run along the two rows of books
+that constituted his library. He saw nothing which he wanted to read.
+Finally he did take down “Paley's Evidences,” and seated himself in
+the big armchair--that costly and oversized anomaly among his humble
+house-hold gods; but the book lay unopened on his knee, and his eyelids
+half closed themselves in sign of revery.
+
+This was his third charge--this Octavius which they both knew they were
+going to dislike so much.
+
+The first had been in the pleasant dairy and hop country many miles to
+the south, on another watershed and among a different kind of people.
+Perhaps, in truth, the grinding labor, the poverty of ideas, the
+systematic selfishness of later rural experience, had not been lacking
+there; but they played no part in the memories which now he passed in
+tender review. He recalled instead the warm sunshine on the fertile
+expanse of fields; the sleek, well-fed herds of “milkers” coming
+lowing down the road under the maples; the prosperous and hospitable
+farmhouses, with their orchards in blossom and their spacious red barns;
+the bountiful boiled dinners which cheery housewives served up with
+their own skilled hands. Of course, he admitted to himself, it would
+not be the same if he were to go back there again. He was conscious of
+having moved along--was it, after all, an advance?--to a point where it
+was unpleasant to sit at table with the unfragrant hired man, and still
+worse to encounter the bucolic confusion between the functions of
+knives and forks. But in those happy days--young, zealous, himself
+farm-bred--these trifles had been invisible to him, and life there
+among those kindly husbandmen had seemed, by contrast with the gaunt
+surroundings and gloomy rule of the theological seminary, luxuriously
+abundant and free.
+
+It was there too that the crowning blessedness of his youth--nay, should
+he not say of all his days?--had come to him. There he had first seen
+Alice Hastings,--the bright-eyed, frank-faced, serenely self-reliant
+girl, who now, less than four years thereafter, could be heard washing
+the dishes out in the parsonage kitchen.
+
+How wonderful she had seemed to him then! How beautiful and
+all-beneficent the miracle still appeared! Though herself the daughter
+of a farmer, her presence on a visit within the borders of his remote
+country charge had seemed to make everything, there a hundred times
+more countrified than it had ever been before. She was fresh from the
+refinements of a town seminary: she read books; it was known that
+she could play upon the piano. Her clothes, her manners, her way of
+speaking, the readiness of her thoughts and sprightly tongue--not
+least, perhaps, the imposing current understanding as to her father's
+wealth--placed her on a glorified pinnacle far away from the girls of
+the neighborhood. These honest and good-hearted creatures indeed
+called ceaseless attention to her superiority by their deference and
+open-mouthed admiration, and treated it as the most natural thing in the
+world that their young minister should be visibly “taken” with her.
+
+Theron Ware, in truth, left this first pastorate of his the following
+spring, in a transfiguring halo of romance. His new appointment was
+to Tyre--a somewhat distant village of traditional local pride and
+substance--and he was to be married only a day or so before entering
+upon his pastoral duties there. The good people among whom he had begun
+his ministry took kindly credit to themselves that he had met his bride
+while she was “visiting round” their countryside. In part by jocose
+inquiries addressed to the expectant groom, in part by the confidences
+of the postmaster at the corners concerning the bulk and frequency of
+the correspondence passing between Theron and the now remote Alice--they
+had followed the progress of the courtship through the autumn and
+winter with friendly zest. When he returned from the Conference, to say
+good-bye and confess the happiness that awaited him, they gave him a
+“donation”--quite as if he were a married pastor with a home of his
+own, instead of a shy young bachelor, who received his guests and their
+contributions in the house where he boarded.
+
+He went away with tears of mingled regret and proud joy in his eyes,
+thinking a good deal upon their predictions of a distinguished career
+before him, feeling infinitely strengthened and upborne by the hearty
+fervor of their God-speed, and taking with him nearly two wagon-loads of
+vegetables, apples, canned preserves, assorted furniture, glass dishes,
+cheeses, pieced bedquilts, honey, feathers, and kitchen utensils.
+
+Of the three years' term in Tyre, it was pleasantest to dwell upon the
+beginning.
+
+The young couple--after being married out at Alice's home in an
+adjoining county, under the depressing conditions of a hopelessly
+bedridden mother, and a father and brothers whose perceptions were
+obviously closed to the advantages of a matrimonial connection with
+Methodism--came straight to the house which their new congregation
+rented as a parsonage. The impulse of reaction from the rather grim
+cheerlessness of their wedding lent fresh gayety to their lighthearted,
+whimsical start at housekeeping. They had never laughed so much in all
+their lives as they did now in these first months--over their weird
+ignorance of domestic details; with its mishaps, mistakes, and
+entertaining discoveries; over the comical super-abundances and
+shortcomings of their “donation” outfit; over the thousand and one
+quaint experiences of their novel relation to each other, to the
+congregation, and to the world of Tyre at large.
+
+Theron, indeed, might be said never to have laughed before. Up to that
+time no friendly student of his character, cataloguing his admirable
+qualities, would have thought of including among them a sense of humor,
+much less a bent toward levity. Neither his early strenuous battle to
+get away from the farm and achieve such education as should serve
+to open to him the gates of professional life, nor the later wave of
+religious enthusiasm which caught him up as he stood on the border-land
+of manhood, and swept him off into a veritable new world of views and
+aspirations, had been a likely school of merriment. People had prized
+him for his innocent candor and guileless mind, for his good heart, his
+pious zeal, his modesty about gifts notably above the average, but it
+had occurred to none to suspect in him a latent funny side.
+
+But who could be solemn where Alice was?--Alice in a quandary over the
+complications of her cooking stove; Alice boiling her potatoes all day,
+and her eggs for half an hour; Alice ordering twenty pounds of steak and
+half a pound of sugar, and striving to extract a breakfast beverage from
+the unground coffee-bean? Clearly not so tenderly fond and sympathetic a
+husband as Theron. He began by laughing because she laughed, and grew by
+swift stages to comprehend, then frankly to share, her amusement. From
+this it seemed only a step to the development of a humor of his own,
+doubling, as it were, their sportive resources. He found himself
+discovering a new droll aspect in men and things; his phraseology took
+on a dryly playful form, fittingly to present conceits which danced up,
+unabashed, quite into the presence of lofty and majestic truths. He
+got from this nothing but satisfaction; it obviously involved increased
+claims to popularity among his parishioners, and consequently magnified
+powers of usefulness, and it made life so much more a joy and a thing to
+be thankful for. Often, in the midst of the exchange of merry quip
+and whimsical suggestion, bright blossoms on that tree of strength and
+knowledge which he felt expanding now with a mighty outward pushing
+in all directions, he would lapse into deep gravity, and ponder with a
+swelling heart the vast unspeakable marvel of his blessedness, in being
+thus enriched and humanized by daily communion with the most worshipful
+of womankind.
+
+This happy and good young couple took the affections of Tyre by storm.
+The Methodist Church there had at no time held its head very high among
+the denominations, and for some years back had been in a deplorably
+sinking state, owing first to the secession of the Free Methodists and
+then to the incumbency of a pastor who scandalized the community by
+marrying a black man to a white woman. But the Wares changed all this.
+Within a month the report of Theron's charm and force in the pulpit was
+crowding the church building to its utmost capacity--and that, too,
+with some of Tyre's best people. Equally winning was the atmosphere of
+jollity and juvenile high spirits which pervaded the parsonage under
+these new conditions, and which Theron and Alice seemed to diffuse
+wherever they went.
+
+Thus swimmingly their first year sped, amid universal acclaim. Mrs. Ware
+had a recognized social place, quite outside the restricted limits of
+Methodism, and shone in it with an unflagging brilliancy altogether
+beyond the traditions of Tyre. Delightful as she was in other people's
+houses, she was still more naively fascinating in her own quaint and
+somewhat harum-scarum domicile; and the drab, two-storied, tin-roofed
+little parsonage might well have rattled its clapboards to see if it
+was not in dreamland--so gay was the company, so light were the hearts,
+which it sheltered in these new days. As for Theron, the period was one
+of incredible fructification and output. He scarcely recognized for his
+own the mind which now was reaching out on all sides with the arms of
+an octopus, exploring unsuspected mines of thought, bringing in rich
+treasures of deduction, assimilating, building, propounding as if by
+some force quite independent of him. He could not look without blinking
+timidity at the radiance of the path stretched out before him, leading
+upward to dazzling heights of greatness.
+
+At the end of this first year the Wares suddenly discovered that they
+were eight hundred dollars in debt.
+
+The second year was spent in arriving, by slow stages and with a cruel
+wealth of pathetic detail, at a realization of what being eight hundred
+dollars in debt meant.
+
+It was not in their elastic and buoyant natures to grasp the full
+significance of the thing at once, or easily. Their position in the
+social structure, too, was all against clear-sightedness in material
+matters. A general, for example, uniformed and in the saddle, advancing
+through the streets with his staff in the proud wake of his division's
+massed walls of bayonets, cannot be imagined as quailing at the glance
+thrown at him by his tailor on the sidewalk. Similarly, a man invested
+with sacerdotal authority, who baptizes, marries, and buries, who
+delivers judgments from the pulpit which may not be questioned in his
+hearing, and who receives from all his fellow-men a special deference of
+manner and speech, is in the nature of things prone to see the grocer's
+book and the butcher's bill through the little end of the telescope.
+
+The Wares at the outset had thought it right to trade as exclusively as
+possible with members of their own church society. This loyalty became
+a principal element of martyrdom. Theron had his creditors seated in
+serried rows before him, Sunday after Sunday. Alice had her critics
+consolidated among those whom it was her chief duty to visit and profess
+friendship for. These situations now began, by regular gradations, to
+unfold their terrors. At the first intimation of discontent, the Wares
+made what seemed to them a sweeping reduction in expenditure. When
+they heard that Brother Potter had spoken of them as “poor pay,” they
+dismissed their hired girl. A little later, Theron brought himself
+to drop a laboriously casual suggestion as to a possible increase of
+salary, and saw with sinking spirits the faces of the stewards freeze
+with dumb disapprobation. Then Alice paid a visit to her parents, only
+to find her brothers doggedly hostile to the notion of her being helped,
+and her father so much under their influence that the paltry sum he
+dared offer barely covered the expenses of her journey. With another
+turn of the screw, they sold the piano she had brought with her from
+home, and cut themselves down to the bare necessities of life, neither
+receiving company nor going out. They never laughed now, and even smiles
+grew rare.
+
+By this time Theron's sermons, preached under that stony glare of
+people to whom he owed money, had degenerated to a pitiful level of
+commonplace. As a consequence, the attendance became once more
+confined to the insufficient membership of the church, and the trustees
+complained of grievously diminished receipts. When the Wares, grown
+desperate, ventured upon the experiment of trading outside the bounds of
+the congregation, the trustees complained again, this time peremptorily.
+
+Thus the second year dragged itself miserably to an end. Nor was
+relief possible, because the Presiding Elder knew something of the
+circumstances, and felt it his duty to send Theron back for a third
+year, to pay his debts, and drain the cup of disciplinary medicine to
+its dregs.
+
+The worst has been told. Beginning in utter blackness, this third year,
+in the second month, brought a change as welcome as it was unlooked for.
+An elderly and important citizen of Tyre, by name Abram Beekman, whom
+Theron knew slightly, and had on occasions seen sitting in one of
+the back pews near the door, called one morning at the parsonage, and
+electrified its inhabitants by expressing a desire to wipe off all their
+old scores for them, and give them a fresh start in life. As he put the
+suggestion, they could find no excuse for rejecting it. He had watched
+them, and heard a good deal about them, and took a fatherly sort of
+interest in them. He did not deprecate their regarding the aid he
+proffered them in the nature of a loan, but they were to make themselves
+perfectly easy about it, and never return it at all unless they could
+spare it sometime with entire convenience, and felt that they wanted to
+do so. As this amazing windfall finally took shape, it enabled the Wares
+to live respectably through the year, and to leave Tyre with something
+over one hundred dollars in hand.
+
+It enabled them, too, to revive in a chastened form their old dream of
+ultimate success and distinction for Theron. He had demonstrated clearly
+enough to himself, during that brief season of unrestrained effulgence,
+that he had within him the making of a great pulpit orator. He set
+to work now, with resolute purpose, to puzzle out and master all the
+principles which underlie this art, and all the tricks that adorn its
+superstructure. He studied it, fastened his thoughts upon it, talked
+daily with Alice about it. In the pulpit, addressing those people who
+had so darkened his life and crushed the first happiness out of his
+home, he withheld himself from any oratorical display which could afford
+them gratification. He put aside, as well; the thought of attracting
+once more the non-Methodists of Tyre, whose early enthusiasm had
+spread such pitfalls for his unwary feet. He practised effects now
+by piecemeal, with an alert ear, and calculation in every tone. An
+ambition, at once embittered and tearfully solicitous, possessed him.
+
+He reflected now, this morning, with a certain incredulous interest,
+upon that unworthy epoch in his life history, which seemed so far behind
+him, and yet had come to a close only a few weeks ago. The opportunity
+had been given him, there at the Tecumseh Conference, to reveal his
+quality. He had risen to its full limit of possibilities, and preached
+a great sermon in a manner which he at least knew was unapproachable. He
+had made his most powerful bid for the prize place, had trebly deserved
+success--and had been banished instead to Octavius!
+
+The curious thing was that he did not resent his failure. Alice had
+taken it hard, but he himself was conscious of a sense of spiritual
+gain. The influence of the Conference, with its songs and seasons of
+prayer and high pressure of emotional excitement, was still strong upon
+him. It seemed years and years since the religious side of him had been
+so stirred into motion. He felt, as he lay back in the chair, and folded
+his hands over the book on his knee, that he had indeed come forth
+from the fire purified and strengthened. The ministry to souls diseased
+beckoned him with a new and urgent significance. He smiled to remember
+that Mr. Beekman, speaking in his shrewd and pointed way, had asked him
+whether, looking it all over, he didn't think it would be better for
+him to study law, with a view to sliding out of the ministry when a good
+chance offered. It amazed him now to recall that he had taken this
+hint seriously, and even gone to the length of finding out what books
+law-students began upon.
+
+Thank God! all that was past and gone now. The Call sounded, resonant
+and imperative, in his ears, and there was no impulse of his heart, no
+fibre of his being, which did not stir in devout response. He closed his
+eyes, to be the more wholly alone with the Spirit, that moved him.
+
+The jangling of a bell in the hallway broke sharply upon his
+meditations, and on the instant his wife thrust in her head from the
+kitchen.
+
+“You'll have to go to the door, Theron!” she warned him, in a loud,
+swift whisper. “I'm not fit to be seen. It is the trustees.”
+
+“All right,” he said, and rose slowly from sprawling recumbency to his
+feet. “I'll go.”
+
+“And don't forget,” she added strenuously; “I believe in Levi Gorringe!
+I've seen him go past here with his rod and fish-basket twice in eight
+days, and that's a good sign. He's got a soft side somewhere. And just
+keep a stiff upper lip about the gas, and don't you let them jew you
+down a solitary cent on that sidewalk.”
+
+“All right,” said Theron, again, and moved reluctantly toward the hall
+door.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+When the three trustees had been shown in by the Rev. Mr. Ware, and had
+taken seats, an awkward little pause ensued. The young minister looked
+doubtingly from one face to another, the while they glanced with
+inquiring interest about the room, noting the pictures and appraising
+the furniture in their minds.
+
+The obvious leader of the party, Loren Pierce, a rich quarryman, was an
+old man of medium size and mean attire, with a square, beardless face as
+hard and impassive in expression as one of his blocks of limestone. The
+irregular, thin-lipped mouth, slightly sunken, and shut with vice-like
+firmness, the short snub nose, and the little eyes squinting from
+half-closed lids beneath slightly marked brows, seemed scarcely to
+attain to the dignity of features, but evaded attention instead, as if
+feeling that they were only there at all from plain necessity, and ought
+not to be taken into account. Mr. Pierce's face did not know how to
+smile--what was the use of smiles?--but its whole surface radiated
+secretiveness. Portrayed on canvas by a master brush, with a ruff or a
+red robe for masquerade, generations of imaginative amateurs would
+have seen in it vast reaching plots, the skeletons of a dozen dynastic
+cupboards, the guarded mysteries of half a century's international
+diplomacy. The amateurs would have been wrong again. There was nothing
+behind Mr. Pierce's juiceless countenance more weighty than a general
+determination to exact seven per cent for his money, and some specific
+notions about capturing certain brickyards which were interfering with
+his quarry-sales. But Octavius watched him shamble along its sidewalks
+quite as the Vienna of dead and forgotten yesterday might have watched
+Metternich.
+
+Erastus Winch was of a breezier sort--a florid, stout, and sandy man,
+who spent most of his life driving over evil country roads in a buggy,
+securing orders for dairy furniture and certain allied lines of farm
+utensils. This practice had given him a loud voice and a deceptively
+hearty manner, to which the other avocation of cheese-buyer, which he
+pursued at the Board of Trade meetings every Monday afternoon, had added
+a considerable command of persuasive yet non-committal language. To
+look at him, still more to hear him, one would have sworn he was a good
+fellow, a trifle rough and noisy, perhaps, but all right at bottom.
+But the County Clerk of Dearborn County could have told you of
+agriculturists who knew Erastus from long and unhappy experience, and
+who held him to be even a tighter man than Loren Pierce in the matter of
+a mortgage.
+
+The third trustee, Levi Gorringe, set one wondering at the very first
+glance what on earth he was doing in that company. Those who had known
+him longest had the least notion; but it may be added that no one knew
+him well. He was a lawyer, and had lived in Octavius for upwards of ten
+years; that is to say, since early manhood. He had an office on the main
+street, just under the principal photograph gallery. Doubtless he was
+sometimes in this office; but his fellow-townsmen saw him more often
+in the street doorway, with the stairs behind him, and the flaring
+show-cases of the photographer on either side, standing with his hands
+in his pockets and an unlighted cigar in his mouth, looking at nothing
+in particular. About every other day he went off after breakfast into
+the country roundabout, sometimes with a rod, sometimes with a gun, but
+always alone. He was a bachelor, and slept in a room at the back of
+his office, cooking some of his meals himself, getting others at a
+restaurant close by. Though he had little visible practice, he was
+understood to be well-to-do and even more, and people tacitly inferred
+that he “shaved notes.” The Methodists of Octavius looked upon him as
+a queer fish, and through nearly a dozen years had never quite outgrown
+their hebdomadal tendency to surprise at seeing him enter their church.
+He had never, it is true, professed religion, but they had elected him
+as a trustee now for a number of terms, all the same--partly because he
+was their only lawyer, partly because he, like both his colleagues, held
+a mortgage on the church edifice and lot. In person, Mr. Gorringe was a
+slender man, with a skin of a clear, uniform citron tint, black waving
+hair, and dark gray eyes, and a thin, high-featured face. He wore
+a mustache and pointed chin-tuft; and, though he was of New England
+parentage and had never been further south than Ocean Grove, he
+presented a general effect of old Mississippian traditions and tastes
+startlingly at variance with the standards of Dearborn County Methodism.
+Nothing could convince some of the elder sisters that he was not a
+drinking man.
+
+The three visitors had completed their survey of the room now; and Loren
+Pierce emitted a dry, harsh little cough, as a signal that business
+was about to begin. At this sound, Winch drew up his feet, and Gorringe
+untied a parcel of account-books and papers that he held on his knee.
+Theron felt that his countenance must be exhibiting to the assembled
+brethren an unfortunate sense of helplessness in their hands. He tried
+to look more resolute, and forced his lips into a smile.
+
+“Brother Gorringe allus acts as Seckertary,” said Erastus Winch, beaming
+broadly upon the minister, as if the mere mention of the fact promoted
+jollity. “That's it, Brother Gorringe,--take your seat at Brother Ware's
+desk. Mind the Dominie's pen don't play tricks on you, an' start off
+writin' out sermons instid of figgers.” The humorist turned to Theron
+as the lawyer walked over to the desk at the window. “I allus have to
+caution him about that,” he remarked with great joviality. “An' do YOU
+look out afterwards, Brother Ware, or else you'll catch that pen o'
+yours scribblin' lawyer's lingo in place o' the Word.”
+
+Theron felt bound to exhibit a grin in acknowledgment of this
+pleasantry. The lawyer's change of position had involved some shifting
+of the others' chairs, and the young minister found himself directly
+confronted by Brother Pierce's hard and colorless old visage. Its little
+eyes were watching him, as through a mask, and under their influence
+the smile of politeness fled from his lips. The lawyer on his right, the
+cheese-buyer to the left, seemed to recede into distance as he for the
+moment returned the gaze of the quarryman. He waited now for him to
+speak, as if the others were of no importance.
+
+“We are a plain sort o' folks up in these parts,” said Brother Pierce,
+after a slight further pause. His voice was as dry and rasping as his
+cough, and its intonations were those of authority. “We walk here,” he
+went on, eying the minister with a sour regard, “in a meek an' humble
+spirit, in the straight an' narrow way which leadeth unto life. We ain't
+gone traipsin' after strange gods, like some people that call themselves
+Methodists in other places. We stick by the Discipline an' the ways of
+our fathers in Israel. No new-fangled notions can go down here. Your
+wife'd better take them flowers out of her bunnit afore next Sunday.”
+
+Silence possessed the room for a few moments, the while Theron,
+pale-faced and with brows knit, studied the pattern of the ingrain
+carpet. Then he lifted his head, and nodded it in assent. “Yes,”
+ he said; “we will do nothing by which our 'brother stumbleth, or is
+offended, or is made weak.'”
+
+Brother Pierce's parchment face showed no sign of surprise or pleasure
+at this easy submission. “Another thing: We don't want no book-learnin'
+or dictionary words in our pulpit,” he went on coldly. “Some folks may
+stomach 'em; we won't. Them two sermons o' yours, p'r'aps they'd do down
+in some city place; but they're like your wife's bunnit here, they're
+too flowery to suit us. What we want to hear is the plain, old-fashioned
+Word of God, without any palaver or 'hems and ha's. They tell me
+there's some parts where hell's treated as played-out--where our
+ministers don't like to talk much about it because people don't want to
+hear about it. Such preachers ought to be put out. They ain't Methodists
+at all. What we want here, sir, is straight-out, flat-footed hell--the
+burnin' lake o' fire an' brim-stone. Pour it into 'em, hot an' strong.
+We can't have too much of it. Work in them awful deathbeds of Voltaire
+an' Tom Paine, with the Devil right there in the room, reachin' for
+'em, an' they yellin' for fright; that's what fills the anxious seat an'
+brings in souls hand over fist.”
+
+Theron's tongue dallied for an instant with the temptation to comment
+upon these old-wife fables, which were so dear to the rural religious
+heart when he and I were boys. But it seemed wiser to only nod again,
+and let his mentor go on.
+
+“We ain't had no trouble with the Free Methodists here,” continued
+Brother Pierce, “jest because we kept to the old paths, an' seek for
+salvation in the good old way. Everybody can shout 'Amen!' as loud
+and as long as the Spirit moves him, with us. Some one was sayin' you
+thought we ought to have a choir and an organ. No, sirree! No such
+tom-foolery for us! You'll only stir up feelin' agin yourself by hintin'
+at such things. And then, too, our folks don't take no stock in all that
+pack o' nonsense about science, such as tellin' the age of the earth by
+crackin' up stones. I've b'en in the quarry line all my life, an' I know
+it's all humbug! Why, they say some folks are goin' round now preachin'
+that our grandfathers were all monkeys. That comes from departin'
+from the ways of our forefathers, an puttin' in organs an' choirs, an'
+deckin' our women-folks out with gewgaws, an' apin' the fashions of the
+worldly. I shouldn't wonder if them kind did have some monkey blood in
+'em. You'll find we're a different sort here.”
+
+The young minister preserved silence for a little, until it became
+apparent that the old trustee had had his say out. Even then he raised
+his head slowly, and at last made answer in a hesitating and irresolute
+way.
+
+“You have been very frank,” he said. “I am obliged to you. A clergyman
+coming to a new charge cannot be better served than by having
+laid before him a clear statement of the views and--and spiritual
+tendencies--of his new flock, quite at the outset. I feel it to be
+of especial value in this case, because I am young in years and in my
+ministry, and am conscious of a great weakness of the flesh. I can
+see how daily contact with a people so attached to the old, simple,
+primitive Methodism of Wesley and Asbury may be a source of much
+strength to me. I may take it,” he added upon second thought, with an
+inquiring glance at Mr. Winch, “that Brother Pierce's description of our
+charge, and its tastes and needs, meets with your approval?”
+
+Erastus Winch nodded his head and smiled expansively. “Whatever Brother
+Pierce says, goes!” he declared. The lawyer, sitting behind at the desk
+by the window, said nothing.
+
+“The place is jest overrun with Irish,” Brother Pierce began again.
+“They've got two Catholic churches here now to our one, and they do jest
+as they blamed please at the Charter elections. It'd be a good idee to
+pitch into Catholics in general whenever you can. You could make a hit
+that way. I say the State ought to make 'em pay taxes on their church
+property. They've no right to be exempted, because they ain't Christians
+at all. They're idolaters, that's what they are! I know 'em! I've had
+'em in my quarries for years, an' they ain't got no idee of decency or
+fair dealin'. Every time the price of stone went up, every man of 'em
+would jine to screw more wages out o' me. Why, they used to keep account
+o' the amount o' business I done, an' figger up my profits, an' have
+the face to come an' talk to me about 'em, as if that had anything to do
+with wages. It's my belief their priests put 'em up to it. People
+don't begin to reelize--that church of idolatry 'll be the ruin o' this
+country, if it ain't checked in time. Jest you go at 'em hammer 'n'
+tongs! I've got Eyetalians in the quarries now. They're sensible
+fellows: they know when they're well off--a dollar a day, an' they're
+satisfied, an' everything goes smooth.”
+
+“But they're Catholics, the same as the Irish,” suddenly interjected the
+lawyer, from his place by the window. Theron pricked up his ears at the
+sound of his voice. There was an anti-Pierce note in it, so to speak,
+which it did him good to hear. The consciousness of sympathy began on
+the instant to inspire him with courage.
+
+“I know some people SAY they are,” Brother Pierce guardedly retorted
+“but I've summered an' wintered both kinds, an' I hold to it they're
+different. I grant ye, the Eyetalians ARE some given to jabbin' knives
+into each other, but they never git up strikes, an' they don't grumble
+about wages. Why, look at the way they live--jest some weeds an' yarbs
+dug up on the roadside, an' stewed in a kettle with a piece o' fat the
+size o' your finger, an' a loaf o' bread, an' they're happy as a king.
+There's some sense in THAT; but the Irish, they've got to have meat an'
+potatoes an' butter jest as if--as if--”
+
+“As if they'd b'en used to 'em at home,” put in Mr. Winch, to help his
+colleague out.
+
+The lawyer ostentatiously drew up his chair to the desk, and began
+turning over the leaves of his biggest book. “It's getting on toward
+noon, gentlemen,” he said, in an impatient voice.
+
+The business meeting which followed was for a considerable time confined
+to hearing extracts from the books and papers read in a swift and formal
+fashion by Mr. Gorringe. If this was intended to inform the new pastor
+of the exact financial situation in Octavius, it lamentably failed of
+its purpose. Theron had little knowledge of figures; and though he
+tried hard to listen, and to assume an air of comprehension, he did not
+understand much of what he heard. In a general way he gathered that the
+church property was put down at $12,000, on which there was a debt of
+$4,800. The annual expenses were $2,250, of which the principal items
+were $800 for his salary, $170 for the rent of the parsonage, and $319
+for interest on the debt. It seemed that last year the receipts had
+fallen just under $2,000, and they now confronted the necessity of
+making good this deficit during the coming year, as well as increasing
+the regular revenues. Without much discussion, it was agreed that they
+should endeavor to secure the services of a celebrated “debt-raiser,”
+ early in the autumn, and utilize him in the closing days of a revival.
+
+Theron knew this “debt-raiser,” and had seen him at work--a burly,
+bustling, vulgar man who took possession of the pulpit as if it were an
+auctioneer's block, and pursued the task of exciting liberality in the
+bosoms of the congregation by alternating prayer, anecdote, song,
+and cheap buffoonery in a manner truly sickening. Would it not be
+preferable, he feebly suggested, to raise the money by a festival, or
+fair, or some other form of entertainment which the ladies could manage?
+
+Brother Pierce shook his head with contemptuous emphasis. “Our
+women-folks ain't that kind,” he said. “They did try to hold a sociable
+once, but nobody came, and we didn't raise more 'n three or four
+dollars. It ain't their line. They lack the worldly arts. As the
+Discipline commands, they avoid the evil of putting on gold and costly
+apparel, and taking such diversions as cannot be used in the name of the
+Lord Jesus.”
+
+“Well--of course--if you prefer the 'debt-raiser'--” Theron began, and
+took the itemized account from Gorringe's knee as an excuse for not
+finishing the hateful sentence.
+
+He looked down the foolscap sheet, line by line, with no special sense
+of what it signified, until his eye caught upon this little section of
+the report, bracketed by itself in the Secretary's neat hand:
+
+     INTEREST CHARGE.
+
+     First mortgage (1873) .. $1,000 ... (E. Winch)    @7.. $ 70
+     Second mortgage (1776)..  1,700 ... (L. Gorringe) @6..  102
+     Third mortgage (1878)...  2,100 ... (L. Pierce)   @7..  147
+     -------                       -----
+     $4,800                        $319
+
+It was no news to him that the three mortgages on the church property
+were held by the three trustees. But as he looked once more, another
+feature of the thing struck him as curious.
+
+“I notice that the rates of interest vary,” he remarked without
+thinking, and then wished the words unsaid, for the two trustees in view
+moved uneasily on their seats.
+
+“Oh, that's nothing,” exclaimed Erastus Winch, with a boisterous display
+of jollity. “It's only Brother Gorringe's pleasant little way of making
+a contribution to our funds. You will notice that, at the date of all
+these mortgages, the State rate of interest was seven per cent. Since
+then it's b'en lowered to six. Well, when that happened, you see,
+Brother Gorringe, not being a professin' member, and so not bound by our
+rules, he could just as well as not let his interest down a cent. But
+Brother Pierce an' me, we talked it over, an' we made up our minds
+we were tied hand an' foot by our contract. You know how strong the
+Discipline lays it down that we must be bound to the letter of our
+agreements. That bein' so, we seen it in the light of duty not to change
+what we'd set our hands to. That's how it is, Brother Ware.”
+
+“I understand,” said Theron, with an effort at polite calmness of tone.
+“And--is there anything else?”
+
+“There's this,” broke in Brother Pierce: “we're commanded to be
+law-abiding people, an' seven per cent WAS the law an' would be now if
+them ragamuffins in the Legislation--”
+
+“Surely we needn't go further into that,” interrupted the minister,
+conscious of a growing stiffness in his moral spine. “Have we any other
+business before us?”
+
+Brother Pierce's little eyes snapped, and the wrinkles in his forehead
+deepened angrily. “Business?” he demanded. “Yes, plenty of it. We've
+got to reduce expenses. We're nigh onto $300 behind-hand this minute.
+Besides your house-rent, you get $800 free an' clear--that is $15.38
+every week, an' only you an' your wife to keep out of it. Why, when
+I was your age, young man, and after that too, I was glad to get $4 a
+week.”
+
+“I don't think my salary is under discussion, Mr. Pierce--”
+
+“BROTHER Pierce!” suggested Winch, in a half-shuckling undertone.
+
+“Brother Pierce, then!” echoed Theron, impatiently. “The Quarterly
+Conference and the Estimating Committee deal with that. The trustees
+have no more to do with it than the man in the moon.”
+
+“Come, come, Brother Ware,” put in Erastus Winch, “we mustn't have no
+hard feelin's. Brotherly love is what we're all lookin' after. Brother
+Pierce's meanin' wasn't agin your drawin' your full salary, every cent
+of it, only--only there are certain little things connected with the
+parsonage here that we feel you ought to bear. F'r instance, there's the
+new sidewalk we had to lay in front of the house here only a month ago.
+Of course, if the treasury was flush we wouldn't say a word about it.
+An' then there's the gas bill here. Seein' as you get your rent for
+nothin', it don't seem much to ask that you should see to lightin' the
+place yourself.”
+
+“No, I don't think that either is a proper charge upon me,” interposed
+Theron. “I decline to pay them.”
+
+“We can have the gas shut off,” remarked Brother Pierce, coldly.
+
+“As soon as you like,” responded the minister, sitting erect and tapping
+the carpet nervously with his foot. “Only you must understand that I will
+take the whole matter to the Quarterly Conference in July. I already see
+a good many other interesting questions about the financial management
+of this church which might be appropriately discussed there.”
+
+“Oh, come, Brother Ware!” broke in Trustee Winch, with a somewhat
+agitated assumption of good-feeling. “Surely these are matters we ought
+to settle amongst ourselves. We never yet asked outsiders to meddle with
+our business here. It's our motto, Brother Ware. I say, if you've got a
+motto, stand by it.”
+
+“Well, my motto,” said Theron, “is to be behaved decently to by those
+with whom I have to deal; and I also propose to stand by it.”
+
+Brother Pierce rose gingerly to his feet, with the hesitation of an old
+man not sure about his knees. When he had straightened himself, he put
+on his hat, and eyed the minister sternly from beneath its brim.
+
+“The Lord gives us crosses grievous to our natur',” he said, “an' we're
+told to bear 'em cheerfully as long as they're on our backs; but there
+ain't nothin' said agin our unloadin' 'em in the ditch the minute we git
+the chance. I guess you won't last here more 'n a twelvemonth.”
+
+He pulled his soft and discolored old hat down over his brows with a
+significantly hostile nod, and, turning, stumped toward the hall-door
+without offering to shake hands.
+
+The other trustees had risen likewise, in tacit recognition that the
+meeting was over. Winch clasped the minister's hand in his own broad,
+hard palm, and squeezed it in an exuberant grip. “Don't mind his little
+ways, Brother Ware,” he urged in a loud, unctuous whisper, with a
+grinning backward nod: “he's a trifle skittish sometimes when you don't
+give him free rein; but he's all wool an' a yard wide when it comes to
+right-down hard-pan religion. My love to Sister Ware;” and he followed
+the senior trustee into the hall.
+
+Mr. Gorringe had been tying up his books and papers. He came now with
+the bulky parcel under his arm, and his hat and stick in the other hand.
+He could give little but his thumb to Theron to shake. His face wore
+a grave expression, and not a line relaxed as, catching the minister's
+look, he slowly covered his left eye in a deliberate wink.
+
+
+
+“Well?--and how did it go off?” asked Alice, from where she knelt by the
+oven door, a few minutes later.
+
+For answer, Theron threw himself wearily into the big old farm
+rocking-chair on the other side of the stove, and shook his head with a
+lengthened sigh.
+
+“If it wasn't for that man Gorringe of yours,” he said dejectedly, “I
+think I should feel like going off--and learning a trade.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+On the following Sunday, young Mrs. Ware sat alone in the preacher's pew
+through the morning service, and everybody noted that the roses had
+been taken from her bonnet. In the evening she was absent, and after
+the doxology and benediction several people, under the pretence of
+solicitude for her health, tried to pump her husband as to the reason.
+He answered their inquiries civilly enough, but with brevity: she
+had stayed at home because she did not feel like coming out--this and
+nothing more.
+
+The congregation dispersed under a gossip-laden cloud of consciousness
+that there must be something queer about Sister Ware. There was a
+tolerably general agreement, however, that the two sermons of the day
+had been excellent. Not even Loren Pierce's railing commentary on the
+pastor's introduction of an outlandish word like “epitome”--clearly
+forbidden by the Discipline's injunction to plain language understood of
+the people--availed to sap the satisfaction of the majority.
+
+Theron himself comprehended that he had pleased the bulk of his
+auditors; the knowledge left him curiously hot and cold. On the one
+hand, there was joy in the apparent prospect that the congregation would
+back him up in a stand against the trustees, if worst came to worst.
+But, on the other hand, the bonnet episode entered his soul. It had
+been a source of bitter humiliation to him to see his wife sitting there
+beneath the pulpit, shorn by despotic order of the adornments natural
+to her pretty head. But he had even greater pain in contemplating the
+effect it had produced on Alice herself. She had said not a word on the
+subject, but her every glance and gesture seemed to him eloquent of deep
+feeling about it. He made sure that she blamed him for having defended
+his own gas and sidewalk rights with successful vigor, but permitted
+the sacrifice of her poor little inoffensive roses without a protest. In
+this view of the matter, indeed, he blamed himself. Was it too late to
+make the error good? He ventured a hint on this Sunday evening, when he
+returned to the parsonage and found her reading an old weekly newspaper
+by the light of the kitchen lamp, to the effect that he fancied there
+would be no great danger in putting those roses back into her bonnet.
+Without lifting her eyes from the paper, she answered that she had
+no earthly desire to wear roses in her bonnet, and went on with her
+reading.
+
+At breakfast the next morning Theron found himself in command of an
+unusual fund of humorous good spirits, and was at pains to make the
+most of it, passing whimsical comments on subjects which the opening
+day suggested, recalling quaint and comical memories of the past, and
+striving his best to force Alice into a laugh. Formerly her merry temper
+had always ignited at the merest spark of gayety. Now she gave his jokes
+only a dutiful half-smile, and uttered scarcely a word in response to
+his running fire of talk. When the meal was finished, she went silently
+to work to clear away the dishes.
+
+Theron turned over in his mind the project of offering to help her, as
+he had done so often in those dear old days when they laughingly began
+life together. Something decided this project in the negative for him,
+and after lingering moments he put on his hat and went out for a walk.
+
+Not even the most doleful and trying hour of his bitter experience in
+Tyre had depressed him like this. Looking back upon these past troubles,
+he persuaded himself that he had borne them all with a light and
+cheerful heart, simply because Alice had been one with him in every
+thought and emotion. How perfect, how ideally complete, their sympathy
+had always been! With what absolute unity of mind and soul they had
+trod that difficult path together! And now--henceforth--was it to be
+different? The mere suggestion of such a thing chilled his veins. He
+said aloud to himself as he walked that life would be an intolerable
+curse if Alice were to cease sharing it with him in every conceivable
+phase.
+
+He had made his way out of town, and tramped along the country hill-road
+for a considerable distance, before a merciful light began to lessen the
+shadows in the picture of gloom with which his mind tortured itself.
+All at once he stopped short, lifted his head, and looked about him. The
+broad valley lay warm and tranquil in the May sunshine at his feet. In
+the thicket up the side-hill above him a gray squirrel was chattering
+shrilly, and the birds sang in a tireless choral confusion. Theron
+smiled, and drew a long breath. The gay clamor of the woodland
+songsters, the placid radiance of the landscape, were suddenly taken in
+and made a part of his new mood. He listened, smiled once more, and then
+started in a leisurely way back toward Octavius.
+
+How could he have been so ridiculous as to fancy that Alice--his
+Alice--had been changed into someone else? He marvelled now at his own
+perverse folly. She was overworked--tired out--that was all. The task of
+moving in, of setting the new household to rights, had been too much for
+her. She must have a rest. They must get in a hired girl.
+
+Once this decision about a servant fixed itself in the young minister's
+mind, it drove out the last vestage of discomfort. He strode along now
+in great content, revolving idly a dozen different plans for gilding and
+beautifying this new life of leisure into which his sanguine thoughts
+projected Alice. One of these particularly pleased him, and waxed in
+definiteness as he turned it over and over. He would get another piano
+for her, in place of that which had been sacrificed in Tyre. That
+beneficient modern invention, the instalment plan, made this quite
+feasible--so easy, in fact, that it almost seemed as if he should find
+his wife playing on the new instrument when he got home. He would stop
+in at the music store and see about it that very day.
+
+Of course, now that these important resolutions had been taken, it would
+be a good thing if he could do something to bring in some extra money.
+This was by no means a new notion. He had mused over the possibility in
+a formless way ever since that memorable discovery of indebtedness in
+Tyre, and had long ago recognized the hopelessness of endeavor in every
+channel save that of literature. Latterly his fancy had been stimulated
+by reading an account of the profits which Canon Farrar had derived from
+his “Life of Christ.” If such a book could command such a bewildering
+multitude of readers, Theron felt there ought to be a chance for him.
+So clear did constant rumination render this assumption that the young
+pastor in time had come to regard this prospective book of his as a
+substantial asset, which could be realized without trouble whenever he
+got around to it.
+
+He had not, it is true, gone to the length of seriously considering what
+should be the subject of his book. That had not seemed to him to matter
+much, so long as it was scriptural. Familiarity with the process of
+extracting a fixed amount of spiritual and intellectual meat from any
+casual text, week after week, had given him an idea that any one of
+many subjects would do, when the time came for him to make a choice.
+He realized now that the time for a selection had arrived, and almost
+simultaneously found himself with a ready-made decision in his mind. The
+book should be about Abraham!
+
+Theron Ware was extremely interested in the mechanism of his own brain,
+and followed its workings with a lively curiosity. Nothing could be more
+remarkable, he thought, than to thus discover that, on the instant of
+his formulating a desire to know what he should write upon, lo, and
+behold! there his mind, quite on its own initiative, had the answer
+waiting for him! When he had gone a little further, and the powerful
+range of possibilities in the son's revolt against the idolatry of his
+father, the image-maker, in the exodus from the unholy city of Ur, and
+in the influence of the new nomadic life upon the little deistic family
+group, had begun to unfold itself before him, he felt that the hand of
+Providence was plainly discernible in the matter. The book was to be
+blessed from its very inception.
+
+Walking homeward briskly now, with his eyes on the sidewalk and his mind
+all aglow with crowding suggestions for the new work, and impatience to
+be at it, he came abruptly upon a group of men and boys who occupied the
+whole path, and were moving forward so noiselessly that he had not heard
+them coming. He almost ran into the leader of this little procession,
+and began a stammering apology, the final words of which were left
+unspoken, so solemnly heedless of him and his talk were all the faces he
+saw.
+
+In the centre of the group were four working-men, bearing between them
+an extemporized litter of two poles and a blanket hastily secured across
+them with spikes. Most of what this litter held was covered by another
+blanket, rounded in coarse folds over a shapeless bulk. From beneath
+its farther end protruded a big broom-like black beard, thrown upward at
+such an angle as to hide everything beyond to those in front. The tall
+young minister, stepping aside and standing tip-toe, could see sloping
+downward behind this hedge of beard a pinched and chalk-like face, with
+wide-open, staring eyes. Its lips, of a dull lilac hue, were moving
+ceaselessly, and made a dry, clicking sound.
+
+Theron instinctively joined himself to those who followed the litter--a
+motley dozen of street idlers, chiefly boys. One of these in whispers
+explained to him that the man was one of Jerry Madden's workmen in the
+wagon-shops, who had been deployed to trim an elm-tree in front of his
+employer's house, and, being unused to such work, had fallen from the
+top and broken all his bones. They would have cared for him at Madden's
+house, but he had insisted upon being taken home. His name was MacEvoy,
+and he was Joey MacEvoy's father, and likewise Jim's and Hughey's and
+Martin's. After a pause the lad, a bright-eyed, freckled, barefooted wee
+Irishman, volunteered the further information that his big brother had
+run to bring “Father Forbess,” on the chance that he might be in time to
+administer “extry munction.”
+
+The way of the silent little procession led through back streets--where
+women hanging up clothes in the yards hurried to the gates, their aprons
+full of clothes-pins, to stare open-mouthed at the passers-by--and came
+to a halt at last in an irregular and muddy lane, before one of a half
+dozen shanties reared among the ash-heaps and debris of the town's most
+bedraggled outskirts.
+
+A stout, middle-aged, red-armed woman, already warned by some messenger
+of calamity, stood waiting on the roadside bank. There were whimpering
+children clinging to her skirts, and a surrounding cluster of women of
+the neighborhood, some of the more elderly of whom, shrivelled little
+crones in tidy caps, and with their aprons to their eyes, were beginning
+in a low-murmured minor the wail which presently should rise into the
+keen of death. Mrs. MacEvoy herself made no moan, and her broad ruddy
+face was stern in expression rather than sorrowful. When the litter
+stopped beside her, she laid a hand for an instant on her husband's wet
+brow, and looked--one could have sworn impassively--into his staring
+eyes. Then, still without a word, she waved the bearers toward the door,
+and led the way herself.
+
+Theron, somewhat wonderingly, found himself, a minute later, inside a
+dark and ill-smelling room, the air of which was humid with the steam
+from a boiler of clothes on the stove, and not in other ways improved by
+the presence of a jostling score of women, all straining their gaze upon
+the open door of the only other apartment--the bed-chamber. Through
+this they could see the workmen laying MacEvoy on the bed, and standing
+awkwardly about thereafter, getting in the way of the wife and old
+Maggie Quirk as they strove to remove the garments from his crushed
+limbs. As the neighbors watched what could be seen of these proceedings,
+they whispered among themselves eulogies of the injured man's industry
+and good temper, his habit of bringing his money home to his wife, and
+the way he kept his Father Mathew pledge and attended to his religious
+duties. They admitted freely that, by the light of his example, their
+own husbands and sons left much to be desired, and from this wandered
+easily off into domestic digressions of their own. But all the while
+their eyes were bent upon the bedroom door; and Theron made out, after
+he had grown accustomed to the gloom and the smell, that many of them
+were telling their beads even while they kept the muttered conversation
+alive. None of them paid any attention to him, or seemed to regard his
+presence there as unusual.
+
+Presently he saw enter through the sunlit street doorway a person of
+a different class. The bright light shone for a passing instant upon a
+fashionable, flowered hat, and upon some remarkably brilliant shade of
+red hair beneath it. In another moment there had edged along through the
+throng, to almost within touch of him, a tall young woman, the owner of
+this hat and wonderful hair. She was clad in light and pleasing spring
+attire, and carried a parasol with a long oxidized silver handle of a
+quaint pattern. She looked at him, and he saw that her face was of a
+lengthened oval, with a luminous rose-tinted skin, full red lips, and
+big brown, frank eyes with heavy auburn lashes. She made a grave little
+inclination of her head toward him, and he bowed in response. Since her
+arrival, he noted, the chattering of the others had entirely ceased.
+
+“I followed the others in, in the hope that I might be of some
+assistance,” he ventured to explain to her in a low murmur, feeling that
+at last here was some one to whom an explanation of his presence in this
+Romish house was due. “I hope they won't feel that I have intruded.”
+
+She nodded her head as if she quite understood. “They'll take the will
+for the deed,” she whispered back. “Father Forbes will be here in a
+minute. Do you know is it too late?”
+
+Even as she spoke, the outer doorway was darkened by the commanding bulk
+of a newcomer's figure. The flash of a silk hat, and the deferential way
+in which the assembled neighbors fell back to clear a passage, made his
+identity clear. Theron felt his blood tingle in an unaccustomed way
+as this priest of a strange church advanced across the room--a
+broad-shouldered, portly man of more than middle height, with a shapely,
+strong-lined face of almost waxen pallor, and a firm, commanding tread.
+He carried in his hands, besides his hat, a small leather-bound case. To
+this and to him the women courtesied and bowed their heads as he passed.
+
+“Come with me,” whispered the tall girl with the parasol to Theron; and
+he found himself pushing along in her wake until they intercepted the
+priest just outside the bedroom door. She touched Father Forbes on the
+arm.
+
+“Just to tell you that I am here,” she said. The priest nodded with
+a grave face, and passed into the other room. In a minute or two the
+workmen, Mrs. MacEvoy, and her helper came out, and the door was shut
+behind them.
+
+“He is making his confession,” explained the young lady. “Stay here for
+a minute.”
+
+She moved over to where the woman of the house stood, glum-faced and
+tearless, and whispered something to her. A confused movement among the
+crowd followed, and out of it presently resulted a small table, covered
+with a white cloth, and bearing on it two unlighted candles, a basin of
+water, and a spoon, which was brought forward and placed in readiness
+before the closed door. Some of those nearest this cleared space were
+kneeling now, and murmuring a low buzz of prayer to the click of beads
+on their rosaries.
+
+The door opened, and Theron saw the priest standing in the doorway with
+an uplifted hand. He wore now a surplice, with a purple band over his
+shoulders, and on his pale face there shone a tranquil and tender light.
+
+One of the workmen fetched from the stove a brand, lighted the two
+candles, and bore the table with its contents into the bedroom. The
+young woman plucked Theron's sleeve, and he dumbly followed her into
+the chamber of death, making one of the group of a dozen, headed by Mrs.
+MacEvoy and her children, which filled the little room, and overflowed
+now outward to the street door. He found himself bowing with the others
+to receive the sprinkled holy water from the priest's white fingers;
+kneeling with the others for the prayers; following in impressed silence
+with the others the strange ceremonial by which the priest traced
+crosses of holy oil with his thumb upon the eyes, ears, nostrils, lips,
+hands, and feet of the dying man, wiping off the oil with a piece
+of cotton-batting each time after he had repeated the invocation to
+forgiveness for that particular sense. But most of all he was moved by
+the rich, novel sound of the Latin as the priest rolled it forth in the
+ASPERGES ME, DOMINE, and MISEREATUR VESTRI OMNIPOTENS DEUS, with its
+soft Continental vowels and liquid R's. It seemed to him that he had
+never really heard Latin before. Then the astonishing young woman with
+the red hair declaimed the CONFITEOR, vigorously and with a resonant
+distinctness of enunciation. It was a different Latin, harsher and more
+sonorous; and while it still dominated the murmured undertone of the
+other's prayers, the last moment came.
+
+Theron had stood face to face with death at many other bedsides; no
+other final scene had stirred him like this. It must have been
+the girl's Latin chant, with its clanging reiteration of the great
+names--BEATUM MICHAELEM ARCHANGELUM, BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, SANCTOS
+APOSTOLOS PETRUM ET PAULUM--invoked with such proud confidence in this
+squalid little shanty, which so strangely affected him.
+
+He came out with the others at last--the candles and the folded hands
+over the crucifix left behind--and walked as one in a dream. Even by
+the time that he had gained the outer doorway, and stood blinking at
+the bright light and filling his lungs with honest air once more, it had
+begun to seem incredible to him that he had seen and done all this.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+While Mr. Ware stood thus on the doorstep, through a minute of
+formless musing, the priest and the girl came out, and, somewhat to his
+confusion, made him one of their party. He felt himself flushing under
+the idea that they would think he had waited for them--was thrusting
+himself upon them. The notion prompted him to bow frigidly in response
+to Father Forbes' pleasant “I am glad to meet you, sir,” and his
+outstretched hand.
+
+“I dropped in by the--the merest accident,” Theron said. “I met them
+bringing the poor man home, and--and quite without thinking, I obeyed
+the impulse to follow them in, and didn't realize--”
+
+He stopped short, annoyed by the reflection that this was his second
+apology. The girl smiled placidly at him, the while she put up her
+parasol.
+
+“It did me good to see you there,” she said, quite as if she had known
+him all her life. “And so it did the rest of us.”
+
+Father Forbes permitted himself a soft little chuckle, approving rather
+than mirthful, and patted her on the shoulder with the air of being
+fifty years her senior instead of fifteen. To the minister's relief, he
+changed the subject as the three started together toward the road.
+
+“Then, again, no doctor was sent for!” he exclaimed, as if resuming a
+familiar subject with the girl. Then he turned to Theron. “I dare-say
+you have no such trouble; but with our poorer people it is very
+vexing. They will not call in a physician, but hurry off first for the
+clergyman. I don't know that it is altogether to avoid doctor's bills,
+but it amounts to that in effect. Of course in this case it made no
+difference; but I have had to make it a rule not to go out at night
+unless they bring me a physician's card with his assurance that it is a
+genuine affair. Why, only last winter, I was routed up after midnight,
+and brought off in the mud and pelting rain up one of the new streets
+on the hillside there, simply because a factory girl who was laced too
+tight had fainted at a dance. I slipped and fell into a puddle in the
+darkness, ruined a new overcoat, and got drenched to the skin; and when
+I arrived the girl had recovered and was dancing away again, thirteen
+to the dozen. It was then that I made the rule. I hope, Mr. Ware, that
+Octavius is producing a pleasant impression upon you so far?”
+
+“I scarcely know yet,” answered Theron. The genial talk of the priest,
+with its whimsical anecdote, had in truth passed over his head. His
+mind still had room for nothing but that novel death-bed scene, with
+the winged captain of the angelic host, the Baptist, the glorified
+Fisherman and the Preacher, all being summoned down in the pomp of
+liturgical Latin to help MacEvoy to die. “If you don't mind my saying
+so,” he added hesitatingly, “what I have just seen in there DID make a
+very powerful impression upon me.”
+
+“It is a very ancient ceremony,” said the priest; “probably Persian,
+like the baptismal form, although, for that matter, we can never dig
+deep enough for the roots of these things. They all turn up Turanian if
+we probe far enough. Our ways separate here, I'm afraid. I am delighted
+to have made your acquaintance, Mr. Ware. Pray look in upon me, if you
+can as well as not. We are near neighbors, you know.”
+
+Father Forbes had shaken hands, and moved off up another street some
+distance, before the voice of the girl recalled Theron to himself.
+
+“Of course you knew HIM by name,” she was saying, “and he knew you
+by sight, and had talked of you; but MY poor inferior sex has to be
+introduced. I am Celia Madden. My father has the wagon-shops, and I--I
+play the organ at the church.”
+
+“I--I am delighted to make your acquaintance,” said Theron, conscious
+as he spoke that he had slavishly echoed the formula of the priest. He
+could think of nothing better to add than, “Unfortunately, we have no
+organ in our church.”
+
+The girl laughed, as they resumed their walk down the street. “I'm
+afraid I couldn't undertake two,” she said, and laughed again. Then she
+spoke more seriously. “That ceremony must have interested you a good
+deal, never having seen it before. I saw that it was all new to you, and
+so I made bold to take you under my wing, so to speak.”
+
+“You were very kind,” said the young minister. “It was really a great
+experience for me. May--may I ask, is it a part of your functions, in
+the church, I mean, to attend these last rites?”
+
+“Mercy, no!” replied the girl, spinning the parasol on her shoulder and
+smiling at the thought. “No; it was only because MacEvoy was one of our
+workmen, and really came by his death through father sending him up to
+trim a tree. Ann MacEvoy will never forgive us that, the longest day she
+lives. Did you notice her? She wouldn't speak to me. After you came out,
+I tried to tell her that we would look out for her and the children; but
+all she would say to me was: 'An' fwat would a wheelwright, an' him the
+father of a family, be doin' up a tree?'”
+
+They had come now upon the main street of the village, with its
+flagstone sidewalk overhung by a lofty canopy of elm-boughs. Here, for
+the space of a block, was concentrated such fashionable elegance of
+mansions and ornamental lawns as Octavius had to offer; and it was
+presented with the irregularity so characteristic of our restless
+civilization. Two or three of the houses survived untouched from the
+earlier days--prim, decorous structures, each with its gabled centre
+and lower wings, each with its row of fluted columns supporting the
+classical roof of a piazza across its whole front, each vying with the
+others in the whiteness of those wooden walls enveloping its bright
+green blinds. One had to look over picket fences to see these houses,
+and in doing so caught the notion that they thus railed themselves
+off in pride at being able to remember before the railroad came to the
+village, or the wagon-works were thought of.
+
+Before the neighboring properties the fences had been swept away, so
+that one might stroll from the sidewalk straight across the well-trimmed
+sward to any one of a dozen elaborately modern doorways. Some of the
+residences, thus frankly proffering friendship to the passer-by, were of
+wood painted in drabs and dusky reds, with bulging windows which marked
+the native yearning for the mediaeval, and shingles that strove to be
+accounted tiles. Others--a prouder, less pretentious sort--were of brick
+or stone, with terra-cotta mouldings set into the walls, and with real
+slates covering the riot of turrets and peaks and dormer peepholes
+overhead.
+
+Celia Madden stopped in front of the largest and most important-looking
+of these new edifices, and said, holding out her hand: “Here I am, once
+more. Good-morning, Mr. Ware.”
+
+Theron hoped that his manner did not betray the flash of surprise he
+felt in discovering that his new acquaintance lived in the biggest house
+in Octavius. He remembered now that some one had pointed it out as the
+abode of the owner of the wagon factories; but it had not occurred to
+him before to associate this girl with that village magnate. It was
+stupid of him, of course, because she had herself mentioned her father.
+He looked at her again with an awkward smile, as he formally shook
+the gloved hand she gave him, and lifted his soft hat. The strong noon
+sunlight, forcing its way down between the elms, and beating upon her
+parasol of lace-edged, creamy silk, made a halo about her hair and face
+at once brilliant and tender. He had not seen before how beautiful she
+was. She nodded in recognition of his salute, and moved up the lawn
+walk, spinning the sunshade on her shoulder.
+
+Though the parsonage was only three blocks away, the young minister had
+time to think about a good many things before he reached home.
+
+First of all, he had to revise in part the arrangement of his notions
+about the Irish. Save for an occasional isolated and taciturn figure
+among the nomadic portion of the hired help in the farm country, Theron
+had scarcely ever spoken to a person of this curiously alien race
+before. He remembered now that there had been some dozen or more Irish
+families in Tyre, quartered in the outskirts among the brickyards,
+but he had never come in contact with any of them, or given to their
+existence even a passing thought. So far as personal acquaintance went,
+the Irish had been to him only a name.
+
+But what a sinister and repellent name! His views on this general
+subject were merely those common to his communion and his environment.
+He took it for granted, for example, that in the large cities most of
+the poverty and all the drunkenness, crime, and political corruption
+were due to the perverse qualities of this foreign people--qualities
+accentuated and emphasized in every evil direction by the baleful
+influence of a false and idolatrous religion. It is hardly too much to
+say that he had never encountered a dissenting opinion on this point.
+His boyhood had been spent in those bitter days when social, political,
+and blood prejudices were fused at white heat in the public crucible
+together. When he went to the Church Seminary, it was a matter of course
+that every member of the faculty was a Republican, and that every one of
+his classmates had come from a Republican household. When, later on, he
+entered the ministry, the rule was still incredulous of exceptions. One
+might as well have looked in the Nedahma Conference for a divergence
+of opinion on the Trinity as for a difference in political conviction.
+Indeed, even among the laity, Theron could not feel sure that he had
+ever known a Democrat; that is, at all closely. He understood very
+little about politics, it is true. If he had been driven into a corner,
+and forced to attempt an explanation of this tremendous partisan unity
+in which he had a share, he would probably have first mentioned
+the War--the last shots of which were fired while he was still in
+petticoats. Certainly his second reason, however, would have been that
+the Irish were on the other side.
+
+He had never before had occasion to formulate, even in his own thoughts,
+this tacit race and religious aversion in which he had been bred. It
+rose now suddenly in front of him, as he sauntered from patch to patch
+of sunlight under the elms, like some huge, shadowy, and symbolic
+monument. He looked at it with wondering curiosity, as at something
+he had heard of all his life, but never seen before--an abhorrent
+spectacle, truly! The foundations upon which its dark bulk reared itself
+were ignorance, squalor, brutality and vice. Pigs wallowed in the mire
+before its base, and burrowing into this base were a myriad of narrow
+doors, each bearing the hateful sign of a saloon, and giving forth
+from its recesses of night the sounds of screams and curses. Above were
+sculptured rows of lowering, ape-like faces from Nast's and Keppler's
+cartoons, and out of these sprang into the vague upper gloom--on the one
+side, lamp-posts from which negroes hung by the neck, and on the other
+gibbets for dynamiters and Molly Maguires, and between the two glowed a
+spectral picture of some black-robed tonsured men, with leering satanic
+masks, making a bonfire of the Bible in the public schools.
+
+Theron stared this phantasm hard in the face, and recognized it for a
+very tolerable embodiment of what he had heretofore supposed he thought
+about the Irish. For an instant, the sight of it made him shiver, as if
+the sunny May had of a sudden lapsed back into bleak December. Then he
+smiled, and the bad vision went off into space. He saw instead Father
+Forbes, in the white and purple vestments, standing by poor MacEvoy's
+bedside, with his pale, chiselled, luminous, uplifted face, and he
+heard only the proud, confident clanging of the girl's recital,--BEATUM
+MICHAELEM ARCHANGELUM, BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, PETRUM ET
+PAULUM--EM!--AM!--UM!--like strokes on a great resonant alarm-bell,
+attuned for the hearing of heaven. He caught himself on the very verge
+of feeling that heaven must have heard.
+
+Then he smiled again, and laid the matter aside, with a parting
+admission that it had been undoubtedly picturesque and impressive, and
+that it had been a valuable experience to him to see it. At least the
+Irish, with all their faults, must have a poetic strain, or they would
+not have clung so tenaciously to those curious and ancient forms. He
+recalled having heard somewhere, or read, it might be, that they were
+a people much given to songs and music. And the young lady, that very
+handsome and friendly Miss Madden, had told him that she was a musician!
+He had a new pleasure in turning this over in his mind. Of all the
+closed doors which his choice of a career had left along his pathway, no
+other had for him such a magical fascination as that on which was graven
+the lute of Orpheus. He knew not even the alphabet of music, and his
+conceptions of its possibilities ran but little beyond the best of the
+hymn-singing he had heard at Conferences, yet none the less the longing
+for it raised on occasion such mutiny in his soul that more than once he
+had specifically prayed against it as a temptation.
+
+Dangerous though some of its tendencies might be, there was no
+gainsaying the fact that a love for music was in the main an uplifting
+influence--an attribute of cultivation. The world was the sweeter and
+more gentle for it. And this brought him to musing upon the odd chance
+that the two people of Octavius who had given him the first notion of
+polish and intellectual culture in the town should be Irish. The Romish
+priest must have been vastly surprised at his intrusion, yet had been
+at the greatest pains to act as if it were quite the usual thing to have
+Methodist ministers assist at Extreme Unction. And the young woman--how
+gracefully, with what delicacy, had she comprehended his position and
+robbed it of all its possible embarrassments! It occurred to him that
+they must have passed, there in front of her home, the very tree from
+which the luckless wheelwright had fallen some hours before; and the
+fact that she had forborne to point it out to him took form in his mind
+as an added proof of her refinement of nature.
+
+The midday dinner was a little more than ready when Theron reached home,
+and let himself in by the front door. On Mondays, owing to the moisture
+and “clutter” of the weekly washing in the kitchen, the table was laid
+in the sitting-room, and as he entered from the hall the partner of
+his joys bustled in by the other door, bearing the steaming platter of
+corned beef, dumplings, cabbages, and carrots, with arms bared to the
+elbows, and a red face. It gave him great comfort, however, to note that
+there were no signs of the morning's displeasure remaining on this face;
+and he immediately remembered again those interrupted projects of his
+about the piano and the hired girl.
+
+“Well! I'd just about begun to reckon that I was a widow,” said Alice,
+putting down her fragrant burden. There was such an obvious suggestion
+of propitiation in her tone that Theron went around and kissed her. He
+thought of saying something about keeping out of the way because it was
+“Blue Monday,” but held it back lest it should sound like a reproach.
+
+“Well, what kind of a washerwoman does THIS one turn out to be?” he
+asked, after they were seated, and he had invoked a blessing and was
+cutting vigorously into the meat.
+
+“Oh, so-so,” replied Alice; “she seems to be particular, but she's
+mortal slow. If I hadn't stood right over her, we shouldn't have had the
+clothes out till goodness knows when. And of course she's Irish!”
+
+“Well, what of THAT?” asked the minister, with a fine unconcern.
+
+Alice looked up from her plate, with knife and fork suspended in air.
+“Why, you know we were talking only the other day of what a pity it was
+that none of our own people went out washing,” she said. “That Welsh
+woman we heard of couldn't come, after all; and they say, too, that she
+presumes dreadfully upon the acquaintance, being a church member, you
+know. So we simply had to fall back on the Irish. And even if they do
+go and tell their priest everything they see and hear, why, there's one
+comfort, they can tell about US and welcome. Of course I see to it she
+doesn't snoop around in here.”
+
+Theron smiled. “That's all nonsense about their telling such things to
+their priests,” he said with easy confidence.
+
+“Why, you told me so yourself,” replied Alice, briskly. “And I've always
+understood so, too; they're bound to tell EVERYTHING in confession.
+That's what gives the Catholic Church such a tremendous hold. You've
+spoken of it often.”
+
+“It must have been by way of a figure of speech,” remarked Theron,
+not with entire directness. “Women are great hands to separate one's
+observations from their context, and so give them meanings quite
+unintended. They are also great hands,” he added genially, “or at least
+one of them is, at making the most delicious dumplings in the world. I
+believe these are the best even you ever made.”
+
+Alice was not unmindful of the compliment, but her thoughts were on
+other things. “I shouldn't like that woman's priest, for example,” she
+said, “to know that we had no piano.”
+
+“But if he comes and stands outside our house every night and
+listens--as of course he will,” said Theron, with mock gravity, “it is
+only a question of time when he must reach that conclusion for himself.
+Our only chance, however, is that there are some sixteen hundred other
+houses for him to watch, so that he may not get around to us for quite a
+spell. Why, seriously, Alice, what on earth do you suppose Father Forbes
+knows or cares about our poor little affairs, or those of any other
+Protestant household in this whole village? He has his work to do, just
+as I have mine--only his is ten times as exacting in everything except
+sermons--and you may be sure he is only too glad when it is over each
+day, without bothering about things that are none of his business.”
+
+“All the same I'm afraid of them,” said Alice, as if argument were
+exhausted.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+On the following morning young Mr. Ware anticipated events by inscribing
+in his diary for the day, immediately after breakfast, these remarks:
+“Arranged about piano. Began work upon book.”
+
+The date indeed deserved to be distinguished from its fellows. Theron
+was so conscious of its importance that he not only prophesied in the
+little morocco-bound diary which Alice had given him for Christmas, but
+returned after he had got out upon the front steps of the parsonage to
+have his hat brushed afresh by her.
+
+“Wonders will never cease,” she said jocosely. “With you getting
+particular about your clothes, there isn't anything in this wide world
+that can't happen now!”
+
+“One doesn't go out to bring home a piano every day,” he made answer.
+“Besides, I want to make such an impression upon the man that he will
+deal gently with that first cash payment down. Do you know,” he added,
+watching her turn the felt brim under the wisp-broom's strokes, “I'm
+thinking some of getting me a regular silk stove-pipe hat.”
+
+“Why don't you, then?” she rejoined, but without any ring of glad
+acquiescence in her tone. He fancied that her face lengthened a little,
+and he instantly ascribed it to recollections of the way in which the
+roses had been bullied out of her own headgear.
+
+“You are quite sure, now, pet,” he made haste to change the subject,
+“that the hired girl can wait just as well as not until fall?”
+
+“Oh, MY, yes!” Alice replied, putting the hat on his head, and smoothing
+back his hair behind his ears. “She'd only be in the way now. You see,
+with hot weather coming on, there won't be much cooking. We'll take all
+our meals out here, and that saves so much work that really what remains
+is hardly more than taking care of a bird-cage. And, besides, not having
+her will almost half pay for the piano.”
+
+“But when cold weather comes, you're sure you'll consent?” he urged.
+
+“Like a shot!” she assured him, and, after a happy little caress, he
+started out again on his momentous mission.
+
+“Thurston's” was a place concerning which opinions differed in Octavius.
+That it typified progress, and helped more than any other feature of the
+village to bring it up to date, no one indeed disputed. One might move
+about a great deal, in truth, and hear no other view expressed. But then
+again one might stumble into conversation with one small storekeeper
+after another, and learn that they united in resenting the existence of
+“Thurston's,” as rival farmers might join to curse a protracted drought.
+Each had his special flaming grievance. The little dry-goods dealers
+asked mournfully how they could be expected to compete with an
+establishment which could buy bankrupt stocks at a hundred different
+points, and make a profit if only one-third of the articles were sold
+for more than they would cost from the jobber? The little boot and
+shoe dealers, clothiers, hatters, and furriers, the small merchants in
+carpets, crockery, and furniture, the venders of hardware and household
+utensils, of leathern goods and picture-frames, of wall-paper, musical
+instruments, and even toys--all had the same pathetically unanswerable
+question to propound. But mostly they put it to themselves, because the
+others were at “Thurston's.”
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware had entertained rather strong views on this
+subject, and that only a week or two ago. One of his first acquaintances
+in Octavius had been the owner of the principal book-store in the
+place--a gentle and bald old man who produced the complete impression of
+a bibliophile upon what the slightest investigation showed to be only a
+meagre acquaintance with publishers' circulars. But at least he had the
+air of loving his business, and the young minister had enjoyed a long
+talk with, or rather, at him. Out of this talk had come the information
+that the store was losing money. Not even the stationery department now
+showed a profit worth mentioning. When Octavius had contained only five
+thousand inhabitants, it boasted four book-stores, two of them good
+ones. Now, with a population more than doubled, only these latter two
+survived, and they must soon go to the wall. The reason? It was in a
+nutshell. A book which sold at retail for one dollar and a half cost the
+bookseller ninety cents. If it was at all a popular book, “Thurston's”
+ advertised it at eighty-nine cents--and in any case at a profit of only
+two or three cents. Of course it was done to widen the establishment's
+patronage--to bring people into the store. Equally of course, it was
+destroying the book business and debauching the reading tastes of the
+community. Without the profits from the light and ephemeral popular
+literature of the season, the book-store proper could not keep up its
+stock of more solid works, and indeed could not long keep open at all.
+On the other hand, “Thurston's” dealt with nothing save the demand of
+the moment, and offered only the books which were the talk of the week.
+Thus, in plain words, the book trade was going to the dogs, and it was
+the same with pretty nearly every other trade.
+
+Theron was indignant at this, and on his return home told Alice that
+he desired her to make no purchases whatever at “Thurston's.” He
+even resolved to preach a sermon on the subject of the modern idea of
+admiring the great for crushing the small, and sketched out some notes
+for it which he thought solved the problem of flaying the local abuse
+without mentioning it by name. They had lain on his desk now for ten
+days or more, and on only the previous Friday he had speculated upon
+using them that coming Sunday.
+
+On this bright and cheerful Tuesday morning he walked with a blithe step
+unhesitatingly down the main street to “Thurston's,” and entered without
+any show of repugnance the door next to the window wherein, flanked
+by dangling banjos and key-bugles built in pyramids, was displayed the
+sign, “Pianos on the Instalment Plan.”
+
+He was recognized by some responsible persons, and treated with
+distinguished deference. They were charmed with the intelligence that he
+desired a piano, and fascinated by his wish to pay for it only a little
+at a time. They had special terms for clergymen, and made him feel as
+if these were being extended to him on a silver charger by kneeling
+admirers.
+
+It was so easy to buy things here that he was a trifle disturbed to find
+his flowing course interrupted by his own entire ignorance as to what
+kind of piano he wanted. He looked at all they had in stock, and heard
+them played upon. They differed greatly in price, and, so he fancied,
+almost as much in tone. It discouraged him to note, however, that
+several of those he thought the finest in tone were among the very
+cheapest in the lot. Pondering this, and staring in hopeless puzzlement
+from one to another of the big black shiny monsters, he suddenly thought
+of something.
+
+“I would rather not decide for myself,” he said, “I know so little about
+it. If you don't mind, I will have a friend of mine, a skilled musician,
+step in and make a selection. I have so much confidence in--in her
+judgment.” He added hurriedly, “It will involve only a day or two's
+delay.”
+
+The next moment he was sorry he had spoken. What would they think when
+they saw the organist of the Catholic church come to pick out a piano
+for the Methodist parsonage? And how could he decorously prefer the
+request to her to undertake this task? He might not meet her again for
+ages, and to his provincial notions writing would have seemed out of the
+question. And would it not be disagreeable to have her know that he was
+buying a piano by part payments? Poor Alice's dread of the washerwoman's
+gossip occurred to him, at this, and he smiled in spite of himself. Then
+all at once the difficulty vanished. Of course it would come all right
+somehow. Everything did.
+
+He was on firmer ground, buying the materials for the new book, over
+on the stationery side. His original intention had been to bestow this
+patronage upon the old bookseller, but these suavely smart people in
+“Thurston's” had had the effect of putting him on his honor when
+they asked, “Would there be anything else?” and he had followed them
+unresistingly.
+
+He indulged to the full his whim that everything entering into the
+construction of “Abraham” should be spick-and-span. He watched with his
+own eyes a whole ream of broad glazed white paper being sliced down by
+the cutter into single sheets, and thrilled with a novel ecstasy as he
+laid his hand upon the spotless bulk, so wooingly did it invite him to
+begin. He tried a score of pens before the right one came to hand.
+When a box of these had been laid aside, with ink and pen-holders and a
+little bronze inkstand, he made a sign that the outfit was complete.
+Or no--there must be some blotting-paper. He had always used those
+blotting-pads given away by insurance companies--his congregations never
+failed to contain one or more agents, who had these to bestow by the
+armful--but the book deserved a virgin blotter.
+
+Theron stood by while all these things were being tied up together in a
+parcel. The suggestion that they should be sent almost hurt him. Oh,
+no, he would carry them home himself. So strongly did they appeal to his
+sanguine imagination that he could not forbear hinting to the man who
+had shown him the pianos and was now accompanying him to the door that
+this package under his arm represented potentially the price of the
+piano he was going to have. He did it in a roundabout way, with one of
+his droll, hesitating smiles. The man did not understand at all, and
+Theron had not the temerity to repeat the remark. He strode home with
+the precious bundle as fast as he could.
+
+“I thought it best, after all, not to commit myself to a selection,” he
+explained about the piano at dinner-time. “In such a matter as this,
+the opinion of an expert is everything. I am going to have one of the
+principal musicians of the town go and try them all, and tell me which
+we ought to have.”
+
+“And while he's about it,” said Alice, “you might ask him to make a
+little list of some of the new music. I've got way behind the times,
+being without a piano so long. Tell him not any VERY difficult pieces,
+you know.”
+
+“Yes, I know,” put in Theron, almost hastily, and began talking of other
+things. His conversation was of the most rambling and desultory sort,
+because all the while the two lobes of his brain, as it were, kept up a
+dispute as to whether Alice ought to have been told that this “principal
+musician” was of her own sex. It would certainly have been better, at
+the outset, he decided; but to mention it now would be to invest the
+fact with undue importance. Yes, that was quite clear; only the clearer
+it became, from one point of view, the shadier it waxed from the other.
+The problem really disturbed the young minister's mind throughout
+the meal, and his abstraction became so marked at last that his wife
+commented upon it.
+
+“A penny for your thoughts!” she said, with cheerful briskness. This
+ancient formula of the farm-land had always rather jarred on Theron. It
+presented itself now to his mind as a peculiarly aggravating banality.
+
+“I am going to begin my book this afternoon,” he remarked impressively.
+“There is a great deal to think about.”
+
+It turned out that there was even more to think about than he had
+imagined. After hours of solitary musing at his desk, or of pacing up
+and down before his open book-shelves, Theron found the first shadows of
+a May-day twilight beginning to fall upon that beautiful pile of white
+paper, still unstained by ink. He saw the book he wanted to write before
+him, in his mental vision, much more distinctly than ever, but the idea
+of beginning it impetuously, and hurling it off hot and glowing week by
+week, had faded away like a dream.
+
+This long afternoon, spent face to face with a project born of his own
+brain but yesterday, yet already so much bigger than himself, was really
+a most fruitful time for the young clergyman. The lessons which cut
+most deeply into our consciousness are those we learn from our children.
+Theron, in this first day's contact with the offspring of his fancy,
+found revealed to him an unsuspected and staggering truth. It was that
+he was an extremely ignorant and rudely untrained young man, whose
+pretensions to intellectual authority among any educated people would be
+laughed at with deserved contempt.
+
+Strangely enough, after he had weathered the first shock, this discovery
+did not dismay Theron Ware. The very completeness of the conviction it
+carried with it, saturated his mind with a feeling as if the fact had
+really been known to him all along. And there came, too, after a little,
+an almost pleasurable sense of the importance of the revelation. He had
+been merely drifting in fatuous and conceited blindness. Now all at once
+his eyes were open; he knew what he had to do. Ignorance was a thing to
+be remedied, and he would forthwith bend all his energies to cultivating
+his mind till it should blossom like a garden. In this mood, Theron
+mentally measured himself against the more conspicuous of his colleagues
+in the Conference. They also were ignorant, clownishly ignorant: the
+difference was that they were doomed by native incapacity to go on all
+their lives without ever finding it out. It was obvious to him that his
+case was better. There was bright promise in the very fact that he had
+discovered his shortcomings.
+
+He had begun the afternoon by taking down from their places the various
+works in his meagre library which bore more or less relation to the task
+in hand. The threescore books which constituted his printed possessions
+were almost wholly from the press of the Book Concern; the few
+exceptions were volumes which, though published elsewhere, had come to
+him through that giant circulating agency of the General Conference,
+and wore the stamp of its approval. Perhaps it was the sight of these
+half-filled shelves which started this day's great revolution in
+Theron's opinions of himself. He had never thought much before about
+owning books. He had been too poor to buy many, and the conditions of
+canvassing about among one's parishioners which the thrifty Book Concern
+imposes upon those who would have without buying, had always repelled
+him. Now, suddenly, as he moved along the two shelves, he felt ashamed
+at their beggarly showing.
+
+“The Land and the Book,” in three portly volumes, was the most
+pretentious of the aids which he finally culled from his collection.
+Beside it he laid out “Bible Lands,” “Rivers and Lakes of Scripture,”
+ “Bible Manners and Customs,” the “Genesis and Exodus” volume of Whedon's
+Commentary, some old numbers of the “Methodist Quarterly Review,” and a
+copy of “Josephus” which had belonged to his grandmother, and had
+seen him through many a weary Sunday afternoon in boyhood. He glanced
+casually through these, one by one, as he took them down, and began to
+fear that they were not going to be of so much use as he had thought.
+Then, seating himself, he read carefully through the thirteen chapters
+of Genesis which chronicle the story of the founder of Israel.
+
+Of course he had known this story from his earliest years. In almost
+every chapter he came now upon a phrase or an incident which had served
+him as the basis for a sermon. He had preached about Hagar in the
+wilderness, about Lot's wife, about the visit of the angels, about the
+intended sacrifice of Isaac, about a dozen other things suggested by the
+ancient narrative. Somehow this time it all seemed different to him.
+The people he read about were altered to his vision. Heretofore a poetic
+light had shone about them, where indeed they had not glowed in a halo
+of sanctification. Now, by some chance, this light was gone, and he saw
+them instead as untutored and unwashed barbarians, filled with animal
+lusts and ferocities, struggling by violence and foul chicanery to
+secure a foothold in a country which did not belong to them--all rude
+tramps and robbers of the uncivilized plain.
+
+The apparent fact that Abram was a Chaldean struck him with peculiar
+force. How was it, he wondered, that this had never occurred to him
+before? Examining himself, he found that he had supposed vaguely that
+there had been Jews from the beginning, or at least, say, from the
+flood. But, no, Abram was introduced simply as a citizen of the Chaldean
+town of Ur, and there was no hint of any difference in race between him
+and his neighbors. It was specially mentioned that his brother, Lot's
+father, died in Ur, the city of his nativity. Evidently the family
+belonged there, and were Chaldeans like the rest.
+
+I do not cite this as at all a striking discovery, but it did have a
+curious effect upon Theron Ware. Up to that very afternoon, his notion
+of the kind of book he wanted to write had been founded upon a popular
+book called “Ruth the Moabitess,” written by a clergyman he knew very
+well, the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin. This model performance troubled itself
+not at all with difficult points, but went swimmingly along through
+scented summer seas of pretty rhetoric, teaching nothing, it is true,
+but pleasing a good deal and selling like hot cakes. Now, all at once
+Theron felt that he hated that sort of book. HIS work should be of a
+vastly different order. He might fairly assume, he thought, that if the
+fact that Abram was a Chaldean was new to him, it would fall upon the
+world in general as a novelty. Very well, then, there was his chance.
+He would write a learned book, showing who the Chaldeans were, and how
+their manners and beliefs differed from, and influenced--
+
+It was at this psychological instant that the wave of self-condemnation
+suddenly burst upon and submerged the young clergyman. It passed again,
+leaving him staring fixedly at the pile of books he had taken down from
+the shelves, and gasping a little, as if for breath. Then the humorous
+side of the thing, perversely enough, appealed to him, and he grinned
+feebly to himself at the joke of his having imagined that he could write
+learnedly about the Chaldeans, or anything else. But, no, it shouldn't
+remain a joke! His long mobile face grew serious under the new resolve.
+He would learn what there was to be learned about the Chaldeans. He rose
+and walked up and down the room, gathering fresh strength of purpose
+as this inviting field of research spread out its vistas before him.
+Perhaps--yes, he would incidentally explore the mysteries of the
+Moabitic past as well, and thus put the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin to confusion
+on his own subject. That would in itself be a useful thing, because
+Mifflin wore kid gloves at the Conference, and affected an intolerable
+superiority of dress and demeanor, and there would be general
+satisfaction among the plainer and worthier brethren at seeing him taken
+down a peg.
+
+Now for the first time there rose distinctly in Theron's mind that
+casual allusion which Father Forbes had made to the Turanians. He
+recalled, too, his momentary feeling of mortification at not knowing who
+the Turanians were, at the time. Possibly, if he had probed this matter
+more deeply, now as he walked and pondered in the little living-room,
+he might have traced the whole of the afternoon's mental experiences to
+that chance remark of the Romish priest. But this speculation did not
+detain him. He mused instead upon the splendid library Father Forbes
+must have.
+
+“Well, how does the book come on? Have you got to 'my Lady Keturah'
+yet?'”
+
+It was Alice who spoke, opening the door from the kitchen, and putting
+in her head with a pretence of great and solemn caution, but with a
+correcting twinkle in her eyes.
+
+“I haven't got to anybody yet,” answered Theron, absently. “These big
+things must be approached slowly.”
+
+“Come out to supper, then, while the beans are hot,” said Alice.
+
+The young minister sat through this other meal, again in deep
+abstraction. His wife pursued her little pleasantry about Keturah,
+the second wife, urging him with mock gravity to scold her roundly for
+daring to usurp Sarah's place, but Theron scarcely heard her, and said
+next to nothing. He ate sparingly, and fidgeted in his seat, waiting
+with obvious impatience for the finish of the meal. At last he rose
+abruptly.
+
+“I've got a call to make--something with reference to the book,” he
+said. “I'll run out now, I think, before it gets dark.”
+
+He put on his hat, and strode out of the house as if his errand was of
+the utmost urgency. Once upon the street, however, his pace slackened.
+There was still a good deal of daylight outside, and he loitered
+aimlessly about, walking with bowed head and hands clasped behind him,
+until dusk fell. Then he squared his shoulders, and started straight as
+the crow flies toward the residence of Father Forbes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The new Catholic church was the largest and most imposing public
+building in Octavius. Even in its unfinished condition, with a bald
+roofing of weather-beaten boards marking on the stunted tower the place
+where a spire was to begin later on, it dwarfed every other edifice of
+the sort in the town, just as it put them all to shame in the matter of
+the throngs it drew, rain or shine, to its services.
+
+These facts had not heretofore been a source of satisfaction to the Rev.
+Theron Ware. He had even alluded to the subject in terms which gave his
+wife the impression that he actively deplored the strength and size of
+the Catholic denomination in this new home of theirs, and was troubled
+in his mind about Rome generally. But this evening he walked along
+the extended side of the big structure, which occupied nearly half the
+block, and then, turning the corner, passed in review its wide-doored,
+looming front, without any hostile emotions whatever. In the gathering
+dusk it seemed more massive than ever before, but he found himself only
+passively considering the odd statement he had heard that all Catholic
+Church property was deeded absolutely in the name of the Bishop of the
+diocese.
+
+Only a narrow passage-way separated the church from the pastorate--a
+fine new brick residence standing flush upon the street. Theron mounted
+the steps, and looked about for a bell-pull. Search revealed instead a
+little ivory button set in a ring of metal work. He picked at this for
+a time with his finger-nail, before he made out the injunction, printed
+across it, to push. Of course! how stupid of him! This was one of those
+electric bells he had heard so much of, but which had not as yet made
+their way to the class of homes he knew. For custodians of a mediaeval
+superstition and fanaticism, the Catholic clergy seemed very much up to
+date. This bell made him feel rather more a countryman than ever.
+
+The door was opened by a tall gaunt woman, who stood in black relief
+against the radiance of the hall-way while Theron, choosing his words
+with some diffidence, asked if the Rev. Mr. Forbes was in.
+
+“He is” came the hush-voiced answer. “He's at dinner, though.”
+
+It took the young minister a second or two to bring into association in
+his mind this evening hour and this midday meal. Then he began to say
+that he would call again--it was nothing special--but the woman suddenly
+cut him short by throwing the door wide open.
+
+“It's Mr. Ware, is it not?” she asked, in a greatly altered tone. “Sure,
+he'd not have you go away. Come inside--do, sir!--I'll tell him.”
+
+Theron, with a dumb show of reluctance, crossed the threshold. He noted
+now that the woman, who had bustled down the hall on her errand, was
+gray-haired and incredibly ugly, with a dark sour face, glowering black
+eyes, and a twisted mouth. Then he saw that he was not alone in the
+hall-way. Three men and two women, all poorly clad and obviously working
+people, were seated in meek silence on a bench beyond the hat-rack. They
+glanced up at him for an instant, then resumed their patient study of
+the linoleum pattern on the floor at their feet.
+
+“And will you kindly step in, sir?” the elderly Gorgon had returned to
+ask. She led Mr. Ware along the hall-way to a door near the end, and
+opened it for him to pass before her.
+
+He entered a room in which for the moment he could see nothing but a
+central glare of dazzling light beating down from a great shaded
+lamp upon a circular patch of white table linen. Inside this ring of
+illumination points of fire sparkled from silver and porcelain, and two
+bars of burning crimson tracked across the cloth in reflection from tall
+glasses filled with wine. The rest of the room was vague darkness; but
+the gloom seemed saturated with novel aromatic odors, the appetizing
+scent of which bore clear relation to what Theron's blinking eyes rested
+upon.
+
+He was able now to discern two figures at the table, outside the glowing
+circle of the lamp. They had both risen, and one came toward him with
+cordial celerity, holding out a white plump hand in greeting. He took
+this proffered hand rather limply, not wholly sure in the half-light
+that this really was Father Forbes, and began once more that everlasting
+apology to which he seemed doomed in the presence of the priest. It was
+broken abruptly off by the other's protesting laughter.
+
+“My dear Mr. Ware, I beg of you,” the priest urged, chuckling with
+hospitable mirth, “don't, don't apologize! I give you my word, nothing
+in the world could have pleased us better than your joining us here
+tonight. It was quite dramatic, your coming in as you did. We were
+speaking of you at that very moment. Oh, I forgot--let me make you
+acquainted with my friend--my very particular friend, Dr. Ledsmar. Let
+me take your hat; pray draw up a chair. Maggie will have a place laid
+for you in a minute.”
+
+“Oh, I assure you--I couldn't think of it--I've just eaten
+my--my--dinner,” expostulated Theron. He murmured more inarticulate
+remonstrances a moment later, when the grim old domestic appeared with
+plates, serviette, and tableware for his use, but she went on spreading
+them before him as if she heard nothing. Thus committed against a decent
+show of resistance, the young minister did eat a little here and there
+of what was set before him, and was human enough to regret frankly
+that he could not eat more. It seemed to him very remarkable cookery,
+transfiguring so simple a thing as a steak, for example, quite out of
+recognition, and investing the humble potato with a charm he had never
+dreamed of. He wondered from time to time if it would be polite to ask
+how the potatoes were cooked, so that he might tell Alice.
+
+The conversation at the table was not continuous, or even enlivened.
+After the lapses into silence became marked, Theron began to suspect
+that his refusal to drink wine had annoyed them--the more so as he had
+drenched a large section of table-cloth in his efforts to manipulate a
+siphon instead. He was greatly relieved, therefore, when Father Forbes
+explained in an incidental way that Dr. Ledsmar and he customarily ate
+their meals almost without a word.
+
+“It's a philosophic fad of his,” the priest went on smilingly, “and I
+have fallen in with it for the sake of a quiet life; so that when we do
+have company--that is to say, once in a blue moon--we display no manners
+to speak of.”
+
+“I had always supposed--that is, I've always heard--that it was more
+healthful to talk at meals,” said Theron. “Of course--what I mean--I
+took it for granted all physicians thought so.”
+
+Dr. Ledsmar laughed. “That depends so much upon the quality of the
+meals!” he remarked, holding his glass up to the light.
+
+He seemed a man of middle age and an equable disposition. Theron,
+stealing stray glances at him around the lampshade, saw most distinctly
+of all a broad, impressive dome of skull, which, though obviously the
+result of baldness, gave the effect of quite belonging to the face.
+There were gold-rimmed spectacles, through which shone now and again the
+vivid sparkle of sharp, alert eyes, and there was a nose of some sort
+not easy to classify, at once long and thick. The rest was thin hair and
+short round beard, mouse-colored where the light caught them, but losing
+their outlines in the shadows of the background. Theron had not heard of
+him among the physicians of Octavius. He wondered if he might not be a
+doctor of something else than medicine, and decided upon venturing the
+question.
+
+“Oh, yes, it is medicine,” replied Ledsmar. “I am a doctor three or four
+times over, so far as parchments can make one. In some other respects,
+though, I should think I am probably less of a doctor than anybody else
+now living. I haven't practised--that is, regularly--for many years, and
+I take no interest whatever in keeping abreast of what the profession
+regards as its progress. I know nothing beyond what was being taught in
+the sixties, and that I am glad to say I have mostly forgotten.”
+
+“Dear me!” said Theron. “I had always supposed that Science was the most
+engrossing of pursuits--that once a man took it up he never left it.”
+
+“But that would imply a connection between Science and Medicine!”
+ commented the doctor. “My dear sir, they are not even on speaking
+terms.”
+
+“Shall we go upstairs?” put in the priest, rising from his chair. “It
+will be more comfortable to have our coffee there--unless indeed, Mr.
+Ware, tobacco is unpleasant to you?”
+
+“Oh, my, no!” the young minister exclaimed, eager to free himself from
+the suggestion of being a kill-joy. “I don't smoke myself; but I am very
+fond of the odor, I assure you.”
+
+Father Forbes led the way out. It could be seen now that he wore a long
+house-gown of black silk, skilfully moulded to his erect, shapely, and
+rounded form. Though he carried this with the natural grace of a proud
+and beautiful belle, there was no hint of the feminine in his bearing,
+or in the contour of his pale, firm-set, handsome face. As he moved
+through the hall-way, the five people whom Theron had seen waiting rose
+from their bench, and two of the women began in humble murmurs, “If you
+please, Father,” and “Good-evening to your Riverence;” but the priest
+merely nodded and passed on up the staircase, followed by his guests.
+The people sat down on their bench again.
+
+A few minutes later, reclining at his ease in a huge low chair, and
+feeling himself unaccountably at home in the most luxuriously appointed
+and delightful little room he had ever seen, the Rev. Theron Ware sipped
+his unaccustomed coffee and embarked upon an explanation of his errand.
+Somehow the very profusion of scholarly symbols about him--the great
+dark rows of encased and crowded book-shelves rising to the ceiling,
+the classical engravings upon the wall, the revolving book-case, the
+reading-stand, the mass of littered magazines, reviews, and papers at
+either end of the costly and elaborate writing-desk--seemed to make
+it the easier for him to explain without reproach that he needed
+information about Abram. He told them quite in detail the story of his
+book.
+
+The two others sat watching him through a faint haze of scented smoke,
+with polite encouragement on their faces. Father Forbes took the added
+trouble to nod understandingly at the various points of the narrative,
+and when it was finished gave one of his little approving chuckles.
+
+“This skirts very closely upon sorcery,” he said smilingly. “Do
+you know, there is perhaps not another man in the country who knows
+Assyriology so thoroughly as our friend here, Dr. Ledsmar.”
+
+“That's putting it too strong,” remarked the Doctor. “I only follow at
+a distance--a year or two behind. But I daresay I can help you. You are
+quite welcome to anything I have: my books cover the ground pretty well
+up to last year. Delitzsch is very interesting; but Baudissin's 'Studien
+zur Semitischen Religionsgeschichte' would come closer to what you need.
+There are several other important Germans--Schrader, Bunsen, Duncker,
+Hommel, and so on.”
+
+“Unluckily I--I don't read German readily,” Theron explained with
+diffidence.
+
+“That's a pity,” said the doctor, “because they do the best work--not
+only in this field, but in most others. And they do so much that the
+mass defies translation. Well, the best thing outside of German of
+course is Sayce. I daresay you know him, though.”
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head mournfully. “I don't seem to know any
+one,” he murmured.
+
+The others exchanged glances.
+
+“But if I may ask, Mr. Ware,” pursued the doctor, regarding their guest
+with interest through his spectacles, “why do you specially hit upon
+Abraham? He is full of difficulties--enough, just now, at any rate, to
+warn off the bravest scholar. Why not take something easier?”
+
+Theron had recovered something of his confidence. “Oh, no,” he said,
+“that is just what attracts me to Abraham. I like the complexities and
+contradictions in his character. Take for instance all that strange
+and picturesque episode of Hagar: see the splendid contrast between the
+craft and commercial guile of his dealings in Egypt and with Abimelech,
+and the simple, straightforward godliness of his later years. No, all
+those difficulties only attract me. Do you happen to know--of course
+you would know--do those German books, or the others, give anywhere any
+additional details of the man himself and his sayings and doings--little
+things which help, you know, to round out one's conception of the
+individual?”
+
+Again the priest and the doctor stole a furtive glance across the young
+minister's head. It was Father Forbes who replied.
+
+“I fear that you are taking our friend Abraham too literally, Mr. Ware,”
+ he said, in that gentle semblance of paternal tones which seemed to go
+so well with his gown. “Modern research, you know, quite wipes him out
+of existence as an individual. The word 'Abram' is merely an eponym--it
+means 'exalted father.' Practically all the names in the Genesis
+chronologies are what we call eponymous. Abram is not a person at all:
+he is a tribe, a sept, a clan. In the same way, Shem is not intended for
+a man; it is the name of a great division of the human race. Heber is
+simply the throwing back into allegorical substance, so to speak, of the
+Hebrews; Heth of the Hittites; Asshur of Assyria.”
+
+“But this is something very new, this theory, isn't it?” queried Theron.
+
+The priest smiled and shook his head. “Bless you, no! My dear sir, there
+is nothing new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian
+theory more than two thousand years ago. As for this eponym thing, why
+Saint Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago. In
+his 'De Civitate Dei,' he expressly says of these genealogical names,
+'GENTES NON HOMINES;' that is, 'peoples, not persons.' It was as obvious
+to him--as much a commonplace of knowledge--as it was to Ezekiel eight
+hundred years before him.”
+
+“It seems passing strange that we should not know it now, then,”
+ commented Theron; “I mean, that everybody shouldn't know it.”
+
+Father Forbes gave a little purring chuckle. “Ah, there we get upon
+contentious ground,” he remarked. “Why should 'everybody' be supposed
+to know anything at all? What business is it of 'everybody's' to know
+things? The earth was just as round in the days when people supposed it
+to be flat, as it is now. So the truth remains always the truth, even
+though you give a charter to ten hundred thousand separate numskulls to
+examine it by the light of their private judgment, and report that it is
+as many different varieties of something else. But of course that whole
+question of private judgment versus authority is No-Man's-Land for us.
+We were speaking of eponyms.”
+
+“Yes,” said Theron; “it is very interesting.”
+
+“There is a curious phase of the subject which hasn't been worked out
+much,” continued the priest. “Probably the Germans will get at that too,
+sometime. They are doing the best Irish work in other fields, as it is.
+I spoke of Heber and Heth, in Genesis, as meaning the Hebrews and the
+Hittites. Now my own people, the Irish, have far more ancient legends
+and traditions than any other nation west of Athens; and you find in
+their myth of the Milesian invasion and conquest two principal leaders
+called Heber and Ith, or Heth. That is supposed to be comparatively
+modern--about the time of Solomon's Temple. But these independent Irish
+myths go back to the fall of the Tower of Babel, and they have there an
+ancestor, grandson of Japhet, named Fenius Farsa, and they ascribe
+to him the invention of the alphabet. They took their ancient name of
+Feine, the modern Fenian, from him. Oddly enough, that is the name which
+the Romans knew the Phoenicians by, and to them also is ascribed the
+invention of the alphabet. The Irish have a holy salmon of knowledge,
+just like the Chaldean man-fish. The Druids' tree-worship is identical
+with that of the Chaldeans--those pagan groves, you know, which the Jews
+were always being punished for building. You see, there is nothing new.
+Everything is built on the ruins of something else. Just as the material
+earth is made up of countless billions of dead men's bones, so the
+mental world is all alive with the ghosts of dead men's thoughts and
+beliefs, the wraiths of dead races' faiths and imaginings.”
+
+Father Forbes paused, then added with a twinkle in his eye: “That
+peroration is from an old sermon of mine, in the days when I used to
+preach. I remember rather liking it, at the time.”
+
+“But you still preach?” asked the Rev. Mr. Ware, with lifted brows.
+
+“No! no more! I only talk now and again,” answered the priest, with what
+seemed a suggestion of curtness. He made haste to take the conversation
+back again. “The names of these dead-and-gone things are singularly
+pertinacious, though. They survive indefinitely. Take the modern name
+Marmaduke, for example. It strikes one as peculiarly modern, up-to-date,
+doesn't it? Well, it is the oldest name on earth--thousands of years
+older than Adam. It is the ancient Chaldean Meridug, or Merodach. He was
+the young god who interceded continually between the angry, omnipotent
+Ea, his father, and the humble and unhappy Damkina, or Earth, who was
+his mother. This is interesting from another point of view, because
+this Merodach or Marmaduke is, so far as we can see now, the original
+prototype of our 'divine intermediary' idea. I daresay, though, that if
+we could go back still other scores of centuries, we should find whole
+receding series of types of this Christ-myth of ours.”
+
+Theron Ware sat upright at the fall of these words, and flung a
+swift, startled look about the room--the instinctive glance of a man
+unexpectedly confronted with peril, and casting desperately about for
+means of defence and escape. For the instant his mind was aflame with
+this vivid impression--that he was among sinister enemies, at the mercy
+of criminals. He half rose under the impelling stress of this feeling,
+with the sweat standing on his brow, and his jaw dropped in a scared and
+bewildered stare.
+
+Then, quite as suddenly, the sense of shock was gone; and it was as if
+nothing at all had happened. He drew a long breath, took another sip of
+his coffee, and found himself all at once reflecting almost pleasurably
+upon the charm of contact with really educated people. He leaned back in
+the big chair again, and smiled to show these men of the world how much
+at his ease he was. It required an effort, he discovered, but he made it
+bravely, and hoped he was succeeding.
+
+“It hasn't been in my power to at all lay hold of what the world keeps
+on learning nowadays about its babyhood,” he said. “All I have done is
+to try to preserve an open mind, and to maintain my faith that the more
+we know, the nearer we shall approach the Throne.”
+
+Dr. Ledsmar abruptly scuffled his feet on the floor, and took out his
+watch. “I'm afraid--” he began.
+
+“No, no! There's plenty of time,” remarked the priest, with his soft
+half-smile and purring tones. “You finish your cigar here with Mr. Ware,
+and excuse me while I run down and get rid of the people in the hall.”
+
+Father Forbes tossed his cigar-end into the fender. Then he took from
+the mantel a strange three-cornered black-velvet cap, with a dangling
+silk tassel at the side, put it on his head, and went out.
+
+Theron, being left alone with the doctor, hardly knew what to do or say.
+He took up a paper from the floor beside him, but realized that it would
+be impolite to go farther, and laid it on his knee. Some trace of that
+earlier momentary feeling that he was in hostile hands came back, and
+worried him. He lifted himself upright in the chair, and then became
+conscious that what really disturbed him was the fact that Dr. Ledsmar
+had turned in his seat, crossed his legs, and was contemplating him with
+a gravely concentrated scrutiny through his spectacles.
+
+This uncomfortable gaze kept itself up a long way beyond the point of
+good manners; but the doctor seemed not to mind that at all.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+When Dr. Ledsmar finally spoke, it was in a kindlier tone than the
+young minister had looked for. “I had half a notion of going to hear
+you preach the other evening,” he said; “but at the last minute I backed
+out. I daresay I shall pluck up the courage, sooner or later, and really
+go. It must be fully twenty years since I last heard a sermon, and I had
+supposed that that would suffice for the rest of my life. But they
+tell me that you are worth while; and, for some reason or other, I find
+myself curious on the subject.”
+
+Involved and dubious though the compliment might be, Theron felt himself
+flushing with satisfaction. He nodded his acknowledgment, and changed
+the topic.
+
+“I was surprised to hear Father Forbes say that he did not preach,” he
+remarked.
+
+“Why should he?” asked the doctor, indifferently. “I suppose he hasn't
+more than fifteen parishioners in a thousand who would understand him
+if he did, and of these probably twelve would join in a complaint to his
+Bishop about the heterodox tone of his sermon. There is no point in his
+going to all that pains, merely to incur that risk. Nobody wants him to
+preach, and he has reached an age where personal vanity no longer tempts
+him to do so. What IS wanted of him is that he should be the paternal,
+ceremonial, authoritative head and centre of his flock, adviser,
+monitor, overseer, elder brother, friend, patron, seigneur--whatever you
+like--everything except a bore. They draw the line at that. You see how
+diametrically opposed this Catholic point of view is to the Protestant.”
+
+“The difference does seem extremely curious to me,” said Theron. “Now,
+those people in the hall--”
+
+“Go on,” put in the doctor, as the other faltered hesitatingly. “I know
+what you were going to say. It struck you as odd that he should let them
+wait on the bench there, while he came up here to smoke.”
+
+Theron smiled faintly. “I WAS thinking that my--my parishioners wouldn't
+have taken it so quietly. But of course--it is all so different!”
+
+“As chalk from cheese!” said Dr. Ledsmar, lighting a fresh cigar. “I
+daresay every one you saw there had come either to take the pledge, or
+see to it that one of the others took it. That is the chief industry
+in the hall, so far as I have observed. Now discipline is an important
+element in the machinery here. Coming to take the pledge implies that
+you have been drunk and are now ashamed. Both states have their values,
+but they are opposed. Sitting on that bench tends to develop penitence
+to the prejudice of alcoholism. But at no stage would it ever occur to
+the occupant of the bench that he was the best judge of how long he was
+to sit there, or that his priest should interrupt his dinner or general
+personal routine, in order to administer that pledge. Now, I daresay you
+have no people at all coming to 'swear off.'”
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head. “No; if a man with us got as bad as
+all that, he wouldn't come near the church at all. He'd simply drop out,
+and there would be an end to it.”
+
+“Quite so,” interjected the doctor. “That is the voluntary system. But
+these fellows can't drop out. There's no bottom to the Catholic Church.
+Everything that's in, stays in. If you don't mind my saying so--of
+course I view you all impartially from the outside--but it seems logical
+to me that a church should exist for those who need its help, and not
+for those who by their own profession are so good already that it is
+they who help the church. Now, you turn a man out of your church who
+behaves badly: that must be on the theory that his remaining in would
+injure the church, and that in turn involves the idea that it is the
+excellent character of the parishioners which imparts virtue to the
+church. The Catholics' conception, you see, is quite the converse. Such
+virtue as they keep in stock is on tap, so to speak, here in the church
+itself, and the parishioners come and get some for themselves according
+to their need for it. Some come every day, some only once a year, some
+perhaps never between their baptism and their funeral. But they all
+have a right here, the professional burglar every whit as much as the
+speckless saint. The only stipulation is that they oughtn't to come
+under false pretences: the burglar is in honor bound not to pass himself
+off to his priest as the saint. But that is merely a moral obligation,
+established in the burglar's own interest. It does him no good to come
+unless he feels that he is playing the rules of the game, and one of
+these is confession. If he cheats there, he knows that he is cheating
+nobody but himself, and might much better have stopped away altogether.”
+
+Theron nodded his head comprehendingly. He had a great many views about
+the Romanish rite of confession which did not at all square with this
+statement of the case, but this did not seem a specially fit time for
+bringing them forth. There was indeed a sense of languid repletion in
+his mind, as if it had been overfed and wanted to lie down for awhile.
+He contented himself with nodding again, and murmuring reflectively,
+“Yes, it is all strangely different.”
+
+His tone was an invitation to silence; and the doctor turned his
+attention to the cigar, studying its ash for a minute with an air
+of deep meditation, and then solemnly blowing out a slow series of
+smoke-rings. Theron watched him with an indolent, placid eye, wondering
+lazily if it was, after all, so very pleasant to smoke.
+
+There fell upon this silence--with a softness so delicate that it came
+almost like a progression in the hush--the sound of sweet music. For a
+little, strain and source were alike indefinite--an impalpable setting
+to harmony of the mellowed light, the perfumed opalescence of the air,
+the luxury and charm of the room. Then it rose as by a sweeping curve of
+beauty, into a firm, calm, severe melody, delicious to the ear, but as
+cold in the mind's vision as moonlit sculpture. It went on upward with
+stately collectedness of power, till the atmosphere seemed all alive
+with the trembling consciousness of the presence of lofty souls, sternly
+pure and pitilessly great.
+
+Theron found himself moved as he had never been before. He almost
+resented the discovery, when it was presented to him by the prosaic,
+mechanical side of his brain, that he was listening to organ-music, and
+that it came through the open window from the church close by. He would
+fain have reclined in his chair and closed his eyes, and saturated
+himself with the uttermost fulness of the sensation. Yet, in absurd
+despite of himself, he rose and moved over to the window.
+
+Only a narrow alley separated the pastorate from the church; Mr. Ware
+could have touched with a walking-stick the opposite wall. Indirectly
+facing him was the arched and mullioned top of a great window. A dim
+light from within shone through the more translucent portions of the
+glass below, throwing out faint little bars of party-colored radiance
+upon the blackness of the deep passage-way. He could vaguely trace by
+these the outlines of some sort of picture on the window. There were
+human figures in it, and--yes--up here in the centre, nearest him, was a
+woman's head. There was a halo about it, engirdling rich, flowing waves
+of reddish hair, the lights in which glowed like flame. The face itself
+was barely distinguishable, but its half-suggested form raised a curious
+sense of resemblance to some other face. He looked at it closely,
+blankly, the noble music throbbing through his brain meanwhile.
+
+“It's that Madden girl!” he suddenly heard a voice say by his side. Dr.
+Ledsmar had followed him to the window, and was close at his shoulder.
+
+Theron's thoughts were upon the puzzling shadowed lineaments on the
+stained glass. He saw now in a flash the resemblance which had baffled
+him. “It IS like her, of course,” he said.
+
+“Yes, unfortunately, it IS just like her,” replied the doctor, with a
+hostile note in his voice. “Whenever I am dining here, she always goes
+in and kicks up that racket. She knows I hate it.”
+
+“Oh, you mean that it is she who is playing,” remarked Theron. “I
+thought you referred to--at least--I was thinking of--”
+
+His sentence died off in inconsequence. He had a feeling that he did not
+want to talk with the doctor about the stained-glass likeness. The music
+had sunk away now into fragmentary and unconnected passages, broken here
+and there by abrupt stops. Dr. Ledsmar stretched an arm out past him and
+shut the window. “Let's hear as little of the row as we can,” he said,
+and the two went back to their chairs.
+
+“Pardon me for the question,” the Rev. Mr. Ware said, after a pause
+which began to affect him as constrained, “but something you said about
+dining--you don't live here, then? In the house, I mean?”
+
+The doctor laughed--a characteristically abrupt, dry little laugh, which
+struck Theron at once as bearing a sort of black-sheep relationship
+to the priest's habitual chuckle. “That must have been puzzling you no
+end,” he said--“that notion that the pastorate kept a devil's advocate
+on the premises. No, Mr. Ware, I don't live here. I inhabit a house
+of my own--you may have seen it--an old-fashioned place up beyond the
+race-course, with a sort of tower at the back, and a big garden. But I
+dine here three or four times a week. It is an old arrangement of ours.
+Vincent and I have been friends for many years now. We are quite alone
+in the world, we two--much to our mutual satisfaction. You must come
+up and see me some time; come up and have a look over the books we were
+speaking of.”
+
+“I am much obliged,” said Theron, without enthusiasm. The thought of the
+doctor by himself did not attract him greatly.
+
+The reservation in his tone seemed to interest the doctor. “I suppose
+you are the first man I have asked in a dozen years,” he remarked,
+frankly willing that the young minister should appreciate the favor
+extended him. “It must be fully that since anybody but Vincent Forbes
+has been under my roof; that is, of my own species, I mean.”
+
+“You live there quite alone,” commented Theron.
+
+“Quite--with my dogs and cats and lizards--and my Chinaman. I mustn't
+forget him.” The doctor noted the inquiry in the other's lifted brows,
+and smilingly explained. “He is my solitary servant. Possibly he
+might not appeal to you much; but I can assure you he used to interest
+Octavius a great deal when I first brought him here, ten years ago or
+so. He afforded occupation for all the idle boys in the village for a
+twelve-month at least. They used to lie in wait for him all day long,
+with stones or horse-chestnuts or snowballs, according to the season.
+The Irishmen from the wagon-works nearly killed him once or twice, but
+he patiently lived it all down. The Chinaman has the patience to live
+everything down--the Caucasian races included. He will see us all to
+bed, will that gentleman with the pigtail!”
+
+The music over in the church had lifted itself again into form and
+sequence, and defied the closed window. If anything, it was louder than
+before, and the sonorous roar of the bass-pedals seemed to be shaking
+the very walls. It was something with a big-lunged, exultant, triumphing
+swing in it--something which ought to have been sung on the battlefield
+at the close of day by the whole jubilant army of victors. It was
+impossible to pretend not to be listening to it; but the doctor
+submitted with an obvious scowl, and bit off the tip of his third cigar
+with an annoyed air.
+
+“You don't seem to care much for music,” suggested Mr. Ware, when a lull
+came.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar looked up, lighted match in hand. “Say musicians!” he
+growled. “Has it ever occurred to you,” he went on, between puffs at the
+flame, “that the only animals who make the noises we call music are of
+the bird family--a debased offshoot of the reptilian creation--the
+very lowest types of the vertebrata now in existence? I insist upon
+the parallel among humans. I have in my time, sir, had considerable
+opportunities for studying close at hand the various orders of mammalia
+who devote themselves to what they describe as the arts. It may sound
+a harsh judgement, but I am convinced that musicians stand on the very
+bottom rung of the ladder in the sub-cellar of human intelligence, even
+lower than painters and actors.”
+
+This seemed such unqualified nonsense to the Rev. Mr. Ware that he
+offered no comment whatever upon it. He tried instead to divert his
+thoughts to the stormy strains which rolled in through the vibrating
+brickwork, and to picture to himself the large, capable figure of Miss
+Madden seated in the half-light at the organ-board, swaying to and fro
+in a splendid ecstasy of power as she evoked at will this superb and
+ordered uproar. But the doctor broke insistently in upon his musings.
+
+“All art, so-called, is decay,” he said, raising his voice. “When a race
+begins to brood on the beautiful--so-called--it is a sign of rot, of
+getting ready to fall from the tree. Take the Jews--those marvellous old
+fellows--who were never more than a handful, yet have imposed the rule
+of their ideas and their gods upon us for fifteen hundred years. Why?
+They were forbidden by their most fundamental law to make sculptures or
+pictures. That was at a time when the Egyptians, when the Assyrians, and
+other Semites, were running to artistic riot. Every great museum in
+the world now has whole floors devoted to statues from the Nile, and
+marvellous carvings from the palaces of Sargon and Assurbanipal. You
+can get the artistic remains of the Jews during that whole period into
+a child's wheelbarrow. They had the sense and strength to penalize art;
+they alone survived. They saw the Egyptians go, the Assyrians go, the
+Greeks go, the late Romans go, the Moors in Spain go--all the artistic
+peoples perish. They remained triumphing over all. Now at last their
+long-belated apogee is here; their decline is at hand. I am told that in
+this present generation in Europe the Jews are producing a great lot of
+young painters and sculptors and actors, just as for a century they have
+been producing famous composers and musicians. That means the end of the
+Jews!”
+
+“What! have you only got as far as that?” came the welcome interruption
+of a cheery voice. Father Forbes had entered the room, and stood looking
+down with a whimsical twinkle in his eye from one to the other of his
+guests.
+
+“You must have been taken over the ground at a very slow pace, Mr.
+Ware,” he continued, chuckling softly, “to have arrived merely at the
+collapse of the New Jerusalem. I fancied I had given him time enough to
+bring you straight up to the end of all of us, with that Chinaman of
+his gently slapping our graves with his pigtail. That's where the doctor
+always winds up, if he's allowed to run his course.”
+
+“It has all been very interesting, extremely so, I assure you,” faltered
+Theron. It had become suddenly apparent to him that he desired nothing
+so much as to make his escape--that he had indeed only been waiting for
+the host's return to do so.
+
+He rose at this, and explained that he must be going. No special effort
+being put forth to restrain him, he presently made his way out, Father
+Forbes hospitably following him down to the door, and putting a very
+gracious cordiality into his adieux.
+
+The night was warm and black. Theron stood still in it the moment the
+pastorate door had closed; the sudden darkness was so thick that it
+was as if he had closed his eyes. His dominant sensation was of a deep
+relief and rest after some undue fatigue. It crossed his mind that
+drunken men probably felt like that as they leaned against things on
+their way home. He was affected himself, he saw, by the weariness and
+half-nausea following a mental intoxication. The conceit pleased him,
+and he smiled to himself as he turned and took the first homeward steps.
+It must be growing late, he thought. Alice would be wondering as she
+waited.
+
+There was a street lamp at the corner, and as he walked toward it he
+noted all at once that his feet were keeping step to the movement of
+the music proceeding from the organ within the church--a vaguely
+processional air, marked enough in measure, but still with a dreamy
+effect. It became a pleasure to identify his progress with the quaint
+rhythm of sound as he sauntered along. He discovered, as he neared
+the light, that he was instinctively stepping over the seams in the
+flagstone sidewalk as he had done as a boy. He smiled again at this.
+There was something exceptionally juvenile and buoyant about his mood,
+now that he examined it. He set it down as a reaction from that doctor's
+extravagant and incendiary talk. One thing was certain--he would never
+be caught up at that house beyond the race-course, with its reptiles and
+its Chinaman. Should he ever even go to the pastorate again? He decided
+not to quite definitely answer THAT in the negative, but as he felt now,
+the chances were all against it.
+
+Turning the corner, and walking off into the shadows along the side
+of the huge church building, Theron noted, almost at the end of the
+edifice, a small door--the entrance to a porch coming out to the
+sidewalk--which stood wide open. A thin, pale, vertical line of light
+showed that the inner door, too, was ajar.
+
+Through this wee aperture the organ-music, reduced and mellowed by
+distance, came to him again with that same curious, intimate, personal
+relation which had so moved him at the start, before the doctor closed
+the window. It was as if it was being played for him alone.
+
+He paused for a doubting minute or two, with bowed head, listening to
+the exquisite harmony which floated out to caress and soothe and enfold
+him. There was no spiritual, or at least pious, effect in it now.
+He fancied that it must be secular music, or, if not, then something
+adapted to marriage ceremonies--rich, vivid, passionate, a celebration
+of beauty and the glory of possession, with its ruling note of joy only
+heightened by soft, wooing interludes, and here and there the tremor of
+a fond, timid little sob.
+
+Theron turned away irresolutely, half frightened at the undreamt-of
+impression this music was making upon him. Then, all at once, he wheeled
+and stepped boldly into the porch, pushing the inner door open and
+hearing it rustle against its leathern frame as it swung to behind him.
+
+He had never been inside a Catholic church before.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Jeremiah Madden was supposed to be probably the richest man in Octavius.
+There was no doubt at all about his being its least pretentious citizen.
+
+The huge and ornate modern mansion which he had built, putting to shame
+every other house in the place, gave an effect of ostentation to the
+Maddens as a family; it seemed only to accentuate the air of humility
+which enveloped Jeremiah as with a garment. Everybody knew some version
+of the many tales afloat which, in a kindly spirit, illustrated the
+incongruity between him and his splendid habitation. Some had it that he
+slept in the shed. Others told whimsical stories of his sitting alone in
+the kitchen evenings, smoking his old clay pipe, and sorrowing because
+the second Mrs. Madden would not suffer the pigs and chickens to come
+in and bear him company. But no matter how comic the exaggeration,
+these legends were invariably amiable. It lay in no man's mouth to speak
+harshly of Jeremiah Madden.
+
+He had been born a Connemara peasant, and he would die one. When he
+was ten years old he had seen some of his own family, and most of his
+neighbors, starve to death. He could remember looking at the stiffened
+figure of a woman stretched on the stones by the roadside, with the
+green stain of nettles on her white lips. A girl five years or so
+older than himself, also a Madden and distantly related, had started
+in despair off across the mountains to the town where it was said the
+poor-law officers were dealing out food. He could recall her coming back
+next day, wild-eyed with hunger and the fever; the officers had refused
+her relief because her bare legs were not wholly shrunken to the bone.
+“While there's a calf on the shank, there's no starvation,” they had
+explained to her. The girl died without profiting by this official
+apothegm. The boy found it burned ineffaceably upon his brain. Now,
+after a lapse of more than forty years, it seemed the thing that he
+remembered best about Ireland.
+
+He had drifted westward as an unconsidered, unresisting item in that
+vast flight of the famine years. Others whom he rubbed against in that
+melancholy exodus, and deemed of much greater promise than himself, had
+done badly. Somehow he did well. He learned the wheelwright's trade,
+and really that seemed all there was to tell. The rest had been calm
+and sequent progression--steady employment as a journeyman first; then
+marriage and a house and lot; the modest start as a master; the move to
+Octavius and cheap lumber; the growth of his business, always marked of
+late years stupendous--all following naturally, easily, one thing out of
+another. Jeremiah encountered the idea among his fellows, now and again,
+that he was entitled to feel proud of all this. He smiled to himself at
+the thought, and then sent a sigh after the smile. What was it all but
+empty and transient vanity? The score of other Connemara boys he had
+known--none very fortunate, several broken tragically in prison or the
+gutter, nearly all now gone the way of flesh--were as good as he. He
+could not have it in his heart to take credit for his success; it would
+have been like sneering over their poor graves.
+
+Jeremiah Madden was now fifty-three--a little man of a reddened,
+weather-worn skin and a meditative, almost saddened, aspect. He had blue
+eyes, but his scanty iron-gray hair showed raven black in its shadows.
+The width and prominence of his cheek-bones dominated all one's
+recollections of his face. The long vertical upper-lip and irregular
+teeth made, in repose, an unshapely mouth; its smile, though, sweetened
+the whole countenance. He wore a fringe of stiff, steel-colored beard,
+passing from ear to ear under his chin. His week-day clothes were as
+simple as his workaday manners, fitting his short black pipe and his
+steadfast devotion to his business. On Sundays he dressed with a certain
+rigor of respectability, all in black, and laid aside tobacco, at least
+to the public view. He never missed going to the early Low Mass, quite
+alone. His family always came later, at the ten o'clock High Mass.
+
+There had been, at one time or another, a good many members of this
+family. Two wives had borne Jeremiah Madden a total of over a dozen
+children. Of these there survived now only two of the first Mrs.
+Madden's offspring--Michael and Celia--and a son of the present wife,
+who had been baptized Terence, but called himself Theodore. This
+minority of the family inhabited the great new house on Main Street.
+Jeremiah went every Sunday afternoon by himself to kneel in the presence
+of the majority, there where they lay in Saint Agnes' consecrated
+ground. If the weather was good, he generally extended his walk through
+the fields to an old deserted Catholic burial-field, which had been used
+only in the first years after the famine invasion, and now was clean
+forgotten. The old wagon-maker liked to look over the primitive,
+neglected stones which marked the graves of these earlier exiles. Fully
+half of the inscriptions mentioned his County Galway--there were two
+naming the very parish adjoining his. The latest date on any stone was
+of the remoter 'fifties. They had all been stricken down, here in this
+strange land with its bitter winters, while the memory of their own
+soft, humid, gentle west-coast air was fresh within them. Musing upon
+the clumsy sculpture, with its “R.I.P.,” or “Pray for the Soul of,” half
+to be guessed under the stain and moss of a generation, there would seem
+to him but a step from this present to that heart-rending, awful past.
+What had happened between was a meaningless vision--as impersonal as the
+passing of the planets overhead. He rarely had an impulse to tears
+in the new cemetery, where his ten children were. He never left this
+weed-grown, forsaken old God's-acre dry-eyed.
+
+One must not construct from all this the image of a melancholy man, as
+his fellows met and knew him. Mr. Madden kept his griefs, racial and
+individual, for his own use. To the men about him in the offices and
+the shops he presented day after day, year after year, an imperturbable
+cheeriness of demeanor. He had been always fortunate in the selection of
+lieutenants and chief helpers. Two of these had grown now into partners,
+and were almost as much a part of the big enterprise as Jeremiah
+himself. They spoke often of their inability to remember any unjust or
+petulant word of his--much less any unworthy deed. Once they had seen
+him in a great rage, all the more impressive because he said next to
+nothing. A thoughtless fellow told a dirty story in the presence of
+some apprentices; and Madden, listening to this, drove the offender
+implacably from his employ. It was years now since any one who knew him
+had ventured upon lewd pleasantries in his hearing. Jokes of the sort
+which women might hear he was very fond of though he had not much humor
+of his own. Of books he knew nothing whatever, and he made only the most
+perfunctory pretence now and again of reading the newspapers.
+
+The elder son Michael was very like his father--diligent, unassuming,
+kindly, and simple--a plain, tall, thin red man of nearly thirty, who
+toiled in paper cap and rolled-up shirt-sleeves as the superintendent in
+the saw-mill, and put on no airs whatever as the son of the master.
+If there was surprise felt at his not being taken into the firm as a
+partner, he gave no hint of sharing it. He attended to his religious
+duties with great zeal, and was President of the Sodality as a matter
+of course. This was regarded as his blind side; and young employees
+who cultivated it, and made broad their phylacteries under his notice,
+certainly had an added chance of getting on well in the works. To some
+few whom he knew specially well, Michael would confess that if he
+had had the brains for it, he should have wished to be a priest. He
+displayed no inclination to marry.
+
+The other son, Terence, was some eight years younger, and seemed the
+product of a wholly different race. The contrast between Michael's sandy
+skin and long gaunt visage and this dark boy's handsome, rounded face,
+with its prettily curling black hair, large, heavily fringed brown
+eyes, and delicately modelled features, was not more obvious than their
+temperamental separation. This second lad had been away for years at
+school,--indeed, at a good many schools, for no one seemed to manage
+to keep him long. He had been with the Jesuits at Georgetown, with the
+Christian Brothers at Manhattan; the sectarian Mt. St. Mary's and the
+severely secular Annapolis had both been tried, and proved misfits.
+The young man was home again now, and save that his name had become
+Theodore, he appeared in no wise changed from the beautiful, wilful,
+bold, and showy boy who had gone away in his teens. He was still rather
+small for his years, but so gracefully moulded in form, and so perfectly
+tailored, that the fact seemed rather an advantage than otherwise.
+He never dreamed of going near the wagon-works, but he did go a good
+deal--in fact, most of the time--to the Nedahma Club. His mother spoke
+often to her friends about her fears for his health. He never spoke to
+his friends about his mother at all.
+
+The second Mrs. Madden did not, indeed, appeal strongly to the family
+pride. She had been a Miss Foley, a dress-maker, and an old maid.
+Jeremiah had married her after a brief widowerhood, principally
+because she was the sister of his parish priest, and had a considerable
+reputation for piety. It was at a time when the expansion of his
+business was promising certain wealth, and suggesting the removal to
+Octavius. He was conscious of a notion that his obligations to social
+respectability were increasing; it was certain that the embarrassments
+of a motherless family were. Miss Foley had shown a good deal of
+attention to his little children. She was not ill-looking; she bore
+herself with modesty; she was the priest's sister--the niece once
+removed of a vicar-general. And so it came about.
+
+Although those most concerned did not say so, everybody could see from
+the outset the pity of its ever having come about at all. The pious
+and stiffly respectable priest's sister had been harmless enough as
+a spinster. It made the heart ache to contemplate her as a wife.
+Incredibly narrow-minded, ignorant, suspicious, vain, and sour-tempered,
+she must have driven a less equable and well-rooted man than Jeremiah
+Madden to drink or flight. He may have had his temptations, but they
+made no mark on the even record of his life. He only worked the harder,
+concentrating upon his business those extra hours which another sort of
+home-life would have claimed instead. The end of twenty years found him
+a rich man, but still toiling pertinaciously day by day, as if he had
+his wage to earn. In the great house which had been built to please, or
+rather placate, his wife, he kept to himself as much as possible. The
+popular story of his smoking alone in the kitchen was more or less
+true; only Michael as a rule sat with him, too weak-lunged for tobacco
+himself, but reading stray scraps from the papers to the lonely old man,
+and talking with him about the works, the while Jeremiah meditatively
+sucked his clay pipe. One or two evenings in the week the twain spent up
+in Celia's part of the house, listening with the awe of simple, honest
+mechanics to the music she played for them.
+
+Celia was to them something indefinably less, indescribably more, than
+a daughter and sister. They could not think there had ever been anything
+like her before in the world; the notion of criticising any deed or word
+of hers would have appeared to them monstrous and unnatural.
+
+She seemed to have come up to this radiant and wise and marvellously
+talented womanhood of hers, to their minds, quite spontaneously. There
+had been a little Celia--a red-headed, sulky, mutinous slip of a girl,
+always at war with her step-mother, and affording no special comfort or
+hope to the rest of the family. Then there was a long gap, during which
+the father, four times a year, handed Michael a letter he had received
+from the superioress of a distant convent, referring with cold formality
+to the studies and discipline by which Miss Madden might profit more if
+she had been better brought up, and enclosing a large bill. Then all at
+once they beheld a big Celia, whom they spoke of as being home again,
+but who really seemed never to have been there before--a tall, handsome,
+confident young woman, swift of tongue and apprehension, appearing to
+know everything there was to be known by the most learned, able to paint
+pictures, carve wood, speak in divers languages, and make music for the
+gods, yet with it all a very proud lady, one might say a queen.
+
+The miracle of such a Celia as this impressed itself even upon the
+step-mother. Mrs. Madden had looked forward with a certain grim
+tightening of her combative jaws to the home-coming of the “red-head.”
+ She felt herself much more the fine lady now than she had been when the
+girl went away. She had her carriage now, and the magnificent new house
+was nearly finished, and she had a greater number of ailments, and
+spent far more money on doctor's bills, than any other lady in the
+whole section. The flush of pride in her greatest achievement up to
+date--having the most celebrated of New York physicians brought up to
+Octavius by special train--still prickled in her blood. It was in
+all the papers, and the admiration of the flatterers and
+“soft-sawdherers”--wives of Irish merchants and smaller professional men
+who formed her social circle--was raising visions in her poor head of
+going next year with Theodore to Saratoga, and fastening the attention
+of the whole fashionable republic upon the variety and resources of her
+invalidism. Mrs. Madden's fancy did not run to the length of seeing her
+step-daughter also at Saratoga; it pictured her still as the sullen
+and hated “red-head,” moping defiantly in corners, or courting by
+her insolence the punishments which leaped against their leash in the
+step-mother's mind to get at her.
+
+The real Celia, when she came, fairly took Mrs. Madden's breath away.
+The peevish little plans for annoyance and tyranny, the resolutions born
+of ignorant and jealous egotism, found themselves swept out of sight by
+the very first swirl of Celia's dress-train, when she came down from her
+room robed in peacock blue. The step-mother could only stare.
+
+Now, after two years of it, Mrs. Madden still viewed her step-daughter
+with round-eyed uncertainty, not unmixed with wrathful fear. She still
+drove about behind two magnificent horses; the new house had become
+almost tiresome by familiarity; her pre-eminence in the interested minds
+of the Dearborn County Medical Society was as towering as ever, but
+somehow it was all different. There was a note of unreality nowadays
+in Mrs. Donnelly's professions of wonder at her bearing up under
+her multiplied maladies; there was almost a leer of mockery in the
+sympathetic smirk with which the Misses Mangan listened to her symptoms.
+Even the doctors, though they kept their faces turned toward her,
+obviously did not pay much attention; the people in the street seemed no
+longer to look at her and her equipage at all. Worst of all, something
+of the meaning of this managed to penetrate her own mind. She caught now
+and again a dim glimpse of herself as others must have been seeing her
+for years--as a stupid, ugly, boastful, and bad-tempered old nuisance.
+And it was always as if she saw this in a mirror held up by Celia.
+
+Of open discord there had been next to none. Celia would not permit it,
+and showed this so clearly from the start that there was scarcely need
+for her saying it. It seemed hardly necessary for her to put into words
+any of her desires, for that matter. All existing arrangements in the
+Madden household seemed to shrink automatically and make room for her,
+whichever way she walked. A whole quarter of the unfinished house set
+itself apart for her. Partitions altered themselves; door-ways moved
+across to opposite sides; a recess opened itself, tall and deep, for it
+knew not what statue--simply because, it seemed, the Lady Celia willed
+it so.
+
+When the family moved into this mansion, it was with a consciousness
+that the only one who really belonged there was Celia. She alone could
+behave like one perfectly at home. It seemed entirely natural to the
+others that she should do just what she liked, shut them off from her
+portion of the house, take her meals there if she felt disposed, and
+keep such hours as pleased her instant whim. If she awakened them at
+midnight by her piano, or deferred her breakfast to the late afternoon,
+they felt that it must be all right, since Celia did it. She had one
+room furnished with only divans and huge, soft cushions, its walls
+covered with large copies of statuary not too strictly clothed, which
+she would suffer no one, not even the servants, to enter. Michael
+fancied sometimes, when he passed the draped entrance to this sacred
+chamber, that the portiere smelt of tobacco, but he would not have
+spoken of it, even had he been sure. Old Jeremiah, whose established
+habit it was to audit minutely the expenses of his household, covered
+over round sums to Celia's separate banking account, upon the mere
+playful hint of her holding her check-book up, without a dream of
+questioning her.
+
+That the step-mother had joy, or indeed anything but gall and wormwood,
+out of all this is not to be pretended. There lingered along in the
+recollection of the family some vague memories of her having tried to
+assert an authority over Celia's comings and goings at the outset, but
+they grouped themselves as only parts of the general disorder of moving
+and settling, which a fort-night or so quite righted. Mrs. Madden
+still permitted herself a certain license of hostile comment when her
+step-daughter was not present, and listened with gratification to what
+the women of her acquaintance ventured upon saying in the same spirit;
+but actual interference or remonstrance she never offered nowadays.
+The two rarely met, for that matter, and exchanged only the baldest and
+curtest forms of speech.
+
+Celia Madden interested all Octavius deeply. This she must have done
+in any case, if only because she was the only daughter of its richest
+citizen. But the bold, luxuriant quality of her beauty, the original
+and piquant freedom of her manners, the stories told in gossip about
+her lawlessness at home, her intellectual attainments, and artistic
+vagaries--these were even more exciting. The unlikelihood of her
+marrying any one--at least any Octavian--was felt to add a certain
+romantic zest to the image she made on the local perceptions. There was
+no visible young Irishman at all approaching the social and financial
+standard of the Maddens; it was taken for granted that a mixed marriage
+was quite out of the question in this case. She seemed to have more
+business about the church than even the priest. She was always playing
+the organ, or drilling the choir, or decorating the altars with flowers,
+or looking over the robes of the acolytes for rents and stains, or going
+in or out of the pastorate. Clearly this was not the sort of girl to
+take a Protestant husband.
+
+The gossip of the town concerning her was, however, exclusively
+Protestant. The Irish spoke of her, even among themselves, but seldom.
+There was no occasion for them to pretend to like her: they did not know
+her, except in the most distant and formal fashion. Even the members of
+the choir, of both sexes, had the sense of being held away from her
+at haughty arm's length. No single parishioner dreamed of calling her
+friend. But when they referred to her, it was always with a cautious and
+respectful reticence. For one thing, she was the daughter of their chief
+man, the man they most esteemed and loved. For another, reservations
+they may have had in their souls about her touched close upon a
+delicately sore spot. It could not escape their notice that their
+Protestant neighbors were watching her with vigilant curiosity, and with
+a certain tendency to wink when her name came into conversation along
+with that of Father Forbes. It had never yet got beyond a tendency--the
+barest fluttering suggestion of a tempted eyelid--but the whole Irish
+population of the place felt themselves to be waiting, with clenched
+fists but sinking hearts, for the wink itself.
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware had not caught even the faintest hint of these
+overtures to suspicion.
+
+When he had entered the huge, dark, cool vault of the church, he could
+see nothing at first but a faint light up over the gallery, far at the
+other end. Then, little by little, his surroundings shaped themselves
+out of the gloom. To his right was a rail and some broad steps rising
+toward a softly confused mass of little gray vertical bars and the pale
+twinkle of tiny spots of gilded reflection, which he made out in the
+dusk to be the candles and trappings of the altar. Overhead the great
+arches faded away from foundations of dimly discernible capitals
+into utter blackness. There was a strange medicinal odor--as of cubeb
+cigarettes--in the air.
+
+After a little pause, he tiptoed noiselessly up the side aisle toward
+the end of the church--toward the light above the gallery. This radiance
+from a single gas-jet expanded as he advanced, and spread itself upward
+over a burnished row of monster metal pipes, which went towering into
+the darkness like giants. They were roaring at him now--a sonorous,
+deafening, angry bellow, which made everything about him vibrate. The
+gallery balustrade hid the keyboard and the organist from view. There
+were only these jostling brazen tubes, as big round as trees and as
+tall, trembling with their own furious thunder. It was for all the world
+as if he had wandered into some vast tragical, enchanted cave, and was
+being drawn against his will--like fascinated bird and python--toward
+fate at the savage hands of these swollen and enraged genii.
+
+He stumbled in the obscure light over a kneeling-bench, making a
+considerable racket. On the instant the noise from the organ ceased, and
+he saw the black figure of a woman rise above the gallery-rail and look
+down.
+
+“Who is it?” the indubitable voice of Miss Madden demanded sharply.
+
+Theron had a sudden sheepish notion of turning and running. With the
+best grace he could summon, he called out an explanation instead.
+
+“Wait a minute. I'm through now. I'm coming down,” she returned. He
+thought there was a note of amusement in her tone.
+
+She came to him a moment later, accompanied by a thin, tall man, whom
+Theron could barely see in the dark, now that the organ-light too was
+gone. This man lighted a match or two to enable them to make their way
+out.
+
+When they were on the sidewalk, Celia spoke: “Walk on ahead, Michael!”
+ she said. “I have some matters to speak of with Mr. Ware.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+“Well, what did you think of Dr. Ledsmar?”
+
+The girl's abrupt question came as a relief to Theron. They were walking
+along in a darkness so nearly complete that he could see next to nothing
+of his companion. For some reason, this seemed to suggest a sort of
+impropriety. He had listened to the footsteps of the man ahead--whom
+he guessed to be a servant--and pictured him as intent upon getting up
+early next morning to tell everybody that the Methodist minister had
+stolen into the Catholic church at night to walk home with Miss Madden.
+That was going to be very awkward--yes, worse than awkward! It might
+mean ruin itself. She had mentioned aloud that she had matters to talk
+over with him: that of course implied confidences, and the man might
+put heaven only knew what construction on that. It was notorious that
+servants did ascribe the very worst motives to those they worked for.
+The bare thought of the delight an Irish servant would have in also
+dragging a Protestant clergyman into the thing was sickening. And what
+could she want to talk to him about, anyway? The minute of silence
+stretched itself out upon his nerves into an interminable period of
+anxious unhappiness. Her mention of the doctor at last somehow, seemed
+to lighten the situation.
+
+“Oh, I thought he was very smart.” he made haste to answer. “Wouldn't
+it be better--to--keep close to your man? He--may--think we've gone some
+other way.”
+
+“It wouldn't matter if he did,” remarked Celia. She appeared to
+comprehend his nervousness and take pity on it, for she added, “It is
+my brother Michael, as good a soul as ever lived. He is quite used to my
+ways.”
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware drew a long comforting breath. “Oh, I see! He went
+with you to--bring you home.”
+
+“To blow the organ,” said the girl in the dark, correctingly. “But about
+that doctor; did you like him?”
+
+“Well,” Theron began, “'like' is rather a strong word for so short
+an acquaintance. He talked very well; that is, fluently. But he is so
+different from any other man I have come into contact with that--”
+
+“What I wanted you to say was that you hated him,” put in Celia, firmly.
+
+“I don't make a practice of saying that of anybody,” returned Theron, so
+much at his ease again that he put an effect of gentle, smiling reproof
+into the words. “And why specially should I make an exception for him?”
+
+“Because he's a beast!”
+
+Theron fancied that he understood. “I noticed that he seemed not to have
+much of an ear for music,” he commented, with a little laugh. “He shut
+down the window when you began to play. His doing so annoyed me, because
+I--I wanted very much to hear it all. I never heard such music before.
+I--I came into the church to hear more of it; but then you stopped!”
+
+“I will play for you some other time,” Celia said, answering the
+reproach in his tone. “But tonight I wanted to talk with you instead.”
+
+She kept silent, in spite of this, so long now that Theron was on the
+point of jestingly asking when the talk was to begin. Then she put a
+question abruptly--
+
+“It is a conventional way of putting it, but are you fond of poetry, Mr.
+Ware?”
+
+“Well, yes, I suppose I am,” replied Theron, much mystified. “I can't
+say that I am any great judge; but I like the things that I like--and--”
+
+“Meredith,” interposed Celia, “makes one of his women, Emilia in
+England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in
+cages, always going to one end and back again. Does it impress you that
+way?”
+
+“I don't know that it does,” said he, dubiously. It seemed, however,
+to be her whim to talk literature, and he went on: “I've hardly read
+Meredith at all. I once borrowed his 'Lucile,' but somehow I never got
+interested in it. I heard a recitation of his once, though--a piece
+about a dead wife, and the husband and another man quarrelling as to
+whose portrait was in the locket on her neck, and of their going up to
+settle the dispute, and finding that it was the likeness of a third man,
+a young priest--and though it was very striking, it didn't give me a
+thirst to know his other poems. I fancied I shouldn't like them. But
+I daresay I was wrong. As I get older, I find that I take less narrow
+views of literature--that is, of course, of light literature--and
+that--that--”
+
+Celia mercifully stopped him. “The reason I asked you was--” she began,
+and then herself paused. “Or no,--never mind that--tell me something
+else. Are you fond of pictures, statuary, the beautiful things of the
+world? Do great works of art, the big achievements of the big artists,
+appeal to you, stir you up?”
+
+“Alas! that is something I can only guess at myself,” answered Theron,
+humbly. “I have always lived in little places. I suppose, from your
+point of view, I have never seen a good painting in my life. I can only
+say this, though--that it has always weighed on my mind as a great and
+sore deprivation, this being shut out from knowing what others mean when
+they talk and write about art. Perhaps that may help you to get at what
+you are after. If I ever went to New York, I feel that one of the first
+things I should do would be to see all the picture galleries; is that
+what you meant? And--would you mind telling me--why you--?”
+
+“Why I asked you?” Celia supplied his halting question. “No, I DON'T
+mind. I have a reason for wanting to know--to satisfy myself whether I
+had guessed rightly or not--about the kind of man you are. I mean in the
+matter of temperament and bent of mind and tastes.”
+
+The girl seemed to be speaking seriously, and without intent to offend.
+Theron did not find any comment ready, but walked along by her side,
+wondering much what it was all about.
+
+“I daresay you think me 'too familiar on short acquaintance,'” she
+continued, after a little.
+
+“My dear Miss Madden!” he protested perfunctorily.
+
+“No; it is a matter of a good deal of importance,” she went on. “I can
+see that you are going to be thrown into friendship, close contact, with
+Father Forbes. He likes you, and you can't help liking him. There is
+nobody else in this raw, overgrown, empty-headed place for you and him
+TO like, nobody except that man, that Dr. Ledsmar. And if you like HIM,
+I shall hate you! He has done mischief enough already. I am counting on
+you to help undo it, and to choke him off from doing more. It would be
+different if you were an ordinary Orthodox minister, all encased like
+a terrapin in prejudices and nonsense. Of course, if you had been THAT
+kind, we should never have got to know you at all. But when I saw you in
+MacEvoy's cottage there, it was plain that you were one of US--I mean a
+MAN, and not a marionette or a mummy. I am talking very frankly to you,
+you see. I want you on my side, against that doctor and his heartless,
+bloodless science.”
+
+“I feel myself very heartily on your side,” replied Theron. She had set
+their progress at a slower pace, now that the lights of the main
+street were drawing near, as if to prolong their talk. All his earlier
+reservations had fled. It was almost as if she were a parishioner of
+his own. “I need hardly tell you that the doctor's whole attitude
+toward--toward revelation--was deeply repugnant to me. It doesn't make
+it any the less hateful to call it science. I am afraid, though,” he
+went on hesitatingly, “that there are difficulties in the way of my
+helping, as you call it. You see, the very fact of my being a Methodist
+minister, and his being a Catholic priest, rather puts my interference
+out of the question.”
+
+“No; that doesn't matter a button,” said Celia, lightly. “None of us
+think of that at all.”
+
+“There is the other embarrassment, then,” pursued Theron, diffidently,
+“that Father Forbes is a vastly broader and deeper scholar--in all these
+matters--than I am. How could I possibly hope to influence him by my
+poor arguments? I don't know even the alphabet of the language he thinks
+in--on these subjects, I mean.”
+
+“Of course you don't!” interposed the girl, with a confidence which the
+other, for all his meekness, rather winced under. “That wasn't what
+I meant at all. We don't want arguments from our friends: we want
+sympathies, sensibilities, emotional bonds. The right person's silence
+is worth more for companionship than the wisest talk in the world from
+anybody else. It isn't your mind that is needed here, or what you know;
+it is your heart, and what you feel. You are full of poetry, of ideals,
+of generous, unselfish impulses. You see the human, the warm-blooded
+side of things. THAT is what is really valuable. THAT is how you can
+help!”
+
+“You overestimate me sadly,” protested Theron, though with considerable
+tolerance for her error in his tone. “But you ought to tell me something
+about this Dr. Ledsmar. He spoke of being an old friend of the pr--of
+Father Forbes.”
+
+“Oh, yes, they've always known each other; that is, for many years. They
+were professors together in a college once, heaven only knows how long
+ago. Then they separated, I fancy they quarrelled, too, before they
+parted. The doctor came here, where some relative had left him the
+place he lives in. Then in time the Bishop chanced to send Father Forbes
+here--that was about three years ago,--and the two men after a while
+renewed their old relations. They dine together; that is the doctor's
+stronghold. He knows more about eating than any other man alive, I
+believe. He studies it as you would study a language. He has taught
+old Maggie, at the pastorate there, to cook like the mother of all
+the Delmonicos. And while they sit and stuff themselves, or loll about
+afterward like gorged snakes, they think it is smart to laugh at all the
+sweet and beautiful things in life, and to sneer at people who believe
+in ideals, and to talk about mankind being merely a fortuitous product
+of fermentation, and twaddle of that sort. It makes me sick!”
+
+“I can readily see,” said Theron, with sympathy, “how such a cold,
+material, and infidel influence as that must shock and revolt an
+essentially religious temperament like yours.”
+
+Miss Madden looked up at him. They had turned into the main street, and
+there was light enough for him to detect something startlingly like a
+grin on her beautiful face.
+
+“But I'm not religious at all, you know,” he heard her say. “I'm as
+Pagan as--anything! Of course there are forms to be observed, and so on;
+I rather like them than otherwise. I can make them serve very well for
+my own system; for I am myself, you know, an out-an-out Greek.”
+
+“Why, I had supposed that you were full blooded Irish,” the Rev. Mr.
+Ware found himself remarking, and then on the instant was overwhelmed by
+the consciousness that he had said a foolish thing. Precisely where the
+folly lay he did not know, but it was impossible to mistake the gesture
+of annoyance which his companion had instinctively made at his words.
+She had widened the distance between them now, and quickened her step.
+They went on in silence till they were within a block of her house.
+Several people had passed them who Theron felt sure must have recognized
+them both.
+
+“What I meant was,” the girl all at once began, drawing nearer again,
+and speaking with patient slowness, “that I find myself much more in
+sympathy with the Greek thought, the Greek theology of the beautiful
+and the strong, the Greek philosophy of life, and all that, than what is
+taught nowadays. Personally, I take much more stock in Plato than I
+do in Peter. But of course it is a wholly personal affair; I had no
+business to bother you with it. And for that matter, I oughtn't to have
+troubled you with any of our--”
+
+“I assure you, Miss Madden!” the young minister began, with fervor.
+
+“No,” she broke in, in a resigned and even downcast tone; “let it all be
+as if I hadn't spoken. Don't mind anything I have said. If it is to be,
+it will be. You can't say more than that, can you?”
+
+She looked into his face again, and her large eyes produced an
+impression of deep melancholy, which Theron found himself somehow
+impelled to share. Things seemed all at once to have become very sad
+indeed.
+
+“It is one of my unhappy nights,” she explained, in gloomy confidence.
+“I get them every once in a while--as if some vicious planet or other
+was crossing in front of my good star--and then I'm a caution to snakes.
+I shut myself up--that's the only thing to do--and have it out with
+myself I didn't know but the organ-music would calm me down, but it
+hasn't. I shan't sleep a wink tonight, but just rage around from one
+room to another, piling all the cushions from the divans on to the
+floor, and then kicking them away again. Do YOU ever have fits like
+that?”
+
+Theron was able to reply with a good conscience in the negative. It
+occurred to him to add, with jocose intent: “I am curious to know,
+do these fits, as you call them, occupy a prominent part in Grecian
+philosophy as a general rule?”
+
+Celia gave a little snort, which might have signified amusement, but did
+not speak until they were upon her own sidewalk. “There is my brother,
+waiting at the gate,” she said then, briefly.
+
+“Well, then, I will bid you good-night here, I think,” Theron remarked,
+coming to a halt, and offering his hand. “It must be getting very
+late, and my--that is--I have to be up particularly early tomorrow. So
+good-night; I hope you will be feeling ever so much better in spirits in
+the morning.”
+
+“Oh, that doesn't matter,” replied the girl, listlessly. “It's a very
+paltry little affair, this life of ours, at the best of it. Luckily it's
+soon done with--like a bad dream.”
+
+“Tut! Tut! I won't have you talk like that!” interrupted Theron, with a
+swift and smart assumption of authority. “Such talk isn't sensible, and
+it isn't good. I have no patience with it!”
+
+“Well, try and have a little patience with ME, anyway, just for
+tonight,” said Celia, taking the reproof with gentlest humility, rather
+to her censor's surprise. “I really am unhappy tonight, Mr. Ware, very
+unhappy. It seems as if all at once the world had swelled out in size
+a thousandfold, and that poor me had dwindled down to the merest wee
+little red-headed atom--the most helpless and forlorn and lonesome of
+atoms at that.” She seemed to force a sorrowful smile on her face as she
+added: “But all the same it has done me good to be with you--I am sure
+it has--and I daresay that by tomorrow I shall be quite out of the
+blues. Good-night, Mr. Ware. Forgive my making such an exhibition of
+myself I WAS going to be such a fine early Greek, you know, and I have
+turned out only a late Milesian--quite of the decadence. I shall do
+better next time. And good-night again, and ever so many thanks.”
+
+She was walking briskly away toward the gate now, where the shadowy
+Michael still patiently stood. Theron strode off in the opposite
+direction, taking long, deliberate steps, and bowing his head in
+thought. He had his hands behind his back, as was his wont, and the
+sense of their recent contact with her firm, ungloved hands was,
+curiously enough, the thing which pushed itself uppermost in his mind.
+There had been a frank, almost manly vigor in her grasp; he said
+to himself that of course that came from her playing so much on the
+keyboard; the exercise naturally would give her large, robust hands.
+
+Suddenly he remembered about the piano; he had quite forgotten to
+solicit her aid in selecting it. He turned, upon the impulse, to go
+back. She had not entered the gate as yet, but stood, shiningly visible
+under the street lamp, on the sidewalk, and she was looking in his
+direction. He turned again like a shot, and started homeward.
+
+The front door of the parsonage was unlocked, and he made his way on
+tiptoe through the unlighted hall to the living-room. The stuffy air
+here was almost suffocating with the evil smell of a kerosene
+lamp turned down too low. Alice sat asleep in her old farmhouse
+rocking-chair, with an inelegant darning-basket on the table by her
+side. The whole effect of the room was as bare and squalid to Theron's
+newly informed eye as the atmosphere was offensive to his nostrils. He
+coughed sharply, and his wife sat up and looked at the clock. It was
+after eleven.
+
+“Where on earth have you been?” she asked, with a yawn, turning up the
+wick of her sewing-lamp again.
+
+“You ought never to turn down a light like that,” said Theron, with a
+complaining note in his voice. “It smells up the whole place. I never
+dreamed of your sitting up for me like this. You ought to have gone to
+bed.”
+
+“But how could I guess that you were going to be so late?,” she
+retorted. “And you haven't told me where you were. Is this book of yours
+going to keep you up like this right along?”
+
+The episode of the book was buried in the young minister's mind beneath
+such a mass of subsequent experiences that it required an effort for him
+to grasp what she was talking about. It seemed as if months had elapsed
+since he was in earnest about that book; and yet he had left the house
+full of it only a few hours before. He shook his wits together, and made
+answer--
+
+“Oh, bless you, no! Only there arose a very curious question. You have
+no idea, literally no conception, of the interesting and important
+problems which are raised by the mere fact of Abraham leaving the city
+of Ur. It's amazing, I assure you. I hadn't realized it myself.”
+
+“Well,” remarked Alice, rising--and with good-humor and petulance
+struggling sleepily ill her tone--“all I've got to say is, that if
+Abraham hasn't anything better to do than to keep young ministers of the
+gospel out, goodness knows where, till all hours of the night, I wish to
+gracious he'd stayed in the city of Ur right straight along.”
+
+“You have no idea what a scholarly man Dr. Ledsmar is,” Theron suddenly
+found himself inspired to volunteer. “He has the most marvellous
+collection of books--a whole library devoted to this very subject--and
+he has put them all quite freely at my disposal. Extremely kind of him,
+isn't it?”
+
+“Ledsmar? Ledsmar?” queried Alice. “I don't seem to remember the name.
+He isn't the little man with the birthmark, who sits in the pew behind
+the Lovejoys, is he? I think some one said he was a doctor.”
+
+“Yes, a horse doctor!” said Theron, with a sniff. “No; you haven't seen
+this Dr. Ledsmar at all. I--I don't know that he attends any church
+regularly. I scraped his acquaintance quite by accident. He is really a
+character. He lives in the big house, just beyond the race-course, you
+know--the one with the tower at the back--”
+
+“No, I don't know. How should I? I've hardly poked my nose outside of
+the yard since I have been here.”
+
+“Well, you shall go,” said the husband, consolingly. “You HAVE been
+cooped up here too much, poor girl. I must take you out more, really.
+I don't know that I could take you to the doctor's place--without an
+invitation, I mean. He is very queer about some things. He lives there
+all alone, for instance, with only a Chinaman for a servant. He told
+me I was almost the only man he had asked under his roof for years. He
+isn't a practising physician at all, you know. He is a scientist; he
+makes experiments with lizards--and things.”
+
+“Theron,” the wife said, pausing lamp in hand on her way to the bedroom,
+“do you be careful, now! For all you know this doctor may be a loose
+man, or pretty near an infidel. You've got to be mighty particular in
+such matters, you know, or you'll have the trustees down on you like a
+'thousand of bricks.'”
+
+“I will thank the trustees to mind their own business,” said Theron,
+stiffly, and the subject dropped.
+
+The bedroom window upstairs was open, and upon the fresh night air
+was borne in the shrill, jangling sound of a piano, being played off
+somewhere in the distance, but so vehemently that the noise imposed
+itself upon the silence far and wide. Theron listened to this as he
+undressed. It proceeded from the direction of the main street, and he
+knew, as by instinct, that it was the Madden girl who was playing. The
+incongruity of the hour escaped his notice. He mused instead upon the
+wild and tropical tangle of moods, emotions, passions, which had grown
+up in that strange temperament. He found something very pathetic in
+that picture she had drawn of herself in forecast, roaming disconsolate
+through her rooms the livelong night, unable to sleep. The woful moan of
+insomnia seemed to make itself heard in every strain from her piano.
+
+Alice heard it also, but being unillumined, she missed the romantic
+pathos. “I call it disgraceful,” she muttered from her pillow, “for
+folks to be banging away on a piano at this time of night. There ought
+to be a law to prevent it.”
+
+“It may be some distressed soul,” said Theron, gently, “seeking relief
+from the curse of sleeplessness.”
+
+The wife laughed, almost contemptuously. “Distressed fiddlesticks!” was
+her only other comment.
+
+The music went on for a long time--rising now to strident heights, now
+sinking off to the merest tinkling murmur, and broken ever and again by
+intervals of utter hush. It did not prevent Alice from at once falling
+sound asleep; but Theron lay awake, it seemed to him, for hours,
+listening tranquilly, and letting his mind wander at will through the
+pleasant antechambers of Sleep, where are more unreal fantasies than
+Dreamland itself affords.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+For some weeks the Rev. Theron Ware saw nothing of either the priest or
+the doctor, or the interesting Miss Madden.
+
+There were, indeed, more urgent matters to think about. June had come;
+and every succeeding day brought closer to hand the ordeal of his first
+Quarterly Conference in Octavius. The waters grew distinctly rougher as
+his pastoral bark neared this difficult passage.
+
+He would have approached the great event with an easier mind if he could
+have made out just how he stood with his congregation. Unfortunately
+nothing in his previous experiences helped him in the least to measure
+or guess at the feelings of these curious Octavians. Their Methodism
+seemed to be sound enough, and to stick quite to the letter of the
+Discipline, so long as it was expressed in formulae. It was its spirit
+which he felt to be complicated by all sorts of conditions wholly novel
+to him.
+
+The existence of a line of street-cars in the town, for example, would
+not impress the casual thinker as likely to prove a rock in the path of
+peaceful religion. Theron, in his simplicity, had even thought, when he
+first saw these bobtailed cars bumping along the rails in the middle of
+the main street, that they must be a great convenience to people living
+in the outskirts, who wished to get in to church of a Sunday morning. He
+was imprudent enough to mention this in conversation with one of his new
+parishioners. Then he learned, to his considerable chagrin, that when
+this line was built, some years before, a bitter war of words had been
+fought upon the question of its being worked on the Sabbath day. The
+then occupant of the Methodist pulpit had so distinguished himself
+above the rest by the solemnity and fervor of his protests against this
+insolent desecration of God's day that the Methodists of Octavius
+still felt themselves peculiarly bound to hold this horse-car line, its
+management, and everything connected with it, in unbending aversion. At
+least once a year they were accustomed to expect a sermon denouncing it
+and all its impious Sunday patrons. Theron made a mental resolve that
+this year they should be disappointed.
+
+Another burning problem, which he had not been called upon before to
+confront, he found now entangled with the mysterious line which divided
+a circus from a menagerie. Those itinerant tent-shows had never come his
+way heretofore, and he knew nothing of that fine balancing proportion
+between ladies in tights on horseback and cages full of deeply
+educational animals, which, even as the impartial rain, was designed
+to embrace alike the just and the unjust. There had arisen inside the
+Methodist society of Octavius some painful episodes, connected with
+members who took their children “just to see the animals,” and were
+convicted of having also watched the Rose-Queen of the Arena, in her
+unequalled flying leap through eight hoops, with an ardent and unashamed
+eye. One of these cases still remained on the censorial docket of the
+church; and Theron understood that he was expected to name a committee
+of five to examine and try it. This he neglected to do.
+
+He was no longer at all certain that the congregation as a whole liked
+his sermons. The truth was, no doubt, that he had learned enough to
+cease regarding the congregation as a whole. He could still rely upon
+carrying along with him in his discourses from the pulpit a large
+majority of interested and approving faces. But here, unhappily, was a
+case where the majority did not rule. The minority, relatively small in
+numbers, was prodigious in virile force.
+
+More than twenty years had now elapsed since that minor schism in the
+Methodist Episcopal Church, the result of which was the independent body
+known as Free Methodists, had relieved the parent flock of its principal
+disturbing element. The rupture came fittingly at that time when all the
+“isms” of the argumentative fifties were hurled violently together into
+the melting-pot of civil war. The great Methodist Church, South, had
+broken bodily off on the question of State Rights. The smaller and
+domestic fraction of Free Methodism separated itself upon an issue
+which may be most readily described as one of civilization. The seceders
+resented growth in material prosperity; they repudiated the introduction
+of written sermons and organ-music; they deplored the increasing laxity
+in meddlesome piety, the introduction of polite manners in the pulpit
+and classroom, and the development of even a rudimentary desire among
+the younger people of the church to be like others outside in dress and
+speech and deportment. They did battle as long as they could, inside
+the fold, to restore it to the severely straight and narrow path of
+primitive Methodism. When the adverse odds became too strong for them,
+they quitted the church and set up a Bethel for themselves.
+
+Octavius chanced to be one of the places where they were able to hold
+their own within the church organization. The Methodism of the town had
+gone along without any local secession. It still held in full fellowship
+the radicals who elsewhere had followed their unbridled bent into the
+strongest emotional vagaries--where excited brethren worked themselves
+up into epileptic fits, and women whirled themselves about in weird
+religious ecstasies, like dervishes of the Orient, till they
+fell headlong in a state of trance. Octavian Methodism was spared
+extravagances of this sort, it is true, but it paid a price for the
+immunity. The people whom an open split would have taken away remained
+to leaven and dominate the whole lump. This small advanced section, with
+its men of a type all the more aggressive from its narrowness, and women
+who went about solemnly in plain gray garments, with tight-fitting,
+unadorned, mouse-colored sunbonnets, had not been able wholly to
+enforce its views upon the social life of the church members, but of its
+controlling influence upon their official and public actions there could
+be no doubt.
+
+The situation had begun to unfold itself to Theron from the outset.
+He had recognized the episodes of the forbidden Sunday milk and of the
+flowers in poor Alice's bonnet as typical of much more that was to
+come. No week followed without bringing some new fulfilment of this
+foreboding. Now, at the end of two months, he knew well enough that
+the hitherto dominant minority was hostile to him and his ministry, and
+would do whatever it could against him.
+
+Though Theron at once decided to show fight, and did not at all waver
+in that resolve, his courage was in the main of a despondent sort.
+Sometimes it would flutter up to the point of confidence, or at
+least hopefulness, when he met with substantial men of the church who
+obviously liked him, and whom he found himself mentally ranging on his
+side, in the struggle which was to come. But more often it was blankly
+apparent to him that, the moment flags were flying and drums on the
+roll, these amiable fair-weather friends would probably take to their
+heels.
+
+Still, such as they were, his sole hope lay in their support. He must
+make the best of them. He set himself doggedly to the task of gathering
+together all those who were not his enemies into what, when the proper
+time came, should be known as the pastor's party. There was plenty of
+apostolic warrant for this. If there had not been, Theron felt that the
+mere elementary demands of self-defence would have justified his use of
+strategy.
+
+The institution of pastoral calling, particularly that inquisitorial
+form of it laid down in the Discipline, had never attracted Theron.
+He and Alice had gone about among their previous flocks in quite a
+haphazard fashion, without thought of system, much less of deliberate
+purpose. Theron made lists now, and devoted thought and examination to
+the personal tastes and characteristics of the people to be cultivated.
+There were some, for example, who would expect him to talk pretty much
+as the Discipline ordained--that is, to ask if they had family prayer,
+to inquire after their souls, and generally to minister grace to his
+hearers--and these in turn subdivided themselves into classes, ranging
+from those who would wish nothing else to those who needed only a mild
+spiritual flavor. There were others whom he would please much better by
+not talking shop at all. Although he could ill afford it, he subscribed
+now for a daily paper that he might have a perpetually renewed source of
+good conversational topics for these more worldly calls. He also bought
+several pounds of candy, pleasing in color, but warranted to be entirely
+harmless, and he made a large mysterious mark on the inside of his new
+silk hat to remind him not to go out calling without some of this in his
+pocket for the children.
+
+Alice, he felt, was not helping him in this matter as effectively as he
+could have wished. Her attitude toward the church in Octavius might best
+be described by the word “sulky.” Great allowance was to be made, he
+realized, for her humiliation over the flowers in her bonnet. That might
+justify her, fairly enough, in being kept away from meeting now and
+again by headaches, or undefined megrims. But it ought not to prevent
+her from going about and making friends among the kindlier parishioners
+who would welcome such a thing, and whom he from time to time indicated
+to her. She did go to some extent, it is true, but she produced,
+in doing so, an effect of performing a duty. He did not find traces
+anywhere of her having created a brilliant social impression. When they
+went out together, he was peculiarly conscious of having to do the work
+unaided.
+
+This was not at all like the Alice of former years, of other charges.
+Why, she had been, beyond comparison, the most popular young woman in
+Tyre. What possessed her to mope like this in Octavius?
+
+Theron looked at her attentively nowadays, when she was unaware of his
+gaze, to try if her face offered any answer to the riddle. It could not
+be suggested that she was ill. Never in her life had she been looking so
+well. She had thrown herself, all at once, and with what was to him
+an unaccountable energy, into the creation and management of a
+flower-garden. She was out the better part of every day, rain or shine,
+digging, transplanting, pruning, pottering generally about among her
+plants and shrubs. This work in the open air had given her an aspect of
+physical well-being which it was impossible to be mistaken about.
+
+Her husband was glad, of course, that she had found some occupation
+which at once pleased her and so obviously conduced to health. This was
+so much a matter of course, in fact, that he said to himself over and
+over again that he was glad. Only--only, sometimes the thought WOULD
+force itself upon his attention that if she did not spend so much of her
+time in her own garden, she would have more time to devote to winning
+friends for them in the Garden of the Lord--friends whom they were going
+to need badly.
+
+The young minister, in taking anxious stock of the chances for and
+against him, turned over often in his mind the fact that he had already
+won rank as a pulpit orator. His sermons had attracted almost universal
+attention at Tyre, and his achievement before the Conference at
+Tecumseh, if it did fail to receive practical reward, had admittedly
+distanced all the other preaching there. It was a part of the evil luck
+pursuing him that here in this perversely enigmatic Octavius his special
+gift seemed to be of no use whatever. There were times, indeed, when he
+was tempted to think that bad preaching was what Octavius wanted.
+
+Somewhere he had heard of a Presbyterian minister, in charge of a big
+city church, who managed to keep well in with a watchfully Orthodox
+congregation, and at the same time establish himself in the affections
+of the community at large, by simply preaching two kinds of sermons. In
+the morning, when almost all who attended were his own communicants,
+he gave them very cautious and edifying doctrinal discourses, treading
+loyally in the path of the Westminster Confession. To the evening
+assemblages, made up for the larger part of outsiders, he addressed
+broadly liberal sermons, literary in form, and full of respectful
+allusions to modern science and the philosophy of the day. Thus he
+filled the church at both services, and put money in its treasury and
+his own fame before the world. There was of course the obvious danger
+that the pious elders who in the forenoon heard infant damnation
+vigorously proclaimed, would revolt when they heard after supper that
+there was some doubt about even adults being damned at all. But either
+because the same people did not attend both services, or because the
+minister's perfect regularity in the morning was each week regarded as a
+retraction of his latest vagaries of an evening, no trouble ever came.
+
+Theron had somewhat tentatively tried this on in Octavius. It was no
+good. His parishioners were of the sort who would have come to church
+eight times a day on Sunday, instead of two, if occasion offered. The
+hope that even a portion of them would stop away, and that their places
+would be taken in the evening by less prejudiced strangers who wished
+for intellectual rather than theological food, fell by the wayside. The
+yearned-for strangers did not come; the familiar faces of the morning
+service all turned up in their accustomed places every evening. They
+were faces which confused and disheartened Theron in the daytime.
+Under the gaslight they seemed even harder and more unsympathetic. He
+timorously experimented with them for an evening or two, then abandoned
+the effort.
+
+Once there had seemed the beginning of a chance. The richest banker in
+Octavius--a fat, sensual, hog-faced old bachelor--surprised everybody
+one evening by entering the church and taking a seat. Theron happened
+to know who he was; even if he had not known, the suppressed excitement
+visible in the congregation, the way the sisters turned round to
+look, the way the more important brethren put their heads together and
+exchanged furtive whispers--would have warned him that big game was in
+view. He recalled afterward with something like self-disgust the eager,
+almost tremulous pains he himself took to please this banker. There was
+a part of the sermon, as it had been written out, which might easily
+give offence to a single man of wealth and free notions of life. With
+the alertness of a mental gymnast, Theron ran ahead, excised this
+portion, and had ready when the gap was reached some very pretty general
+remarks, all the more effective and eloquent, he felt, for having
+been extemporized. People said it was a good sermon; and after
+the benediction and dispersion some of the officials and principal
+pew-holders remained to talk over the likelihood of a capture having
+been effected. Theron did not get away without having this mentioned
+to him, and he was conscious of sharing deeply the hope of the
+brethren--with the added reflection that it would be a personal triumph
+for himself into the bargain. He was ashamed of this feeling a little
+later, and of his trick with the sermon. But this chastening product
+of introspection was all the fruit which the incident bore. The banker
+never came again.
+
+Theron returned one afternoon, a little earlier than usual, from a group
+of pastoral calls. Alice, who was plucking weeds in a border at the
+shady side of the house, heard his step, and rose from her labors. He
+was walking slowly, and seemed weary. He took off his high hat, as
+he saw her, and wiped his brow. The broiling June sun was still high
+overhead. Doubtless it was its insufferable heat which was accountable
+for the worn lines in his face and the spiritless air which the wife's
+eye detected. She went to the gate, and kissed him as he entered.
+
+“I believe if I were you,” she said, “I'd carry an umbrella such
+scorching days as this. Nobody'd think anything of it. I don't see why a
+minister shouldn't carry one as much as a woman carries a parasol.”
+
+Theron gave her a rueful, meditative sort of smile. “I suppose people
+really do think of us as a kind of hybrid female,” he remarked. Then,
+holding his hat in his hand, he drew a long breath of relief at finding
+himself in the shade, and looked about him.
+
+“Why, you've got more posies here, on this one side of the house alone,
+than mother had in her whole yard,” he said, after a little. “Let's
+see--I know that one: that's columbine, isn't it? And that's London
+pride, and that's ragged robin. I don't know any of the others.”
+
+Alice recited various unfamiliar names, as she pointed out the several
+plants which bore them, and he listened with a kindly semblance of
+interest.
+
+They strolled thus to the rear of the house, where thick clumps of
+fragrant pinks lined both sides of the path. She picked some of these
+for him, and gave him more names with which to label the considerable
+number of other plants he saw about him.
+
+“I had no idea we were so well provided as all this,” he commented at
+last. “Those Van Sizers must have been tremendous hands for flowers. You
+were lucky in following such people.”
+
+“Van Sizers!” echoed Alice, with contempt. “All they left was old tomato
+cans and clamshells. Why, I've put in every blessed one of these myself,
+all except those peonies, there, and one brier on the side wall.”
+
+“Good for you!” exclaimed Theron, approvingly. Then it occurred to him
+to ask, “But where did you get them all? Around among our friends?”
+
+“Some few,” responded Alice, with a note of hesitation in her voice.
+“Sister Bult gave me the verbenas, there, and the white pinks were
+a present from Miss Stevens. But most of them Levi Gorringe was good
+enough to send me--from his garden.”
+
+“I didn't know that Gorringe had a garden,” said Theron. “I thought he
+lived over his law-office, in the brick block, there.”
+
+“Well, I don't know that it's exactly HIS,” explained Alice; “but it's a
+big garden somewhere outside, where he can have anything he likes.” She
+went on with a little laugh: “I didn't like to question him too closely,
+for fear he'd think I was looking a gift horse in the mouth--or else
+hinting for more. It was quite his own offer, you know. He picked them
+all out for me, and brought them here, and lent me a book telling me
+just what to do with each one. And in a few days, now, I am to have
+another big batch of plants--dahlias and zinnias and asters and so on;
+I'm almost ashamed to take them. But it's such a change to find some one
+in this Octavius who isn't all self!”
+
+“Yes, Gorringe is a good fellow,” said Theron. “I wish he was a
+professing member.” Then some new thought struck him. “Alice,” he
+exclaimed, “I believe I'll go and see him this very afternoon. I don't
+know why it hasn't occurred to me before: he's just the man whose advice
+I need most. He knows these people here; he can tell me what to do.”
+
+“Aren't you too tired now?” suggested Alice, as Theron put on his hat.
+
+“No, the sooner the better,” he replied, moving now toward the gate.
+
+“Well,” she began, “if I were you, I wouldn't say too much about--that
+is, I--but never mind.”
+
+“What is it?” asked her husband.
+
+“Nothing whatever,” replied Alice, positively. “It was only some
+nonsense of mine;” and Theron, placidly accepting the feminine whim,
+went off down the street again.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware found Levi Gorringe's law-office readily enough, but
+its owner was not in. He probably would be back again, though, in a
+quarter of an hour or so, the boy said, and the minister at once decided
+to wait.
+
+Theron was interested in finding that this office-boy was no other than
+Harvey--the lad who brought milk to the parsonage every morning. He
+remembered now that he had heard good things of this urchin, as to the
+hard work he did to help his mother, the Widow Semple, in her struggle
+to keep a roof over her head; and also bad things, in that he did
+not come regularly either to church or Sunday-school. The clergyman
+recalled, too, that Harvey had impressed him as a character.
+
+“Well, sonny, are you going to be a lawyer?” he asked, as he seated
+himself by the window, and looked about him, first at the dusty litter
+of old papers, pamphlets, and tape-bound documents in bundles which
+crowded the stuffy chamber, and then at the boy himself.
+
+Harvey was busy at a big box--a rough pine dry-goods box which bore the
+flaring label of an express company, and also of a well-known seed firm
+in a Western city, and which the boy had apparently just opened. He was
+lifting from it, and placing on the table after he had shaken off the
+sawdust and moss in which they were packed, small parcels of what looked
+in the fading light to be half-dried plants.
+
+“Well, I don't know--I rather guess not,” he made answer, as he pursued
+his task. “So far as I can make out, this wouldn't be the place to start
+in at, if I WAS going to be a lawyer. A boy can learn here first-rate
+how to load cartridges and clean a gun, and braid trout-flies on to
+leaders, but I don't see much law laying around loose. Anyway,” he went
+on, “I couldn't afford to read law, and not be getting any wages. I have
+to earn money, you know.”
+
+Theron felt that he liked the boy. “Yes,” he said, with a kindly tone;
+“I've heard that you are a good, industrious youngster. I daresay Mr.
+Gorringe will see to it that you get a chance to read law, and get wages
+too.”
+
+“Oh, I can read all there is here and welcome,” the boy explained,
+stepping toward the window to decipher the label on a bundle of roots
+in his hand, “but that's no good unless there's regular practice coming
+into the office all the while. THAT'S how you learn to be a lawyer. But
+Gorringe don't have what I call a practice at all. He just sees men in
+the other room there, with the door shut, and whatever there is to do he
+does it all himself.”
+
+The minister remembered a stray hint somewhere that Mr. Gorringe was
+a money-lender--what was colloquially called a “note-shaver.” To his
+rustic sense, there was something not quite nice about that occupation.
+It would be indecorous, he felt, to encourage further talk about it from
+the boy.
+
+“What are you doing there?” he inquired, to change the subject.
+
+“Sorting out some plants,” replied Harvey. “I don't know what's got
+into Gorringe lately. This is the third big box he's had since I've been
+here--that is, in six weeks--besides two baskets full of rose-bushes.
+I don't know what he does with them. He carries them off himself
+somewhere. I've had kind of half a notion that he's figurin' on getting
+married. I can't think of anything else that would make a man spend
+money like water--just for flowers and bushes. They do get foolish, you
+know, when they've got marriage on the brain.”
+
+Theron found himself only imperfectly following the theories of the
+young philosopher. It was his fact that monopolized the minister's
+attention.
+
+“But as I understand it,” he remarked hesitatingly, “Brother
+Gorringe--or rather Mr. Gorringe--gets all the plants he wants,
+everything he likes, from a big garden somewhere outside. I don't
+know that it is exactly his; but I remember hearing something to that
+effect.”
+
+The boy slapped the last litter off his hands, and, as he came to the
+window, shook his head. “These don't come from no garden outside,” he
+declared. “They come from the dealers', and he pays solid cash for 'em.
+The invoice for this lot alone was thirty-one dollars and sixty cents.
+There it is on the table. You can see it for yourself.”
+
+Mr. Ware did not offer to look. “Very likely these are for the garden I
+was speaking of,” he said. “Of course you can't go on taking plants out
+of a garden indefinitely without putting others in.”
+
+“I don't know anything about any garden that he takes plants out of,”
+ answered Harvey, and looked meditatively for a minute or two out upon
+the street below. Then he turned to the minister. “Your wife's doing a
+good deal of gardening this spring, I notice,” he said casually. “You'd
+hardly think it was the same place, she's fixed it up so. If she wants
+any extra hoeing done, I can always get off Saturday afternoons.”
+
+“I will remember,” said Theron. He also looked out of the window; and
+nothing more was said until, a few moments later, Mr. Gorringe himself
+came in.
+
+The lawyer seemed both surprised and pleased at discovering the
+identity of his visitor, with whom he shook hands in almost an excess of
+cordiality. He spread a large newspaper over the pile of seedling plants
+on the table, pushed the packing-box under the table with his foot, and
+said almost peremptorily to the boy, “You can go now!” Then he turned
+again to Theron.
+
+“Well, Mr. Ware, I'm glad to see you,” he repeated, and drew up a chair
+by the window. “Things are going all right with you, I hope.”
+
+Theron noted again the waving black hair, the dark skin, and the
+carefully trimmed mustache and chin-tuft which gave the lawyer's face
+a combined effect of romance and smartness. No; it was the eyes,
+cool, shrewd, dark-gray eyes, which suggested this latter quality. The
+recollection of having seen one of them wink, in deliberate hostility
+of sarcasm, when those other trustees had their backs turned, came
+mercifully at the moment to recall the young minister to his errand.
+
+“I thought I would drop in and have a chat with you,” he said, getting
+better under way as he went on. “Quarterly Conference is only a
+fortnight off, and I am a good deal at sea about what is going to
+happen.”
+
+“I'm not a church member, you know,” interposed Gorringe. “That shuts me
+out of the Quarterly Conference.”
+
+“Alas, yes!” said Theron. “I wish it didn't. I'm afraid I'm not going to
+have any friends to spare there.”
+
+“What are you afraid of?” asked the lawyer, seeming now to be wholly at
+his ease again “They can't eat you.”
+
+“No, they keep me too lean for that,” responded Theron, with a pensive
+smile. “I WAS going to ask, you know, for an increase of salary, or an
+extra allowance. I don't see how I can go on as it is. The sum fixed by
+the last Quarterly Conference of the old year, and which I am getting
+now, is one hundred dollars less than my predecessor had. That isn't
+fair, and it isn't right. But so far from its looking as if I could get
+an increase, the prospect seems rather that they will make me pay for
+the gas and that sidewalk. I never recovered more than about half of my
+moving expenses, as you know, and--and, frankly, I don't know which way
+to turn. It keeps me miserable all the while.”
+
+“That's where you're wrong,” said Mr. Gorringe. “If you let things
+like that worry you, you'll keep a sore skin all your life. You take
+my advice and just go ahead your own gait, and let other folks do the
+worrying. They ARE pretty close-fisted here, for a fact, but you
+can manage to rub along somehow. If you should get into any real
+difficulties, why, I guess--” the lawyer paused to smile in a
+hesitating, significant way--“I guess some road out can be found all
+right. The main thing is, don't fret, and don't allow your wife to--to
+fret either.”
+
+He stopped abruptly. Theron nodded in recognition of his amiable tone,
+and then found the nod lengthening itself out into almost a bow as the
+thought spread through his mind that this had been nothing more nor less
+than a promise to help him with money if worst came to worst. He looked
+at Levi Gorringe, and said to himself that the intuition of women was
+wonderful. Alice had picked him out as a friend of theirs merely by
+seeing him pass the house.
+
+“Yes,” he said; “I am specially anxious to keep my wife from worrying.
+She was surrounded in her girlhood by a good deal of what, relatively,
+we should call luxury, and that makes it all the harder for her to be a
+poor minister's wife. I had quite decided to get her a hired girl, come
+what might, but she thinks she'd rather get on without one. Her health
+is better, I must admit, than it was when we came here. She works out in
+her garden a great deal, and that seems to agree with her.”
+
+“Octavius is a healthy place--that's generally admitted,” replied the
+lawyer, with indifference. He seemed not to be interested in Mrs. Ware's
+health, but looked intently out through the window at the buildings
+opposite, and drummed with his fingers on the arms of his chair.
+
+Theron made haste to revert to his errand. “Of course, your not being in
+the Quarterly Conference,” he said, “renders certain things impossible.
+But I didn't know but you might have some knowledge of how matters are
+going, what plans the officials of the church had; they seem to have
+agreed to tell me nothing.”
+
+“Well, I HAVE heard this much,” responded Gorringe. “They're figuring on
+getting the Soulsbys here to raise the debt and kind o' shake things up
+generally. I guess that's about as good as settled. Hadn't you heard of
+it?”
+
+“Not a breath!” exclaimed Theron, mournfully. “Well,” he added upon
+reflection, “I'm sorry, downright sorry. The debt-raiser seems to me
+about the lowest-down thing we produce. I've heard of those Soulsbys; I
+think I saw HIM indeed once at Conference, but I believe SHE is the head
+of the firm.”
+
+“Yes; she wears the breeches, I understand,” said Gorringe
+sententiously.
+
+“I HAD hoped,” the young minister began with a rueful sigh, “in fact, I
+felt quite confident at the outset that I could pay off this debt, and
+put the church generally on a new footing, by giving extra attention to
+my pulpit work. It is hardly for me to say it, but in other places where
+I have been, my preaching has been rather--rather a feature in the town
+itself. I have always been accustomed to attract to our services a good
+many non-members, and that, as you know, helps tremendously from a money
+point of view. But somehow that has failed here. I doubt if the average
+congregations are a whit larger now than they were when I came in April.
+I know the collections are not.”
+
+“No,” commented the lawyer, slowly; “you'll never do anything in that
+line in Octavius. You might, of course, if you were to stay here and
+work hard at it for five or six years--”
+
+“Heaven forbid!” groaned Mr. Ware.
+
+“Quite so,” put in the other. “The point is that the Methodists here
+are a little set by themselves. I don't know that they like one another
+specially, but I do know that they are not what you might call popular
+with people outside. Now, a new preacher at the Presbyterian church,
+or even the Baptist--he might have a chance to create talk, and make
+a stir. But Methodist--no! People who don't belong won't come near the
+Methodist church here so long as there's any other place with a roof on
+it to go to. Give a dog a bad name, you know. Well, the Methodists here
+have got a bad name; and if you could preach like Henry Ward Beecher
+himself you wouldn't change it, or get folks to come and hear you.”
+
+“I see what you mean,” Theron responded. “I'm not particularly surprised
+myself that Octavius doesn't love us, or look to us for intellectual
+stimulation. I myself leave that pulpit more often than otherwise
+feeling like a wet rag--utterly limp and discouraged. But, if you don't
+mind my speaking of it, YOU don't belong, and yet YOU come.”
+
+It was evident that the lawyer did not mind. He spoke freely in reply.
+“Oh, yes, I've got into the habit of it. I began going when I first came
+here, and--and so it grew to be natural for me to go. Then, of course,
+being the only lawyer you have, a considerable amount of my business is
+mixed up in one way or another with your membership; you see those are
+really the things which settle a man in a rut, and keep him there.”
+
+“I suppose your people were Methodists,” said Theron, to fill in the
+pause, “and that is how you originally started with us.”
+
+Levi Gorringe shook his head. He leaned back, half closed his eyes,
+put his finger-tips together, and almost smiled as if something in
+retrospect pleased and moved him.
+
+“No,” he said; “I went to the church first to see a girl who used to
+go there. It was long before your time. All her family moved away years
+ago. You wouldn't know any of them. I was younger then, and I didn't
+know as much as I do now. I worshipped the very ground that girl walked
+on, and like a fool I never gave her so much as a hint of it. Looking
+back now, I can see that I might have had her if I'd asked her. But
+I went instead and sat around and looked at her at church and
+Sunday-school and prayer-meetings Thursday nights, and class-meetings
+after the sermon. She was devoted to religion and church work; and,
+thinking it would please her, I joined the church on probation. Men can
+fool themselves easier than they can other people. I actually believed
+at the time that I had experienced religion. I felt myself full of all
+sorts of awakenings of the soul and so forth. But it was really that
+girl. You see I'm telling you the thing just as it was. I was very
+happy. I think it was the happiest time of my life. I remember there was
+a love-feast while I was on probation; and I sat down in front, right
+beside her, and we ate the little square chunks of bread and drank the
+water together, and I held one corner of her hymn-book when we stood up
+and sang. That was the nearest I ever got to her, or to full membership
+in the church. That very next week, I think it was, we learned that she
+had got engaged to the minister's son--a young man who had just become
+a minister himself. They got married, and went away--and I--somehow I
+never took up my membership when the six months' probation was over.
+That's how it was.”
+
+“It is very interesting,” remarked Theron, softly, after a little
+silence--“and very full of human nature.”
+
+“Well, now you see,” said the lawyer, “what I mean when I say that there
+hasn't been another minister here since, that I should have felt like
+telling this story to. They wouldn't have understood it at all. They
+would have thought it was blasphemy for me to say straight out that
+what I took for experiencing religion was really a girl. But you are
+different. I felt that at once, the first time I saw you. In a pulpit or
+out of it, what I like in a human being is that he SHOULD be human.”
+
+“It pleases me beyond measure that you should like me, then” returned
+the young minister, with frank gratification shining on his face. “The
+world is made all the sweeter and more lovable by these--these elements
+of romance. I am not one of those who would wish to see them banished or
+frowned upon. I don't mind admitting to you that there is a good deal in
+Methodism--I mean the strict practice of its letter which you find here
+in Octavius--that is personally distasteful to me. I read the other day
+of an English bishop who said boldly, publicly, that no modern nation
+could practise the principles laid down in the Sermon on the Mount and
+survive for twenty-four hours.”
+
+“Ha, ha! That's good!” laughed the lawyer.
+
+“I felt that it was good, too,” pursued Theron. “I am getting to see
+a great many things differently, here in Octavius. Our Methodist
+Discipline is like the Beatitudes--very helpful and beautiful, if
+treated as spiritual suggestion, but more or less of a stumbling-block
+if insisted upon literally. I declare!” he added, sitting up in his
+chair, “I never talked like this to a living soul before in all my life.
+Your confidences were contagious.”
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware rose as he spoke, and took up his hat.
+
+“Must you be going?” asked the lawyer, also rising. “Well, I'm glad I
+haven't shocked you. Come in oftener when you are passing. And if you
+see anything I can help you in, always tell me.”
+
+The two men shook hands, with an emphatic and lingering clasp.
+
+“I am glad,” said Theron, “that you didn't stop coming to church just
+because you lost the girl.”
+
+Levi Gorringe answered the minister's pleasantry with a smile which
+curled his mustache upward, and expanded in little wrinkles at the ends
+of his eyes. “No,” he said jestingly. “I'm death on collecting debts;
+and I reckon that the church still owes me a girl. I'll have one yet.”
+
+So, with merriment the echoes of which pleasantly accompanied Theron
+down the stairway, the two men parted.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+Though time lagged in passing with a slowness which seemed born of
+studied insolence, there did arrive at last a day which had something
+definitive about it to Theron's disturbed and restless mind. It was a
+Thursday, and the prayer-meeting to be held that evening would be the
+last before the Quarterly Conference, now only four days off.
+
+For some reason, the young minister found himself dwelling upon this
+fact, and investing it with importance. But yesterday the Quarterly
+Conference had seemed a long way ahead. Today brought it alarmingly
+close to hand. He had not heretofore regarded the weekly assemblage
+for prayer and song as a thing calling for preparation, or for any
+preliminary thought. Now on this Thursday morning he went to his desk
+after breakfast, which was a sign that he wanted the room to himself,
+quite as if he had the task of a weighty sermon before him. He sat at
+the desk all the forenoon, doing no writing, it is true, but remembering
+every once in a while, when his mind turned aside from the book in his
+hands, that there was that prayer-meeting in the evening.
+
+Sometimes he reached the point of vaguely wondering why this strictly
+commonplace affair should be forcing itself thus upon his attention.
+Then, with a kind of mental shiver at the recollection that this was
+Thursday, and that the great struggle came on Monday, he would go back
+to his book.
+
+There were a half-dozen volumes on the open desk before him. He had
+taken them out from beneath a pile of old “Sunday-School Advocates” and
+church magazines, where they had lain hidden from Alice's view most of
+the week. If there had been a locked drawer in the house, he would have
+used it instead to hold these books, which had come to him in a neat
+parcel, which also contained an amiable note from Dr. Ledsmar, recalling
+a pleasant evening in May, and expressing the hope that the accompanying
+works would be of some service. Theron had glanced at the backs of the
+uppermost two, and discovered that their author was Renan. Then he had
+hastily put the lot in the best place he could think of to escape his
+wife's observation.
+
+He realized now that there had been no need for this secrecy. Of the
+other four books, by Sayce, Budge, Smith, and Lenormant, three indeed
+revealed themselves to be published under religious auspices. As for
+Renan, he might have known that the name would be meaningless to Alice.
+The feeling that he himself was not much wiser in this matter than his
+wife may have led him to pass over the learned text-books on Chaldean
+antiquity, and even the volume of Renan which appeared to be devoted
+to Oriental inscriptions, and take up his other book, entitled in
+the translation, “Recollections of my Youth.” This he rather glanced
+through, at the outset, following with a certain inattention the
+introductory sketches and essays, which dealt with an unfamiliar, and,
+to his notion, somewhat preposterous Breton racial type. Then, little by
+little, it dawned upon him that there was a connected story in all this;
+and suddenly he came upon it, out in the open, as it were. It was
+the story of how a deeply devout young man, trained from his earliest
+boyhood for the sacred office, and desiring passionately nothing but
+to be worthy of it, came to a point where, at infinite cost of pain to
+himself and of anguish to those dearest to him, he had to declare that
+he could no longer believe at all in revealed religion.
+
+Theron Ware read this all with an excited interest which no book had
+ever stirred in him before. Much of it he read over and over again, to
+make sure that he penetrated everywhere the husk of French habits of
+thought and Catholic methods in which the kernel was wrapped. He broke
+off midway in this part of the book to go out to the kitchen to dinner,
+and began the meal in silence. To Alice's questions he replied briefly
+that he was preparing himself for the evening's prayer-meeting. She
+lifted her brows in such frank surprise at this that he made a further
+and somewhat rambling explanation about having again taken up the work
+on his book--the book about Abraham.
+
+“I thought you said you'd given that up altogether,” she remarked.
+
+“Well,” he said, “I WAS discouraged about it for a while. But a man
+never does anything big without getting discouraged over and over again
+while he's doing it. I don't say now that I shall write precisely
+THAT book--I'm merely reading scientific works about the period, just
+now--but if not that, I shall write some other book. Else how will you
+get that piano?” he added, with an attempt at a smile.
+
+“I thought you had given that up, too!” she replied ruefully. Then
+before he could speak, she went on: “Never mind the piano; that can
+wait. What I've got on my mind just now isn't piano; it's potatoes.
+Do you know, I saw some the other day at Rasbach's, splendid
+potatoes--these are some of them--and fifteen cents a bushel cheaper
+than those dried-up old things Brother Barnum keeps, and so I bought two
+bushels. And Sister Barnum met me on the street this morning, and threw
+it in my face that the Discipline commands us to trade with each other.
+Is there any such command?”
+
+“Yes,” said the husband. “It's Section 33. Don't you remember? I looked
+it up in Tyre. We are to 'evidence our desire of salvation by doing
+good, especially to them that are of the household of faith, or groaning
+so to be; by employing them preferably to others; buying one of another;
+helping each other in business'--and so on. Yes, it's all there.”
+
+“Well, I told her I didn't believe it was,” put in Alice, “and I said
+that even if it was, there ought to be another section about selling
+potatoes to their minister for more than they're worth--potatoes that
+turn all green when you boil them, too. I believe I'll read up that old
+Discipline myself, and see if it hasn't got some things that I can talk
+back with.”
+
+“The very section before that, Number 32, enjoins members against
+'uncharitable or unprofitable conversation--particularly speaking evil
+of magistrates or ministers.' You'd have 'em there, I think.” Theron had
+begun cheerfully enough, but the careworn, preoccupied look returned now
+to his face. “I'm sorry if we've fallen out with the Barnums,” he said.
+“His brother-in-law, Davis, the Sunday-school superintendent, is a
+member of the Quarterly Conference, you know, and I've been hoping that
+he was on my side. I've been taking a good deal of pains to make up to
+him.”
+
+He ended with a sigh, the pathos of which impressed Alice. “If you think
+it will do any good,” she volunteered, “I'll go and call on the Davises
+this very afternoon. I'm sure to find her at home,--she's tied hand
+and foot with that brood of hers--and you'd better give me some of that
+candy for them.”
+
+Theron nodded his approval and thanks, and relapsed into silence. When
+the meal was over, he brought out the confectionery to his wife, and
+without a word went back to that remarkable book.
+
+When Alice returned toward the close of day, to prepare the simple tea
+which was always laid a half-hour earlier on Thursdays and Sundays,
+she found her husband where she had left him, still busy with those new
+scientific works. She recounted to him some incidents of her call
+upon Mrs. Davis, as she took off her hat and put on the big kitchen
+apron--how pleased Mrs. Davis seemed to be; how her affection for
+her sister-in-law, the grocer's wife, disclosed itself to be not even
+skin-deep; how the children leaped upon the candy as if they had never
+seen any before; and how, in her belief, Mr. Davis would be heart and
+soul on Theron's side at the Conference.
+
+To her surprise, the young minister seemed not at all interested.
+He hardly looked at her during her narrative, but reclined in the
+easy-chair with his head thrown back, and an abstracted gaze wandering
+aimlessly about the ceiling. When she avowed her faith in the
+Sunday-school superintendent's loyal partisanship, which she did with
+a pardonable pride in having helped to make it secure, her husband even
+closed his eyes, and moved his head with a gesture which plainly bespoke
+indifference.
+
+“I expected you'd be tickled to death,” she remarked, with evident
+disappointment.
+
+“I've a bad headache,” he explained, after a minute's pause.
+
+“No wonder!” Alice rejoined, sympathetically enough, but with a note of
+reproof as well. “What can you expect, staying cooped up in here all day
+long, poring over those books? People are all the while remarking that
+you study too much. I tell them, of course, that you're a great hand for
+reading, and always were; but I think myself it would be better if you
+got out more, and took more exercise, and saw people. You know lots
+and slathers more than THEY do now, or ever will, if you never opened
+another book.”
+
+Theron regarded her with an expression which she had never seen on his
+face before. “You don't realize what you are saying,” he replied slowly.
+He sighed as he added, with increased gravity, “I am the most ignorant
+man alive!”
+
+Alice began a little laugh of wifely incredulity, and then let it die
+away as she recognized that he was really troubled and sad in his mind.
+She bent over to kiss him lightly on the brow, and tiptoed her way out
+into the kitchen.
+
+“I believe I will let you make my excuses at the prayer-meeting this
+evening,” he said all at once, as the supper came to an end. He
+had eaten next to nothing during the meal, and had sat in a sort of
+brown-study from which Alice kindly forbore to arouse him. “I don't
+know--I hardly feel equal to it. They won't take it amiss--for once--if
+you explain to them that I--I am not at all well.”
+
+“Oh, I do hope you're not coming down with anything!” Alice had risen
+too, and was gazing at him with a solicitude the tenderness of which at
+once comforted, and in some obscure way jarred on his nerves. “Is there
+anything I can do--or shall I go for a doctor? We've got mustard in the
+house, and senna--I think there's some senna left--and Jamaica ginger.”
+
+Theron shook his head wearily at her. “Oh, no,--no!” he expostulated.
+“It isn't anything that needs drugs, or doctors either. It's just mental
+worry and fatigue, that's all. An evening's quiet rest in the big chair,
+and early to bed--that will fix me up all right.”
+
+“But you'll read; and that will make your head worse,” said Alice.
+
+“No, I won't read any more,” he promised her, walking slowly into the
+sitting-room, and settling himself in the big chair, the while she
+brought out a pillow from the adjoining best bedroom, and adjusted it
+behind his head. “That's nice! I'll just lie quiet here, and perhaps
+doze a little till you come back. I feel in the mood for the rest; it
+will do me all sorts of good.”
+
+He closed his eyes; and Alice, regarding his upturned face anxiously,
+decided that already it looked more at peace than awhile ago.
+
+“Well, I hope you'll be better when I get back,” she said, as she began
+preparations for the evening service. These consisted in combing
+stiffly back the strands of light-brown hair which, during the day, had
+exuberantly loosened themselves over her temples into something
+almost like curls; in fastening down upon this rebellious hair a plain
+brown-straw bonnet, guiltless of all ornament save a binding ribbon of
+dull umber hue; and in putting on a thin dark-gray shawl and a pair
+of equally subdued lisle-thread gloves. Thus attired, she made a
+mischievous little grimace of dislike at her puritanical image in
+the looking-glass over the mantel, and then turned to announce her
+departure.
+
+“Well, I'm off,” she said. Theron opened his eyes to take in this figure
+of his wife dressed for prayer-meeting, and then closed them again
+abruptly. “All right,” he murmured, and then he heard the door shut
+behind her.
+
+Although he had been alone all day, there seemed to be quite a unique
+value and quality in this present solitude. He stretched out his legs on
+the opposite chair, and looked lazily about him, with the feeling that
+at last he had secured some leisure, and could think undisturbed to his
+heart's content. There were nearly two hours of unbroken quiet before
+him; and the mere fact of his having stepped aside from the routine of
+his duty to procure it; marked it in his thoughts as a special occasion,
+which ought in the nature of things to yield more than the ordinary
+harvest of mental profit.
+
+Theron's musings were broken in upon from time to time by rumbling
+outbursts of hymn-singing from the church next door. Surely, he said to
+himself, there could be no other congregation in the Conference, or in
+all Methodism, which sang so badly as these Octavians did. The noise,
+as it came to him now and again, divided itself familiarly into a main
+strain of hard, high, sharp, and tinny female voices, with three or four
+concurrent and clashing branch strains of part-singing by men who did
+not know how. How well he already knew these voices! Through two wooden
+walls he could detect the conceited and pushing note of Brother Lovejoy,
+who tried always to drown the rest out, and the lifeless, unmeasured
+weight of shrill clamor which Sister Barnum hurled into every chorus,
+half closing her eyes and sticking out her chin as she did so. They
+drawled their hymns too, these people, till Theron thought he understood
+that injunction in the Discipline against singing too slowly. It had
+puzzled him heretofore; now he felt that it must have been meant in
+prophecy for Octavius.
+
+It was impossible not to recall in contrast that other church music
+he had heard, a month before, and the whole atmosphere of that other
+pastoral sitting room, from which he had listened to it. The startled
+and crowded impressions of that strange evening had been lying hidden
+in his mind all this while, driven into a corner by the pressure of more
+ordinary, everyday matters. They came forth now, and passed across
+his brain--no longer confusing and distorted, but in orderly and
+intelligible sequence. Their earlier effect had been one of frightened
+fascination. Now he looked them over calmly as they lifted themselves,
+one by one, and found himself not shrinking at all, or evading anything,
+but dwelling upon each in turn as a natural and welcome part of the most
+important experience of his life.
+
+The young minister had arrived, all at once, at this conclusion. He did
+not question at all the means by which he had reached it. Nothing was
+clearer to his mind than the conclusion itself--that his meeting, with
+the priest and the doctor was the turning-point in his career. They had
+lifted him bodily out of the slough of ignorance, of contact with low
+minds and sordid, narrow things, and put him on solid ground. This book
+he had been reading--this gentle, tender, lovable book, which had as
+much true piety in it as any devotional book he had ever read, and yet,
+unlike all devotional books, put its foot firmly upon everything which
+could not be proved in human reason to be true--must be merely one of a
+thousand which men like Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar knew by heart. The
+very thought that he was on the way now to know them, too, made Theron
+tremble. The prospect wooed him, and he thrilled in response, with the
+wistful and delicate eagerness of a young lover.
+
+Somehow, the fact that the priest and the doctor were not religious men,
+and that this book which had so impressed and stirred him was nothing
+more than Renan's recital of how he, too, ceased to be a religious man,
+did not take a form which Theron could look square in the face. It wore
+the shape, instead, of a vague premise that there were a great many
+different kinds of religions--the past and dead races had multiplied
+these in their time literally into thousands--and that each no doubt had
+its central support of truth somewhere for the good men who were in it,
+and that to call one of these divine and condemn all the others was
+a part fit only for untutored bigots. Renan had formally repudiated
+Catholicism, yet could write in his old age with the deepest filial
+affection of the Mother Church he had quitted. Father Forbes could talk
+coolly about the “Christ-myth” without even ceasing to be a priest,
+and apparently a very active and devoted priest. Evidently there was an
+intellectual world, a world of culture and grace, of lofty thoughts
+and the inspiring communion of real knowledge, where creeds were not of
+importance, and where men asked one another, not “Is your soul saved?”
+ but “Is your mind well furnished?” Theron had the sensation of having
+been invited to become a citizen of this world. The thought so dazzled
+him that his impulses were dragging him forward to take the new oath
+of allegiance before he had had time to reflect upon what it was he was
+abandoning.
+
+The droning of the Doxology from the church outside stirred Theron
+suddenly out of his revery. It had grown quite dark, and he rose and lit
+the gas. “Blest be the Tie that Binds,” they were singing. He paused,
+with hand still in air, to listen. That well-worn phrase arrested his
+attention, and gave itself a new meaning. He was bound to those people,
+it was true, but he could never again harbor the delusion that the tie
+between them was blessed. There was vaguely present in his mind the
+consciousness that other ties were loosening as well. Be that as it
+might, one thing was certain. He had passed definitely beyond pretending
+to himself that there was anything spiritually in common between him and
+the Methodist Church of Octavius. The necessity of his keeping up the
+pretence with others rose on the instant like a looming shadow before
+his mental vision. He turned away from it, and bent his brain to think
+of something else.
+
+The noise of Alice opening the front door came as a pleasant digression.
+A second later it became clear from the sound of voices that she had
+brought some one back with her, and Theron hastily stretched himself out
+again in the armchair, with his head back in the pillow, and his feet
+on the other chair. He had come mighty near forgetting that he was an
+invalid, and he protected himself the further now by assuming an air of
+lassitude verging upon prostration.
+
+“Yes; there's a light burning. It's all right,” he heard Alice say. She
+entered the room, and Theron's head was too bad to permit him to turn
+it, and see who her companion was.
+
+“Theron dear,” Alice began, “I knew you'd be glad to see HER, even if
+you were out of sorts; and I persuaded her just to run in for a minute.
+Let me introduce you to Sister Soulsby. Sister Soulsby--my husband.”
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware sat upright with an energetic start, and fastened upon
+the stranger a look which conveyed anything but the satisfaction his
+wife had been so sure about. It was at the first blush an undisguised
+scowl, and only some fleeting memory of that reflection about needing
+now to dissemble, prevented him from still frowning as he rose to his
+feet, and perfunctorily held out his hand.
+
+“Delighted, I'm sure,” he mumbled. Then, looking up, he discovered that
+Sister Soulsby knew he was not delighted, and that she seemed not to
+mind in the least.
+
+“As your good lady said, I just ran in for a moment,” she remarked,
+shaking his limp hand with a brisk, business-like grasp, and dropping
+it. “I hate bothering sick people, but as we're to be thrown together
+a good deal this next week or so, I thought I'd like to lose no time in
+saying 'howdy.' I won't keep you up now. Your wife has been sweet enough
+to ask me to move my trunk over here in the morning, so that you'll see
+enough of me and to spare.”
+
+Theron looked falteringly into her face, as he strove for words which
+should sufficiently mask the disgust this intelligence stirred within
+him. A debt-raiser in the town was bad enough! A debt-raiser quartered
+in the very parsonage!--he ground his teeth to think of it.
+
+Alice read his hesitation aright. “Sister Soulsby went to the hotel,”
+ she hastily put in; “and Loren Pierce was after her to come and stay at
+his house, and I ventured to tell her that I thought we could make her
+more comfortable here.” She accompanied this by so daring a grimace
+and nod that her husband woke up to the fact that a point in Conference
+politics was involved.
+
+He squeezed a doubtful smile upon his features. “We shall both do our
+best,” he said. It was not easy, but he forced increasing amiability
+into his glance and tone. “Is Brother Soulsby here, too?” he asked.
+
+The debt-raiser shook her head--again the prompt, decisive movement, so
+like a busy man of affairs. “No,” she answered. “He's doing supply
+down on the Hudson this week, but he'll be here in time for the Sunday
+morning love-feast. I always like to come on ahead, and see how the land
+lies. Well, good-night! Your head will be all right in the morning.”
+
+Precisely what she meant by this assurance, Theron did not attempt to
+guess. He received her adieu, noted the masterful manner in which
+she kissed his wife, and watched her pass out into the hall, with the
+feeling uppermost that this was a person who decidedly knew her way
+about. Much as he was prepared to dislike her, and much as he detested
+the vulgar methods her profession typified, he could not deny that she
+seemed a very capable sort of woman.
+
+This mental concession did not prevent his fixing upon Alice, when she
+returned to the room, a glance of obvious disapproval.
+
+“Theron,” she broke forth, to anticipate his reproach, “I did it for the
+best. The Pierces would have got her if I hadn't cut in. I thought it
+would help to have her on our side. And, besides, I like her. She's the
+first sister I've seen since we've been in this hole that's had a kind
+word for me--or--or sympathized with me! And--and--if you're going to be
+offended--I shall cry!”
+
+There were real tears on her lashes, ready to make good the threat.
+“Oh, I guess I wouldn't,” said Theron, with an approach to his old,
+half-playful manner. “If you like her, that's the chief thing.”
+
+Alice shook her tear-drops away. “No,” she replied, with a wistful
+smile; “the chief thing is to have her like you. She's as smart as a
+steel trap--that woman is--and if she took the notion, I believe she
+could help get us a better place.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+The ensuing week went by with a buzz and whirl, circling about Theron
+Ware's dizzy consciousness like some huge, impalpable teetotum sent
+spinning under Sister Soulsby's resolute hands. Whenever his vagrant
+memory recurred to it, in after months, he began by marvelling, and
+ended with a shudder of repulsion.
+
+It was a week crowded with events, which seemed to him to shoot past
+so swiftly that in effect they came all of a heap. He never essayed the
+task, in retrospect, of arranging them in their order of sequence. They
+had, however, a definite and interdependent chronology which it is worth
+the while to trace.
+
+Mrs. Soulsby brought her trunk round to the parsonage bright and early
+on Friday morning, and took up her lodgement in the best bedroom,
+and her headquarters in the house at large, with a cheerful and
+business-like manner. She desired nothing so much, she said, as that
+people should not put themselves out on her account, or allow her to
+get in their way. She appeared to mean this, too, and to have very good
+ideas about securing its realization.
+
+During both Friday and the following day, indeed, Theron saw her only at
+the family meals. There she displayed a hearty relish for all that was
+set before her which quite won Mrs. Ware's heart, and though she talked
+rather more than Theron found himself expecting from a woman, he could
+not deny that her conversation was both seemly and entertaining. She had
+evidently been a great traveller, and referred to things she had seen in
+Savannah or Montreal or Los Angeles in as matter-of-fact fashion as
+he could have spoken of a visit to Tecumseh. Theron asked her many
+questions about these and other far-off cities, and her answers were
+all so pat and showed so keen and clear an eye that he began in spite of
+himself to think of her with a certain admiration.
+
+She in turn plied him with inquiries about the principal pew-holders
+and members of his congregation--their means, their disposition, and the
+measure of their devotion. She put these queries with such intelligence,
+and seemed to assimilate his replies with such an alert understanding,
+that the young minister was spurred to put dashes of character in
+his descriptions, and set forth the idiosyncrasies and distinguishing
+earmarks of his flock with what he felt afterward might have been too
+free a tongue. But at the time her fine air of appreciation led him
+captive. He gossiped about his parishioners as if he enjoyed it. He
+made a specially happy thumb-nail sketch for her of one of his trustees,
+Erastus Winch, the loud-mouthed, ostentatiously jovial, and really
+cold-hearted cheese-buyer. She was particularly interested in hearing
+about this man. The personality of Winch seemed to have impressed her,
+and she brought the talk back to him more than once, and prompted Theron
+to the very threshold of indiscretion in his confidences on the subject.
+
+Save at meal-times, Sister Soulsby spent the two days out around among
+the Methodists of Octavius. She had little or nothing to say about
+what she thus saw and heard, but used it as the basis for still further
+inquiries. She told more than once, however, of how she had been pressed
+here or there to stay to dinner or supper, and how she had excused
+herself. “I've knocked about too much,” she would explain to the Wares,
+“not to fight shy of random country cooking. When I find such a born
+cook as you are--well I know when I'm well off.” Alice flushed with
+pleased pride at this, and Theron himself felt that their visitor showed
+great good sense. By Saturday noon, the two women were calling each
+other by their first names. Theron learned with a certain interest that
+Sister Soulsby's Christian name was Candace.
+
+It was only natural that he should give even more thought to her than to
+her quaint and unfamiliar old Ethiopian name. She was undoubtedly a very
+smart woman. To his surprise she had never introduced in her talk any of
+the stock religious and devotional phrases which official Methodists
+so universally employed in mutual converse. She might have been an
+insurance agent, or a school-teacher, visiting in a purely secular
+household, so little parade of cant was there about her.
+
+He caught himself wondering how old she was. She seemed to have been
+pretty well over the whole American continent, and that must take years
+of time. Perhaps, however, the exertion of so much travel would tend
+to age one in appearance. Her eyes were still youthful--decidedly
+wise eyes, but still juvenile. They had sparkled with almost girlish
+merriment at some of his jokes. She turned them about a good deal when
+she spoke, making their glances fit and illustrate the things she said.
+He had never met any one whose eyes played so constant and prominent a
+part in their owner's conversation. Theron had never seen a play; but
+he had encountered the portraits of famous queens of the drama several
+times in illustrated papers or shop windows, and it occurred to him that
+some of the more marked contortions of Sister Soulsby's eyes--notably
+a trick she had of rolling them swiftly round and plunging them, so to
+speak, into an intent, yearning, one might almost say devouring, gaze
+at the speaker--were probably employed by eminent actresses like Ristori
+and Fanny Davenport.
+
+The rest of Sister Soulsby was undoubtedly subordinated in interest to
+those eyes of hers. Sometimes her face seemed to be reviving temporarily
+a comeliness which had been constant in former days; then again it would
+look decidedly, organically, plain. It was the worn and loose-skinned
+face of a nervous, middle-aged woman, who had had more than her share of
+trouble, and drank too much tea. She wore the collar of her dress rather
+low; and Theron found himself wondering at this, because, though long
+and expansive, her neck certainly showed more cords and cavities than
+consorted with his vague ideal of statuesque beauty. Then he wondered at
+himself for thinking about it, and abruptly reined up his fancy, only to
+find that it was playing with speculations as to whether her yellowish
+complexion was due to that tea-drinking or came to her as a legacy of
+Southern blood.
+
+He knew that she was born in the South because she said so. From the
+same source he learned that her father had been a wealthy planter, who
+was ruined by the war, and sank into a premature grave under the weight
+of his accumulated losses. The large dark rings around her eyes
+grew deeper still in their shadows when she told about this, and her
+ordinarily sharp voice took on a mellow cadence, with a soft, drawling
+accent, turning U's into O's, and having no R's to speak of. Theron had
+imbibed somewhere in early days the conviction that the South was the
+land of romance, of cavaliers and gallants and black eyes flashing
+behind mantillas and outspread fans, and somehow when Sister Soulsby
+used this intonation she suggested all these things.
+
+But almost all her talk was in another key--a brisk, direct, idiomatic
+manner of speech, with an intonation hinting at no section in
+particular. It was merely that of the city-dweller as distinguished from
+the rustic. She was of about Alice's height, perhaps a shade taller.
+It did not escape the attention of the Wares that she wore clothes of a
+more stylish cut and a livelier arrangement of hues than any Alice had
+ever dared own, even in lax-minded Tyre. The two talked of this in their
+room on Friday night; and Theron explained that congregations would
+tolerate things of this sort with a stranger which would be sharply
+resented in the case of local folk whom they controlled. It was on this
+occasion that Alice in turn told Theron she was sure Mrs. Soulsby had
+false teeth--a confidence which she immediately regretted as an act of
+treachery to her sex.
+
+On Saturday afternoon, toward evening, Brother Soulsby arrived, and was
+guided to the parsonage by his wife, who had gone to the depot to meet
+him. They must have talked over the situation pretty thoroughly on the
+way, for by the time the new-comer had washed his face and hands and
+put on a clean collar, Sister Soulsby was ready to announce her plan of
+campaign in detail.
+
+Her husband was a man of small stature and, like herself, of uncertain
+age. He had a gentle, if rather dry, clean-shaven face, and wore his
+dust-colored hair long behind. His little figure was clad in black
+clothes of a distinctively clerical fashion, and he had a white
+neck-cloth neatly tied under his collar. The Wares noted that he looked
+clean and amiable rather than intellectually or spiritually powerful, as
+he took the vacant seat between theirs, and joined them in concentrating
+attention upon Mrs. Soulsby.
+
+This lady, holding herself erect and alert on the edge of the low, big
+easy-chair had the air of presiding over a meeting.
+
+“My idea is,” she began, with an easy implication that no one else's
+idea was needed, “that your Quarterly Conference, when it meets on
+Monday, must be adjourned to Tuesday. We will have the people all out
+tomorrow morning to love-feast, and announcement can be made there, and
+at the morning service afterward, that a series of revival meetings are
+to be begun that same evening. Mr. Soulsby and I can take charge in the
+evening, and we'll see to it that THAT packs the house--fills the church
+to overflowing Monday evening. Then we'll quietly turn the meeting into
+a debt-raising convention, before they know where they are, and we'll
+wipe off the best part of the load. Now, don't you see,” she turned her
+eyes full upon Theron as she spoke, “you want to hold your Quarterly
+Conference AFTER this money's been raised, not before.”
+
+“I see what you mean,” Mr. Ware responded gravely. “But--”
+
+“But what!” Sister Soulsby interjected, with vivacity.
+
+“Well,” said Theron, picking his words, “in the first place, it rests
+with the Presiding Elder to say whether an adjournment can be made until
+Tuesday, not with me.”
+
+“That's all right. Leave that to me,” said the lady.
+
+“In the second place,” Theron went on, still more hesitatingly, “there
+seems a certain--what shall I say?--indirection in--in--”
+
+“In getting them together for a revival, and springing a debt-raising on
+them?” Sister Soulsby put in. “Why, man alive, that's the best part of
+it. You ought to be getting some notion by this time what these Octavius
+folks of yours are like. I've only been here two days, but I've got
+their measure down to an allspice. Supposing you were to announce
+tomorrow that the debt was to be raised Monday. How many men with
+bank-accounts would turn up, do you think? You could put them all in
+your eye, sir--all in your eye!”
+
+“Very possibly you're right,” faltered the young minister.
+
+“Right? Why, of course I'm right,” she said, with placid confidence.
+“You've got to take folks as you find them; and you've got to find them
+the best way you can. One place can be worked, managed, in one way,
+and another needs quite a different way, and both ways would be dead
+frosts--complete failures--in a third.”
+
+Brother Soulsby coughed softly here, and shuffled his feet for an
+instant on the carpet. His wife resumed her remarks with slightly abated
+animation, and at a slower pace.
+
+“My experience,” she said, “has shown me that the Apostle was right.
+To properly serve the cause, one must be all things to all men. I have
+known very queer things indeed turn out to be means of grace. You
+simply CAN'T get along without some of the wisdom of the serpent. We are
+commanded to have it, for that matter. And now, speaking of that, do
+you know when the Presiding Elder arrives in town today, and where he is
+going to eat supper and sleep?”
+
+Theron shook his head. “All I know is he isn't likely to come here,” he
+said, and added sadly, “I'm afraid he's not an admirer of mine.”
+
+“Perhaps that's not all his fault,” commented Sister Soulsby. “I'll tell
+you something. He came in on the same train as my husband, and that old
+trustee Pierce of yours was waiting for him with his buggy, and I saw
+like a flash what was in the wind, and the minute the train stopped I
+caught the Presiding Elder, and invited him in your name to come
+right here and stay; told him you and Alice were just set on his
+coming--wouldn't take no for an answer. Of course he couldn't come--I
+knew well enough he had promised old Pierce--but we got in our
+invitation anyway, and it won't do you any harm. Now, that's what I call
+having some gumption--wisdom of the serpent, and so on.”
+
+“I'm sure,” remarked Alice, “I should have been mortified to death if he
+had come. We lost the extension-leaf to our table in moving, and four is
+all it'll seat decently.”
+
+Sister Soulsby smiled winningly into the wife's honest face. “Don't you
+see, dear,” she explained patiently, “I only asked him because I knew
+he couldn't come. A little butter spreads a long way, if it's only
+intelligently warmed.”
+
+“It was certainly very ingenious of you,” Theron began almost stiffly.
+Then he yielded to the humanities, and with a kindling smile added,
+“And it was as kind as kind could be. I'm afraid you're wrong about
+it's doing me any good, but I can see how well you meant it, and I'm
+grateful.”
+
+“We COULD have sneaked in the kitchen table, perhaps, while he was out
+in the garden, and put on the extra long tablecloth,” interjected Alice,
+musingly.
+
+Sister Soulsby smiled again at Sister Ware, but without any words this
+time; and Alice on the instant rose, with the remark that she must be
+going out to see about supper.
+
+“I'm going to insist on coming out to help you,” Mrs. Soulsby declared,
+“as soon as I've talked over one little matter with your husband. Oh,
+yes, you must let me this time. I insist!”
+
+As the kitchen door closed behind Mrs. Ware, a swift and apparently
+significant glance shot its way across from Sister Soulsby's roving,
+eloquent eyes to the calmer and smaller gray orbs of her husband. He
+rose to his feet, made some little explanation about being a gardener
+himself, and desiring to inspect more closely some rhododendrons he had
+noticed in the garden, and forthwith moved decorously out by the other
+door into the front hall. They heard his footsteps on the gravel beneath
+the window before Mrs. Soulsby spoke again.
+
+“You're right about the Presiding Elder, and you're wrong,” she said.
+“He isn't what one might call precisely in love with you. Oh, I know the
+story--how you got into debt at Tyre, and he stepped in and insisted on
+your being denied Tecumseh and sent here instead.”
+
+“HE was responsible for that, then, was he?” broke in Theron, with
+contracted brows.
+
+“Why, don't you make any effort to find out anything at ALL?” she asked
+pertly enough, but with such obvious good-nature that he could not but
+have pleasure in her speech. “Why, of course he did it! Who else did you
+suppose?”
+
+“Well,” said the young minister, despondently, “if he's as much against
+me as all that, I might as well hang up my fiddle and go home.”
+
+Sister Soulsby gave a little involuntary groan of impatience. She
+bent forward, and, lifting her eyes, rolled them at him in a curve of
+downward motion which suggested to his fancy the image of two eagles in
+a concerted pounce upon a lamb.
+
+“My friend,” she began, with a new note of impressiveness in her voice,
+“if you'll pardon my saying it, you haven't got the spunk of a mouse.
+If you're going to lay down, and let everybody trample over you just as
+they please, you're right! You MIGHT as well go home. But now here, this
+is what I wanted to say to you: Do you just keep your hands off these
+next few days, and leave this whole thing to me. I'll pull it into
+shipshape for you. No--wait a minute--don't interrupt now. I have taken
+a liking to you. You've got brains, and you've got human nature in you,
+and heart. What you lack is SABE--common-sense. You'll get that, too, in
+time, and meanwhile I'm not going to stand by and see you cut up and fed
+to the dogs for want of it. I'll get you through this scrape, and put
+you on your feet again, right-side-up-with care, because, as I said, I
+like you. I like your wife, too, mind. She's a good, honest little soul,
+and she worships the very ground you tread on. Of course, as long as
+people WILL marry in their teens, the wrong people will get yoked up
+together. But that's neither here nor there. She's a kind sweet little
+body, and she's devoted to you, and it isn't every intellectual man
+that gets even that much. But now it's a go, is it? You promise to keep
+quiet, do you, and leave the whole show absolutely to me? Shake hands on
+it.”
+
+Sister Soulsby had risen, and stood now holding out her hand in a frank,
+manly fashion. Theron looked at the hand, and made mental notes that
+there were a good many veins discernible on the small wrist, and that
+the forearm seemed to swell out more than would have been expected in a
+woman producing such a general effect of leanness. He caught the
+shine of a thin bracelet-band of gold under the sleeve. A delicate,
+significant odor just hinted its presence in the air about this
+outstretched arm--something which was not a perfume, yet deserved as
+gracious a name.
+
+He rose to his feet, and took the proffered hand with a deliberate
+gesture, as if he had been cautiously weighing all the possible
+arguments for and against this momentous compact.
+
+“I promise,” he said gravely, and the two palms squeezed themselves
+together in an earnest clasp.
+
+“Right you are,” exclaimed the lady, once more with cheery vivacity.
+“Mind, when it's all over, I'm going to give you a good, serious,
+downright talking to--a regular hoeing-over. I'm not sure I shan't give
+you a sound shaking into the bargain. You need it. And now I'm going out
+to help Alice.”
+
+The Reverend Mr. Ware remained standing after his new friend had
+left the room, and his meditative face wore an even unusual air of
+abstraction. He strolled aimlessly over, after a time, to the desk by
+the window, and stood there looking out at the slight figure of Brother
+Soulsby, who was bending over and attentively regarding some pink
+blossoms on a shrub through what seemed to be a pocket magnifying-glass.
+
+What remained uppermost in his mind was not this interesting woman's
+confident pledge of championship in his material difficulties. He found
+himself dwelling instead upon her remark about the incongruous results
+of early marriages. He wondered idly if the little man in the white
+tie, fussing out there over that rhododendron-bush, had figured in her
+thoughts as an example of these evils. Then he reflected that they had
+been mentioned in clear relation to talk about Alice.
+
+Now that he faced this question, it was as if he had been consciously
+ignoring and putting it aside for a long time. How was it, he asked
+himself now, that Alice, who had once seemed so bright and keen-witted,
+who had in truth started out immeasurably his superior in swiftness of
+apprehension and readiness in humorous quips and conceits, should
+have grown so dull? For she was undoubtedly slow to understand things
+nowadays. Her absurd lugging in of the extension-table problem, when
+the great strategic point of that invitation foisted upon the
+Presiding Elder came up, was only the latest sample of a score of these
+heavy-minded exhibitions that recalled themselves to him. And outsiders
+were apparently beginning to notice it. He knew by intuition what
+those phrases, “good, honest little soul” and “kind, sweet little body”
+ signified, when another woman used them to a husband about his wife. The
+very employment of that word “little” was enough, considering that there
+was scarcely more than a hair's difference between Mrs. Soulsby and
+Alice, and that they were both rather tall than otherwise, as the
+stature of women went.
+
+What she had said about the chronic misfortunes of intellectual men in
+such matters gave added point to those meaning phrases. Nobody could
+deny that geniuses and men of conspicuous talent had as a rule, all
+through history, contracted unfortunate marriages. In almost every case
+where their wives were remembered at all, it was on account of their
+abnormal stupidity, or bad temper, or something of that sort. Take
+Xantippe, for example, and Shakespeare's wife, and--and--well, there was
+Byron, and Bulwer-Lytton, and ever so many others.
+
+Of course there was nothing to be done about it. These things happened,
+and one could only put the best possible face on them, and live one's
+appointed life as patiently and contentedly as might be. And Alice
+undoubtedly merited all the praise which had been so generously bestowed
+upon her. She was good and honest and kindly, and there could be no
+doubt whatever as to her utter devotion to him. These were tangible,
+solid qualities, which must always secure respect for her. It was true
+that she no longer seemed to be very popular among people. He questioned
+whether men, for instance, like Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar would care
+much about her. Visions of the wifeless and academic calm in which
+these men spent their lives--an existence consecrated to literature and
+knowledge and familiarity with all the loftiest and noblest thoughts of
+the past--rose and enveloped him in a cloud of depression. No such
+lot would be his! He must labor along among ignorant and spiteful
+narrow-minded people to the end of his days, pocketing their insults and
+fawning upon the harsh hands of jealous nonentities who happened to
+be his official masters, just to keep a roof over his head--or rather
+Alice's. He must sacrifice everything to this, his ambitions, his
+passionate desires to do real good in the world on a large scale,
+his mental freedom, yes, even his chance of having truly elevating,
+intellectual friendships. For it was plain enough that the men whose
+friendship would be of genuine and stimulating profit to him would not
+like her. Now that he thought of it, she seemed latterly to make no
+friends at all.
+
+Suddenly, as he watched in a blank sort of way Brother Soulsby take
+out a penknife, and lop an offending twig from a rose-bush against the
+fence, something occurred to him. There was a curious exception to
+that rule of Alice's isolation. She had made at least one friend. Levi
+Gorringe seemed to like her extremely.
+
+As if his mind had been a camera, Theron snapped a shutter down upon
+this odd, unbidden idea, and turned away from the window.
+
+The sounds of an active, almost strenuous conversation in female voices
+came from the kitchen. Theron opened the door noiselessly, and put in
+his head, conscious of something furtive in his intention.
+
+“You must dreen every drop of water off the spinach, mind, before you
+put it over, or else--”
+
+It was Sister Soulsby's sharp and penetrating tones which came to him.
+Theron closed the door again, and surrendered himself once more to the
+circling whirl of his thoughts.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+A love-feast at nine in the morning opened the public services of a
+Sunday still memorable in the annals of Octavius Methodism.
+
+This ceremony, which four times a year preceded the sessions of the
+Quarterly Conference, was not necessarily an event of importance. It
+was an occasion upon which the brethren and sisters who clung to the
+old-fashioned, primitive ways of the itinerant circuit-riders, let
+themselves go with emphasized independence, putting up more vehement
+prayers than usual, and adding a special fervor of noise to their
+“Amens!” and other interjections--and that was all.
+
+It was Theron's first love-feast in Octavius, and as the big class-room
+in the church basement began to fill up, and he noted how the men with
+ultra radical views and the women clad in the most ostentatious drabs
+and grays were crowding into the front seats, he felt his spirits
+sinking. He had literally to force himself from sentence to sentence,
+when the time came for him to rise and open the proceedings with an
+exhortation. He had eagerly offered this function to the Presiding
+Elder, the Rev. Aziel P. Larrabee, who sat in severe silence on the
+little platform behind him, but had been informed that the dignitary
+would lead off in giving testimony later on. So Theron, feeling all the
+while the hostile eyes of the Elder burning holes in his back, dragged
+himself somehow through the task. He had never known any such difficulty
+of speech before. The relief was almost overwhelming when he came to
+the customary part where all are adjured to be as brief as possible in
+witnessing for the Lord, because the time belongs to all the people, and
+the Discipline forbids the feast to last more than ninety minutes. He
+delivered this injunction to brevity with marked earnestness, and then
+sat down abruptly.
+
+There was some rather boisterous singing, during which the stewards,
+beginning with the platform, passed plates of bread cut in small
+cubes, and water in big plated pitchers and tumblers, about among
+the congregation, threading their way between the long wooden benches
+ordinarily occupied at this hour by the children of the Sunday-school,
+and helping each brother and sister in turn. They held by the old
+custom, here in Octavius, and all along the seats the sexes alternated,
+as they do at a polite dinner-table.
+
+Theron impassively watched the familiar scene. The early nervousness had
+passed away. He felt now that he was not in the least afraid of these
+people, even with the Presiding Elder thrown in. Folks who sang with
+such unintelligence, and who threw themselves with such undignified
+fervor into this childish business of the bread and water, could not
+be formidable antagonists for a man of intellect. He had never realized
+before what a spectacle the Methodist love-feast probably presented to
+outsiders. What must they think of it!
+
+He had noticed that the Soulsbys sat together, in the centre and toward
+the front. Next to Brother Soulsby sat Alice. He thought she looked pale
+and preoccupied, and set it down in passing to her innate distaste for
+the somber garments she was wearing, and for the company she perforce
+found herself in. Another head was in the way, and for a time Theron did
+not observe who sat beside Alice on the other side. When at last he saw
+that it was Levi Gorringe, his instinct was to wonder what the lawyer
+must be saying to himself about these noisy and shallow enthusiasts. A
+recurring emotion of loyalty to the simple people among whom, after all,
+he had lived his whole life, prompted him to feel that it wasn't wholly
+nice of Gorringe to come and enjoy this revelation of their foolish
+side, as if it were a circus. There was some vague memory in his mind
+which associated Gorringe with other love-feasts, and with a cynical
+attitude toward them. Oh, yes! he had told how he went to one just for
+the sake of sitting beside the girl he admired--and was pursuing.
+
+The stewards had completed their round, and the loud, discordant singing
+came to an end. There ensued a little pause, during which Theron turned
+to the Presiding Elder with a gesture of invitation to take charge
+of the further proceedings. The Elder responded with another gesture,
+calling his attention to something going on in front.
+
+Brother and Sister Soulsby, to the considerable surprise of everybody,
+had risen to their feet, and were standing in their places, quite
+motionless, and with an air of professional self-assurance dimly
+discernible under a large show of humility. They stood thus until
+complete silence had been secured. Then the woman, lifting her head,
+began to sing. The words were “Rock of Ages,” but no one present had
+heard the tune to which she wedded them. Her voice was full and very
+sweet, and had in it tender cadences which all her hearers found
+touching. She knew how to sing, and she put forth the words so that each
+was distinctly intelligible. There came a part where Brother Soulsby,
+lifting his head in turn, took up a tuneful second to her air. Although
+the two did not, as one could hear by listening closely, sing the same
+words at the same time, they produced none the less most moving and
+delightful harmonies of sound.
+
+The experience was so novel and charming that listeners ran ahead in
+their minds to fix the number of verses there were in the hymn, and
+to hope that none would be left out. Toward the end, when some of the
+intolerably self-conceited local singers, fancying they had caught the
+tune, started to join in, they were stopped by an indignant “sh-h!”
+ which rose from all parts of the class-room; and the Soulsbys, with a
+patient and pensive kindliness written on their uplifted faces, gave
+that verse over again.
+
+What followed seemed obviously restrained and modified by the effect of
+this unlooked-for and tranquillizing overture. The Presiding Elder
+was known to enjoy visits to old-fashioned congregations like that
+of Octavius, where he could indulge to the full his inner passion for
+high-pitched passionate invocations and violent spiritual demeanor, but
+this time he spoke temperately, almost soothingly. The most tempestuous
+of the local witnesses for the Lord gave in their testimony in
+relatively pacific tones, under the influence of the spell which good
+music had laid upon the gathering. There was the deepest interest as to
+what the two visitors would do in this way. Brother Soulsby spoke first,
+very briefly and in well rounded and well-chosen, if conventional,
+phrases. His wife, following him, delivered in a melodious monotone some
+equally hackneyed remarks. The assemblage, listening in rapt attention,
+felt the suggestion of reserved power in every sentence she uttered, and
+burst forth, as she dropped into her seat, in a loud chorus of approving
+ejaculations. The Soulsbys had captured Octavius with their first outer
+skirmish line.
+
+Everything seemed to move forward now with a new zest and spontaneity.
+Theron had picked out for the occasion the best of those sermons which
+he had prepared in Tyre, at the time when he was justifying his ambition
+to be accounted a pulpit orator. It was orthodox enough, but had been
+planned as the framework for picturesque and emotional rhetoric rather
+than doctrinal edification. He had never dreamed of trying it on
+Octavius before, and only on the yesterday had quavered at his own
+daring in choosing it now. Nothing but the desire to show Sister Soulsby
+what was in him had held him to the selection.
+
+Something of this same desire no doubt swayed and steadied him now in
+the pulpit. The labored slowness of his beginning seemed to him to be
+due to nervous timidity, until suddenly, looking down into those big
+eyes of Sister Soulsby's, which were bent gravely upon him from where
+she sat beside Alice in the minister's pew, he remembered that it was
+instead the studied deliberation which art had taught him. He went on,
+feeling more and more that the skill and histrionic power of his best
+days were returning to him, were as marked as ever--nay, had never
+triumphed before as they were triumphing now. The congregation watched
+and listened with open, steadfast eyes and parted lips. For the first
+time in all that weary quarter, their faces shone. The sustaining
+sparkle of their gaze lifted him to a peroration unrivalled in his own
+recollection of himself.
+
+He sat down, and bent his head forward upon the open Bible, breathing
+hard, but suffused with a glow of satisfaction. His ears caught the
+music of that sighing rustle through the audience which bespeaks a
+profound impression. He could scarcely keep the fingers of his hands,
+covering his bowed face in a devotional posture as they were, from
+drumming a jubilant tattoo. His pulses did this in every vein, throbbing
+with excited exultation. The insistent whim seized him, as he still
+bent thus before his people, to whisper to his own heart, “At last!--The
+dogs!”
+
+The announcement that in the evening a series of revival meetings was to
+be inaugurated, had been made at the love-feast, and it was repeated
+now from the pulpit, with the added statement that for the once
+the class-meetings usually following this morning service would be
+suspended. Then Theron came down the steps, conscious after a fashion
+that the Presiding Elder had laid a propitiatory hand on his shoulder
+and spoken amiably about the sermon, and that several groups of more or
+less important parishioners were waiting in the aisle and the vestibule
+to shake hands and tell him how much they had enjoyed the sermon. His
+mind perversely kept hold of the thought that all this came too late. He
+politely smiled his way along out, and, overtaking the Soulsbys and his
+wife near the parsonage gate, went in with them.
+
+At the cold, picked-up noonday meal which was the Sunday rule of the
+house, Theron rather expected that his guests would talk about the
+sermon, or at any rate about the events of the morning. A Sabbath chill
+seemed to have settled upon both their tongues. They ate almost in
+silence, and their sparse remarks touched upon topics far removed from
+church affairs. Alice too, seemed strangely disinclined to conversation.
+The husband knew her face and its varying moods so well that he could
+see she was laboring under some very powerful and deep emotion. No doubt
+it was the sermon, the oratorical swing of which still tingled in his
+own blood, that had so affected her. If she had said so, it would have
+pleased him, but she said nothing.
+
+After dinner, Brother Soulsby disappeared in his bedroom, with the
+remark that he guessed he would lie down awhile. Sister Soulsby put
+on her bonnet, and, explaining that she always prepared herself for an
+evening's work by a long solitary walk, quitted the house. Alice, after
+she had put the dinner things away, went upstairs, and stayed there.
+Left to himself, Theron spent the afternoon in the easy-chair, and,
+in the intervals of confused introspection, read “Recollections of my
+Youth” through again from cover to cover.
+
+He went through the remarkable experiences attending the opening of the
+revival, when evening came, as one in a dream. Long before the hour for
+the service arrived, the sexton came in to tell him that the church was
+already nearly full, and that it was going to be impossible to present
+any distinction in the matter of pews. When the party from the parsonage
+went over--after another cold and mostly silent meal--it was to find the
+interior of the church densely packed, and people being turned away from
+the doors.
+
+Theron was supposed to preside over what followed, and he did sit on
+the central chair in the pulpit, between the Presiding Elder and Brother
+Soulsby, and on the several needful occasions did rise and perfunctorily
+make the formal remarks required of him. The Elder preached a short,
+but vigorously phrased sermon. The Soulsbys sang three or four times--on
+each occasion with familiar hymnal words set to novel, concerted
+music--and then separately exhorted the assemblage. The husband's part
+seemed well done. If his speech lacked some of the fire of the divine
+girdings which older Methodists recalled, it still led straight, and
+with kindling fervency, up to a season of power. The wife took up the
+word as he sat down. She had risen from one of the side-seats; and,
+speaking as she walked, she moved forward till she stood within the
+altar-rail, immediately under the pulpit, and from this place, facing
+the listening throng, she delivered her harangue. Those who watched
+her words most intently got the least sense of meaning from them.
+The phrases were all familiar enough--“Jesus a very present help,”
+ “Sprinkled by the Blood,” “Comforted by the Word,” “Sanctified by the
+Spirit,” “Born into the Kingdom,” and a hundred others--but it was as in
+the case of her singing: the words were old; the music was new.
+
+What Sister Soulsby said did not matter. The way she said it--the
+splendid, searching sweep of her great eyes; the vibrating roll of
+her voice, now full of tears, now scornful, now boldly, jubilantly
+triumphant; the sympathetic swaying of her willowy figure under the
+stress of her eloquence--was all wonderful. When she had finished, and
+stood, flushed and panting, beneath the shadow of the pulpit, she
+held up a hand deprecatingly as the resounding “Amens!” and “Bless the
+Lords!” began to well up about her.
+
+“You have heard us sing,” she said, smiling to apologize for her
+shortness of breath. “Now we want to hear you sing!”
+
+Her husband had risen as she spoke, and on the instant, with a far
+greater volume of voice than they had hitherto disclosed, the two began
+“From Greenland's Icy Mountains,” in the old, familiar tune. It did
+not need Sister Soulsby's urgent and dramatic gesture to lift people to
+their feet. The whole assemblage sprang up, and, under the guidance of
+these two powerful leading voices, thundered the hymn out as Octavius
+had never heard it before.
+
+While its echoes were still alive, the woman began speaking again.
+“Don't sit down!” she cried. “You would stand up if the President of the
+United States was going by, even if he was only going fishing. How much
+more should you stand up in honor of living souls passing forward to
+find their Saviour!”
+
+The psychological moment was upon them. Groans and cries arose, and
+a palpable ferment stirred the throng. The exhortation to sinners
+to declare themselves, to come to the altar, was not only on the
+revivalist's lips: it seemed to quiver in the very air, to be borne on
+every inarticulate exclamation in the clamor of the brethren. A young
+woman, with a dazed and startled look in her eyes, rose in the body of
+the church tremblingly hesitated for a moment, and then, with bowed head
+and blushing cheeks, pressed her way out from the end of a crowded
+pew and down the aisle to the rail. A triumphant outburst of welcoming
+ejaculations swelled to the roof as she knelt there, and under its
+impetus others followed her example. With interspersed snatches of song
+and shouted encouragements the excitement reached its height only when
+twoscore people, mostly young, were tightly clustered upon their knees
+about the rail, and in the space opening upon the aisle. Above the
+confusion of penitential sobs and moans, and the hysterical murmurings
+of members whose conviction of entire sanctity kept them in their seats,
+could be heard the voices of the Presiding Elder, the Soulsbys, and
+the elderly deacons of the church, who moved about among the kneeling
+mourners, bending over them and patting their shoulders, and calling
+out to them: “Fasten your thoughts on Jesus!” “Oh, the Precious Blood!”
+ “Blessed be His Name!” “Seek Him, and you shall find Him!” “Cling to
+Jesus, and Him Crucified!”
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware did not, with the others, descend from the pulpit.
+Seated where he could not see Sister Soulsby, he had failed utterly to
+be moved by the wave of enthusiasm she had evoked. What he heard her say
+disappointed him. He had expected from her more originality, more spice
+of her own idiomatic, individual sort. He viewed with a cold sense of
+aloofness the evidences of her success when they began to come forward
+and abase themselves at the altar. The instant resolve that, come what
+might, he would not go down there among them, sprang up ready-made in
+his mind. He saw his two companions pass him and descend the pulpit
+stairs, and their action only hardened his resolution. If an excuse were
+needed, he was presiding, and the place to preside in was the pulpit.
+But he waived in his mind the whole question of an excuse.
+
+After a little, he put his hand over his face, leaning the elbow forward
+on the reading-desk. The scene below would have thrilled him to the
+marrow six months--yes, three months ago. He put a finger across his
+eyes now, to half shut it out. The spectacle of these silly young
+“mourners”--kneeling they knew not why, trembling at they could not tell
+what, pledging themselves frantically to dogmas and mysteries they knew
+nothing of, under the influence of a hubbub of outcries as meaningless
+in their way, and inspiring in much the same way, as the racket of a
+fife and drum corps--the spectacle saddened and humiliated him now.
+He was conscious of a dawning sense of shame at being even tacitly
+responsible for such a thing. His fancy conjured up the idea of Dr.
+Ledsmar coming in and beholding this maudlin and unseemly scene, and he
+felt his face grow hot at the bare thought.
+
+Looking through his fingers, Theron all at once saw something which
+caught at his breath with a sharp clutch. Alice had risen from the
+minister's pew--the most conspicuous one in the church--and was moving
+down the aisle toward the rail, her uplifted face chalk-like in its
+whiteness, and her eyes wide-open, looking straight ahead.
+
+The young pastor could scarcely credit his sight. He thrust aside his
+hand, and bent forward, only to see his wife sink upon her knees among
+the rest, and to hear this notable accession to the “mourners” hailed
+by a tumult of approving shouts. Then, remembering himself, he drew back
+and put up his hand, shutting out the strange scene altogether. To see
+nothing at all was a relief, and under cover he closed his eyes, and bit
+his teeth together.
+
+A fresh outburst of thanksgivings, spreading noisily through the
+congregation, prompted him to peer through his fingers again. Levi
+Gorringe was making his way down the aisle--was at the moment quite in
+front. Theron found himself watching this man with the stern composure
+of a fatalist. The clamant brethren down below were stirred to new
+excitement by the thought that the sceptical lawyer, so long with them,
+yet not of them, had been humbled and won by the outpourings of the
+Spirit. Theron's perceptions were keener. He knew that Gorringe was
+coming forward to kneel beside Alice; The knowledge left him curiously
+undisturbed. He saw the lawyer advance, gently insinuate himself past
+the form of some kneeling mourner who was in his way, and drop on his
+knees close beside the bowed figure of Alice. The two touched shoulders
+as they bent forward beneath Sister Soulsby's outstretched hands, held
+over them as in a blessing. Theron looked fixedly at them, and professed
+to himself that he was barely interested.
+
+A little afterward, he was standing up in his place, and reading aloud
+a list of names which one of the stewards had given him. They were the
+names of those who had asked that evening to be taken into the church
+as members on probation. The sounds of the recent excitement were all
+hushed now, save as two or three enthusiasts in a corner raised their
+voices in abrupt greeting of each name in its turn, but Theron felt
+somehow that this noise had been transferred to the inside of his head.
+A continuous buzzing went on there, so that the sound of his voice was
+far-off and unfamiliar in his ears.
+
+He read through the list--comprising some fifteen items--and pronounced
+the names with great distinctness. It was necessary to take pains with
+this, because the only name his blurred eyes seemed to see anywhere on
+the foolscap sheet was that of Levi Gorringe. When he had finished and
+was taking his seat, some one began speaking to him from the body of the
+church. He saw that this was the steward, who was explaining to him that
+the most important name of the lot--that of Brother Gorringe--had not
+been read out.
+
+Theron smiled and shook his head. Then, when the Presiding Elder touched
+him on the arm, and assured him that he had not mentioned the name in
+question, he replied quite simply, and with another smile, “I thought it
+was the only name I did read out.”
+
+Then he sat down abruptly, and let his head fall to one side. There
+were hurried movements inside the pulpit, and people in the audience had
+begun to stand up wonderingly, when the Presiding Elder, with uplifted
+hands, confronted them.
+
+“We will omit the Doxology, and depart quietly after the benediction,”
+ he said. “Brother Ware seems to have been overcome by the heat.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+When Theron woke next morning, Alice seemed to have dressed and left the
+room--a thing which had never happened before.
+
+This fact connected itself at once in his brain with the recollection
+of her having made an exhibition of herself the previous evening--going
+forward before all eyes to join the unconverted and penitent sinners, as
+if she were some tramp or shady female, instead of an educated lady, a
+professing member from her girlhood, and a minister's wife. It crossed
+his mind that probably she had risen and got away noiselessly, for very
+shame at looking him in the face, after such absurd behavior.
+
+Then he remembered more, and grasped the situation. He had fainted in
+church, and had been brought home and helped to bed. Dim memories of
+unaccustomed faces in the bedroom, of nauseous drugs and hushed voices,
+came to him out of the night-time. Now that he thought of it, he was a
+sick man. Having settled this, he went off to sleep again, a feverish
+and broken sleep, and remained in this state most of the time for the
+following twenty-four hours. In the brief though numerous intervals of
+waking, he found certain things clear in his mind. One was that he was
+annoyed with Alice, but would dissemble his feelings. Another was that
+it was much pleasanter to be ill than to be forced to attend and take
+part in those revival meetings. These two ideas came and went in a lazy,
+drowsy fashion, mixing themselves up with other vagrant fancies, yet
+always remaining on top.
+
+In the evening the singing from the church next door filled his room.
+The Soulsbys' part of it was worth keeping awake for. He turned over and
+deliberately dozed when the congregation sang.
+
+Alice came up a number of times during the day to ask how he felt, and
+to bring him broth or toast-water. On several occasions, when he heard
+her step, the perverse inclination mastered him to shut his eyes, and
+pretend to be asleep, so that she might tip-toe out again. She had a
+depressed and thoughtful air, and spoke to him like one whose mind was
+on something else. Neither of them alluded to what had happened the
+previous evening. Toward the close of the long day, she came to ask him
+whether he would prefer her to remain in the house, instead of attending
+the meeting.
+
+“Go, by all means,” he said almost curtly.
+
+The Presiding Elder and the Sunday-school superintendent called early
+Tuesday morning at the parsonage to make brotherly inquiries, and
+Theron was feeling so much better that he himself suggested their
+coming upstairs to see him. The Elder was in good spirits; he
+smiled approvingly, and even put in a jocose word or two while the
+superintendent sketched for the invalid in a cheerful way the leading
+incidents of the previous evening.
+
+There had been an enormous crowd, even greater than that of Sunday
+night, and everybody had been looking forward to another notable and
+exciting season of grace. These expectations were especially heightened
+when Sister Soulsby ascended the pulpit stairs and took charge of the
+proceedings. She deferred to Paul's views about women preachers on
+Sundays, she said; but on weekdays she had just as much right to snatch
+brands from the burning as Paul, or Peter, or any other man. She went
+on like that, in a breezy, off-hand fashion which tickled the audience
+immensely, and led to the liveliest anticipations of what would happen
+when she began upon the evening's harvest of souls.
+
+But it was something else that happened. At a signal from Sister Soulsby
+the steward got up, and, in an unconcerned sort of way, went through the
+throng to the rear of the church, locked the doors, and put the keys
+in their pockets. The sister dryly explained now to the surprised
+congregation that there was a season for all things, and that on the
+present occasion they would suspend the glorious work of redeeming
+fallen human nature, and take up instead the equally noble task of
+raising some fifteen hundred dollars which the church needed in its
+business. The doors would only be opened again when this had been
+accomplished.
+
+The brethren were much taken aback by this trick, and they permitted
+themselves to exchange a good many scowling and indignant glances, the
+while their professional visitors sang another of their delightfully
+novel sacred duets. Its charm of harmony for once fell upon
+unsympathetic ears. But then Sister Soulsby began another monologue,
+defending this way of collecting money, chaffing the assemblage with
+bright-eyed impudence on their having been trapped, and scoring,
+one after another, neat and jocose little personal points on local
+characteristics, at which everybody but the individual touched grinned
+broadly. She was so droll and cheeky, and withal effective in her talk,
+that she quite won the crowd over. She told a story about a woodchuck
+which fairly brought down the house.
+
+“A man,” she began, with a quizzical twinkle in her eye, “told me once
+about hunting a woodchuck with a pack of dogs, and they chased it so
+hard that it finally escaped only by climbing a butternut-tree. 'But, my
+friend,' I said to him, 'woodchucks can't climb trees--butternut-trees
+or any other kind--and you know it!' All he said in reply to me was:
+'This woodchuck had to climb a tree!' And that's the way with this
+congregation. You think you can't raise $1,500, but you've GOT to.”
+
+So it went on. She set them all laughing; and then, with a twist of the
+eyes and a change of voice, lo, and behold, she had them nearly crying
+in the same breath. Under the pressure of these jumbled emotions,
+brethren began to rise up in their pews and say what they would give.
+The wonderful woman had something smart and apt to say about each fresh
+contribution, and used it to screw up the general interest a notch
+further toward benevolent hysteria. With songs and jokes and impromptu
+exhortations and prayers she kept the thing whirling, until a sort of
+duel of generosity began between two of the most unlikely men--Erastus
+Winch and Levi Gorringe. Everybody had been surprised when Winch gave
+his first $50; but when he rose again, half an hour afterward, and said
+that, owing to the high public position of some of the new members on
+probation, he foresaw a great future for the church, and so felt moved
+to give another $25, there was general amazement. Moved by a common
+instinct, all eyes were turned upon Levi Gorringe, and he, without the
+slightest hesitation, stood up and said he would give $100. There was
+something in his tone which must have annoyed Brother Winch, for he shot
+up like a dart, and called out, “Put me down for fifty more;” and that
+brought Gorringe to his feet with an added $50, and then the two went
+on raising each other till the assemblage was agape with admiring
+stupefaction.
+
+This gladiatorial combat might have been going on till now, the
+Sunday-school superintendent concluded, if Winch hadn't subsided. The
+amount of the contributions hadn't been figured up yet, for Sister
+Soulsby kept the list; but there had been a tremendous lot of money
+raised. Of that there could be no doubt.
+
+The Presiding Elder now told Theron that the Quarterly Conference had
+been adjourned yesterday till today. He and Brother Davis were even now
+on their way to attend the session in the church next door. The Elder
+added, with an obvious kindly significance, that though Theron was too
+ill to attend it, he guessed his absence would do him no harm. Then the
+two men left the room, and Theron went to sleep again.
+
+Another almost blank period ensued, this time lasting for forty-eight
+hours. The young minister was enfolded in the coils of a fever of some
+sort, which Brother Soulsby, who had dabbled considerably in medicine,
+admitted that he was puzzled about. Sometimes he thought that it was
+typhoid, and then again there were symptoms which looked suspiciously
+like brain fever. The Methodists of Octavius counted no physician among
+their numbers, and when, on the second day, Alice grew scared, and
+decided, with Brother Soulsby's assent, to call in professional advice,
+the only doctor's name she could recall was that of Ledsmar. She was
+conscious of an instinctive dislike for the vague image of him her fancy
+had conjured up, but the reflection that he was Theron's friend, and so
+probably would be more moderate in his charges, decided her.
+
+Brother Soulsby showed a most comforting tact and swiftness of
+apprehension when Alice, in mentioning Dr. Ledsmar's name, disclosed by
+her manner a fear that his being sent for would create talk among the
+church people. He volunteered at once to act as messenger himself, and,
+with no better guide than her dim hints at direction, found the doctor
+and brought him back to the parsonage.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar expressly disclaimed to Soulsby all pretence of professional
+skill, and made him understand that he went along solely because
+he liked Mr. Ware, and was interested in him, and in any case would
+probably be of as much use as the wisest of strange physicians--a view
+which the little revivalist received with comprehending nods of tacit
+acquiescence. Ledsmar came, and was taken up to the sick-room. He sat
+on the bedside and talked with Theron awhile, and then went downstairs
+again. To Alice's anxious inquiries, he replied that it seemed to him
+merely a case of over-work and over-worry, about which there was not the
+slightest occasion for alarm.
+
+“But he says the strangest things,” the wife put in. “He has been quite
+delirious at times.”
+
+“That means only that his brain is taking a rest as well as his body,”
+ remarked Ledsmar. “That is Nature's way of securing an equilibrium of
+repose--of recuperation. He will come out of it with his mind all the
+fresher and clearer.”
+
+“I don't believe he knows shucks!” was Alice's comment when she closed
+the street door upon Dr. Ledsmar. “Anybody could have come in and looked
+at a sick man and said, 'Leave him alone.' You expect something more
+from a doctor. It's his business to say what to do. And I suppose he'll
+charge two dollars for just telling me that my husband was resting!”
+
+“No,” said Brother Soulsby, “he said he never practised, and that he
+would come only as a friend.”
+
+“Well, it isn't my idea of a friend--not to prescribe a single thing,”
+ protested Alice.
+
+Yet it seemed that no prescription was needed, after all. The next
+morning Theron woke to find himself feeling quite restored in spirits
+and nerves. He sat up in bed, and after an instant of weakly giddiness,
+recognized that he was all right again. Greatly pleased, he got up,
+and proceeded to dress himself. There were little recurring hints of
+faintness and vertigo, while he was shaving, but he had the sense
+to refer these to the fact that he was very, very hungry. He went
+downstairs, and smiled with the pleased pride of a child at the surprise
+which his appearance at the door created. Alice and the Soulsbys were
+at breakfast. He joined them, and ate voraciously, declaring that it was
+worth a month's illness to have things taste so good once more.
+
+“You still look white as a sheet,” said Alice, warningly. “If I were
+you, I'd be careful in my diet for a spell yet.”
+
+For answer, Theron let Sister Soulsby help him again to ham and eggs.
+He talked exclusively to Sister Soulsby, or rather invited her by
+his manner to talk to him, and listened and watched her with indolent
+content. There was a sort of happy and purified languor in his physical
+and mental being, which needed and appreciated just this--to sit next a
+bright and attractive woman at a good breakfast, and be ministered to by
+her sprightly conversation, by the flash of her informing and inspiring
+eyes, and the nameless sense of support and repose which her near
+proximity exhaled. He felt himself figuratively leaning against Sister
+Soulsby's buoyant personality, and resting.
+
+Brother Soulsby, like the intelligent creature he was, ate his breakfast
+in peace; but Alice would interpose remarks from time to time. Theron
+was conscious of a certain annoyance at this, and knew that he was
+showing it by an exaggerated display of interest in everything Sister
+Soulsby said, and persisted in it. There trembled in the background of
+his thoughts ever and again the recollection of a grievance against
+his wife--an offence which she had committed--but he put it aside as
+something to be grappled and dealt with when he felt again like taking
+up the serious and disagreeable things of life. For the moment, he
+desired only to be amused by Sister Soulsby. Her casual mention of the
+fact that she and her husband were taking their departure that very day,
+appealed to him as an added reason for devoting his entire attention to
+her.
+
+“You mustn't forget that famous talking-to you threatened me with--that
+'regular hoeing-over,' you know,” he reminded her, when he found
+himself alone with her after breakfast. He smiled as he spoke, in frank
+enjoyment of the prospect.
+
+Sister Soulsby nodded, and aided with a roll of her eyes the effect of
+mock-menace in her uplifted forefinger. “Oh, never fear,” she cried.
+“You'll catch it hot and strong. But that'll keep till afternoon.
+Tell me, do you feel strong enough to go in next door and attend the
+trustees' meeting this forenoon? It's rather important that you should
+be there, if you can spur yourself up to it. By the way, you haven't
+asked what happened at the Quarterly Conference yesterday.”
+
+Theron sighed, and made a little grimace of repugnance. “If you knew how
+little I cared!” he said. “I did hope you'd forget all about mentioning
+that--and everything else connected with--the next door. You talk so
+much more interestingly about other things.”
+
+“Here's gratitude for you!” exclaimed Sister Soulsby, with a gay
+simulation of despair. “Why, man alive, do you know what I've done for
+you? I got around on the Presiding Elder's blind side, I captured old
+Pierce, I wound Winch right around my little finger, I worked two or
+three of the class-leaders--all on your account. The result was you
+went through as if you'd had your ears pinned back, and been greased all
+over. You've got an extra hundred dollars added to your salary; do you
+hear? On the sixth question of the order of business the Elder ruled
+that the recommendation of the last conference's estimating committee
+could be revised (between ourselves he was wrong, but that doesn't
+matter), and so you're in clover. And very friendly things were said
+about you, too.”
+
+“It was very kind of you,” said Theron. “I am really extremely grateful
+to you.” He shook her by the hand to make up for what he realized to be
+a lack of fervor in his tones.
+
+“Well, then,” Sister Soulsby replied, “you pull yourself together, and
+take your place as chairman of the trustees' meeting, and see to it
+that, whatever comes up, you side with old Pierce and Winch.”
+
+“Oh, THEY'RE my friends now, are they?” asked Theron, with a faint play
+of irony about his lips.
+
+“Yes, that's your ticket this election,” she answered briskly, “and mind
+you vote it straight. Don't bother about reasons now. Just take it from
+me, as the song says, 'that things have changed since Willie died.'
+That's all. And then come back here, and this afternoon we'll have a
+good old-fashioned jaw.”
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware, walking with ostentatious feebleness, and forcing
+a conventional smile upon his wan face, duly made his unexpected
+appearance at the trustees' meeting in one of the smaller classrooms. He
+received their congratulations gravely, and shook hands with all three.
+It required an effort to do this impartially, because, upon sight of
+Levi Gorringe, there rose up suddenly within him an emotion of fierce
+dislike and enmity. In some enigmatic way his thoughts had kept
+themselves away from Gorringe ever since Sunday evening. Now they
+concentrated with furious energy and swiftness upon him. Theron
+seemed able in a flash of time to coordinate many recollections of
+Gorringe--the early liking Alice had professed for him, the mystery of
+those purchased plants in her garden, the story of the girl he had lost
+in church, his offer to lend him money, the way in which he had sat
+beside Alice at the love-feast and followed her to the altar-rail in
+the evening. These raced abreast through the young minister's brain, yet
+with each its own image, and its relation to the others clearly defined.
+
+He found the nerve, all the same, to take this third trustee by the
+hand, and to thank him for his congratulations, and even to say, with a
+surface smile of welcome, “It is BROTHER Gorringe, now, I remember.”
+
+The work before the meeting was chiefly of a routine kind. In most
+places this would have been transacted by the stewards; but in Octavius
+these minor officials had degenerated into mere ceremonial abstractions,
+who humbly ratified, or by arrangement anticipated, the will of the
+powerful, mortgage-owning trustees. Theron sat languidly at the head
+of the table while these common-place matters passed in their course,
+noting the intonations of Gorringe's voice as he read from his
+secretary's book, and finding his ear displeased by them. No issue arose
+upon any of these trivial affairs, and the minister, feeling faint
+and weary in the heat, wondered why Sister Soulsby had insisted on his
+coming.
+
+All at once he sat up straight, with an instinctive warning in his
+mind that here was the thing. Gorringe had taken up the subject of the
+“debt-raising” evening, and read out its essentials as they had been
+embodied in a report of the stewards. The gross sum obtained, in cash
+and promises, was $1,860. The stewards had collected of this a trifle
+less than half, but hoped to get it all in during the ensuing quarter.
+There were, also, the bill of Mr. and Mrs. Soulsby for $150, and the
+increases of $100 in the pastor's salary and $25 in the apportioned
+contribution of the charge toward the Presiding Elder's maintenance, the
+two latter items of which the Quarterly Conference had sanctioned.
+
+“I want to hear the names of the subscribers and their amounts read
+out,” put in Brother Pierce.
+
+When this was done, it became apparent that much more than half of the
+entire amount had been offered by two men. Levi Gorringe's $450 and
+Erastus Winch's $425 left only $985 to be divided up among some seventy
+or eighty other members of the congregation.
+
+Brother Pierce speedily stopped the reading of these subordinate names.
+“They're of no concern whatever,” he said, despite the fact that his
+own might have been reached in time. “Those first names are what I was
+getting at. Have those two first amounts, the big ones, be'n paid?”
+
+“One has--the other not,” replied Gorringe.
+
+“PRE-cisely,” remarked the senior trustee. “And I'm goin' to move that
+it needn't be paid, either. When Brother Winch, here, began hollerin'
+out those extra twenty-fives and fifties, that evening, it was under a
+complete misapprehension. He'd be'n on the Cheese Board that same Monday
+afternoon, and he'd done what he thought was a mighty big stroke of
+business, and he felt liberal according. I know just what that feelin'
+is myself. If I'd be'n makin' a mint o' money, instead o' losin' all the
+while, as I do, I'd 'a' done just the same. But the next day, lo, and
+behold, Brother Winch found that it was all a mistake--he hadn't made a
+single penny.”
+
+“Fact is, I lost by the whole transaction,” put in Erastus Winch,
+defiantly.
+
+“Just so,” Brother Pierce went on. “He lost money. You have his own word
+for it. Well, then, I say it would be a burning shame for us to consent
+to touch one penny of what he offered to give, in the fullness of his
+heart, while he was laborin' under that delusion. And I move he be not
+asked for it. We've got quite as much as we need, without it. I put my
+motion.”
+
+“That is, YOU don't put it,” suggested Winch, correctingly. “You move
+it, and Brother Ware, whom we're all so glad to see able to come and
+preside--he'll put it.”
+
+There was a moment's silence. “You've heard the motion,” said Theron,
+tentatively, and then paused for possible remarks. He was not going to
+meddle in this thing himself, and Gorringe was the only other who might
+have an opinion to offer. The necessities of the situation forced him
+to glance at the lawyer inquiringly. He did so, and turned his eyes away
+again like a shot. Gorringe was looking him squarely in the face, and
+the look was freighted with satirical contempt.
+
+The young minister spoke between clinched teeth. “All those in favor
+will say aye.”
+
+Brothers Pierce and Winch put up a simultaneous and confident “Aye.”
+
+“No, you don't!” interposed the lawyer, with deliberate, sneering
+emphasis. “I decidedly protest against Winch's voting. He's directly
+interested, and he mustn't vote. Your chairman knows that perfectly
+well.”
+
+“Yes, I think Brother Winch ought not to vote,” decided Theron, with
+great calmness. He saw now what was coming, and underneath his surface
+composure there were sharp flutterings.
+
+“Very well, then,” said Gorringe. “I vote no, and it's a tie. It rests
+with the chairman now to cast the deciding vote, and say whether this
+interesting arrangement shall go through or not.”
+
+“Me?” said Theron, eying the lawyer with a cool self-control which had
+come all at once to him. “Me? Oh, I vote Aye.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+“Well, I did what you told me to do,” Theron Ware remarked to Sister
+Soulsby, when at last they found themselves alone in the sitting-room
+after the midday meal.
+
+It had taken not a little strategic skirmishing to secure the room to
+themselves for the hospitable Alice, much touched by the thought of her
+new friend's departure that very evening had gladly proposed to let all
+the work stand over until night, and devote herself entirely to Sister
+Soulsby. When, finally, Brother Soulsby conceived and deftly executed
+the coup of interesting her in the budding of roses, and then leading
+her off into the garden to see with her own eyes how it was done, Theron
+had a sense of being left alone with a conspirator. The notion impelled
+him to plunge at once into the heart of their mystery.
+
+“I did what you told me to do,” he repeated, looking up from his low
+easy-chair to where she sat by the desk; “and I dare say you won't be
+surprised when I add that I have no respect for myself for doing it.”
+
+“And yet you would go and do it right over again, eh?” the woman
+said, in bright, pert tones, nodding her head, and smiling at him with
+roguish, comprehending eyes. “Yes, that's the way we're built. We spend
+our lives doing that sort of thing.”
+
+“I don't know that you would precisely grasp my meaning,” said the young
+minister, with a polite effort in his words to mask the untoward side of
+the suggestion. “It is a matter of conscience with me; and I am pained
+and shocked at myself.”
+
+Sister Soulsby drummed for an absent moment with her thin, nervous
+fingers on the desk-top. “I guess maybe you'd better go and lie down
+again,” she said gently. “You're a sick man, still, and it's no good
+your worrying your head just now with things of this sort. You'll see
+them differently when you're quite yourself again.”
+
+“No, no,” pleaded Theron. “Do let us have our talk out! I'm all right.
+My mind is clear as a bell. Truly, I've really counted on this talk with
+you.”
+
+“But there's something else to talk about, isn't there, besides--besides
+your conscience?” she asked. Her eyes bent upon him a kindly pressure as
+she spoke, which took all possible harshness from her meaning.
+
+Theron answered the glance rather than her words. “I know that you are
+my friend,” he said simply.
+
+Sister Soulsby straightened herself, and looked down upon him with a new
+intentness. “Well, then,” she began, “let's thrash this thing out right
+now, and be done with it. You say it's hurt your conscience to do
+just one little hundredth part of what there was to be done here. Ask
+yourself what you mean by that. Mind, I'm not quarrelling, and I'm not
+thinking about anything except just your own state of mind. You think
+you soiled your hands by doing what you did. That is to say, you wanted
+ALL the dirty work done by other people. That's it, isn't it?”
+
+“The Rev. Mr. Ware sat up, in turn, and looked doubtingly into his
+companion's face.
+
+“Oh, we were going to be frank, you know,” she added, with a pleasant
+play of mingled mirth and honest liking in her eyes.
+
+“No,” he said, picking his words, “my point would rather be that--that
+there ought not to have been any of what you yourself call this--this
+'dirty work.' THAT is my feeling.”
+
+“Now we're getting at it,” said Sister Soulsby, briskly. “My dear
+friend, you might just as well say that potatoes are unclean and unfit
+to eat because manure is put into the ground they grow in. Just look at
+the case. Your church here was running behind every year. Your people
+had got into a habit of putting in nickels instead of dimes, and letting
+you sweat for the difference. That's a habit, like tobacco, or biting
+your fingernails, or anything else. Either you were all to come to smash
+here, or the people had to be shaken up, stood on their heads, broken
+of their habit. It's my business--mine and Soulsby's--to do that sort
+of thing. We came here and we did it--did it up brown, too. We not
+only raised all the money the church needs, and to spare, but I took a
+personal shine to you, and went out of my way to fix up things for
+you. It isn't only the extra hundred dollars, but the whole tone of
+the congregation is changed toward you now. You'll see that they'll be
+asking to have you back here, next spring. And you're solid with your
+Presiding Elder, too. Well, now, tell me straight--is that worth while,
+or not?”
+
+“I've told you that I am very grateful,” answered the minister, “and I
+say it again, and I shall never be tired of repeating it. But--but it
+was the means I had in mind.”
+
+“Quite so,” rejoined the sister, patiently. “If you saw the way a hotel
+dinner was cooked, you wouldn't be able to stomach it. Did you ever see
+a play? In a theatre, I mean. I supposed not. But you'll understand when
+I say that the performance looks one way from where the audience sit,
+and quite a different way when you are behind the scenes. THERE you see
+that the trees and houses are cloth, and the moon is tissue paper,
+and the flying fairy is a middle-aged woman strung up on a rope.
+That doesn't prove that the play, out in front, isn't beautiful and
+affecting, and all that. It only shows that everything in this world is
+produced by machinery--by organization. The trouble is that you've
+been let in on the stage, behind the scenes, so to speak, and you're so
+green--if you'll pardon me--that you want to sit down and cry because
+the trees ARE cloth, and the moon IS a lantern. And I say, don't be such
+a goose!”
+
+“I see what you mean,” Theron said, with an answering smile. He added,
+more gravely, “All the same, the Winch business seems to me--”
+
+“Now the Winch business is my own affair,” Sister Soulsby broke in
+abruptly. “I take all the responsibility for that. You need know nothing
+about it. You simply voted as you did on the merits of the case as he
+presented them--that's all.”
+
+“But--” Theron began, and then paused. Something had occurred to him,
+and he knitted his brows to follow its course of expansion in his mind.
+Suddenly he raised his head. “Then you arranged with Winch to make those
+bogus offers--just to lead others on?” he demanded.
+
+Sister Soulsby's large eyes beamed down upon him in reply, at first in
+open merriment, then more soberly, till their regard was almost pensive.
+
+“Let us talk of something else,” she said. “All that is past and gone.
+It has nothing to do with you, anyway. I've got some advice to give you
+about keeping up this grip you've got on your people.”
+
+The young minister had risen to his feet while she spoke. He put his
+hands in his pockets, and with rounded shoulders began slowly pacing the
+room. After a turn or two he came to the desk, and leaned against it.
+
+“I doubt if it's worth while going into that,” he said, in the solemn
+tone of one who feels that an irrevocable thing is being uttered. She
+waited to hear more, apparently. “I think I shall go away--give up the
+ministry,” he added.
+
+Sister Soulsby's eyes revealed no such shock of consternation as he,
+unconsciously, had looked for. They remained quite calm; and when she
+spoke, they deepened, to fit her speech, with what he read to be a
+gaze of affectionate melancholy--one might say pity. She shook her head
+slowly.
+
+“No--don't let any one else hear you say that,” she replied. “My poor
+young friend, it's no good to even think it. The real wisdom is to
+school yourself to move along smoothly, and not fret, and get the best
+of what's going. I've known others who felt as you do--of course there
+are times when every young man of brains and high notions feels that
+way--but there's no help for it. Those who tried to get out only broke
+themselves. Those who stayed in, and made the best of it--well, one of
+them will be a bishop in another ten years.”
+
+Theron had started walking again. “But the moral degradation of it!”
+ he snapped out at her over his shoulder. “I'd rather earn the meanest
+living, at an honest trade, and be free from it.”
+
+“That may all be,” responded Sister Soulsby. “But it isn't a question of
+what you'd rather do. It's what you can do. How could you earn a living?
+What trade or business do you suppose you could take up now, and get a
+living out of? Not one, my man, not one.”
+
+Theron stopped and stared at her. This view of his capabilities came
+upon him with the force and effect of a blow.
+
+“I don't discover, myself,” he began stumblingly, “that I'm so
+conspicuously inferior to the men I see about me who do make livings,
+and very good ones, too.”
+
+“Of course you're not,” she replied with easy promptness; “you're
+greatly the other way, or I shouldn't be taking this trouble with you.
+But you're what you are because you're where you are. The moment you try
+on being somewhere else, you're done for. In all this world nobody else
+comes to such unmerciful and universal grief as the unfrocked priest.”
+
+The phrase sent Theron's fancy roving. “I know a Catholic priest,” he
+said irrelevantly, “who doesn't believe an atom in--in things.”
+
+“Very likely,” said Sister Soulsby. “Most of us do. But you don't hear
+him talking about going and earning his living, I'll bet! Or if he
+does, he takes powerful good care not to go, all the same. They've got
+horse-sense, those priests. They're artists, too. They know how to allow
+for the machinery behind the scenes.”
+
+“But it's all so different,” urged the young minister; “the same things
+are not expected of them. Now I sat the other night and watched those
+people you got up around the altar-rail, groaning and shouting and
+crying, and the others jumping up and down with excitement, and Sister
+Lovejoy--did you see her?--coming out of her pew and regularly waltzing
+in the aisle, with her eyes shut, like a whirling dervish--I positively
+believe it was all that made me ill. I couldn't stand it. I can't stand
+it now. I won't go back to it! Nothing shall make me!”
+
+“Oh-h, yes, you will,” she rejoined soothingly. “There's nothing else to
+do. Just put a good face on it, and make up your mind to get through by
+treading on as few corns as possible, and keeping your own toes well in,
+and you'll be surprised how easy it'll all come to be. You were
+speaking of the revival business. Now that exemplifies just what I was
+saying--it's a part of our machinery. Now a church is like everything
+else,--it's got to have a boss, a head, an authority of some sort, that
+people will listen to and mind. The Catholics are different, as you say.
+Their church is chuck-full of authority--all the way from the Pope
+down to the priest--and accordingly they do as they're told. But the
+Protestants--your Methodists most of all--they say 'No, we won't have
+any authority, we won't obey any boss.' Very well, what happens? We
+who are responsible for running the thing, and raising the money and
+so on--we have to put on a spurt every once in a while, and work up a
+general state of excitement; and while it's going, don't you see that
+THAT is the authority, the motive power, whatever you like to call it,
+by which things are done? Other denominations don't need it. We do, and
+that's why we've got it.”
+
+“But the mean dishonesty of it all!” Theron broke forth. He moved about
+again, his bowed face drawn as with bodily suffering. “The low-born
+tricks, the hypocrisies! I feel as if I could never so much as look at
+these people here again without disgust.”
+
+“Oh, now that's where you make your mistake,” Sister Soulsby put in
+placidly. “These people of yours are not a whit worse than other people.
+They've got their good streaks and their bad streaks, just like the rest
+of us. Take them by and large, they're quite on a par with other folks
+the whole country through.”
+
+“I don't believe there's another congregation in the Conference
+where--where this sort of thing would have been needed, or, I might say,
+tolerated,” insisted Theron.
+
+“Perhaps you're right,” the other assented; “but that only shows that
+your people here are different from the others--not that they're worse.
+You don't seem to realize: Octavius, so far as the Methodists are
+concerned, is twenty or thirty years behind the times. Now that has its
+advantages and its disadvantages. The church here is tough and coarse,
+and full of grit, like a grindstone; and it does ministers from other
+more niminy-piminy places all sorts of good to come here once in a while
+and rub themselves up against it. It scours the rust and mildew off from
+their piety, and they go back singing and shouting. But of course
+it's had a different effect with you. You're razor-steel instead of
+scythe-steel, and the grinding's been too rough and violent for you.
+But you see what I mean. These people here really take their primitive
+Methodism seriously. To them the profession of entire sanctification is
+truly a genuine thing. Well, don't you see, when people just know that
+they're saved, it doesn't seem to them to matter so much what they
+do. They feel that ordinary rules may well be bent and twisted in the
+interest of people so supernaturally good as they are. That's pure human
+nature. It's always been like that.”
+
+Theron paused in his walk to look absently at her. “That thought,”
+ he said, in a vague, slow way, “seems to be springing up in my path,
+whichever way I turn. It oppresses me, and yet it fascinates me--this
+idea that the dead men have known more than we know, done more than we
+do; that there is nothing new anywhere; that--”
+
+“Never mind the dead men,” interposed Sister Soulsby. “Just you come
+and sit down here. I hate to have you straddling about the room when I'm
+trying to talk to you.”
+
+Theron obeyed, and as he sank into the low seat, Sister Soulsby drew up
+her chair, and put her hand on his shoulder. Her gaze rested upon his
+with impressive steadiness.
+
+“And now I want to talk seriously to you, as a friend,” she began. “You
+mustn't breathe to any living soul the shadow of a hint of this nonsense
+about leaving the ministry. I could see how you were feeling--I saw the
+book you were reading the first time I entered this room--and that made
+me like you; only I expected to find you mixing up more worldly gumption
+with your Renan. Well, perhaps I like you all the better for not having
+it--for being so delightfully fresh. At any rate, that made me sail in
+and straighten your affairs for you. And now, for God's sake, keep them
+straight. Just put all notions of anything else out of your head. Watch
+your chief men and women, and be friends with them. Keep your eye open
+for what they think you ought to do, and do it. Have your own ideas as
+much as you like, read what you like, say 'Damn' under your breath as
+much as you like, but don't let go of your job. I've knocked about
+too much, and I've seen too many promising young fellows cut their own
+throats for pure moonshine, not to have a right to say that.”
+
+Theron could not be insensible to the friendly hand on his shoulder, or
+to the strenuous sincerity of the voice which thus adjured him.
+
+“Well,” he said vaguely, smiling up into her earnest eyes, “if we agree
+that it IS moonshine.”
+
+“See here!” she exclaimed, with renewed animation, patting his shoulder
+in a brisk, automatic way, to point the beginnings of her confidences:
+“I'll tell you something. It's about myself. I've got a religion of my
+own, and it's got just one plank in it, and that is that the time to
+separate the sheep from the goats is on Judgment Day, and that it can't
+be done a minute before.”
+
+The young minister took in the thought, and turned it about in his mind,
+and smiled upon it.
+
+“And that brings me to what I'm going to tell you,” Sister Soulsby
+continued. She leaned back in her chair, and crossed her knees so
+that one well-shaped and artistically shod foot poised itself close to
+Theron's hand. Her eyes dwelt upon his face with an engaging candor.
+
+“I began life,” she said, “as a girl by running away from a stupid home
+with a man that I knew was married already. After that, I supported
+myself for a good many years--generally, at first, on the stage. I've
+been a front-ranker in Amazon ballets, and I've been leading lady in
+comic opera companies out West. I've told fortunes in one room of a
+mining-camp hotel where the biggest game of faro in the Territory went
+on in another. I've been a professional clairvoyant, and I've been a
+professional medium, and I've been within one vote of being indicted
+by a grand jury, and the money that bought that vote was put up by the
+smartest and most famous train-gambler between Omaha and 'Frisco, a
+gentleman who died in his boots and took three sheriff's deputies along
+with him to Kingdom-Come. Now, that's MY record.”
+
+Theron looked earnestly at her, and said nothing.
+
+“And now take Soulsby,” she went on. “Of course I take it for granted
+there's a good deal that he has never felt called upon to mention. He
+hasn't what you may call a talkative temperament. But there is also a
+good deal that I do know. He's been an actor, too, and to this day I'd
+back him against Edwin Booth himself to recite 'Clarence's Dream.' And
+he's been a medium, and then he was a travelling phrenologist, and for
+a long time he was advance agent for a British Blondes show, and when I
+first saw him he was lecturing on female diseases--and he had HIS little
+turn with a grand jury too. In fact, he was what you may call a regular
+bad old rooster.”
+
+Again Theron suffered the pause to lapse without comment--save for an
+amorphous sort of conversation which he felt to be going on between his
+eyes and those of Sister Soulsby.
+
+“Well, then,” she resumed, “so much for us apart. Now about us together.
+We liked each other from the start. We compared notes, and we found that
+we had both soured on living by fakes, and that we were tired of the
+road, and wanted to settle down and be respectable in our old age. We
+had a little money--enough to see us through a year or two. Soulsby had
+always hungered and longed to own a garden and raise flowers, and had
+never been able to stay long enough in one place to see so much as a
+bean-pod ripen. So we took a little place in a quiet country village
+down on the Southern Tier, and he planted everything three deep all over
+the place, and I bought a roomful of cheap good books, and we started
+in. We took to it like ducks to water for a while, and I don't say that
+we couldn't have stood it out, just doing nothing, to this very day; but
+as luck would have it, during the first winter there was a revival at
+the local Methodist church, and we went every evening--at first just to
+kill time, and then because we found we liked the noise and excitement
+and general racket of the thing. After it was all over each of us found
+that the other had been mighty near going up to the rail and joining the
+mourners. And another thing had occurred to each of us, too--that is,
+what tremendous improvements there were possible in the way that amateur
+revivalist worked up his business. This stuck in our crops, and we
+figured on it all through the winter.--Well, to make a long story short,
+we finally went into the thing ourselves.”
+
+“Tell me one thing,” interposed Theron. “I'm anxious to understand
+it all as we go along. Were you and he at any time sincerely
+converted?--that is, I mean, genuinely convicted of sin and conscious
+of--you know what I mean!”
+
+“Oh, bless you, yes,” responded Sister Soulsby. “Not only once--dozens
+of times--I may say every time. We couldn't do good work if we weren't.
+But that's a matter of temperament--of emotions.”
+
+“Precisely. That was what I was getting at,” explained Theron.
+
+“Well, then, hear what I was getting at,” she went on. “You were talking
+very loudly here about frauds and hypocrisies and so on, a few minutes
+ago. Now I say that Soulsby and I do good, and that we're good fellows.
+Now take him, for example. There isn't a better citizen in all
+Chemung County than he is, or a kindlier neighbor, or a better or more
+charitable man. I've known him to stay up a whole winter's night in
+a poor Irishman's stinking and freezing stable, trying to save his
+cart-horse for him, that had been seized with some sort of fit. The
+man's whole livelihood, and his family's, was in that horse; and when it
+died, Soulsby bought him another, and never told even ME about it. Now
+that I call real piety, if you like.”
+
+“So do I,” put in Theron, cordially.
+
+“And this question of fraud,” pursued his companion,--“look at it in
+this light. You heard us sing. Well, now, I was a singer, of course, but
+Soulsby hardly knew one note from another. I taught him to sing, and he
+went at it patiently and diligently, like a little man. And I invented
+that scheme of finding tunes which the crowd didn't know, and so
+couldn't break in on and smother. I simply took Chopin--he is full of
+sixths, you know--and I got all sorts of melodies out of his waltzes
+and mazurkas and nocturnes and so on, and I trained Soulsby just to sing
+those sixths so as to make the harmony, and there you are. He couldn't
+sing by himself any more than a crow, but he's got those sixths of his
+down to a hair. Now that's machinery, management, organization. We take
+these tunes, written by a devil-may-care Pole who was living with George
+Sand openly at the time, and pass 'em off on the brethren for hymns.
+It's a fraud, yes; but it's a good fraud. So they are all good frauds.
+I say frankly that I'm glad that the change and the chance came to help
+Soulsby and me to be good frauds.”
+
+“And the point is that I'm to be a good fraud, too,” commented the young
+minister.
+
+She had risen, and he got to his feet as well. He instinctively sought
+for her hand, and pressed it warmly, and held it in both his, with an
+exuberance of gratitude and liking in his manner.
+
+Sister Soulsby danced her eyes at him with a saucy little shake of the
+head. “I'm afraid you'll never make a really GOOD fraud,” she said. “You
+haven't got it in you. Your intentions are all right, but your execution
+is hopelessly clumsy. I came up to your bedroom there twice while you
+were sick, just to say 'howdy,' and you kept your eyes shut, and all the
+while a blind horse could have told that you were wide awake.”
+
+“I must have thought it was my wife,” said Theron.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+When the lingering dusk finally settled down upon this long summer
+evening, the train bearing the Soulsbys homeward was already some score
+of miles on its way, and the Methodists of Octavius had nearly finished
+their weekly prayer-meeting.
+
+After the stirring events of the revival, it was only to be expected
+that this routine, home-made affair should suffer from a reaction. The
+attendance was larger than usual, perhaps, but the proceedings were
+spiritless and tame. Neither the pastor nor his wife was present at
+the beginning, and the class-leader upon whom control devolved made but
+feeble headway against the spell of inertia which the hot night-air
+laid upon the gathering. Long pauses intervened between the perfunctory
+praise-offerings and supplications, and the hymns weariedly raised from
+time to time fell again in languor by the wayside.
+
+Alice came in just as people were beginning to hope that some one
+would start the Doxology, and bring matters to a close. Her appearance
+apparently suggested this to the class-leader, for in a few moments the
+meeting had been dismissed, and some of the members, on their way out,
+were shaking hands with their minister's wife, and expressing the polite
+hope that he was better. The worried look in her face, and the obvious
+stains of recent tears upon her cheeks imparted an added point and
+fervor to these inquiries, but she replied to all in tones of
+studied tranquillity that, although not feeling well enough to attend
+prayer-meeting, Brother Ware was steadily recovering strength, and
+confidently expected to be in complete health by Sunday. They left her,
+and could hardly wait to get into the vestibule to ask one another in
+whispers what on earth she could have been crying about.
+
+Meanwhile Brother Ware improved his convalescent state by pacing slowly
+up and down under the elms on the side of the street opposite the
+Catholic church. There were no houses here for a block and more; the
+sidewalk was broken in many places, so that passers-by avoided it; the
+overhanging boughs shrouded it all in obscurity; it was preeminently a
+place to be alone in.
+
+Theron had driven to the depot with his guests an hour before, and after
+a period of pleasant waiting on the platform, had said good-bye to
+them as the train moved away. Then he turned to Alice, who had also
+accompanied them in the carriage, and was conscious of a certain
+annoyance at her having come. That long familiar talk of the afternoon
+had given him the feeling that he was entitled to bid farewell to Sister
+Soulsby--to both the Soulsbys--by himself.
+
+“I am afraid folks will think it strange--neither of us attending the
+prayer-meeting,” he said, with a suggestion of reproof in his tone, as
+they left the station-yard.
+
+“If we get back in time, I'll run in for a minute,” answered Alice, with
+docility.
+
+“No--no,” he broke in. “I'm not equal to walking so fast. You run on
+ahead, and explain matters, and I will come along slowly.”
+
+“The hack we came in is still there in the yard,” the wife suggested.
+“We could drive home in that. I don't believe it would cost more than a
+quarter--and if you're feeling badly--”
+
+“But I am NOT feeling badly,” Theron replied, with frank impatience.
+“Only I feel--I feel that being alone with my thoughts would be good for
+me.”
+
+“Oh, certainly--by all means!” Alice had said, and turned sharply on her
+heel.
+
+Being alone with these thoughts, Theron strolled aimlessly about, and
+did not think at all. The shadows gathered, and fireflies began to
+disclose their tiny gleams among the shrubbery in the gardens.
+A lamp-lighter came along, and passed him, leaving in his wake a
+straggling double line of lights, glowing radiantly against the
+black-green of the trees. This recalled to Theron that he had heard that
+the town council lit the street lamps by the almanac, and economized gas
+when moonshine was due. The idea struck him as droll, and he dwelt
+upon it in various aspects, smiling at some of its comic possibilities.
+Looking up in the middle of one of these whimsical conceits, the
+sportive impulse died suddenly within him. He realized that it was dark,
+and that the massive black bulk reared against the sky on the other side
+of the road was the Catholic church. The other fact, that he had been
+there walking to and fro for some time, was borne in upon him more
+slowly. He turned, and resumed the pacing up and down with a still more
+leisurely step, musing upon the curious way in which people's minds all
+unconsciously follow about where instincts and intuitions lead.
+
+No doubt it was what Sister Soulsby had said about Catholics which had
+insensibly guided his purposeless stroll in this direction. What a
+woman that was! Somehow the purport of her talk--striking, and even
+astonishing as he had found it--did not stand out so clearly in his
+memory as did the image of the woman herself. She must have
+been extremely pretty once. For that matter she still was a most
+attractive-looking woman. It had been a genuine pleasure to have her in
+the house--to see her intelligent responsive face at the table--to have
+it in one's power to make drafts at will upon the fund of sympathy and
+appreciation, of facile mirth and ready tenderness in those big eyes of
+hers. He liked that phrase she had used about herself--“a good fellow.”
+ It seemed to fit her to a “t.” And Soulsby was a good fellow too. All at
+once it occurred to him to wonder whether they were married or not.
+
+But really that was no affair of his, he reflected. A citizen of the
+intellectual world should be above soiling his thoughts with mean
+curiosities of that sort, and he drove the impertinent query down again
+under the surface of his mind. He refused to tolerate, as well, sundry
+vagrant imaginings which rose to cluster about and literalize the
+romance of her youth which Sister Soulsby had so frankly outlined.
+He would think upon nothing but her as he knew her,--the kindly,
+quick-witted, capable and charming woman who had made such a brilliant
+break in the monotony of life at that dull parsonage of his. The
+only genuine happiness in life must consist in having bright, smart,
+attractive women like that always about.
+
+The lights were visible now in the upper rooms of Father Forbes'
+pastorate across the way. Theron paused for a second to consider whether
+he wanted to go over and call on the priest. He decided that mentally he
+was too fagged and flat for such an undertaking. He needed another sort
+of companionship--some restful, soothing human contact, which should
+exact nothing from him in return, but just take charge of him,
+with soft, wise words and pleasant plays of fancy, and jokes
+and--and--something of the general effect created by Sister Soulsby's
+eyes. The thought expanded itself, and he saw that he had never realized
+before--nay, never dreamt before--what a mighty part the comradeship of
+talented, sweet-natured and beautiful women must play in the development
+of genius, the achievement of lofty aims, out in the great world of
+great men. To know such women--ah, that would never fall to his hapless
+lot.
+
+The priest's lamps blinked at him through the trees. He remembered that
+priests were supposed to be even further removed from the possibilities
+of such contact than he was himself. His memory reverted to that
+horribly ugly old woman whom Father Forbes had spoken of as his
+housekeeper. Life under the same roof with such a hag must be even worse
+than--worse than--
+
+The young minister did not finish the comparison, even in the privacy
+of his inner soul. He stood instead staring over at the pastorate, in a
+kind of stupor of arrested thought. The figure of a woman passed in view
+at the nearest window--a tall figure with pale summer clothes of some
+sort, and a broad summer hat--a flitting effect of diaphanous shadow
+between him and the light which streamed from the casement.
+
+Theron felt a little shiver run over him, as if the delicate coolness of
+the changing night-air had got into his blood. The window was open, and
+his strained hearing thought it caught the sound of faint laughter. He
+continued to gaze at the place where the vision had appeared, the while
+a novel and strange perception unfolded itself upon his mind.
+
+He had come there in the hope of encountering Celia Madden.
+
+Now that he looked this fact in the face, there was nothing remarkable
+about it. In truth, it was simplicity itself. He was still a sick man,
+weak in body and dejected in spirits. The thought of how unhappy and
+unstrung he was came to him now with an insistent pathos that brought
+tears to his eyes. He was only obeying the universal law of nature--the
+law which prompts the pallid spindling sprout of the potato in the
+cellar to strive feebly toward the light.
+
+From where he stood in the darkness he stretched out his hands in the
+direction of that open window. The gesture was his confession to the
+overhanging boughs, to the soft night-breeze, to the stars above--and
+it bore back to him something of the confessional's vague and wistful
+solace. He seemed already to have drawn down into his soul a taste
+of the refreshment it craved. He sighed deeply, and the hot moisture
+smarted again upon his eyelids, but this time not all in grief. With
+his tender compassion for himself there mingled now a flutter of buoyant
+prescience, of exquisite expectancy.
+
+Fate walked abroad this summer night. The street door of the pastorate
+opened, and in the flood of illumination which spread suddenly forth
+over the steps and sidewalk, Theron saw again the tall form, with the
+indefinitely light-hued flowing garments and the wide straw hat. He
+heard a tuneful woman's voice call out “Good-night, Maggie,” and caught
+no response save the abrupt closing of the door, which turned everything
+black again with a bang. He listened acutely for another instant, and
+then with long, noiseless strides made his way down his deserted side of
+the street. He moderated his pace as he turned to cross the road at the
+corner, and then, still masked by the trees, halted altogether, in a
+momentary tumult of apprehension. No--yes--it was all right. The girl
+sauntered out from the total darkness into the dim starlight of the open
+corner.
+
+“Why, bless me, is that you, Miss Madden?”
+
+Celia seemed to discern readily enough, through the accents of surprise,
+the identity of the tall, slim man who addressed her from the shadows.
+
+“Good-evening, Mr. Ware,” she said, with prompt affability. “I'm so glad
+to find you out again. We heard you were ill.”
+
+“I have been very ill,” responded Theron, as they shook hands and walked
+on together. He added, with a quaver in his voice, “I am still far
+from strong. I really ought not to be out at all. But--but the longing
+for--for--well, I COULDN'T stay in any longer. Even if it kills me, I
+shall be glad I came out tonight.”
+
+“Oh, we won't talk of killing,” said Celia. “I don't believe in
+illnesses myself.”
+
+“But you believe in collapses of the nerves,” put in Theron, with gentle
+sadness, “in moral and spiritual and mental breakdowns. I remember how I
+was touched by the way you told me YOU suffered from them. I had to take
+what you said then for granted. I had had no experience of it myself.
+But now I know what it is.” He drew a long, pathetic sigh. “Oh, DON'T I
+know what it is!” he repeated gloomily.
+
+“Come, my friend, cheer up,” Celia purred at him, in soothing tones. He
+felt that there was a deliciously feminine and sisterly intuition in
+her speech, and in the helpful, nurse-like way in which she drew his arm
+through hers. He leaned upon this support, and was glad of it in every
+fibre of his being.
+
+“Do you remember? You promised--that last time I saw you--to play for
+me,” he reminded her. They were passing the little covered postern door
+at the side and rear of the church as he spoke, and he made a half halt
+to point the coincidence.
+
+“Oh, there's no one to blow the organ,” she said, divining his
+suggestion. “And I haven't the key--and, besides, the organ is too heavy
+and severe for an invalid. It would overwhelm you tonight.”
+
+“Not as you would know how to play it for me,” urged Theron, pensively.
+“I feel as if good music to-night would make me well again. I am really
+very ill and weak--and unhappy!”
+
+The girl seemed moved by the despairing note in his voice. She invited
+him by a sympathetic gesture to lean even more directly on her arm.
+
+“Come home with me, and I'll play Chopin to you,” she said, in
+compassionate friendliness. “He is the real medicine for bruised and
+wounded nerves. You shall have as much of him as you like.”
+
+The idea thus unexpectedly thrown forth spread itself like some vast and
+inexpressibly alluring vista before Theron's imagination. The spice of
+adventure in it fascinated his mind as well, but for a shrinking moment
+the flesh was weak.
+
+“I'm afraid your people would--would think it strange,” he faltered--and
+began also to recall that he had some people of his own who would be
+even more amazed.
+
+“Nonsense,” said Celia, in fine, bold confidence, and with a reassuring
+pressure on his arm. “I allow none of my people to question what I do.
+They never dream of such a preposterous thing. Besides, you will see
+none of them. Mrs. Madden is at the seaside, and my father and brother
+have their own part of the house. I shan't listen for a minute to your
+not coming. Come, I'm your doctor. I'm to make you well again.”
+
+There was further conversation, and Theron more or less knew that he was
+bearing a part in it, but his whole mind seemed concentrated, in a
+sort of delicious terror, upon the wonderful experience to which every
+footstep brought him nearer. His magnetized fancy pictured a great
+spacious parlor, such as a mansion like the Maddens' would of course
+contain, and there would be a grand piano, and lace curtains, and
+paintings in gold frames, and a chandelier, and velvet easy-chairs, and
+he would sit in one of these, surrounded by all the luxury of the rich,
+while Celia played to him. There would be servants about, he presumed,
+and very likely they would recognize him, and of course they would
+talk about it to Tom, Dick and Harry afterward. But he said to himself
+defiantly that he didn't care.
+
+He withdrew his arm from hers as they came upon the well-lighted main
+street. He passed no one who seemed to know him. Presently they came
+to the Madden place, and Celia, without waiting for the gravelled walk,
+struck obliquely across the lawn. Theron, who had been lagging behind
+with a certain circumspection, stepped briskly to her side now. Their
+progress over the soft, close-cropped turf in the dark together, with
+the scent of lilies and perfumed shrubs heavy on the night air, and
+the majestic bulk of the big silent house rising among the trees before
+them, gave him a thrilling sense of the glory of individual freedom.
+
+“I feel a new man already,” he declared, as they swung along on the
+grass. He breathed a long sigh of content, and drew nearer, so that
+their shoulders touched now and again as they walked. In a minute more
+they were standing on the doorstep, and Theron heard the significant
+jingle of a bunch of keys which his companion was groping for in her
+elusive pocket. He was conscious of trembling a little at the sound.
+
+It seemed that, unlike other people, the Maddens did not have their
+parlor on the ground-floor, opening off the front hall. Theron stood in
+the complete darkness of this hall, till Celia had lit one of several
+candles which were in their hand-sticks on a sort of sideboard next the
+hat-rack. She beckoned him with a gesture of her head, and he followed
+her up a broad staircase, magnificent in its structural appointments
+of inlaid woods, and carpeted with what to his feet felt like down. The
+tiny light which his guide bore before her half revealed, as they passed
+in their ascent, tall lengths of tapestry, and the dull glint of
+armor and brazen discs in shadowed niches on the nearer wall. Over the
+stair-rail lay an open space of such stately dimensions, bounded by
+terminal lines of decoration so distant in the faint candle-flicker,
+that the young country minister could think of no word but “palatial” to
+fit it all.
+
+At the head of the flight, Celia led the way along a wide corridor to
+where it ended. Here, stretched from side to side, and suspended from
+broad hoops of a copper-like metal, was a thick curtain, of a uniform
+color which Theron at first thought was green, and then decided must be
+blue. She pushed its heavy folds aside, and unlocked another door. He
+passed under the curtain behind her, and closed the door.
+
+The room into which he had made his way was not at all after the fashion
+of any parlor he had ever seen. In the obscure light it was difficult
+to tell what it resembled. He made out what he took to be a painter's
+easel, standing forth independently in the centre of things. There were
+rows of books on rude, low shelves. Against one of the two windows was
+a big, flat writing-table--or was it a drawing-table?--littered with
+papers. Under the other window was a carpenter's bench, with a large
+mound of something at one end covered with a white cloth. On a table
+behind the easel rose a tall mechanical contrivance, the chief feature
+of which was a thick upright spiral screw. The floor was of bare
+wood stained brown. The walls of this queer room had photographs and
+pictures, taken apparently from illustrated papers, pinned up at random
+for their only ornament.
+
+Celia had lighted three or four other candles on the mantel. She
+caught the dumfounded expression with which her guest was surveying his
+surroundings, and gave a merry little laugh.
+
+“This is my workshop,” she explained. “I keep this for the things I do
+badly--things I fool with. If I want to paint, or model in clay, or bind
+books, or write, or draw, or turn on the lathe, or do some carpentering,
+here's where I do it. All the things that make a mess which has to
+be cleaned up--they are kept out here--because this is as far as the
+servants are allowed to come.”
+
+She unlocked still another door as she spoke--a door which was also
+concealed behind a curtain.
+
+“Now,” she said, holding up the candle so that its reddish flare rounded
+with warmth the creamy fulness of her chin and throat, and glowed upon
+her hair in a flame of orange light--“now I will show you what is my
+very own.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+Theron Ware looked about him with frankly undisguised astonishment.
+
+The room in which he found himself was so dark at first that it
+yielded little to the eye, and that little seemed altogether beyond his
+comprehension. His gaze helplessly followed Celia and her candle
+about as she busied herself in the work of illumination. When she had
+finished, and pinched out the taper, there were seven lights in the
+apartment--lights beaming softly through half-opaque alternating
+rectangles of blue and yellow glass. They must be set in some sort of
+lanterns around against the wall, he thought, but the shape of these he
+could hardly make out.
+
+Gradually his sight adapted itself to this subdued light, and he began
+to see other things. These queer lamps were placed, apparently, so as to
+shed a special radiance upon some statues which stood in the corners of
+the chamber, and upon some pictures which were embedded in the walls.
+Theron noted that the statues, the marble of which lost its aggressive
+whiteness under the tinted lights, were mostly of naked men and women;
+the pictures, four or five in number, were all variations of a single
+theme--the Virgin Mary and the Child.
+
+A less untutored vision than his would have caught more swiftly the
+scheme of color and line in which these works of art bore their share.
+The walls of the room were in part of flat upright wooden columns,
+terminating high above in simple capitals, and they were all painted in
+pale amber and straw and primrose hues, irregularly wavering here and
+there toward suggestions of white. Between these pilasters were broader
+panels of stamped leather, in gently varying shades of peacock blue.
+These contrasted colors vaguely interwove and mingled in what he
+could see of the shadowed ceiling far above. They were repeated in the
+draperies and huge cushions and pillows of the low, wide divan which ran
+about three sides of the room. Even the floor, where it revealed itself
+among the scattered rugs, was laid in a mosaic pattern of matched woods,
+which, like the rugs, gave back these same shifting blues and uncertain
+yellows.
+
+The fourth side of the apartment was broken in outline at one end by the
+door through which they had entered, and at the other by a broad, square
+opening, hung with looped-back curtains of a thin silken stuff. Between
+the two apertures rose against the wall what Theron took at first glance
+to be an altar. There were pyramidal rows of tall candles here on either
+side, each masked with a little silken hood; below, in the centre, a
+shelf-like projection supported what seemed a massive, carved casket,
+and in the beautiful intricacies of this, and the receding canopy of
+delicate ornamentation which depended above it, the dominant color was
+white, deepening away in its shadows, by tenderly minute gradations, to
+the tints which ruled the rest of the room.
+
+Celia lighted some of the high, thick tapers in these candelabra, and
+opened the top of the casket. Theron saw with surprise that she had
+uncovered the keyboard of a piano. He viewed with much greater amazement
+her next proceeding--which was to put a cigarette between her lips, and,
+bending over one of the candles with it for an instant, turn to him with
+a filmy, opalescent veil of smoke above her head.
+
+“Make yourself comfortable anywhere,” she said, with a gesture which
+comprehended all the divans and pillows in the place. “Will you smoke?”
+
+“I have never tried since I was a little boy,” said Theron, “but I think
+I could. If you don't mind, I should like to see.”
+
+Lounging at his ease on the oriental couch, Theron experimented
+cautiously upon the unaccustomed tobacco, and looked at Celia with what
+he felt to be the confident quiet of a man of the world. She had thrown
+aside her hat, and in doing so had half released some of the heavy
+strands of hair coiled at the back of her head. His glance instinctively
+rested upon this wonderful hair of hers. There was no mistaking the
+sudden fascination its disorder had for his eye.
+
+She stood before him with the cigarette poised daintily between thumb
+and finger of a shapely hand, and smiled comprehendingly down on her
+guest.
+
+“I suffered the horrors of the damned with this hair of mine when I was
+a child,” she said. “I daresay all children have a taste for persecuting
+red-heads; but it's a specialty with Irish children. They get hold
+somehow of an ancient national superstition, or legend, that red hair
+was brought into Ireland by the Danes. It's been a term of reproach with
+us since Brian Boru's time to call a child a Dane. I used to be pursued
+and baited with it every day of my life, until the one dream of my
+ambition was to get old enough to be a Sister of Charity, so that I
+might hide my hair under one of their big beastly white linen caps. I've
+got rather away from that ideal since, I'm afraid,” she added, with a
+droll downward curl of her lip.
+
+“Your hair is very beautiful,” said Theron, in the calm tone of a
+connoisseur.
+
+“I like it myself,” Celia admitted, and blew a little smoke-ring toward
+him. “I've made this whole room to match it. The colors, I mean,” she
+explained, in deference to his uplifted brows. “Between us, we make up
+what Whistler would call a symphony. That reminds me--I was going to
+play for you. Let me finish the cigarette first.”
+
+Theron felt grateful for her reticence about the fact that he had laid
+his own aside. “I have never seen a room at all like this,” he remarked.
+“You are right; it does fit you perfectly.”
+
+She nodded her sense of his appreciation. “It is what I like,” she
+said. “It expresses ME. I will not have anything about me--or anybody
+either--that I don't like. I suppose if an old Greek could see it, it
+would make him sick, but it represents what I mean by being a Greek. It
+is as near as an Irishman can get to it.”
+
+“I remember your puzzling me by saying that you were a Greek.”
+
+Celia laughed, and tossed the cigarette-end away. “I'd puzzle you more,
+I'm afraid, if I tried to explain to you what I really meant by it. I
+divide people up into two classes, you know--Greeks and Jews. Once you
+get hold of that principle, all other divisions and classifications,
+such as by race or language or nationality, seem pure foolishness. It
+is the only true division there is. It is just as true among negroes
+or wild Indians who never heard of Greece or Jerusalem, as it is among
+white folks. That is the beauty of it. It works everywhere, always.”
+
+“Try it on me,” urged Theron, with a twinkling eye. “Which am I?”
+
+“Both,” said the girl, with a merry nod of the head. “But now I'll play.
+I told you you were to hear Chopin. I prescribe him for you. He is the
+Greekiest of the Greeks. THERE was a nation where all the people were
+artists, where everybody was an intellectual aristocrat, where the
+Philistine was as unknown, as extinct, as the dodo. Chopin might have
+written his music for them.”
+
+“I am interested in Shopang,” put in Theron, suddenly recalling
+Sister Soulsby's confidences as to the source of her tunes. “He lived
+with--what's his name--George something. We were speaking about him only
+this afternoon.”
+
+Celia looked down into her visitor's face at first inquiringly, then
+with a latent grin about her lips. “Yes--George something,” she said, in
+a tone which mystified him.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware was sitting up, a minute afterward, in a ferment of
+awakened consciousness that he had never heard the piano played before.
+After a little, he noiselessly rearranged the cushions, and settled
+himself again in a recumbent posture. It was beyond his strength to
+follow that first impulse, and keep his mind abreast with what his ears
+took in. He sighed and lay back, and surrendered his senses to the mere
+unthinking charm of it all.
+
+It was the Fourth Prelude that was singing in the air about him--a
+simple, plaintive strain wandering at will over a surface of steady
+rhythmic movement underneath, always creeping upward through mysteries
+of sweetness, always sinking again in cadences of semi-tones. With only
+a moment's pause, there came the Seventh Waltz--a rich, bold confusion
+which yet was not confused. Theron's ears dwelt with eager delight upon
+the chasing medley of swift, tinkling sounds, but it left his thoughts
+free.
+
+From where he reclined, he turned his head to scrutinize, one by one,
+the statues in the corners. No doubt they were beautiful--for this was a
+department in which he was all humility--and one of them, the figure of
+a broad-browed, stately, though thick-waisted woman, bending slightly
+forward and with both arms broken off, was decently robed from the hips
+downward. The others were not robed at all. Theron stared at them with
+the erratic, rippling jangle of the waltz in his ears, and felt that he
+possessed a new and disturbing conception of what female emancipation
+meant in these later days. Roving along the wall, his glance rested
+again upon the largest of the Virgin pictures--a full-length figure
+in sweeping draperies, its radiant, aureoled head upturned in rapt
+adoration, its feet resting on a crescent moon which shone forth in
+bluish silver through festooned clouds of cherubs. The incongruity
+between the unashamed statues and this serene incarnation of holy
+womanhood jarred upon him for the instant. Then his mind went to the
+piano.
+
+Without a break the waltz had slowed and expanded into a passage of what
+might be church music, an exquisitely modulated and gently solemn chant,
+through which a soft, lingering song roved capriciously, forcing the
+listener to wonder where it was coming out, even while it caressed and
+soothed to repose.
+
+He looked from the Madonna to Celia. Beyond the carelessly drooping
+braids and coils of hair which blazed between the candles, he could see
+the outline of her brow and cheek, the noble contour of her lifted chin
+and full, modelled throat, all pink as the most delicate rose leaf
+is pink, against the cool lights of the altar-like wall. The sight
+convicted him in the court of his own soul as a prurient and mean-minded
+rustic. In the presence of such a face, of such music, there ceased to
+be any such thing as nudity, and statues no more needed clothes than
+did those slow, deep, magnificent chords which came now, gravely
+accumulating their spell upon him.
+
+“It is all singing!” the player called out to him over her shoulder, in
+a minute of rest. “That is what Chopin does--he sings!”
+
+She began, with an effect of thinking of something else, the Sixth
+Nocturne, and Theron at first thought she was not playing anything in
+particular, so deliberately, haltingly, did the chain of charm unwind
+itself into sequence. Then it came closer to him than the others had
+done. The dreamy, wistful, meditative beauty of it all at once oppressed
+and inspired him. He saw Celia's shoulders sway under the impulse of the
+RUBATO license--the privilege to invest each measure with the stress of
+the whole, to loiter, to weep, to run and laugh at will--and the music
+she made spoke to him as with a human voice. There was the wooing sense
+of roses and moonlight, of perfumes, white skins, alluring languorous
+eyes, and then--
+
+“You know this part, of course,” he heard her say.
+
+On the instant they had stepped from the dark, scented, starlit garden,
+where the nightingale sang, into a great cathedral. A sombre and lofty
+anthem arose, and filled the place with the splendor of such dignified
+pomp of harmony and such suggestions of measureless choral power and
+authority that Theron sat abruptly up, then was drawn resistlessly to
+his feet. He stood motionless in the strange room, feeling most of all
+that one should kneel to hear such music.
+
+“This you'll know too--the funeral march from the Second Sonata,” she
+was saying, before he realized that the end of the other had come. He
+sank upon the divan again, bending forward and clasping his hands tight
+around his knees. His heart beat furiously as he listened to the weird,
+mediaeval processional, with its wild, clashing chords held down in
+the bondage of an orderly sadness. There was a propelling motion in
+the thing--a sense of being borne bodily along--which affected him
+like dizziness. He breathed hard through the robust portions of stern,
+vigorous noise, and rocked himself to and fro when, as rosy morn
+breaks upon a storm-swept night, the drums are silenced for the sweet,
+comforting strain of solitary melody. The clanging minor harmonies into
+which the march relapses came to their abrupt end. Theron rose once
+more, and moved with a hesitating step to the piano.
+
+“I want to rest a little,” he said, with his hand on her shoulder.
+
+“Whew! so do I,” exclaimed Celia, letting her hands fall with an
+exaggerated gesture of weariness. “The sonatas take it out of one! They
+are hideously difficult, you know. They are rarely played.”
+
+“I didn't know,” remarked Theron. She seemed not to mind his hand upon
+her shoulder, and he kept it there. “I didn't know anything about music
+at all. What I do know now is that--that this evening is an event in my
+life.”
+
+She looked up at him and smiled. He read unsuspected tendernesses and
+tolerances of friendship in the depths of her eyes, which emboldened
+him to stir the fingers of that audacious hand in a lingering, caressing
+trill upon her shoulder. The movement was of the faintest, but having
+ventured it, he drew his hand abruptly away.
+
+“You are getting on,” she said to him. There was an enigmatic twinkle
+in the smile with which she continued to regard him. “We are Hellenizing
+you at a great rate.”
+
+A sudden thought seemed to strike her. She shifted her eyes toward
+vacancy with a swift, abstracted glance, reflected for a moment, then
+let a sparkling half-wink and the dimpling beginnings of an almost
+roguish smile mark her assent to the conceit, whatever it might be.
+
+“I will be with you in a moment,” he heard her say; and while the words
+were still in his ears she had risen and passed out of sight through
+the broad, open doorway to the right. The looped curtains fell together
+behind her. Presently a mellow light spread over their delicately
+translucent surface--a creamy, undulating radiance which gave the effect
+of moving about among the myriad folds of the silk.
+
+Theron gazed at these curtains for a little, then straightened his
+shoulders with a gesture of decision, and, turning on his heel, went
+over and examined the statues in the further corners minutely.
+
+“If you would like some more, I will play you the Berceuse now.”
+
+Her voice came to him with a delicious shock. He wheeled round and
+beheld her standing at the piano, with one hand resting, palm upward,
+on the keys. She was facing him. Her tall form was robed now in some
+shapeless, clinging drapery, lustrous and creamy and exquisitely soft,
+like the curtains. The wonderful hair hung free and luxuriant about her
+neck and shoulders, and glowed with an intensity of fiery color which
+made all the other hues of the room pale and vague. A fillet of faint,
+sky-like blue drew a gracious span through the flame of red above her
+temples, and from this there rose the gleam of jewels. Her head inclined
+gently, gravely, toward him--with the posture of that armless woman in
+marble he had been studying--and her brown eyes, regarding him from the
+shadows, emitted light.
+
+“It is a lullaby--the only one he wrote,” she said, as Theron,
+pale-faced and with tightened lips, approached her. “No--you mustn't
+stand there,” she added, sinking into the seat before the instrument;
+“go back and sit where you were.”
+
+The most perfect of lullabies, with its swaying abandonment to cooing
+rhythm, ever and again rising in ripples to the point of insisting on
+something, one knows not what, and then rocking, melting away once
+more, passed, so to speak, over Theron's head. He leaned back upon the
+cushions, and watched the white, rounded forearm which the falling folds
+of this strange, statue-like drapery made bare.
+
+There was more that appealed to his mood in the Third Ballade. It
+seemed to him that there were words going along with it--incoherent and
+impulsive yet very earnest words, appealing to him in strenuous argument
+and persuasion. Each time he almost knew what they said, and strained
+after their meaning with a passionate desire, and then there would come
+a kind of cuckoo call, and everything would swing dancing off again into
+a mockery of inconsequence.
+
+Upon the silence there fell the pure, liquid, mellifluous melody of a
+soft-throated woman singing to her lover.
+
+“It is like Heine--simply a love-poem,” said the girl, over her
+shoulder.
+
+Theron followed now with all his senses, as she carried the Ninth
+Nocturne onward. The stormy passage, which she banged finely forth,
+was in truth a lover's quarrel; and then the mild, placid flow of sweet
+harmonies into which the furore sank, dying languorously away upon a
+silence all alive with tender memories of sound--was that not also a
+part of love?
+
+They sat motionless through a minute--the man on the divan, the girl
+at the piano--and Theron listened for what he felt must be the audible
+thumping of his heart.
+
+Then, throwing back her head, with upturned face, Celia began what she
+had withheld for the last--the Sixteenth Mazurka. This strange foreign
+thing she played with her eyes closed, her head tilted obliquely so that
+Theron could see the rose-tinted, beautiful countenance, framed as if
+asleep in the billowing luxuriance of unloosed auburn hair. He fancied
+her beholding visions as she wrought the music--visions full of barbaric
+color and romantic forms. As his mind swam along with the gliding,
+tricksy phantom of a tune, it seemed as if he too could see these
+visions--as if he gazed at them through her eyes.
+
+It could not be helped. He lifted himself noiselessly to his feet, and
+stole with caution toward her. He would hear the rest of this weird,
+voluptuous fantasy standing thus, so close behind her that he could look
+down upon her full, uplifted lace--so close that, if she moved, that
+glowing nimbus of hair would touch him.
+
+There had been some curious and awkward pauses in this last piece, which
+Theron, by some side cerebration, had put down to her not watching
+what her fingers did. There came another of these pauses now--an odd,
+unaccountable halt in what seemed the middle of everything. He stared
+intently down upon her statuesque, dreaming face during the hush, and
+caught his breath as he waited. There fell at last a few faltering
+ascending notes, making a half-finished strain, and then again there was
+silence.
+
+Celia opened her eyes, and poured a direct, deep gaze into the face
+above hers. Its pale lips were parted in suspense, and the color had
+faded from its cheeks.
+
+“That is the end,” she said, and, with a turn of her lithe body, stood
+swiftly up, even while the echoes of the broken melody seemed panting in
+the air about her for completion.
+
+Theron put his hands to his face, and pressed them tightly against eyes
+and brow for an instant. Then, throwing them aside with an expansive
+downward sweep of the arms, and holding them clenched, he returned
+Celia's glance. It was as if he had never looked into a woman's eyes
+before.
+
+“It CAN'T be the end!” he heard himself saying, in a low voice charged
+with deep significance. He held her gaze in the grasp of his with
+implacable tenacity. There was a trouble about breathing, and the mosaic
+floor seemed to stir under his feet. He clung defiantly to the one idea
+of not releasing her eyes.
+
+“How COULD it be the end?” he demanded, lifting an uncertain hand to
+his breast as he spoke, and spreading it there as if to control the
+tumultuous fluttering of his heart. “Things don't end that way!”
+
+A sharp, blinding spasm of giddiness closed upon and shook him, while
+the brave words were on his lips. He blinked and tottered under it, as
+it passed, and then backed humbly to his divan and sat down, gasping a
+little, and patting his hand on his heart. There was fright written all
+over his whitened face.
+
+“We--we forgot that I am a sick man,” he said feebly, answering Celia's
+look of surprised inquiry with a forced, wan smile. “I was afraid my
+heart had gone wrong.”
+
+She scrutinized him for a further moment, with growing reassurance
+in her air. Then, piling up the pillows and cushions behind him for
+support, for all the world like a big sister again, she stepped into the
+inner room, and returned with a flagon of quaint shape and a tiny glass.
+She poured this latter full to the brim of a thick yellowish, aromatic
+liquid, and gave it him to drink.
+
+“This Benedictine is all I happen to have,” she said. “Swallow it down.
+It will do you good.”
+
+Theron obeyed her. It brought tears to his eyes; but, upon reflection,
+it was grateful and warming. He did feel better almost immediately. A
+great wave of comfort seemed to enfold him as he settled himself back
+on the divan. For that one flashing instant he had thought that he was
+dying. He drew a long grateful breath of relief, and smiled his content.
+
+Celia had seated herself beside him, a little away. She sat with her
+head against the wall, and one foot curled under her, and almost faced
+him.
+
+“I dare say we forced the pace a little,” she remarked, after a pause,
+looking down at the floor, with the puckers of a ruminating amusement
+playing in the corners of her mouth. “It doesn't do for a man to get to
+be a Greek all of a sudden. He must work along up to it gradually.”
+
+He remembered the music. “Oh, if I only knew how to tell you,” he
+murmured ecstatically, “what a revelation your playing has been to me!
+I had never imagined anything like it. I shall think of it to my dying
+day.”
+
+He began to remember as well the spirit that was in the air when the
+music ended. The details of what he had felt and said rose vaguely in
+his mind. Pondering them, his eye roved past Celia's white-robed figure
+to the broad, open doorway beyond. The curtains behind which she had
+disappeared were again parted and fastened back. A dim light was burning
+within, out of sight, and its faint illumination disclosed a room filled
+with white marbles, white silks, white draperies of varying sorts, which
+shaped themselves, as he looked, into the canopy and trappings of an
+extravagantly over-sized and sumptuous bed. He looked away again.
+
+“I wish you would tell me what you really mean by that Greek idea of
+yours,” he said with the abruptness of confusion.
+
+Celia did not display much enthusiasm in the tone of her answer. “Oh,”
+ she said almost indifferently, “lots of things. Absolute freedom from
+moral bugbears, for one thing. The recognition that beauty is the only
+thing in life that is worth while. The courage to kick out of one's life
+everything that isn't worth while; and so on.”
+
+“But,” said Theron, watching the mingled delicacy and power of the bared
+arm and the shapely grace of the hand which she had lifted to her
+face, “I am going to get you to teach it ALL to me.” The memories began
+crowding in upon him now, and the baffling note upon which the mazurka
+had stopped short chimed like a tuning-fork in his ears. “I want to be
+a Greek myself, if you're one. I want to get as close to you--to your
+ideal, that is, as I can. You open up to me a whole world that I had not
+even dreamed existed. We swore our friendship long ago, you know: and
+now, after tonight--you and the music have decided me. I am going to put
+the things out of MY life that are not worthwhile. Only you must help
+me; you must tell me how to begin.”
+
+He looked up as he spoke, to enforce the almost tender entreaty of his
+words. The spectacle of a yawn, only fractionally concealed behind those
+talented fingers, chilled his soft speech, and sent a flush over his
+face. He rose on the instant.
+
+Celia was nothing abashed at his discovery. She laughed gayly in
+confession of her fault, and held her hand out to let him help her
+disentangle her foot from her draperies, and get off the divan. It
+seemed to be her meaning that he should continue holding her hand after
+she was also standing.
+
+“You forgive me, don't you?” she urged smilingly. “Chopin always first
+excites me, then sends me to sleep. You see how YOU sleep tonight!”
+
+The brown, velvety eyes rested upon him, from under their heavy lids,
+with a languorous kindliness. Her warm, large palm clasped his in frank
+liking.
+
+“I don't want to sleep at all,” Mr. Ware was impelled to say. “I want to
+lie awake and think about--about everything all over again.”
+
+She smiled drowsily. “And you're sure you feel strong enough to walk
+home?”
+
+“Yes,” he replied, with a lingering dilatory note, which deepened upon
+reflection into a sigh. “Oh, yes.”
+
+He followed her and her candle down the magnificent stairway again. She
+blew the light out in the hall, and, opening the front door, stood with
+him for a silent moment on the threshold. Then they shook hands once
+more, and with a whispered good-night, parted.
+
+Celia, returning to the blue and yellow room, lighted a cigarette and
+helped herself to some Benedictine in the glass which Theron had used.
+She looked meditatively at this little glass for a moment, turning it
+about in her fingers with a smile. The smile warmed itself suddenly into
+a joyous laugh. She tossed the glass aside, and, holding out her flowing
+skirts with both hands, executed a swinging pirouette in front of the
+gravely beautiful statue of the armless woman.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+It was apparent to the Rev. Theron Ware, from the very first moment of
+waking next morning, that both he and the world had changed over night.
+The metamorphosis, in the harsh toils of which he had been laboring
+blindly so long, was accomplished. He stood forth, so to speak, in a new
+skin, and looked about him, with perceptions of quite an altered kind,
+upon what seemed in every way a fresh existence. He lacked even the
+impulse to turn round and inspect the cocoon from which he had emerged.
+Let the past bury the past. He had no vestige of interest in it.
+
+The change was not premature. He found himself not in the least confused
+by it, or frightened. Before he had finished shaving, he knew himself
+to be easily and comfortably at home in his new state, and master of all
+its requirements.
+
+It seemed as if Alice, too, recognized that he had become another man,
+when he went down and took his chair at the breakfast table. They had
+exchanged no words since their parting in the depot-yard the previous
+evening--an event now faded off into remote vagueness in Theron's
+mind. He smiled brilliantly in answer to the furtive, half-sullen,
+half-curious glance she stole at him, as she brought the dishes in.
+
+“Ah! potatoes warmed up in cream!” he said, with hearty pleasure in his
+tone. “What a mind-reader you are, to be sure!”
+
+“I'm glad you're feeling so much better,” she said briefly, taking her
+seat.
+
+“Better?” he returned. “I'm a new being!”
+
+She ventured to look him over more freely, upon this assurance. He
+perceived and catalogued, one by one, the emotions which the small brain
+was expressing through those shallow blue eyes of hers. She was
+turning over this, that, and the other hostile thought and childish
+grievance--most of all she was dallying with the idea of asking him
+where he had been till after midnight. He smiled affably in the face of
+this scattering fire of peevish glances, and did not dream of resenting
+any phase of them all.
+
+“I am going down to Thurston's this morning, and order that piano sent
+up today,” he announced presently, in a casual way.
+
+“Why, Theron, can we afford it?” the wife asked, regarding him with
+surprise.
+
+“Oh, easily enough,” he replied light-heartedly. “You know they've
+increased my salary.”
+
+She shook her head. “No, I didn't. How should I? You don't realize it,”
+ she went on, dolefully, “but you're getting so you don't tell me the
+least thing about your affairs nowadays.”
+
+Theron laughed aloud. “You ought to be grateful--such melancholy affairs
+as mine have been till now,” he declared--“that is, if it weren't absurd
+to think such a thing.” Then, more soberly, he explained: “No, my girl,
+it is you who don't realize. I am carrying big projects in my mind--big,
+ambitious thoughts and plans upon which great things depend. They no
+doubt make me seem preoccupied and absent-minded; but it is a wife's
+part to understand, and make allowances, and not intrude trifles which
+may throw everything out of gear. Don't think I'm scolding, my girl. I
+only speak to reassure you and--and help you to comprehend. Of course I
+know that you wouldn't willingly embarrass my--my career.”
+
+“Of course not,” responded Alice, dubiously; “but--but--”
+
+“But what? Theron felt compelled by civility to say, though on the
+instant he reproached himself for the weakness of it.
+
+“Well--I hardly know how to say it,” she faltered, “but it was nicer in
+the old days, before you bothered your head about big projects, and
+your career, as you call it, and were just a good, earnest, simple young
+servant of the Lord. Oh, Theron!” she broke forth suddenly, with tearful
+zeal, “I get sometimes lately almost scared lest you should turn out to
+be a--a BACKSLIDER!”
+
+The husband sat upright, and hardened his countenance. But yesterday the
+word would have had in it all sorts of inherited terrors for him. This
+morning's dawn of a new existence revealed it as merely an empty and
+stupid epithet.
+
+“These are things not to be said,” he admonished her, after a moment's
+pause, and speaking with carefully measured austerity. “Least of all are
+they to be said to a clergyman--by his wife.”
+
+It was on the tip of Alice's tongue to retort, “Better by his wife than
+by outsiders!” but she bit her lips, and kept the gibe back. A rebuke of
+this form and gravity was a novelty in their relations. The fear that it
+had been merited troubled, even while it did not convince, her mind, and
+the puzzled apprehension was to be read plainly enough on her face.
+
+Theron, noting it, saw a good deal more behind. Really, it was amazing
+how much wiser he had grown all at once. He had been married for years,
+and it was only this morning that he suddenly discovered how a wife
+ought to be handled. He continued to look sternly away into space for a
+little. Then his brows relaxed slowly and under the visible influence of
+melting considerations. He nodded his head, turned toward her abruptly,
+and broke the silence with labored amiability.
+
+“Come, come--the day began so pleasantly--it was so good to feel well
+again--let us talk about the piano instead. That is,” he added, with an
+obvious overture to playfulness, “if the thought of having a piano is
+not too distasteful to you.”
+
+Alice yielded almost effusively to his altered mood. They went together
+into the sitting-room, to measure and decide between the two available
+spaces which were at their disposal, and he insisted with resolute
+magnanimity on her settling this question entirely by herself. When at
+last he mentioned the fact that it was Friday, and he would look over
+some sermon memoranda before he went out, Alice retired to the kitchen
+in openly cheerful spirits.
+
+Theron spread some old manuscript sermons before him on his desk,
+and took down his scribbling-book as well. But there his application
+flagged, and he surrendered himself instead, chin on hand, to staring
+out at the rhododendron in the yard. He recalled how he had seen Soulsby
+patiently studying this identical bush. The notion of Soulsby, not
+knowing at all how to sing, yet diligently learning those sixths,
+brought a smile to his mind; and then he seemed to hear Celia calling
+out over her shoulder, “That's what Chopin does--he sings!” The spirit
+of that wonderful music came back to him, enfolded him in its wings. It
+seemed to raise itself up--a palpable barrier between him and all that
+he had known and felt and done before. That was his new birth--that
+marvellous night with the piano. The conceit pleased him--not the less
+because there flashed along with it the thought that it was a poet that
+had been born. Yes; the former country lout, the narrow zealot, the
+untutored slave groping about in the dark after silly superstitions,
+cringing at the scowl of mean Pierces and Winches, was dead. There was
+an end of him, and good riddance. In his place there had been born a
+Poet--he spelled the word out now unabashed--a child of light, a
+lover of beauty and sweet sounds, a recognizable brother to Renan and
+Chopin--and Celia!
+
+Out of the soothing, tenderly grateful revery, a practical suggestion
+suddenly took shape. He acted upon it without a moment's delay, getting
+out his letter-pad, and writing hurriedly--
+
+“Dear Miss Madden,--Life will be more tolerable to me if before
+nightfall I can know that there is a piano under my roof. Even if it
+remains dumb, it will be some comfort to have it here and look at it,
+and imagine how a great master might make it speak.
+
+“Would it be too much to beg you to look in at Thurston's, say at eleven
+this forenoon, and give me the inestimable benefit of your judgment in
+selecting an instrument?
+
+“Do not trouble to answer this, for I am leaving home now, but shall
+call at Thurston's at eleven, and wait.
+
+“Thanking you in anticipation,
+
+“I am--”
+
+Here Theron's fluency came to a sharp halt. There were adverbs enough
+and to spare on the point of his pen, but the right one was not easy to
+come at. “Gratefully,” “faithfully,” “sincerely,” “truly”--each in turn
+struck a false note. He felt himself not quite any of these things. At
+last he decided to write just the simple word “yours,” and then wavered
+between satisfaction at his boldness, dread lest he had been over-bold,
+and, worst of the lot, fear that she would not notice it one way or
+the other--all the while he sealed and addressed the letter, put it
+carefully in an inner pocket, and got his hat.
+
+There was a moment's hesitation as to notifying the kitchen of his
+departure. The interests of domestic discipline seemed to point the
+other way. He walked softly through the hall, and let himself out by the
+front door without a sound.
+
+Down by the canal bridge he picked out an idle boy to his mind--a lad
+whose aspect appeared to promise intelligence as a messenger, combined
+with large impartiality in sectarian matters. He was to have ten
+cents on his return; and he might report himself to his patron at the
+bookstore yonder.
+
+Theron was grateful to the old bookseller for remaining at his desk in
+the rear. There was a tacit compliment in the suggestion that he was
+not a mere customer, demanding instant attention. Besides, there was no
+keeping “Thurston's” out of conversations in this place.
+
+Loitering along the shelves, the young minister's eye suddenly found
+itself arrested by a name on a cover. There were a dozen narrow volumes
+in uniform binding, huddled together under a cardboard label of “Eminent
+Women Series.” Oddly enough, one of these bore the title “George Sand.”
+ Theron saw there must be some mistake, as he took the book down, and
+opened it. His glance hit by accident upon the name of Chopin. Then he
+read attentively until almost the stroke of eleven.
+
+“We have to make ourselves acquainted with all sorts of queer phases of
+life,” he explained in self-defence to the old bookseller, then counting
+out the money for the book from his lean purse. He smiled as he added,
+“There seems something almost wrong about taking advantage of the
+clergyman's discount for a life of George Sand.”
+
+“I don't know,” answered the other, pleasantly. “Guess she wasn't
+so much different from the rest of 'em--except that she didn't mind
+appearances. We know about her. We don't know about the others.”
+
+“I must hurry,” said Theron, turning on his heel. The haste with which
+he strode out of the store, crossed the street, and made his way toward
+Thurston's, did not prevent his thinking much upon the astonishing
+things he had encountered in this book. Their relation to Celia forced
+itself more and more upon his mind. He could recall the twinkle in
+her eye, the sub-mockery in her tone, as she commented with that
+half-contemptuous “Yes--George something!” upon his blundering
+ignorance. His mortification at having thus exposed his dull rusticity
+was swallowed up in conjectures as to just what her tolerant familiarity
+with such things involved. He had never before met a young unmarried
+woman who would have confessed to him any such knowledge. But then, of
+course, he had never known a girl who resembled Celia in any other way.
+He recognized vaguely that he must provide himself with an entire new
+set of standards by which to measure and comprehend her. But it was for
+the moment more interesting to wonder what her standards were. Did she
+object to George Sand's behavior? Or did she sympathize with that sort
+of thing? Did those statues, and the loose-flowing diaphonous toga
+and unbound hair, the cigarettes, the fiery liqueur, the deliberately
+sensuous music--was he to believe that they signified--?
+
+“Good-morning, Mr. Ware. You have managed by a miracle to hit on one of
+my punctual days,” said Celia.
+
+She was standing on the doorstep, at the entrance to the musical
+department of Thurston's. He had not noticed before the fact that the
+sun was shining. The full glare of its strong light, enveloping her
+figure as she stood, and drawing the dazzled eye for relief to the bower
+of softened color, close beneath her parasol of creamy silk and lace,
+was what struck him now first of all. It was as if Celia had brought the
+sun with her.
+
+Theron shook hands with her, and found joy in the perception, that his
+own hand trembled. He put boldly into words the thought that came to
+him.
+
+“It was generous of you,” he said, “to wait for me out here, where all
+might delight in the sight of you, instead of squandering the privilege
+on a handful of clerks inside.”
+
+Miss Madden beamed upon him, and nodded approval.
+
+“Alcibiades never turned a prettier compliment,” she remarked. They went
+in together at this, and Theron made a note of the name.
+
+During the ensuing half-hour, the young minister followed about even
+more humbly than the clerks in Celia's commanding wake. There were a
+good many pianos in the big show-room overhead, and Theron found himself
+almost awed by their size and brilliancy of polish, and the thought of
+the tremendous sum of money they represented altogether. Not so with the
+organist. She ordered them rolled around this way or that, as if they
+had been so many checkers on a draught-board. She threw back their
+covers with the scant ceremony of a dispensary dentist opening paupers'
+mouths. She exploited their several capacities with masterful hands,
+not deigning to seat herself, but just slightly bending forward, and
+sweeping her fingers up and down their keyboards--able, domineering
+fingers which pounded, tinkled, meditated, assented, condemned, all in
+a flash, and amid what affected the layman's ears as a hopelessly
+discordant hubbub.
+
+Theron moved about in the group, nursing her parasol in his arms, and
+watching her. The exaggerated deference which the clerks and salesmen
+showed to her as the rich Miss Madden, seemed to him to be mixed with a
+certain assertion of the claims of good-fellowship on the score of her
+being a musician. There undoubtedly was a sense of freemasonry between
+them. They alluded continually in technical terms to matters of which he
+knew nothing, and were amused at remarks of hers which to him carried no
+meaning whatever. It was evident that the young men liked her, and that
+their liking pleased her. It thrilled him to think that she knew he
+liked her, too, and to recall what abundant proofs she had given that
+here, also, she had pleasure in the fact. He clung insistently to the
+memory of these evidences. They helped him to resist a disagreeable
+tendency to feel himself an intruder, an outsider, among these
+pianoforte experts.
+
+When it was all over, Celia waved the others aside, and talked with
+Theron. “I suppose you want me to tell you the truth,” she said.
+“There's nothing here really good. It is always much better to buy of
+the makers direct.”
+
+“Do they sell on the instalment plan?” he asked. There was a wistful
+effect in his voice which caught her attention.
+
+She looked away--out through the window on the street below--for
+a moment. Then her eyes returned to his, and regarded him with a
+comforting, friendly, half-motherly glance, recalling for all the world
+the way Sister Soulsby had looked at him at odd times.
+
+“Oh, you want it at once--I see,” she remarked softly. “Well, this
+Adelberger is the best value for the money.”
+
+Mr. Ware followed her finger, and beheld with dismay that it pointed
+toward the largest instrument in the room--a veritable leviathan among
+pianos. The price of this had been mentioned as $600. He turned over the
+fact that this was two-thirds his yearly salary, and found the courage
+to shake his head.
+
+“It would be too large--much too large--for the room,” he explained.
+“And, besides, it is more than I like to pay--or CAN pay, for that
+matter.” It was pitiful to be explaining such details, but there was no
+help for it.
+
+They picked out a smaller one, which Celia said was at least of fair
+quality. “Now leave all the bargaining to me,” she adjured him. “These
+prices that they talk about in the piano trade are all in the air. There
+are tremendous discounts, if one knows how to insist upon them. All
+you have to do is to tell them to send it to your house--you wanted it
+today, you said?”
+
+“Yes--in memory of yesterday,” he murmured.
+
+She herself gave the directions, and Thurston's people, now all salesmen
+again, bowed grateful acquiescence. Then she sailed regally across the
+room and down the stairs, drawing Theron in her train. The hirelings
+made salaams to him as well; it would have been impossible to interpose
+anything so trivial and squalid as talk about terms and dates of
+payment.
+
+“I am ever so much obliged to you,” he said fervently, in the
+comparative solitude of the lower floor. She had paused to look at
+something in the book-department.
+
+“Of course I was entirely at your service; don't mention it,” she
+replied, reaching forth her hand in an absent way for her parasol.
+
+He held up instead the volume he had purchased. “Guess what that is! You
+never would guess in this wide world!” His manner was surcharged with a
+sense of the surreptitious.
+
+“Well, then, there's no good trying, IS there?” commented Celia, her
+glance roving again toward the shelves.
+
+“It is a life of George Sand,” whispered Theron. “I've been reading it
+this morning--all the Chopin part--while I was waiting for you.”
+
+To his surprise, there was an apparently displeased contraction of her
+brows as he made this revelation. For the instant, a dreadful fear of
+having offended her seized upon and sickened him. But then her face
+cleared, as by magic. She smiled, and let her eyes twinkle in laughter
+at him, and lifted a forefinger in the most winning mockery of
+admonition.
+
+“Naughty! naughty!” she murmured back, with a roguishly solemn wink.
+
+He had no response ready for this, but mutely handed her the parasol.
+The situation had suddenly grown too confused for words, or even sequent
+thoughts. Uppermost across the hurly-burly of his mind there scudded the
+singular reflection that he should never hear her play on that new piano
+of his. Even as it flashed by out of sight, he recognized it for one of
+the griefs of his life; and the darkness which followed seemed nothing
+but a revolt against the idea of having a piano at all. He would
+countermand the order. He would--but she was speaking again.
+
+They had strolled toward the door, and her voice was as placidly
+conventional as if the talk had never strayed from the subject of
+pianos. Theron with an effort pulled himself together, and laid hold of
+her words.
+
+“I suppose you will be going the other way,” she was saying. “I shall
+have to be at the church all day. We have just got a new Mass over from
+Vienna, and I'm head over heels in work at it. I can have Father Forbes
+to myself today, too. That bear of a doctor has got the rheumatism, and
+can't come out of his cave, thank Heaven!”
+
+And then she was receding from view, up the sunlit, busy sidewalk, and
+Theron, standing on the doorstep, ruefully rubbed his chin. She had said
+he was going the other way, and, after a little pause, he made her words
+good, though each step he took seemed all in despite of his personal
+inclinations. Some of the passers-by bowed to him, and one or two
+paused as if to shake hands and exchange greetings. He nodded responses
+mechanically, but did not stop. It was as if he feared to interrupt the
+process of lifting his reluctant feet and propelling them forward, lest
+they should wheel and scuttle off in the opposite direction.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+Deliberate as his progress was, the diminishing number of store-fronts
+along the sidewalk, and the increasing proportion of picket-fences
+enclosing domestic lawns, forced upon Theron's attention the fact that
+he was nearing home. It was a trifle past the hour for his midday meal.
+He was not in the least hungry; still less did he feel any desire just
+now to sit about in that library living-room of his. Why should he go
+home at all? There was no reason whatever--save that Alice would be
+expecting him. Upon reflection, that hardly amounted to a reason. Wives,
+with their limited grasp of the realities of life, were always expecting
+their husbands to do things which it turned out not to be feasible for
+them to do. The customary male animal spent a considerable part of his
+life in explaining to his mate why it had been necessary to disappoint
+or upset her little plans for his comings and goings. It was in the very
+nature of things that it should be so.
+
+Sustained by these considerations, Mr. Ware slackened his steps, then
+halted irresolutely, and after a minute's hesitation, entered the small
+temperance restaurant before which, as by intuition, he had paused. The
+elderly woman who placed on the tiny table before him the tea and rolls
+he ordered, was entirely unknown to him, he felt sure, yet none the less
+she smiled at him, and spoke almost familiarly--“I suppose Mrs. Ware is
+at the seaside, and you are keeping bachelor's hall?”
+
+“Not quite that,” he responded stiffly, and hurried through the meagre
+and distasteful repast, to avoid any further conversation.
+
+There was an idea underlying her remark, however, which recurred to him
+when he had paid his ten cents and got out on the street again. There
+was something interesting in the thought of Alice at the seaside.
+Neither of them had ever laid eyes on salt water, but Theron took for
+granted the most extravagant landsman's conception of its curative and
+invigorating powers. It was apparent to him that he was going to pay
+much greater attention to Alice's happiness and well-being in the future
+than he had latterly done. He had bought her, this very day, a superb
+new piano. He was going to simply insist on her having a hired girl. And
+this seaside notion--why, that was best of all.
+
+His fancy built up pleasant visions of her feasting her delighted eyes
+upon the marvel of a great ocean storm, or roaming along a beach strewn
+with wonderful marine shells, exhibiting an innocent joy in their
+beauty. The fresh sea-breeze blew through her hair, as he saw her in
+mind's eye, and brought the hardy flush of health back upon her rather
+pallid cheeks. He was prepared already hardly to know her, so robust and
+revivified would she have become, by the time he went down to the depot
+to meet her on her return.
+
+For his imagination stopped short of seeing himself at the seaside.
+It sketched instead pictures of whole weeks of solitary academic calm,
+alone with his books and his thoughts. The facts that he had no books,
+and that nobody dreamed of interfering with his thoughts, subordinated
+themselves humbly to his mood. The prospect, as he mused fondly upon
+it, expanded to embrace the priest's and the doctor's libraries; the
+thoughts which he longed to be alone with involved close communion
+with their thoughts. It could not but prove a season of immense mental
+stimulation and ethical broadening. It would have its lofty poetic and
+artistic side as well; the languorous melodies of Chopin stole over his
+revery, as he dwelt upon these things, and soft azure and golden lights
+modelled forth the exquisite outlines of tall marble forms.
+
+He opened the gate leading to Dr. Ledsmar's house. His walk had brought
+him quite out of the town, and up, by a broad main highway which
+yet took on all sorts of sylvan charms, to a commanding site on the
+hillside. Below, in the valley, lay Octavius, at one end half-hidden in
+factory smoke, at the other, where narrow bands of water gleamed upon
+the surface of a broad plain piled symmetrically with lumber, presenting
+an oddly incongruous suggestion of forest odors and the simplicity of
+the wilderness. In the middle distance, on gradually rising ground,
+stretched a wide belt of dense, artificial foliage, peeping through
+which tiled turrets and ornamented chimneys marked the polite residences
+of those who, though they neither stoked the furnace fires to the west,
+nor sawed the lumber on the east, lived in purple and fine linen from
+the profits of this toil. Nearer at hand, pastures with grazing cows on
+the one side of the road, and the nigh, weather-stained board fence
+of the race-course on the other, completed the jumble of primitive
+rusticity and urban complications characterizing the whole picture.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar's house, toward which Theron's impulses had been secretly
+leading him ever since Celia's parting remark about the rheumatism, was
+of that spacious and satisfying order of old-fashioned houses which men
+of leisure and means built for themselves while the early traditions of
+a sparse and contented homogeneous population were still strong in the
+Republic. There was a hospitable look about its wide veranda, its broad,
+low bulk, and its big, double front door, which did not fit at all with
+the sketch of a man-hating recluse that the doctor had drawn of himself.
+
+Theron had prepared his mind for the effect of being admitted by a
+Chinaman, and was taken somewhat aback when the door was opened by the
+doctor himself. His reception was pleasant enough, almost cordial, but
+the sense of awkwardness followed him into his host's inner room and
+rested heavily upon his opening speech.
+
+“I heard, quite by accident, that you were ill,” he said, laying aside
+his hat.
+
+“It's nothing at all,” replied Ledsmar. “Merely a stiff shoulder that I
+wear from time to time in memory of my father. It ought to be quite gone
+by nightfall. It was good of you to come, all the same. Sit down if you
+can find a chair. As usual, we are littered up to our eyes here. That's
+it--throw those things on the floor.”
+
+Mr. Ware carefully deposited an armful of pamphlets on the rug at his
+feet, and sat down. Litter was indeed the word for what he saw about
+him. Bookcases, chairs, tables, the corners of the floor, were all
+buried deep under disorderly strata of papers, diagrams, and opened
+books. One could hardly walk about without treading on them. The dust
+which danced up into the bar of sunshine streaming in from the window,
+as the doctor stepped across to another chair, gave Theron new ideas
+about the value of Chinese servants.
+
+“I must thank you, first of all, doctor,” he began, “for your kindness
+in coming when I was ill. 'I was sick, and ye visited me.'”
+
+“You mustn't think of it that way,” said Ledsmar; “your friend came for
+me, and of course I went; and gladly too. There was nothing that I
+could do, or that anybody could do. Very interesting man, that friend
+of yours. And his wife, too--both quite out of the common. I don't know
+when I've seen two such really genuine people. I should like to have
+known more of them. Are they still here?”
+
+“They went yesterday,” Theron replied. His earlier shyness had worn off,
+and he felt comfortably at his ease. “I don't know,” he went on, “that
+the word 'genuine' is just what would have occurred to me to describe
+the Soulsbys. They are very interesting people, as you say--MOST
+interesting--and there was a time, I dare say, when I should have
+believed in their sincerity. But of course I saw them and their
+performance from the inside--like one on the stage of a theatre, you
+know, instead of in the audience, and--well, I understand things better
+than I used to.”
+
+The doctor looked over his spectacles at him with a suggestion of
+inquiry in his glance, and Theron continued: “I had several long talks
+with her; she told me very frankly the whole story of her life--and and
+it was decidedly queer, I can assure you! I may say to you--you will
+understand what I mean--that since my talk with you, and the books you
+lent me, I see many things differently. Indeed, when I think upon it
+sometimes my old state of mind seems quite incredible to me. I can use
+no word for my new state short of illumination.”
+
+Dr. Ledsmar continued to regard his guest with that calm, interrogatory
+scrutiny of his. He did not seem disposed to take up the great issue of
+illumination. “I suppose,” he said after a little, “no woman can come
+in contact with a priest for any length of time WITHOUT telling him the
+'story of her life,' as you call it. They all do it. The thing amounts
+to a law.”
+
+The young minister's veins responded with a pleasurable thrill to the
+use of the word “priest” in obvious allusion to himself. “Perhaps in
+fairness I ought to explain,” he said, “that in her case it was only
+done in the course of a long talk about myself. I might say that it was
+by way of kindly warning to me. She saw how I had become unsettled in
+many--many of my former views--and she was nervous lest this should lead
+me to--to--”
+
+“To throw up the priesthood,” the doctor interposed upon his hesitation.
+“Yes, I know the tribe. Why, my dear sir, your entire profession would
+have perished from the memory of mankind, if it hadn't been for women.
+It is a very curious subject. Lots of thinkers have dipped into it,
+but no one has gone resolutely in with a search-light and exploited the
+whole thing. Our boys, for instance, traverse in their younger years all
+the stages of the childhood of the race. They have terrifying dreams
+of awful monsters and giant animals of which they have never so much
+as heard in their waking hours; they pass through the lust for digging
+caves, building fires, sleeping out in the woods, hunting with bows
+and arrows--all remote ancestral impulses; they play games with stones,
+marbles, and so on at regular stated periods of the year which they
+instinctively know, just as they were played in the Bronze Age, and
+heaven only knows how much earlier. But the boy goes through all this,
+and leaves it behind him--so completely that the grown man feels himself
+more a stranger among boys of his own place who are thinking and doing
+precisely the things he thought and did a few years before, than he
+would among Kurds or Esquimaux. But the woman is totally different. She
+is infinitely more precocious as a girl. At an age when her slow brother
+is still stubbing along somewhere in the neolithic period, she has flown
+way ahead to a kind of mediaeval stage, or dawn of mediaevalism, which
+is peculiarly her own. Having got there, she stays there; she dies
+there. The boy passes her, as the tortoise did the hare. He goes on,
+if he is a philosopher, and lets her remain in the dark ages, where she
+belongs. If he happens to be a fool, which is customary, he stops and
+hangs around in her vicinity.”
+
+Theron smiled. “We priests,” he said, and paused again to enjoy the
+words--“I suppose I oughtn't to inquire too closely just where we belong
+in the procession.”
+
+“We are considering the question impersonally,” said the doctor. “First
+of all, what you regard as religion is especially calculated to attract
+women. They remain as superstitious today, down in the marrow of their
+bones, as they were ten thousand years ago. Even the cleverest of
+them are secretly afraid of omens, and respect auguries. Think of the
+broadest women you know. One of them will throw salt over her shoulder
+if she spills it. Another drinks money from her cup by skimming the
+bubbles in a spoon. Another forecasts her future by the arrangement of
+tea-grounds. They make the constituency to which an institution based
+on mysteries, miracles, and the supernatural generally, would naturally
+appeal. Secondly, there is the personality of the priest.”
+
+“Yes,” assented Ware. There rose up before him, on the instant, the
+graceful, portly figure and strong, comely face of Father Forbes.
+
+“Women are not a metaphysical people. They do not easily follow
+abstractions. They want their dogmas and religious sentiments embodied
+in a man, just as they do their romantic fancies. Of course you
+Protestants, with your married clergy, see less of the effects of this
+than celibates do, but even with you there is a great deal in it.
+Why, the very institution of celibacy itself was forced upon the early
+Christian Church by the scandal of rich Roman ladies loading bishops
+and handsome priests with fabulous gifts until the passion for currying
+favor with women of wealth, and marrying them or wheedling their
+fortunes from them, debauched the whole priesthood. You should read your
+Jerome.”
+
+“I will--certainly,” said the listener, resolving to remember the name
+and refer it to the old bookseller.
+
+“Well, whatever laws one sect or another makes, the woman's attitude
+toward the priest survives. She desires to see him surrounded by
+flower-pots and candles, to have him smelling of musk. She would like
+to curl his hair, and weave garlands in it. Although she is not learned
+enough to have ever heard of such things, she intuitively feels in his
+presence a sort of backwash of the old pagan sensuality and lascivious
+mysticism which enveloped the priesthood in Greek and Roman days. Ugh!
+It makes one sick!”
+
+Dr. Ledsmar rose, as he spoke, and dismissed the topic with a dry little
+laugh. “Come, let me show you round a bit,” he said. “My shoulder is
+easier walking than sitting.”
+
+“Have you never written a book yourself?” asked Theron, getting to his
+feet.
+
+“I have a thing on serpent-worship,” the scientist replied--“written
+years ago.”
+
+“I can't tell you how I should enjoy reading it,” urged the other.
+
+The doctor laughed again. “You'll have to learn German, then, I 'm
+afraid. It is still in circulation in Germany, I believe, on its merits
+as a serious book. I haven't a copy of the edition in English. THAT was
+all exhausted by collectors who bought it for its supposed obscenity,
+like Burton's 'Arabian Nights.' Come this way, and I will show you my
+laboratory.”
+
+They moved out of the room, and through a passage, Ledsmar talking as
+he led the way. “I took up that subject, when I was at college, by a
+curious chance. I kept a young monkey in my rooms, which had been born
+in captivity. I brought home from a beer hall--it was in Germany--some
+pretzels one night, and tossed one toward the monkey. He jumped toward
+it, then screamed and ran back shuddering with fright. I couldn't
+understand it at first. Then I saw that the curled pretzel, lying there
+on the floor, was very like a little coiled-up snake. The monkey had
+never seen a snake, but it was in his blood to be afraid of one.
+That incident changed my whole life for me. Up to that evening, I had
+intended to be a lawyer.”
+
+Theron did not feel sure that he had understood the point of the
+anecdote. He looked now, without much interest, at some dark little
+tanks containing thick water, a row of small glass cases with adders and
+other lesser reptiles inside, and a general collection of boxes, jars,
+and similar receptacles connected with the doctor's pursuits. Further
+on was a smaller chamber, with a big empty furnace, and shelves bearing
+bottles and apparatus like a drugstore.
+
+It was pleasanter in the conservatory--a low, spacious structure with
+broad pathways between the plants, and an awning over the sunny side
+of the roof. The plants were mostly orchids, he learned. He had read
+of them, but never seen any before. No doubt they were curious; but he
+discovered nothing to justify the great fuss made about them. The heat
+grew oppressive inside, and he was glad to emerge into the garden. He
+paused under the grateful shade of a vine-clad trellis, took off his
+hat, and looked about him with a sigh of relief. Everything seemed
+old-fashioned and natural and delightfully free from pretence in the
+big, overgrown field of flowers and shrubs.
+
+Theron recalled with some surprise Celia's indictment of the doctor as a
+man with no poetry in his soul. “You must be extremely fond of flowers,”
+ he remarked.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar shrugged his well shoulder. “They have their points,” he
+said briefly. “These are all dioecious here. Over beyond are monoecious
+species. My work is to test the probabilities for or against Darwin's
+theory that hermaphroditism in plants is a late by-product of these
+earlier forms.”
+
+“And is his theory right?” asked Mr. Ware, with a polite show of
+interest.
+
+“We may know in the course of three or four hundred years,” replied
+Ledsmar. He looked up into his guest's face with a quizzical half-smile.
+“That is a very brief period for observation when such a complicated
+question as sex is involved,” he added. “We have been studying the
+female of our own species for some hundreds of thousands of years, and
+we haven't arrived at the most elementary rules governing her actions.”
+
+They had moved along to a bed of tall plants, the more forward of which
+were beginning to show bloom. “Here another task will begin next month,”
+ the doctor observed. “These are salvias, pentstemons, and antirrhinums,
+or snapdragons, planted very thick for the purpose. Humble-bees bore
+holes through their base, to save the labor of climbing in and out of
+the flowers, and we don't quite know yet why some hive-bees discover and
+utilize these holes at once, while others never do. It may be merely the
+old-fogy conservatism of the individual, or there may be a law in it.”
+
+These seemed very paltry things for a man of such wisdom to bother
+his head about. Theron looked, as he was bidden, at the rows of hives
+shining in the hot sun on a bench along the wall, but offered no comment
+beyond a casual, “My mother was always going to keep bees, but somehow
+she never got around to it. They say it pays very well, though.”
+
+“The discovery of the reason why no bee will touch the nectar of the
+EPIPACTIS LATIFOLIA, though it is sweet to our taste, and wasps are
+greedy for it, WOULD pay,” commented the doctor. “Not like a blue
+rhododendron, in mere money, but in recognition. Lots of men have
+achieved a half-column in the 'Encyclopedia Britannica' on a smaller
+basis than that.”
+
+They stood now at the end of the garden, before a small, dilapidated
+summer-house. On the bench inside, facing him, Theron saw a strange
+recumbent figure stretched at full length, apparently sound asleep, or
+it might be dead. Looking closer, with a startled surprise, he made out
+the shaven skull and outlandish garb of a Chinaman. He turned toward his
+guide in the expectation of a scene.
+
+The doctor had already taken out a note-book and pencil, and was drawing
+his watch from his pocket. He stepped into the summer-house, and,
+lifting the Oriental's limp arm, took account of his pulse. Then, with
+head bowed low, side-wise, he listened for the heart-action. Finally, he
+somewhat brusquely pushed back one of the Chinaman's eyelids, and made
+a minute inspection of what the operation disclosed. Returning to the
+light, he inscribed some notes in his book, put it back in his pocket,
+and came out. In answer to Theron's marvelling stare, he pointed toward
+a pipe of odd construction lying on the floor beneath the sleeper.
+
+“This is one of my regular afternoon duties,” he explained, again with
+the whimsical half-smile. “I am increasing his dose monthly by regular
+stages, and the results promise to be rather remarkable. Heretofore,
+observations have been made mostly on diseased or morbidly deteriorated
+subjects. This fellow of mine is strong as an ox, perfectly nourished,
+and watched over intelligently. He can assimilate opium enough to kill
+you and me and every other vertebrate creature on the premises, without
+turning a hair, and he hasn't got even fairly under way yet.”
+
+The thing was unpleasant, and the young minister turned away. They
+walked together up the path toward the house. His mind was full now of
+the hostile things which Celia had said about the doctor. He had vaguely
+sympathized with her then, upon no special knowledge of his own. Now he
+felt that his sentiments were vehemently in accord with hers. The doctor
+WAS a beast.
+
+And yet--as they moved slowly along through the garden the thought took
+sudden shape in his mind--it would be only justice for him to get also
+the doctor's opinion of Celia. Even while they offended and repelled
+him, he could not close his eyes to the fact that the doctor's
+experiments and occupations were those of a patient and exact man of
+science--a philosopher. And what he had said about women--there was
+certainly a great deal of acumen and shrewd observation in that. If
+he would only say what he really thought about Celia, and about her
+relations with the priest! Yes, Theron recognized now there was nothing
+else that he so much needed light upon as those puzzling ties between
+Celia and Father Forbes.
+
+He paused, with a simulated curiosity, about one of the flower-beds.
+“Speaking of women and religion”--he began, in as casual a tone as he
+could command--“I notice curiously enough in my own case, that as I
+develop in what you may call the--the other direction, my wife, who
+formerly was not especially devote, is being strongly attracted by the
+most unthinking and hysterical side of--of our church system.”
+
+The doctor looked at him, nodded, and stooped to nip some buds from a
+stalk in the bed.
+
+“And another case,” Theron went on--“of course it was all so new and
+strange to me--but the position which Miss Madden seems to occupy about
+the Catholic Church here--I suppose you had her in mind when you spoke.”
+
+Ledsmar stood up. “My mind has better things to busy itself with than
+mad asses of that description,” he replied. “She is not worth talking
+about--a mere bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed lewdness. If
+she were even a type, she might be worth considering; but she is simply
+an abnormal sport, with a little brain addled by notions that she is
+like Hypatia, and a large impudence rendered intolerable by the fact
+that she has money. Her father is a decent man. He ought to have her
+whipped.”
+
+Mr. Ware drew himself erect, as he listened to these outrageous words.
+It would be unmanly, he felt, to allow such comments upon an absent
+friend to pass unrebuked. Yet there was the courtesy due to a host to
+be considered. His mind, fluttering between these two extremes,
+alighted abruptly upon a compromise. He would speak so as to show his
+disapproval, yet not so as to prevent his finding out what he wanted to
+know. The desire to hear Ledsmar talk about Celia and the priest
+seemed now to have possessed him for a long time, to have dictated his
+unpremeditated visit out here, to have been growing in intensity all the
+while he pretended to be interested in orchids and bees and the drugged
+Chinaman. It tugged passionately at his self-control as he spoke.
+
+“I cannot in the least assent to your characterization of the lady,” he
+began with rhetorical dignity.
+
+“Bless me!” interposed the doctor, with deceptive cheerfulness, “that is
+not required of you at all. It is a strictly personal opinion, offered
+merely as a contribution to the general sum of hypotheses.”
+
+“But,” Theron went on, feeling his way, “of course, I gathered that
+evening that you had prejudices in the matter; but these are rather
+apart from the point I had in view. We were speaking, you will remember,
+of the traditional attitude of women toward priests--wanting to curl
+their hair and put flowers in it, you know, and that suggested to me
+some individual illustrations, and it occurred to me to wonder just what
+were the relations between Miss Madden and--and Father Forbes. She
+said this morning, for instance--I happened to meet her, quite by
+accident--that she was going to the church to practise a new piece, and
+that she could have Father Forbes to herself all day. Now that would
+be quite an impossible remark in our--that is, in any Protestant
+circles--and purely as a matter of comparison, I was curious to ask you
+just how much there was in it. I ask you, because going there so much
+you have had exceptional opportunities for--”
+
+A sharp exclamation from his companion interrupted the clergyman's
+hesitating monologue. It began like a high-pitched, violent word, but
+dwindled suddenly into a groan of pain. The doctor's face, too, which
+had on the flash of Theron's turning seemed given over to unmixed anger,
+took on an expression of bodily suffering instead.
+
+“My shoulder has grown all at once excessively painful,” he said
+hastily. “I'm afraid I must ask you to excuse me, Mr. Ware.”
+
+Carrying the afflicted side with ostentatious caution, he led the way
+without ado round the house to the front gate on the road. He had put
+his left hand under his coat to press it against his aching shoulder,
+and his right hung palpably helpless. This rendered it impossible for
+him to shake hands with his guest in parting.
+
+“You're sure there's nothing I can do,” said Theron, lingering on the
+outer side of the gate. “I used to rub my father's shoulders and back;
+I'd gladly--”
+
+“Oh, not for worlds!” groaned the doctor. His anguish was so impressive
+that Theron, as he walked down the road, quite missed the fact that
+there had been no invitation to come again.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar stood for a minute or two, his gaze meditatively following
+the retreating figure. Then he went in, opening the front door with
+his right hand, and carrying himself once more as if there were no such
+thing as rheumatism in the world. He wandered on through the hall into
+the laboratory, and stopped in front of the row of little tanks full of
+water.
+
+Some deliberation was involved in whatever his purpose might be, for he
+looked from one tank to another with a pondering, dilatory gaze. At last
+he plunged his hand into the opaque fluid and drew forth a long, slim,
+yellowish-green lizard, with a coiling, sinuous tail and a pointed, evil
+head. The reptile squirmed and doubled itself backward around his wrist,
+darting out and in with dizzy swiftness its tiny forked tongue.
+
+The doctor held the thing up to the light, and, scrutinizing it through
+his spectacles, nodded his head in sedate approval. A grim smile curled
+in his beard.
+
+“Yes, you are the type,” he murmured to it, with evident enjoyment in
+the conceit. “Your name isn't Johnny any more. It's the Rev. Theron
+Ware.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+The annual camp-meeting of the combined Methodist districts of Octavius
+and Thessaly was held this year in the second half of September, a
+little later than usual. Of the nine days devoted to this curious
+survival of primitive Wesleyanism, the fifth fell upon a Saturday. On
+the noon of that day the Rev. Theron Ware escaped for some hours from
+the burden of work and incessant observation which he shared with twenty
+other preachers, and walked alone in the woods.
+
+The scene upon which he turned his back was one worth looking at. A
+spacious, irregularly defined clearing in the forest lay level as a
+tennis-court, under the soft haze of autumn sunlight. In the centre was
+a large, roughly constructed frame building, untouched by paint, but
+stained and weather-beaten with time. Behind it were some lines of
+horse-sheds, and still further on in that direction, where the trees
+began, the eye caught fragmentary glimpses of low roofs and the fronts
+of tiny cottages, withdrawn from full view among the saplings and
+underbrush. At the other side of the clearing, fully fourscore tents
+were pitched, some gray and mended, others dazzlingly white in their
+newness. The more remote of these tents fell into an orderly arrangement
+of semi-circular form, facing that part of the engirdling woods where
+the trees were largest, and their canopy of overhanging foliage was
+lifted highest from the ground. Inside this half-ring of tents were many
+rounded rows of benches, which followed in narrowing lines the idea of
+an amphitheatre cut in two. In the centre, just under the edge of the
+roof of boughs, rose a wooden pagoda, in form not unlike an open-air
+stand for musicians. In front of this, and leading from it on the level
+of its floor, there projected a platform, railed round with aggressively
+rustic woodwork. The nearest benches came close about this platform.
+
+At the hour when Theron started away, there were few enough signs of
+life about this encampment. The four or five hundred people who were in
+constant residence were eating their dinners in the big boarding-house,
+or the cottages or the tents. It was not the time of day for strangers.
+Even when services were in progress by daylight, the regular attendants
+did not make much of a show, huddled in a gray-black mass at the front
+of the auditorium, by comparison with the great green and blue expanses
+of nature about them.
+
+The real spectacle was in the evening when, as the shadows gathered, big
+clusters of kerosene torches, hung on the trees facing the audience were
+lighted. The falling darkness magnified the glow of the lights, and
+the size and importance of what they illumined. The preacher, bending
+forward over the rails of the platform, and fastening his eyes upon the
+abashed faces of those on the “anxious seat” beneath him, borrowed an
+effect of druidical mystery from the wall of blackness about him, from
+the flickering reflections on the branches far above, from the cool
+night air which stirred across the clearing. The change was in the blood
+of those who saw and heard him, too. The decorum and half-heartedness
+of their devotions by day deepened under the glare of the torches into a
+fervent enthusiasm, even before the services began. And if there was in
+the rustic pulpit a man whose prayers or exhortations could stir their
+pulses, they sang and groaned and bellowed out their praises with an
+almost barbarous license, such as befitted the wilderness.
+
+But in the evening not all were worshippers. For a dozen miles round
+on the country-side, young farm-workers and their girls regarded the
+camp-meeting as perhaps the chief event of the year--no more to be
+missed than the country fair or the circus, and offering, from many
+points of view, more opportunities for genuine enjoyment than either.
+Their behavior when they came was pretty bad--not the less so because
+all the rules established by the Presiding Elders for the regulation of
+strangers took it for granted that they would act as viciously as
+they knew how. These sight-seers sometimes ventured to occupy the back
+benches where the light was dim. More often they stood outside, in the
+circular space between the tents and the benches, and mingled cat-calls,
+drovers' yelps, and all sorts of mocking cries and noises with the
+“Amens” of the earnest congregation. Their rough horse-play on the
+fringe of the sanctified gathering was grievous enough; everybody knew
+that much worse things went on further out in the surrounding darkness.
+Indeed, popular report gave to these external phases of the
+camp-meeting an even more evil fame than attached to the later moonlight
+husking-bees, or the least reputable of the midwinter dances at Dave
+Randall's low halfway house.
+
+Cynics said that the Methodists found consolation for this scandal in
+the large income they derived from their unruly visitors' gate-money.
+This was unfair. No doubt the money played its part, but there was
+something else far more important. The pious dwellers in the camp,
+intent upon reviving in their poor modern way the character and
+environment of the heroic early days, felt the need of just this hostile
+and scoffing mob about them to bring out the spirit they sought. Theirs
+was pre-eminently a fighting religion, which languished in peaceful
+fair weather, but flamed high in the storm. The throng of loafers and
+light-minded worldlings of both sexes, with their jeering interruptions
+and lewd levity of conduct, brought upon the scene a kind of visible
+personal devil, with whom the chosen could do battle face to face. The
+daylight services became more and more perfunctory, as the sojourn in
+the woods ran its course, and interest concentrated itself upon the
+night meetings, for the reason that THEN came the fierce wrestle with
+a Beelzebub of flesh and blood. And it was not so one-sided a contest,
+either!
+
+No evening passed without its victories for the pulpit. Careless or
+mischievous young people who were pushed into the foremost ranks of the
+mockers, and stood grinning and grimacing under the lights, would of
+a sudden feel a spell clamped upon them. They would hear a strange,
+quavering note in the preacher's voice, catch the sense of a piercing,
+soul-commanding gleam in his eye--not at all to be resisted. These
+occult forces would take control of them, drag them forward as in a
+dream to the benches under the pulpit, and abase them there like
+worms in the dust. And then the preacher would descend, and the elders
+advance, and the torch-fires would sway and dip before the wind of the
+mighty roar that went up in triumph from the brethren.
+
+These combats with Satan at close quarters, if they made the week-day
+evenings exciting, reacted with an effect of crushing dulness upon the
+Sunday services. The rule was to admit no strangers to the grounds
+from Saturday night to Monday morning. Every year attempts were made to
+rescind or modify this rule, and this season at least three-fourths of
+the laymen in attendance had signed a petition in favor of opening
+the gates. The two Presiding Elders, supported by a dozen of the older
+preachers, resisted the change, and they had the backing of the more
+bigoted section of the congregation from Octavius. The controversy
+reached a point where Theron's Presiding Elder threatened to quit the
+grounds, and the leaders of the open-Sunday movement spoke freely of the
+ridiculous figure which its cranks and fanatics made poor Methodism cut
+in the eyes of modern go-ahead American civilization. Then Theron Ware
+saw his opportunity, and preached an impromptu sermon upon the sanctity
+of the Sabbath, which ended all discussion. Sometimes its arguments
+seemed to be on one side, sometimes on the other, but always they were
+clothed with so serene a beauty of imagery, and moved in such a lofty
+and rarefied atmosphere of spiritual exaltation, that it was impossible
+to link them to so sordid a thing as this question of gate-money. When
+he had finished, nobody wanted the gates opened. The two factions found
+that the difference between them had melted out of existence. They sat
+entranced by the charm of the sermon; then, glancing around at the empty
+benches, glaringly numerous in the afternoon sunlight, they whispered
+regrets that ten thousand people had not been there to hear that
+marvellous discourse. Theron's conquest was of exceptional dimensions.
+The majority, whose project he had defeated, were strangers who
+appreciated and admired his effort most. The little minority of his own
+flock, though less susceptible to the influence of graceful diction
+and delicately balanced rhetoric, were proud of the distinction he had
+reflected upon them, and delighted with him for having won their
+fight. The Presiding Elders wrung his hand with a significant grip. The
+extremists of his own charge beamed friendship upon him for the first
+time. He was the veritable hero of the week.
+
+The prestige of this achievement made it the easier for Theron to get
+away by himself next day, and walk in the woods. A man of such power
+had a right to solitude. Those who noted his departure from the camp
+remembered with pleasure that he was to preach again on the morrow.
+He was going to commune with God in the depths of the forest, that the
+Message next day might be clearer and more luminous still.
+
+Theron strolled for a little, with an air of aimlessness, until he was
+well outside the more or less frequented neighborhood of the camp.
+Then he looked at the sun and the lay of the land with that informing
+scrutiny of which the farm-bred boy never loses the trick, turned, and
+strode at a rattling pace down the hillside. He knew nothing personally
+of this piece of woodland--a spur of the great Adirondack wilderness
+thrust southward into the region of homesteads and dairies and
+hop-fields--but he had prepared himself by a study of the map, and
+he knew where he wanted to go. Very Soon he hit upon the path he had
+counted upon finding, and at this he quickened his gait.
+
+Three months of the new life had wrought changes in Theron. He bore
+himself more erectly, for one thing; his shoulders were thrown back, and
+seemed thicker. The alteration was even more obvious in his face. The
+effect of lank, wistful, sallow juvenility had vanished. It was the
+countenance of a mature, well-fed, and confident man, firmer and more
+rounded in its outlines, and with a glow of health on its whole surface.
+Under the chin were the suggestions of fulness which bespeak an easy
+mind. His clothes were new; the frock-coat fitted him, and the thin,
+dark-colored autumn overcoat, with its silk lining exposed at the
+breast, gave a masculine bulk and shape to his figure. He wore a shining
+tall hat, and, in haste though he was, took pains not to knock it
+against low-hanging branches.
+
+All had gone well--more than well--with him. The second Quarterly
+Conference had passed without a ripple. Both the attendance and the
+collections at his church were larger than ever before, and the tone of
+the congregation toward him was altered distinctly for the better. As
+for himself, he viewed with astonished delight the progress he had made
+in his own estimation. He had taken Sister Soulsby's advice, and the
+results were already wonderful. He had put aside, once and for all, the
+thousand foolish trifles and childish perplexities which formerly had
+racked his brain, and worried him out of sleep and strength. He borrowed
+all sorts of books boldly now from the Octavius public library, and
+could swim with a calm mastery and enjoyment upon the deep waters into
+which Draper and Lecky and Laing and the rest had hurled him. He dallied
+pleasurably, a little languorously, with a dozen aspects of the case
+against revealed religion, ranging from the mild heterodoxy of Andover's
+qualms to the rude Ingersoll's rollicking negation of God himself, as a
+woman of coquetry might play with as many would-be lovers. They amused
+him; they were all before him to choose; and he was free to postpone
+indefinitely the act of selection. There was a sense of the luxurious in
+this position which softened bodily as well as mental fibres. He ceased
+to grow indignant at things below or outside his standards, and he
+bought a small book which treated of the care of the hand and finger
+nails.
+
+Alice had accepted with deference his explanation that shapely hands
+played so important a part in pulpit oratory. For that matter, she now
+accepted whatever he said or did with admirable docility. It was months
+since he could remember her venturing upon a critical attitude toward
+him.
+
+She had not wished to leave home, for the seaside or any other resort,
+during the summer, but had worked outside in her garden more than usual.
+This was inexpensive, and it seemed to do her as much good as a holiday
+could have done. Her new devotional zeal was now quite an odd thing; it
+had not slackened at all from the revival pitch. At the outset she had
+tried several times to talk with her husband upon this subject. He
+had discouraged conversation about her soul and its welfare, at first
+obliquely, then, under compulsion, with some directness. His thoughts
+were absorbed, he said, by the contemplation of vast, abstract schemes
+of creation and the government of the universe, and it only diverted and
+embarrassed his mind to try to fasten it upon the details of personal
+salvation. Thereafter the topic was not broached between them.
+
+She bestowed a good deal of attention, too, upon her piano. The knack of
+a girlish nimbleness of touch had returned to her after a few weeks, and
+she made music which Theron supposed was very good--for her. It pleased
+him, at all events, when he sat and listened to it; but he had a far
+greater pleasure, as he listened, in dwelling upon the memories of the
+yellow and blue room which the sounds always brought up. Although three
+months had passed, Thurston's had never asked for the first payment
+on the piano, or even sent in a bill. This impressed him as being
+peculiarly graceful behavior on his part, and he recognized its delicacy
+by not going near Thurston's at all.
+
+An hour's sharp walk, occasionally broken by short cuts across open
+pastures, but for the most part on forest paths, brought Theron to the
+brow of a small knoll, free from underbrush, and covered sparsely with
+beech-trees. The ground was soft with moss and the powdered remains of
+last year's foliage; the leaves above him were showing the first yellow
+stains of autumn. A sweet smell of ripening nuts was thick upon the
+air, and busy rustlings and chirpings through the stillness told how the
+chipmunks and squirrels were attending to their harvest.
+
+Theron had no ears for these noises of the woodland. He had halted, and
+was searching through the little vistas offered between the stout gray
+trunks of the beeches for some sign of a more sophisticated sort. Yes!
+there were certainly voices to be heard, down in the hollow. And
+now, beyond all possibility of mistake, there came up to him the low,
+rhythmic throb of music. It was the merest faint murmur of music, made
+up almost wholly of groaning bass notes, but it was enough. He moved
+down the slope, swiftly at first, then with increasing caution. The
+sounds grew louder as he advanced, until he could hear the harmony of
+the other strings in its place beside the uproar of the big fiddles, and
+distinguish from both the measured noise of many feet moving as one.
+
+He reached a place from which, himself unobserved, he could overlook
+much of what he had come to see.
+
+The bottom of the glade below him lay out in the full sunshine, as flat
+and as velvety in its fresh greenness as a garden lawn. Its open expanse
+was big enough to accommodate several distinct crowds, and here the
+crowds were--one massed about an enclosure in which young men were
+playing at football, another gathered further off in a horse-shoe curve
+at the end of a baseball diamond, and a third thronging at a point where
+the shade of overhanging woods began, focussed upon a centre of interest
+which Theron could not make out. Closer at hand, where a shallow stream
+rippled along over its black-slate bed, some little boys, with legs
+bared to the thighs, were paddling about, under the charge of two men
+clad in long black gowns. There were others of these frocked monitors
+scattered here and there upon the scene--pallid, close-shaven, monkish
+figures, who none the less wore modern hats, and superintended with
+knowledge the games of the period. Theron remembered that these were the
+Christian Brothers, the semi-monastic teachers of the Catholic school.
+
+And this was the picnic of the Catholics of Octavius. He gazed in
+mingled amazement and exhilaration upon the spectacle. There seemed
+to be literally thousands of people on the open fields before him, and
+apparently there were still other thousands in the fringes of the woods
+round about. The noises which arose from this multitude--the shouts of
+the lads in the water, the playful squeals of the girls in the swings,
+the fused uproar of the more distant crowds, and above all the diligent,
+ordered strains of the dance-music proceeding from some invisible
+distance in the greenwood--charmed his ears with their suggestion of
+universal merriment. He drew a long breath--half pleasure, half wistful
+regret--as he remembered that other gathering in the forest which he had
+left behind.
+
+At any rate, it should be well behind him today, whatever the morrow
+might bring! Evidently he was on the wrong side of the circle for the
+headquarters of the festivities. He turned and walked to the right
+through the beeches, making a detour, under cover, of the crowds at
+play. At last he rounded the long oval of the clearing, and found
+himself at the very edge of that largest throng of all, which had been
+too far away for comprehension at the beginning. There was no mystery
+now. A rough, narrow shed, fully fifty feet in length, imposed itself
+in an arbitrary line across the face of this crowd, dividing it into two
+compact halves. Inside this shed, protected all round by a waist-high
+barrier of boards, on top of which ran a flat, table-like covering, were
+twenty men in their shirt-sleeves, toiling ceaselessly to keep abreast
+of the crowd's thirst for beer. The actions of these bartenders greatly
+impressed Theron. They moved like so many machines, using one
+hand, apparently, to take money and give change, and with the other
+incessantly sweeping off rows of empty glasses, and tossing forward in
+their place fresh, foaming glasses five at a time. Hundreds of arms and
+hands were continually stretched out, on both sides of the shed, toward
+this streaming bar, and through the babel of eager cries rose without
+pause the racket of mallets tapping new kegs.
+
+Theron had never seen any considerable number of his fellow-citizens
+engaged in drinking lager beer before. His surprise at the facility of
+those behind the bar began to yield, upon observation, to a profound
+amazement at the thirst of those before it. The same people seemed to
+be always in front, emptying the glasses faster than the busy men inside
+could replenish them, and clamoring tirelessly for more. Newcomers had
+to force their way to the bar by violent efforts, and once there they
+stayed until pushed bodily aside. There were actually women to be seen
+here and there in the throng, elbowing and shoving like the rest for a
+place at the front. Some of the more gallant young men fought their
+way outward, from time to time, carrying for safety above their heads
+glasses of beer which they gave to young and pretty girls standing on
+the fringe of the crowd, among the trees.
+
+Everywhere a remarkable good-humor prevailed. Once a sharp fight broke
+out, just at the end of the bar nearest Theron, and one young man was
+knocked down. A rush of the onlookers confused everything before the
+minister's eyes for a minute, and then he saw the aggrieved combatant up
+on his legs again, consenting under the kindly pressure of the crowd to
+shake hands with his antagonist, and join him in more beer. The incident
+caught his fancy. There was something very pleasingly human, he thought,
+in this primitive readiness to resort to fisticuffs, and this frank and
+genial reconciliation.
+
+Perhaps there was something contagious in this wholesale display of
+thirst, for the Rev. Mr. Ware became conscious of a notion that he
+should like to try a glass of beer. He recalled having heard that
+lager was really a most harmless beverage. Of course it was out of the
+question that he should show himself at the bar. Perhaps some one would
+bring him out a glass, as if he were a pretty girl. He looked about for
+a possible messenger. Turning, he found himself face to face with two
+smiling people, into whose eyes he stared for an instant in dumfounded
+blankness. Then his countenance flashed with joy, and he held out both
+hands in greeting. It was Father Forbes and Celia.
+
+“We stole down upon you unawares,” said the priest, in his cheeriest
+manner. He wore a brown straw hat, and loose clothes hardly at all
+clerical in form, and had Miss Madden's arm drawn lightly within his
+own. “We could barely believe our eyes--that it could be you whom we
+saw, here among the sinners!”
+
+“I am in love with your sinners,” responded Theron, as he shook hands
+with Celia, and trusted himself to look fully into her eyes. “I've had
+five days of the saints, over in another part of the woods, and they've
+bored the head off me.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+At the command of Father Forbes, a lad who was loitering near them went
+down through the throng to the bar, and returned with three glasses of
+beer. It pleased the Rev. Mr. Ware that the priest should have taken
+it for granted that he would do as the others did. He knocked his glass
+against theirs in compliance with a custom strange to him, but which
+they seemed to understand very well. The beer itself was not so
+agreeable to the taste as he had expected, but it was cold and
+refreshing.
+
+When the boy had returned with the glasses, the three stood for a moment
+in silence, meditatively watching the curious scene spread below them.
+Beyond the bar, Theron could catch now through the trees regularly
+recurring glimpses of four or five swings in motion. These were nearest
+him, and clearest to the vision as well, at the instant when they
+reached their highest forward point. The seats were filled with girls,
+some of them quite grown young women, and their curving upward sweep
+through the air was disclosing at its climax a remarkable profusion of
+white skirts and black stockings. The sight struck him as indecorous in
+the extreme, and he turned his eyes away. They met Celia's; and there
+was something latent in their brown depths which prompted him, after a
+brief dalliance of interchanging glances, to look again at the swings.
+
+“That old maid Curran is really too ridiculous, with those white
+stockings of hers,” remarked Celia; “some friend ought to tell her to
+dye them.”
+
+“Or pad them,” suggested Father Forbes, with a gay little chuckle. “I
+daresay the question of swings and ladies' stockings hardly arises with
+you, over at the camp-meeting, Mr. Ware?”
+
+Theron laughed aloud at the conceit. “I should say not!” he replied.
+
+“I'm just dying to see a camp-meeting!” said Celia. “You hear such racy
+accounts of what goes on at them.”
+
+“Don't go, I beg of you!” urged Theron, with doleful emphasis. “Don't
+let's even talk about them. I should like to feel this afternoon as if
+there was no such thing within a thousand miles of me as a camp-meeting.
+Do you know, all this interests me enormously. It is a revelation to me
+to see these thousands of good, decent, ordinary people, just frankly
+enjoying themselves like human beings. I suppose that in this whole huge
+crowd there isn't a single person who will mention the subject of his
+soul to any other person all day long.”
+
+“I should think the assumption was a safe one,” said the priest,
+smilingly, “unless,” he added on afterthought, “it be by way of a genial
+profanity. There used to be some old Clare men who said 'Hell to my
+soul!' when they missed at quoits, but I haven't heard it for a long
+time. I daresay they're all dead.”
+
+“I shall never forget that death-bed--where I saw you first,” remarked
+Theron, musingly. “I date from that experience a whole new life. I have
+been greatly struck lately, in reading our 'Northern Christian Advocate'
+to see in the obituary notices of prominent Methodists how over and over
+again it is recorded that they got religion in their youth through being
+frightened by some illness of their own, or some epidemic about them.
+The cholera year of 1832 seems to have made Methodists hand over
+fist. Even to this day our most successful revivalists, those who work
+conversions wholesale wherever they go, do it more by frightful pictures
+of hell-fire surrounding the sinner's death-bed than anything else.
+You could hear the same thing at our camp-meeting tonight, if you were
+there.”
+
+“There isn't so much difference as you think,” said Father Forbes,
+dispassionately. “Your people keep examining their souls, just as
+children keep pulling up the bulbs they have planted to see are there
+any roots yet. Our people are more satisfied to leave their souls alone,
+once they have been planted, so to speak, by baptism. But fear of hell
+governs them both, pretty much alike. As I remember saying to you once
+before, there is really nothing new under the sun. Even the saying isn't
+new. Though there seem to have been the most tremendous changes in
+races and civilizations and religions, stretching over many thousands
+of years, yet nothing is in fact altered very much. Where religions are
+concerned, the human race are still very like savages in a dangerous
+wood in the dark, telling one another ghost stories around a camp-fire.
+They have always been like that.”
+
+“What nonsense!” cried Celia. “I have no patience with such gloomy
+rubbish. The Greeks had a religion full of beauty and happiness and
+light-heartedness, and they weren't frightened of death at all. They
+made the image of death a beautiful boy, with a torch turned down. Their
+greatest philosophers openly preached and practised the doctrine of
+suicide when one was tired of life. Our own early Church was full of
+these broad and beautiful Greek ideas. You know that yourself! And it
+was only when your miserable Jeromes and Augustines and Cyrils brought
+in the abominable meannesses and cruelties of the Jewish Old Testament,
+and stamped out the sane and lovely Greek elements in the Church,
+that Christians became the poor, whining, cowardly egotists they are,
+troubling about their little tin-pot souls, and scaring themselves in
+their churches by skulls and crossbones.”
+
+“My dear Celia,” interposed the priest, patting her shoulder gently, “we
+will have no Greek debate today. Mr. Ware has been permitted to taboo
+camp-meetings, and I claim the privilege to cry off on Greeks. Look at
+those fellows down there, trampling over one another to get more beer.
+What have they to do with Athens, or Athens with them? I take it, Mr.
+Ware,” he went on, with a grave face but a twinkling eye, “that what we
+are observing here in front of us is symbolical of a great ethical
+and theological revolution, which in time will modify and control the
+destiny of the entire American people. You see those young Irishmen
+there, struggling like pigs at a trough to get their fill of German
+beer. That signifies a conquest of Teuton over Kelt more important and
+far-reaching in its results than the landing of Hengist and Horsa.
+The Kelt has come to grief heretofore--or at least been forced to play
+second fiddle to other races--because he lacked the right sort of a
+drink. He has in his blood an excess of impulsive, imaginative, even
+fantastic qualities. It is much easier for him to make a fool of
+himself, to begin with, than it is for people of slower wits and more
+sluggish temperaments. When you add whiskey to that, or that essence of
+melancholia which in Ireland they call 'porther,' you get the Kelt at
+his very weakest and worst. These young men down there are changing all
+that. They have discovered lager. Already many of them can outdrink
+the Germans at their own beverage. The lager-drinking Irishman in a few
+generations will be a new type of humanity--the Kelt at his best. He
+will dominate America. He will be THE American. And his church--with
+the Italian element thrown clean out of it, and its Pope living, say, in
+Baltimore or Georgetown--will be the Church of America.”
+
+“Let us have some more lager at once,” put in Celia. “This revolution
+can't be hurried forward too rapidly.”
+
+Theron could not feel sure how much of the priest's discourse was in
+jest, how much in earnest. “It seems to me,” he said, “that as things
+are going, it doesn't look much as if the America of the future will
+trouble itself about any kind of a church. The march of science must
+very soon produce a universal scepticism. It is in the nature of human
+progress. What all intelligent men recognize today, the masses must
+surely come to see in time.”
+
+Father Forbes laughed outright this time. “My dear Mr. Ware,” he said,
+as they touched glasses again, and sipped the fresh beer that had been
+brought them, “of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless
+and empty as this idea that humanity progresses. The savage's natural
+impression is that the world he sees about him was made for him, and
+that the rest of the universe is subordinated to him and his world, and
+that all the spirits and demons and gods occupy themselves exclusively
+with him and his affairs. That idea was the basis of every pagan
+religion, and it is the basis of the Christian religion, simply because
+it is the foundation of human nature. That foundation is just as firm
+and unshaken today as it was in the Stone Age. It will always
+remain, and upon it will always be built some kind of a religious
+superstructure. 'Intelligent men,' as you call them, really have very
+little influence, even when they all pull one way. The people as a whole
+soon get tired of them. They give too much trouble. The most powerful
+forces in human nature are self-protection and inertia. The middle-aged
+man has found out that the chief wisdom in life is to bend to the
+pressures about him, to shut up and do as others do. Even when he thinks
+he has rid his own mind of superstitions, he sees that he will best
+enjoy a peaceful life by leaving other peoples' superstitions alone.
+That is always the ultimate view of the crowd.”
+
+“But I don't see,” observed Theron, “granting that all this is true, how
+you think the Catholic Church will come out on top. I could understand
+it of Unitarianism, or Universalism, or the Episcopal Church, where
+nobody seems to have to believe particularly in anything except the
+beauty of its burial service, but I should think the very rigidity of
+the Catholic creed would make it impossible. There everything is hard
+and fast; nothing is elastic; there is no room for compromise.”
+
+“The Church is always compromising,” explained the priest, “only it does
+it so slowly that no one man lives long enough to quite catch it at the
+trick. No; the great secret of the Catholic Church is that it doesn't
+debate with sceptics. No matter what points you make against it, it
+is never betrayed into answering back. It simply says these things are
+sacred mysteries, which you are quite free to accept and be saved, or
+reject and be damned. There is something intelligible and fine about
+an attitude like that. When people have grown tired of their absurd and
+fruitless wrangling over texts and creeds which, humanly speaking, are
+all barbaric nonsense, they will come back to repose pleasantly under
+the Catholic roof, in that restful house where things are taken for
+granted. There the manners are charming, the service excellent, the
+decoration and upholstery most acceptable to the eye, and the music”--he
+made a little mock bow here to Celia--“the music at least is divine.
+There you have nothing to do but be agreeable, and avoid scandal, and
+observe the convenances. You are no more expected to express doubts
+about the Immaculate Conception than you are to ask the lady whom you
+take down to dinner how old she is. Now that is, as I have said,
+an intelligent and rational church for people to have. As the Irish
+civilize themselves--you observe them diligently engaged in the process
+down below there--and the social roughness of their church becomes
+softened and ameliorated, Americans will inevitably be attracted toward
+it. In the end, it will embrace them all, and be modified by them, and
+in turn influence their development, till you will have a new nation and
+a new national church, each representative of the other.”
+
+“And all this is to be done by lager beer!” Theron ventured to comment,
+jokingly. He was conscious of a novel perspiration around the bridge of
+his nose, which was obviously another effect of the drink.
+
+The priest passed the pleasantry by. “No,” he said seriously; “what you
+must see is that there must always be a church. If one did not exist, it
+would be necessary to invent it. It is needed, first and foremost, as a
+police force. It is needed, secondly, so to speak, as a fire insurance.
+It provides the most even temperature and pure atmosphere for the growth
+of young children. It furnishes the best obtainable social machinery for
+marrying off one's daughters, getting to know the right people, patching
+up quarrels, and so on. The priesthood earn their salaries as the agents
+for these valuable social arrangements. Their theology is thrown in as
+a sort of intellectual diversion, like the ritual of a benevolent
+organization. There are some who get excited about this part of it, just
+as one hears of Free-Masons who believe that the sun rises and sets to
+exemplify their ceremonies. Others take their duties more quietly, and,
+understanding just what it all amounts to, make the best of it, like you
+and me.”
+
+Theron assented to the philosophy and the compliment by a grave bow.
+“Yes, that is the idea--to make the best of it,” he said, and fastened
+his regard boldly this time upon the swings.
+
+“We were both ordained by our bishops,” continued the priest, “at an
+age when those worthy old gentlemen would not have trusted our combined
+wisdom to buy a horse for them.”
+
+“And I was married,” broke in Theron, with an eagerness almost vehement,
+“when I had only just been ordained! At the worst, YOU had only the
+Church fastened upon your back, before you were old enough to know
+what you wanted. It is easy enough to make the best of THAT, but it is
+different with me.”
+
+A marked silence followed this outburst. The Rev. Mr. Ware had never
+spoken of his marriage to either of these friends before; and something
+in their manner seemed to suggest that they did not find the subject
+inviting, now that it had been broached. He himself was filled with a
+desire to say more about it. He had never clearly realized before what
+a genuine grievance it was. The moisture at the top of his nose merged
+itself into tears in the corners of his eyes, as the cruel enormity of
+the sacrifice he had made in his youth rose before him. His whole life
+had been fettered and darkened by it. He turned his gaze from the swings
+toward Celia, to claim the sympathy he knew she would feel for him.
+
+But Celia was otherwise engaged. A young man had come up to her--a tall
+and extremely thin young man, soberly dressed, and with a long, gaunt,
+hollow-eyed face, the skin of which seemed at once florid and pale. He
+had sandy hair and the rough hands of a workman; but he was speaking to
+Miss Madden in the confidential tones of an equal.
+
+“I can do nothing at all with him,” this newcomer said to her. “He'll
+not be said by me. Perhaps he'd listen to you!”
+
+“It's likely I'll go down there!” said Celia. “He may do what he likes
+for all me! Take my advice, Michael, and just go your way, and leave
+him to himself. There was a time when I would have taken out my eyes
+for him, but it was love wasted and thrown away. After the warnings he's
+had, if he WILL bring trouble on himself, let's make it no affair of
+ours.”
+
+Theron had found himself exchanging glances of inquiry with this young
+man. “Mr. Ware,” said Celia, here, “let me introduce you to my brother
+Michael--my full brother.”
+
+Mr. Ware remembered him now, and began, in response to the other's
+formal bow, to say something about their having met in the dark, inside
+the church. But Celia held up her hand. “I'm afraid, Mr. Ware,” she said
+hurriedly, “that you are in for a glimpse of the family skeleton. I will
+apologize for the infliction in advance.”
+
+Wonderingly, Theron followed her look, and saw another young man who
+had come up the path from the crowd below, and was close upon them. The
+minister recognized in him a figure which had seemed to be the centre of
+almost every group about the bar that he had studied in detail. He was
+a small, dapper, elegantly attired youth, with dark hair, and the
+handsome, regularly carved face of an actor. He advanced with a smiling
+countenance and unsteady step--his silk hat thrust back upon his head,
+his frock-coat and vest unbuttoned, and his neckwear disarranged--and
+saluted the company with amiability.
+
+“I saw you up here, Father Forbes,” he said, with a thickened and
+erratic utterance. “Whyn't you come down and join us? I'm setting 'em up
+for everybody. You got to take care of the boys, you know. I'll blow in
+the last cent I've got in the world for the boys, every time, and they
+know it. They're solider for me than they ever were for anybody. That's
+how it is. If you stand by the boys, the boys'll stand by you. I'm going
+to the Assembly for this district, and they ain't nobody can stop me.
+The boys are just red hot for me. Wish you'd come down, Father Forbes,
+and address a few words to the meeting--just mention that I'm a
+candidate, and say I'm bound to win, hands down. That'll make you solid
+with the boys, and we'll be all good fellows together. Come on down!”
+
+The priest affably disengaged his arm from the clutch which the speaker
+had laid upon it, and shook his head in gentle deprecation. “No, no; you
+must excuse me, Theodore,” he said. “We mustn't meddle in politics, you
+know.”
+
+“Politics be damned!” urged Theodore, grabbing the priest's other arm,
+and tugging at it stoutly to pull him down the path. “I say, boys” he
+shouted to those below, “here's Father Forbes, and he's going to come
+down and address the meeting. Come on, Father! Come down, and have a
+drink with the boys!”
+
+It was Celia who sharply pulled his hand away from the priest's arm
+this time. “Go away with you!” she snapped in low, angry tones at the
+intruder. “You should be ashamed of yourself! If you can't keep sober
+yourself, you can at least keep your hands off the priest. I should
+think you'd have more decency, when you're in such a state as this, than
+to come where I am. If you've no respect for yourself, you might have
+that much respect for me! And before strangers, too!
+
+“Oh, I mustn't come where YOU are, eh?” remarked the peccant Theodore,
+straightening himself with an elaborate effort. “You've bought these
+woods, have you? I've got a hundred friends here, all the same, for
+every one you'll ever have in your life, Red-head, and don't you forget
+it.”
+
+“Go and spend your money with them, then, and don't come insulting
+decent people,” said Celia.
+
+“Before strangers, too!” the young man called out, with beery sarcasm.
+“Oh, we'll take care of the strangers all right.” He had not seemed to
+be aware of Theron's presence, much less his identity, before; but he
+turned to him now with a knowing grin. “I'm running for the Assembly,
+Mr. Ware,” he said, speaking loudly and with deliberate effort to avoid
+the drunken elisions and comminglings to which his speech tended, “and I
+want you to fix up the Methodists solid for me. I'm going to drive over
+to the camp-meeting tonight, me and some of the boys in a barouche, and
+I'll put a twenty-dollar bill on their plate. Here it is now, if you
+want to see it.”
+
+As the young man began fumbling in a vest-pocket, Theron gathered his
+wits together.
+
+“You'd better not go this evening,” he said, as convincingly as he
+knew how; “because the gates will be closed very early, and the
+Saturday-evening services are of a particularly special nature, quite
+reserved for those living on the grounds.”
+
+“Rats!” said Theodore, raising his head, and abandoning the search for
+the bill. “Why don't you speak out like a man, and say you think I'm too
+drunk?”
+
+“I don't think that is a question which need arise between us, Mr.
+Madden,” murmured Theron, confusedly.
+
+“Oh, don't you make any mistake! A hell of a lot of questions arise
+between us, Mr. Ware,” cried Theodore, with a sudden accession of vigor
+in tone and mien. “And one of 'em is--go away from me, Michael!--one of
+'em is, I say, why don't you leave our girls alone? They've got their
+own priests to make fools of themselves over, without any sneak of a
+Protestant parson coming meddling round them. You're a married man into
+the bargain; and you've got in your house this minute a piano that my
+sister bought and paid for. Oh, I've seen the entry in Thurston's books!
+You have the cheek to talk to me about being drunk--why--”
+
+These remarks were never concluded, for Father Forbes here clapped a
+hand abruptly over the offending mouth, and flung his free arm in a
+tight grip around the young man's waist. “Come with me, Michael!” he
+said, and the two men led the reluctant and resisting Theodore at a
+sharp pace off into the woods.
+
+Theron and Celia stood and watched them disappear among the undergrowth.
+“It's the dirty Foley blood that's in him,” he heard her say, as if
+between clenched teeth.
+
+The girl's big brown eyes, when Theron looked into them again, were
+still fixed upon the screen of foliage, and dilated like those of a
+Medusa mask. The blood had gone away, and left the fair face and neck
+as white, it seemed to him, as marble. Even her lips, fiercely bitten
+together, appeared colorless. The picture of consuming and powerless
+rage which she presented, and the shuddering tremor which ran over her
+form, as visible as the quivering track of a gust of wind across a pond,
+awed and frightened him.
+
+Tenderness toward her helpless state came too, and uppermost. He drew
+her arm into his, and turned their backs upon the picnic scene.
+
+“Let us walk a little up the path into the woods,” he said, “and get
+away from all this.”
+
+“The further away the better,” she answered bitterly, and he felt the
+shiver run through her again as she spoke.
+
+The methodical waltz-music from that unseen dancing platform rose again
+above all other sounds. They moved up the woodland path, their steps
+insensibly falling into the rhythm of its strains, and vanished from
+sight among the trees.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+Theron and Celia walked in silence for some minutes, until the noises
+of the throng they had left behind were lost. The path they followed had
+grown indefinite among the grass and creepers of the forest carpet;
+now it seemed to end altogether in a little copse of young birches, the
+delicately graceful stems of which were clustered about a parent stump,
+long since decayed and overgrown with lichens and layers of thick moss.
+
+As the two paused, the girl suddenly sank upon her knees, then threw
+herself face forward upon the soft green bark which had formed itself
+above the roots of the ancient mother-tree. Her companion looked down
+in pained amazement at what he saw. Her body shook with the violence
+of recurring sobs, or rather gasps of wrath and grief Her hands, with
+stiffened, claw-like fingers, dug into the moss and tangle of tiny
+vines, and tore them by the roots. The half-stifled sounds of weeping
+that arose from where her face grovelled in the leaves were terrible
+to his ears. He knew not what to say or do, but gazed in resourceless
+suspense at the strange figure she made. It seemed a cruelly long time
+that she lay there, almost at his feet, struggling fiercely with the
+fury that was in her.
+
+All at once the paroxysms passed away, the sounds of wild weeping
+ceased. Celia sat up, and with her handkerchief wiped the tears and
+leafy fragments from her face. She rearranged her hat and the braids of
+her hair with swift, instinctive touches, brushed the woodland debris
+from her front, and sprang to her feet.
+
+“I'm all right now,” she said briskly. There was palpable effort in her
+light tone, and in the stormy sort of smile which she forced upon her
+blotched and perturbed countenance, but they were only too welcome to
+Theron's anxious mood.
+
+“Thank God!” he blurted out, all radiant with relief. “I feared you were
+going to have a fit--or something.”
+
+Celia laughed, a little artificially at first, then with a genuine
+surrender to the comic side of his visible fright. The mirth came back
+into the brown depths of her eyes again, and her face cleared itself of
+tear-stains and the marks of agitation. “I AM a nice quiet party for
+a Methodist minister to go walking in the woods with, am I not?” she
+cried, shaking her skirts and smiling at him.
+
+“I am not a Methodist minister--please!” answered Theron--“at least not
+today--and here--with you! I am just a man--nothing more--a man who has
+escaped from lifelong imprisonment, and feels for the first time what it
+is to be free!”
+
+“Ah, my friend,” Celia said, shaking her head slowly, “I'm afraid you
+deceive yourself. You are not by any means free. You are only looking
+out of the window of your prison, as you call it. The doors are locked,
+just the same.”
+
+“I will smash them!” he declared, with confidence. “Or for that matter,
+I HAVE smashed them--battered them to pieces. You don't realize what
+progress I have made, what changes there have been in me since that
+night, you remember that wonderful night! I am quite another being, I
+assure you! And really it dates from way beyond that--why, from the very
+first evening, when I came to you in the church. The window in Father
+Forbes' room was open, and I stood by it listening to the music next
+door, and I could just faintly see on the dark window across the
+alley-way a stained-glass picture of a woman. I suppose it was the
+Virgin Mary. She had hair like yours, and your face, too; and that is
+why I went into the church and found you. Yes, that is why.”
+
+Celia regarded him with gravity. “You will get yourself into great
+trouble, my friend,” she said.
+
+“That's where you're wrong,” put in Theron. “Not that I'd mind any
+trouble in this wide world, so long as you called me 'my friend,' but
+I'm not going to get into any at all. I know a trick worth two of that.
+I've learned to be a showman. I can preach now far better than I used
+to, and I can get through my work in half the time, and keep on the
+right side of my people, and get along with perfect smoothness. I
+was too green before. I took the thing seriously, and I let every
+mean-fisted curmudgeon and crazy fanatic worry me, and keep me on pins
+and needles. I don't do that any more. I've taken a new measure of life.
+I see now what life is really worth, and I'm going to have my share of
+it. Why should I deliberately deny myself all possible happiness for the
+rest of my days, simply because I made a fool of myself when I was in my
+teens? Other men are not eternally punished like that, for what they
+did as boys, and I won't submit to it either. I will be as free to enjoy
+myself as--as Father Forbes.”
+
+Celia smiled softly, and shook her head again. “Poor man, to call HIM
+free!” she said: “why, he is bound hand and foot. You don't in the least
+realize how he is hedged about, the work he has to do, the thousand
+suspicious eyes that watch his every movement, eager to bring the Bishop
+down upon him. And then think of his sacrifice--the great sacrifice of
+all--to never know what love means, to forswear his manhood, to live
+a forlorn, celibate life--you have no idea how sadly that appeals to a
+woman.”
+
+“Let us sit down here for a little,” said Theron; “we seem at the end of
+the path.” She seated herself on the root-based mound, and he reclined
+at her side, with an arm carelessly extended behind her on the moss.
+
+“I can see what you mean,” he went on, after a pause. “But to me, do you
+know, there is an enormous fascination in celibacy. You forget that I
+know the reverse of the medal. I know how the mind can be cramped, the
+nerves harassed, the ambitions spoiled and rotted, the whole existence
+darkened and belittled, by--by the other thing. I have never talked to
+you before about my marriage.”
+
+“I don't think we'd better talk about it now,” observed Celia. “There
+must be many more amusing topics.”
+
+He missed the spirit of her remark. “You are right,” he said slowly. “It
+is too sad a thing to talk about. But there! it is my load, and I bear
+it, and there's nothing more to be said.”
+
+Theron drew a heavy sigh, and let his fingers toy abstractedly with a
+ribbon on the outer edge of Celia's penumbra of apparel.
+
+“No,” she said. “We mustn't snivel, and we mustn't sulk. When I get into
+a rage it makes me ill, and I storm my way through it and tear things,
+but it doesn't last long, and I come out of it feeling all the better.
+I don't know that I've ever seen your wife. I suppose she hasn't got red
+hair?”
+
+“I think it's a kind of light brown,” answered Theron, with an effect of
+exerting his memory.
+
+“It seems that you only take notice of hair in stained-glass windows,”
+ was Celia's comment.
+
+“Oh-h!” he murmured reproachfully, “as if--as if--but I won't say what I
+was going to.”
+
+“That's not fair!” she said. The little touch of whimsical mockery which
+she gave to the serious declaration was delicious to him. “You have me
+at such a disadvantage! Here am I rattling out whatever comes into my
+head, exposing all my lightest emotions, and laying bare my very heart
+in candor, and you meditate, you turn things over cautiously in your
+mind, like a second Machiavelli. I grow afraid of you; you are so subtle
+and mysterious in your reserves.”
+
+Theron gave a tug at the ribbon, to show the joy he had in her delicate
+chaff. “No, it is you who are secretive,” he said. “You never told me
+about--about the piano.”
+
+The word was out! A minute before it had seemed incredible to him that
+he should ever have the courage to utter it--but here it was. He laid
+firm hold upon the ribbon, which it appeared hung from her waist, and
+drew himself a trifle nearer to her. “I could never have consented to
+take it, I'm afraid,” he went on in a low voice, “if I had known. And
+even as it is, I fear it won't be possible.”
+
+“What are you afraid of?” asked Celia. “Why shouldn't you take it?
+People in your profession never do get anything unless it's given to
+them, do they? I've always understood it was like that. I've often
+read of donation parties--that's what they're called, isn't it?--where
+everybody is supposed to bring some gift to the minister. Very well,
+then, I've simply had a donation party of my own, that's all. Unless
+you mean that my being a Catholic makes a difference. I had supposed you
+were quite free from that kind of prejudice.”
+
+“So I am! Believe me, I am!” urged Theron. “When I'm with you, it seems
+impossible to realize that there are people so narrow and contracted
+in their natures as to take account of such things. It is another
+atmosphere that I breathe near you. How could you imagine that such a
+thought--about our difference of creed--would enter my head? In
+fact,” he concluded with a nervous half-laugh, “there isn't any such
+difference. Whatever your religion is, it's mine too. You remember--you
+adopted me as a Greek.”
+
+“Did I?” she rejoined. “Well, if that's the case, it leaves you without
+a leg to stand on. I challenge you to find any instance where a Greek
+made any difficulties about accepting a piano from a friend. But
+seriously--while we are talking about it--you introduced the subject:
+I didn't--I might as well explain to you that I had no such intention,
+when I picked the instrument out. It was later, when I was talking to
+Thurston's people about the price, that the whim seized me. Now it is
+the one fixed rule of my life to obey my whims. Whatever occurs to me as
+a possibly pleasant thing to do, straight like a hash, I go and do it.
+It is the only way that a person with means, with plenty of money, can
+preserve any freshness of character. If they stop to think what it would
+be prudent to do, they get crusted over immediately. That is the curse
+of rich people--they teach themselves to distrust and restrain every
+impulse toward unusual actions. They get to feel that it is more
+necessary for them to be cautious and conventional than it is for
+others. I would rather work at a wash-tub than occupy that attitude
+toward my bank account. I fight against any sign of it that I detect
+rising in my mind. The instant a wish occurs to me, I rush to gratify
+it. That is my theory of life. That accounts for the piano; and I don't
+see that you've anything to say about it at all.”
+
+It seemed very convincing, this theory of life. Somehow, the thought
+of Miss Madden's riches had never before assumed prominence in Theron's
+mind. Of course her father was very wealthy, but it had not occurred
+to him that the daughter's emancipation might run to the length of a
+personal fortune. He knew so little of rich people and their ways!
+
+He lifted his head, and looked up at Celia with an awakened humility and
+awe in his glance. The glamour of a separate banking-account shone upon
+her. Where the soft woodland light played in among the strands of her
+disordered hair, he saw the veritable gleam of gold. A mysterious new
+suggestion of power blended itself with the beauty of her face, was
+exhaled in the faint perfume of her garments. He maintained a timorous
+hold upon the ribbon, wondering at his hardihood in touching it, or
+being near her at all.
+
+“What surprises me,” he heard himself saying, “is that you are
+contented to stay in Octavius. I should think that you would travel--go
+abroad--see the beautiful things of the world, surround yourself with
+the luxuries of big cities--and that sort of thing.”
+
+Celia regarded the forest prospect straight in front of her with
+a pensive gaze. “Sometime--no doubt I will sometime,” she said
+abstractedly.
+
+“One reads so much nowadays,” he went on, “of American heiresses going
+to Europe and marrying dukes and noblemen. I suppose you will do that
+too. Princes would fight one another for you.”
+
+The least touch of a smile softened for an instant the impassivity of
+her countenance. Then she stared harder than ever at the vague, leafy
+distance. “That is the old-fashioned idea,” she said, in a musing tone,
+“that women must belong to somebody, as if they were curios, or statues,
+or race-horses. You don't understand, my friend, that I have a different
+view. I am myself, and I belong to myself, exactly as much as any man.
+The notion that any other human being could conceivably obtain the
+slightest property rights in me is as preposterous, as ridiculous,
+as--what shall I say?--as the notion of your being taken out with a
+chain on your neck and sold by auction as a slave, down on the canal
+bridge. I should be ashamed to be alive for another day, if any other
+thought were possible to me.”
+
+“That is not the generally accepted view, I should think,” faltered
+Theron.
+
+“No more is it the accepted view that young married Methodist ministers
+should sit out alone in the woods with red-headed Irish girls. No, my
+friend, let us find what the generally accepted views are, and as fast
+as we find them set our heels on them. There is no other way to live
+like real human beings. What on earth is it to me that other women crawl
+about on all-fours, and fawn like dogs on any hand that will buckle
+a collar onto them, and toss them the leavings of the table? I am not
+related to them. I have nothing to do with them. They cannot make any
+rules for me. If pride and dignity and independence are dead in them,
+why, so much the worse for them! It is no affair of mine. Certainly it
+is no reason why I should get down and grovel also. No; I at least stand
+erect on my legs.”
+
+Mr. Ware sat up, and stared confusedly, with round eyes and parted lips,
+at his companion. Instinctively his brain dragged forth to the surface
+those epithets which the doctor had hurled in bitter contempt at
+her--“mad ass, a mere bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed
+lewdness.” The words rose in their order on his memory, hard and
+sharp-edged, like arrow-heads. But to sit there, quite at her side; to
+breathe the same air, and behold the calm loveliness of her profile; to
+touch the ribbon of her dress--and all the while to hold these poisoned
+darts of abuse levelled in thought at her breast--it was monstrous. He
+could have killed the doctor at that moment. With an effort, he drove
+the foul things from his mind--scattered them back into the darkness.
+He felt that he had grown pale, and wondered if she had heard the groan
+that seemed to have been forced from him in the struggle. Or was the
+groan imaginary?
+
+Celia continued to sit unmoved, composedly looking upon vacancy.
+Theron's eyes searched her face in vain for any sign of consciousness
+that she had astounded and bewildered him. She did not seem to be
+thinking of him at all. The proud calm of her thoughtful countenance
+suggested instead occupation with lofty and remote abstractions and
+noble ideals. Contemplating her, he suddenly perceived that what she had
+been saying was great, wonderful, magnificent. An involuntary thrill ran
+through his veins at recollection of her words. His fancy likened it to
+the sensation he used to feel as a youth, when the Fourth of July reader
+bawled forth that opening clause: “When, in the course of human events,
+it becomes necessary,” etc. It was nothing less than another Declaration
+of Independence he had been listening to.
+
+He sank again recumbent at her side, and stretched the arm behind her,
+nearer than before. “Apparently, then, you will never marry.” His voice
+trembled a little.
+
+“Most certainly not!” said Celia.
+
+“You spoke so feelingly a little while ago,” he ventured along, with
+hesitation, “about how sadly the notion of a priest's sacrificing
+himself--never knowing what love meant--appealed to a woman. I should
+think that the idea of sacrificing herself would seem to her even sadder
+still.”
+
+“I don't remember that we mentioned THAT,” she replied. “How do you
+mean--sacrificing herself?”
+
+Theron gathered some of the outlying folds of her dress in his hand, and
+boldly patted and caressed them. “You, so beautiful and so free, with
+such fine talents and abilities,” he murmured; “you, who could have the
+whole world at your feet--are you, too, never going to know what love
+means? Do you call that no sacrifice? To me it is the most terrible that
+my imagination can conceive.”
+
+Celia laughed--a gentle, amused little laugh, in which Theron's ears
+traced elements of tenderness. “You must regulate that imagination of
+yours,” she said playfully. “It conceives the thing that is not. Pray,
+when”--and here, turning her head, she bent down upon his face a gaze of
+arch mock-seriousness--“pray, when did I describe myself in these terms?
+When did I say that I should never know what love meant?”
+
+For answer Theron laid his head down upon his arm, and closed his
+eyes, and held his face against the draperies encircling her. “I cannot
+think!” he groaned.
+
+The thing that came uppermost in his mind, as it swayed and rocked in
+the tempest of emotion, was the strange reminiscence of early childhood
+in it all. It was like being a little boy again, nestling in an
+innocent, unthinking transport of affection against his mother's skirts.
+The tears he felt scalding his eyes were the spontaneous, unashamed
+tears of a child; the tremulous and exquisite joy which spread,
+wave-like, over him, at once reposeful and yearning, was full of
+infantile purity and sweetness. He had not comprehended at all before
+what wellsprings of spiritual beauty, what limpid depths of idealism,
+his nature contained.
+
+“We were speaking of our respective religions,” he heard Celia say, as
+imperturbably as if there had been no digression worth mentioning.
+
+“Yes,” he assented, and moved his head so that he looked up at her back
+hair, and the leaves high above, mottled against the sky. The wish
+to lie there, where now he could just catch the rose-leaf line of her
+under-chin as well, was very strong upon him. “Yes?” he repeated.
+
+“I cannot talk to you like that,” she said; and he sat up again
+shamefacedly.
+
+“Yes--I think we were speaking of religions--some time ago,” he
+faltered, to relieve the situation. The dreadful thought that she might
+be annoyed began to oppress him.
+
+“Well, you said whatever my religion was, it was yours too. That
+entitles you at least to be told what the religion is. Now, I am a
+Catholic.”
+
+Theron, much mystified, nodded his head. Could it be possible--was there
+coming a deliberate suggestion that he should become a convert? “Yes--I
+know,” he murmured.
+
+“But I should explain that I am only a Catholic in the sense that its
+symbolism is pleasant to me. You remember what Schopenhauer said--you
+cannot have the water by itself: you must also have the jug that it is
+in. Very well; the Catholic religion is my jug. I put into it the things
+I like. They were all there long ago, thousands of years ago. The Jews
+threw them out; we will put them back again. We will restore art and
+poetry and the love of beauty, and the gentle, spiritual, soulful life.
+The Greeks had it; and Christianity would have had it too, if it hadn't
+been for those brutes they call the Fathers. They loved ugliness and
+dirt and the thought of hell-fire. They hated women. In all the earlier
+stages of the Church, women were very prominent in it. Jesus himself
+appreciated women, and delighted to have them about him, and talk with
+them and listen to them. That was the very essence of the Greek spirit;
+and it breathed into Christianity at its birth a sweetness and a grace
+which twenty generations of cranks and savages like Paul and Jerome
+and Tertullian weren't able to extinguish. But the very man, Cyril, who
+killed Hypatia, and thus began the dark ages, unwittingly did another
+thing which makes one almost forgive him. To please the Egyptians, he
+secured the Church's acceptance of the adoration of the Virgin. It is
+that idea which has kept the Greek spirit alive, and grown and grown,
+till at last it will rule the world. It was only epileptic Jews who
+could imagine a religion without sex in it.”
+
+“I remember the pictures of the Virgin in your room,” said Theron,
+feeling more himself again. “I wondered if they quite went with the
+statues.”
+
+The remark won a smile from Celia's lips.
+
+“They get along together better than you suppose,” she answered.
+“Besides, they are not all pictures of Mary. One of them, standing on
+the moon, is of Isis with the infant Horus in her arms. Another might as
+well be Mahamie, bearing the miraculously born Buddha, or Olympias with
+her child Alexander, or even Perictione holding her babe Plato--all
+these were similar cases, you know. Almost every religion had its
+Immaculate Conception. What does it all come to, except to show us that
+man turns naturally toward the worship of the maternal idea? That is the
+deepest of all our instincts--love of woman, who is at once daughter and
+wife and mother. It is that that makes the world go round.”
+
+Brave thoughts shaped themselves in Theron's mind, and shone forth in a
+confident yet wistful smile on his face.
+
+“It is a pity you cannot change estates with me for one minute,” he
+said, in steady, low tone. “Then you would realize the tremendous truth
+of what you have been saying. It is only your intellect that has reached
+out and grasped the idea. If you were in my place, you would discover
+that your heart was bursting with it as well.”
+
+Celia turned and looked at him.
+
+“I myself,” he went on, “would not have known, half an hour ago, what
+you meant by the worship of the maternal idea. I am much older than
+you. I am a strong, mature man. But when I lay down there, and shut my
+eyes--because the charm and marvel of this whole experience had for
+the moment overcome me--the strangest sensation seized upon me. It was
+absolutely as if I were a boy again, a good, pure-minded, fond little
+child, and you were the mother that I idolized.”
+
+Celia had not taken her eyes from his face. “I find myself liking you
+better at this moment,” she said, with gravity, “than I have ever liked
+you before.”
+
+Then, as by a sudden impulse, she sprang to her feet. “Come!” she cried,
+her voice and manner all vivacity once more, “we have been here long
+enough.”
+
+Upon the instant, as Theron was more laboriously getting up, it became
+apparent to them both that perhaps they had been there too long.
+
+A boy with a gun under his arm, and two gray squirrels tied by the tails
+slung across his shoulder, stood at the entrance to the glade, some
+dozen paces away, regarding them with undisguised interest. Upon the
+discovery that he was in turn observed, he resumed his interrupted
+progress through the woods, whistling softly as he went, and vanished
+among the trees.
+
+“Heavens above!” groaned Theron, shudderingly.
+
+“Know him?” he went on, in answer to the glance of inquiry on his
+companion's face. “I should think I did! He spades my--my wife's garden
+for her. He used to bring our milk. He works in the law office of one
+of my trustees--the one who isn't friendly to me, but is very friendly
+indeed with my--with Mrs. Ware. Oh, what shall I do? It may easily mean
+my ruin!”
+
+Celia looked at him attentively. The color had gone out of his face, and
+with it the effect of earnestness and mental elevation which, a minute
+before, had caught her fancy. “Somehow, I fear that I do not like you
+quite so much just now, my friend,” she remarked.
+
+“In God's name, don't say that!” urged Theron. He raised his voice in
+agitated entreaty. “You don't know what these people are--how they would
+leap at the barest hint of a scandal about me. In my position I am a
+thousand times more defenceless than any woman. Just a single whisper,
+and I am done for!”
+
+“Let me point out to you, Mr. Ware,” said Celia, slowly, “that to be
+seen sitting and talking with me, whatever doubts it may raise as to
+a gentleman's intellectual condition, need not necessarily blast his
+social reputation beyond all hope whatever.”
+
+Theron stared at her, as if he had not grasped her meaning. Then he
+winced visibly under it, and put out his hands to implore her. “Forgive
+me! Forgive me!” he pleaded. “I was beside myself for the moment with
+the fright of the thing. Oh, say you do forgive me, Celia!” He made
+haste to support this daring use of her name. “I have been so happy
+today--so deeply, so vastly happy--like the little child I spoke of--and
+that is so new in my lonely life--that--the suddenness of the thing--it
+just for the instant unstrung me. Don't be too hard on me for it! And
+I had hoped, too--I had had such genuine heartfelt pleasure in the
+thought--that, an hour or two ago, when you were unhappy, perhaps it had
+been some sort of consolation to you that I was with you.”
+
+Celia was looking away. When he took her hand she did not withdraw it,
+but turned and nodded in musing general assent to what he had said.
+“Yes, we have both been unstrung, as you call it, today,” she said,
+decidedly out of pitch. “Let each forgive the other, and say no more
+about it.”
+
+She took his arm, and they retraced their steps along the path, again
+in silence. The labored noise of the orchestra, as it were, returned to
+meet them. They halted at an intersecting footpath.
+
+“I go back to my slavery--my double bondage,” said Theron, letting his
+voice sink to a sigh. “But even if I am put on the rack for it, I shall
+have had one day of glory.”
+
+“I think you may kiss me, in memory of that one day--or of a few minutes
+in that day,” said Celia.
+
+Their lips brushed each other in a swift, almost perfunctory caress.
+
+Theron went his way at a hurried pace, the sobered tones of her
+“good-bye” beating upon his brain with every measure of the droning
+waltz-music.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+The memory of the kiss abode with Theron. Like Aaron's rod, it swallowed
+up one by one all competing thoughts and recollections, and made his
+brain its slave.
+
+Even as he strode back through the woods to the camp-meeting, it was the
+kiss that kept his feet in motion, and guided their automatic course.
+All along the watches of the restless night, it was the kiss that bore
+him sweet company, and wandered with him from one broken dream of bliss
+to another. Next day, it was the kiss that made of life for him a sort
+of sunlit wonderland. He preached his sermon in the morning, and took
+his appointed part in the other services of afternoon and evening,
+apparently to everybody's satisfaction: to him it was all a vision.
+
+When the beautiful full moon rose, this Sunday evening, and glorified
+the clearing and the forest with its mellow harvest radiance, he could
+have groaned with the burden of his joy. He went out alone into the
+light, and bared his head to it, and stood motionless for a long time.
+In all his life, he had never been impelled as powerfully toward earnest
+and soulful thanksgiving. The impulse to kneel, there in the pure,
+tender moonlight, and lift up offerings of praise to God, kept uppermost
+in his mind. Some formless resignation restrained him from the act
+itself, but the spirit of it hallowed his mood. He gazed up at the broad
+luminous face of the satellite. “You are our God,” he murmured. “Hers
+and mine! You are the most beautiful of heavenly creatures, as she is of
+the angels on earth. I am speechless with reverence for you both.”
+
+It was not until the camp-meeting broke up, four days later, and Theron
+with the rest returned to town, that the material aspects of what had
+happened, and might be expected to happen, forced themselves upon his
+mind. The kiss was a child of the forest. So long as Theron remained in
+the camp, the image of the kiss, which was enshrined in his heart and
+ministered to by all his thoughts, continued enveloped in a haze of
+sylvan mystery, like a dryad. Suggestions of its beauty and holiness
+came to him in the odors of the woodland, at the sight of wild flowers
+and water-lilies. When he walked alone in unfamiliar parts of the
+forest, he carried about with him the half-conscious idea of somewhere
+coming upon a strange, hidden pool which mortal eye had not seen
+before--a deep, sequestered mere of spring-fed waters, walled in by
+rich, tangled growths of verdure, and bearing upon its virgin bosom only
+the shadows of the primeval wilderness, and the light of the eternal
+skies. His fancy dwelt upon some such nook as the enchanted home of
+the fairy that possessed his soul. The place, though he never found it,
+became real to him. As he pictured it, there rose sometimes from among
+the lily-pads, stirring the translucent depths and fluttering over the
+water's surface drops like gems, the wonderful form of a woman, with
+pale leaves wreathed in her luxuriant red hair, and a skin which gave
+forth light.
+
+With the homecoming to Octavius, his dreams began to take more account
+of realities. In a day or two he was wide awake, and thinking hard. The
+kiss was as much as ever the ceaseless companion of his hours, but it no
+longer insisted upon shrouding itself in vines and woodland creepers, or
+outlining itself in phosphorescent vagueness against mystic backgrounds
+of nymph-haunted glades. It advanced out into the noonday, and assumed
+tangible dimensions and substance. He saw that it was related to the
+facts of his daily life, and had, in turn, altered his own relations to
+all these facts.
+
+What ought he to do? What COULD he do? Apparently, nothing but wait.
+He waited for a week--then for another week. The conclusion that the
+initiative had been left to him began to take shape in his mind. From
+this it seemed but a step to the passionate resolve to act at once.
+
+Turning the situation over and over in his anxious thoughts, two things
+stood out in special prominence. One was that Celia loved him. The other
+was that the boy in Gorringe's law office, and possibly Gorringe, and
+heaven only knew how many others besides, had reasons for suspecting
+this to be true.
+
+And what about Celia? Side by side with the moving rapture of thinking
+about her as a woman, there rose the substantial satisfaction of
+contemplating her as Miss Madden. She had kissed him, and she was very
+rich. The things gradually linked themselves before his eyes. He tried
+a thousand varying guesses at what she proposed to do, and each time
+reined up his imagination by the reminder that she was confessedly a
+creature of whims, who proposed to do nothing, but was capable of all
+things.
+
+And as to the boy. If he had blabbed what he saw, it was incredible that
+somebody should not take the subject up, and impart a scandalous twist
+to it, and send it rolling like a snowball to gather up exaggeration and
+foul innuendo till it was big enough to overwhelm him. What would happen
+to him if a formal charge were preferred against him? He looked it up
+in the Discipline. Of course, if his accusers magnified their mean
+suspicions and calumnious imaginings to the point of formulating a
+charge, it would be one of immorality. They could prove nothing; there
+was nothing to prove. At the worst, it was an indiscretion, which would
+involve his being admonished by his Presiding Elder. Or if these narrow
+bigots confused slanders with proofs, and showed that they intended to
+convict him, then it would be open to him to withdraw from the ministry,
+in advance of his condemnation. His relation to the church would be
+the same as if he had been expelled, but to the outer world it would be
+different. And supposing he did withdraw from the ministry?
+
+Yes; this was the important point. What if he did abandon this mistaken
+profession of his? On its mental side the relief would be prodigious,
+unthinkable. But on the practical side, the bread-and-butter side? For
+some days Theron paused with a shudder when he reached this question.
+The thought of the plunge into unknown material responsibilities gave
+him a sinking heart. He tried to imagine himself lecturing, canvassing
+for books or insurance policies, writing for newspapers--and remained
+frightened. But suddenly one day it occurred to him that these qualms
+and forebodings were sheer folly. Was not Celia rich? Would she not with
+lightning swiftness draw forth that check-book, like the flashing sword
+of a champion from its scabbard, and run to his relief? Why, of course.
+It was absurd not to have thought of that before.
+
+He recalled her momentary anger with him, that afternoon in the woods,
+when he had cried out that discovery would mean ruin to him. He saw
+clearly enough now that she had been grieved at his want of faith in her
+protection. In his flurry of fright, he had lost sight of the fact that,
+if exposure and trouble came to him, she would naturally feel that she
+had been the cause of his martyrdom. It was plain enough now. If he got
+into hot water, it would be solely on account of his having been seen
+with her. He had walked into the woods with her--“the further the
+better” had been her own words--out of pure kindliness, and the
+desire to lead her away from the scene of her brother's and her own
+humiliation. But why amplify arguments? Her own warm heart would tell
+her, on the instant, how he had been sacrificed for her sake, and would
+bring her, eager and devoted, to his succor.
+
+That was all right, then. Slowly, from this point, suggestions expanded
+themselves. The future could be, if he willed it, one long serene
+triumph of love, and lofty intellectual companionship, and existence
+softened and enriched at every point by all that wealth could command,
+and the most exquisite tastes suggest. Should he will it! Ah! the
+question answered itself. But he could not enter upon this beckoning
+heaven of a future until he had freed himself. When Celia said to him,
+“Come!” he must not be in the position to reply, “I should like to, but
+unfortunately I am tied by the leg.” He should have to leave Octavius,
+leave the ministry, leave everything. He could not begin too soon to
+face these contingencies.
+
+Very likely Celia had not thought it out as far as this. With her,
+it was a mere vague “sometime I may.” But the harder masculine sense,
+Theron felt, existed for the very purpose of correcting and giving point
+to these loose feminine notions of time and space. It was for him to
+clear away the obstacles, and map the plans out with definite decision.
+
+One warm afternoon, as he lolled in his easy-chair under the open
+window of his study, musing upon the ever-shifting phases of this vast,
+complicated, urgent problem, some chance words from the sidewalk in
+front came to his ears, and, coming, remained to clarify his thoughts.
+
+Two ladies whose voices were strange to him had stopped--as so many
+people almost daily stopped--to admire the garden of the parsonage. One
+of them expressed her pleasure in general terms. Said the other--
+
+“My husband declares those dahlias alone couldn't be matched for thirty
+dollars, and that some of those gladiolus must have cost three or four
+dollars apiece. I know we've spent simply oceans of money on our garden,
+and it doesn't begin to compare with this.”
+
+“It seems like a sinful waste to me,” said her companion.
+
+“No-o,” the other hesitated. “No, I don't think quite that--if you can
+afford it just as well as not. But it does seem to me that I'd rather
+live in a little better house, and not spend it ALL on flowers. Just
+LOOK at that cactus!”
+
+The voices died away. Theron sat up, with a look of arrested thought
+upon his face, then sprang to his feet and moved hurriedly through the
+parlor to an open front window. Peering out with caution he saw that the
+two women receding from view were fashionably dressed and evidently
+came from homes of means. He stared after them in a blank way until they
+turned a corner.
+
+He went into the hall then, put on his frock-coat and hat, and stepped
+out into the garden. He was conscious of having rather avoided it
+heretofore--not altogether without reasons of his own, lying unexamined
+somewhere in the recesses of his mind. Now he walked slowly about, and
+examined the flowers with great attentiveness. The season was
+advancing, and he saw that many plants had gone out of bloom. But what a
+magnificent plenitude of blossoms still remained!
+
+Thirty dollars' worth of dahlias--that was what the stranger had said.
+Theron hardly brought himself to credit the statement; but all the same
+it was apparent to even his uninformed eye that these huge, imbricated,
+flowering masses, with their extraordinary half-colors, must be unusual.
+He remembered that the boy in Gorringe's office had spoken of just one
+lot of plants costing thirty-one dollars and sixty cents, and there had
+been two other lots as well. The figures remained surprisingly distinct
+in his memory. It was no good deceiving himself any longer: of course
+these were the plants that Gorringe had spent his money upon, here all
+about him.
+
+As he surveyed them with a sour regard, a cool breeze stirred across the
+garden. The tall, over-laden flower-spikes of gladioli bent and nodded
+at him; the hollyhocks and flaming alvias, the clustered blossoms on the
+standard roses, the delicately painted lilies on their stilt-like stems,
+fluttered in the wind, and seemed all bowing satirically to him. “Yes,
+Levi Gorringe paid for us!” He almost heard their mocking declaration.
+
+Out in the back-yard, where a longer day of sunshine dwelt, there were
+many other flowers, and notably a bed of geraniums which literally made
+the eye ache. Standing at this rear corner of the house, he caught the
+droning sound of Alice's voice, humming a hymn to herself as she went
+about her kitchen work. He saw her through the open window. She was
+sweeping, and had a sort of cap on her head which did not add to the
+graces of her appearance. He looked at her with a hard glance, recalling
+as a fresh grievance the ten days of intolerable boredom he had spent
+cooped up in a ridiculous little tent with her, at the camp-meeting. She
+must have realized at the time how odious the enforced companionship was
+to him. Yes, beyond doubt she did. It came back to him now that they
+had spoken but rarely to each other. She had not even praised his sermon
+upon the Sabbath-question, which every one else had been in raptures
+over. For that matter she no longer praised anything he did, and took
+obvious pains to preserve toward him a distant demeanor. So much the
+better, he felt himself thinking. If she chose to behave in that
+offish and unwifely fashion, she could blame no one but herself for its
+results.
+
+She had seen him, and came now to the window, watering-pot and broom
+in hand. She put her head out, to breathe a breath of dustless air, and
+began as if she would smile on him. Then her face chilled and stiffened,
+as she caught his look.
+
+“Shall you be home for supper?” she asked, in her iciest tone.
+
+He had not thought of going out before. The question, and the manner of
+it, gave immediate urgency to the idea of going somewhere. “I may or I
+may not,” he replied. “It is quite impossible for me to say.” He turned
+on his heel with this, and walked briskly out of the yard and down the
+street.
+
+It was the most natural thing that presently he should be strolling past
+the Madden house, and letting a covert glance stray over its front and
+the grounds about it, as he loitered along. Every day since his return
+from the woods he had given the fates this chance of bringing Celia
+to meet him, without avail. He had hung about in the vicinity of the
+Catholic church on several evenings as well, but to no purpose. The
+organ inside was dumb, and he could detect no signs of Celia's presence
+on the curtains of the pastorate next door. This day, too, there was
+no one visible at the home of the Maddens, and he walked on, a little
+sadly. It was weary work waiting for the signal that never came.
+
+But there were compensations. His mind reverted doggedly to the flowers
+in his garden, and to Alice's behavior toward him. They insisted upon
+connecting themselves in his thoughts. Why should Levi Gorringe, a
+money-lender, and therefore the last man in the world to incur reckless
+expenditure, go and buy perhaps a hundred dollars, worth of flowers for
+his wife's garden? It was time--high time--to face this question. And
+his experiencing religion afterward, just when Alice did, and marching
+down to the rail to kneel beside her--that was a thing to be thought of,
+too.
+
+Meditation, it is true, hardly threw fresh light upon the matter. It
+was incredible, of course, that there should be anything wrong. To even
+shape a thought of Alice in connection with gallantry would be wholly
+impossible. Nor could it be said that Gorringe, in his new capacity as a
+professing church-member, had disclosed any sign of ulterior motives,
+or of insincerity. Yet there the facts were. While Theron pondered them,
+their mystery, if they involved a mystery, baffled him altogether.
+But when he had finished, he found himself all the same convinced that
+neither Alice nor Gorringe would be free to blame him for anything
+he might do. He had grounds for complaint against them. If he did not
+himself know just what these grounds were, it was certain enough that
+THEY knew. Very well, then, let them take the responsibility for what
+happened.
+
+It was indeed awkward that at the moment, as Theron chanced to emerge
+temporarily from his brown-study, his eyes fell full upon the spare,
+well-knit form of Levi Gorringe himself, standing only a few feet away,
+in the staircase entrance to his law office. His lean face, browned by
+the summer's exposure, had a more Arabian aspect than ever. His hands
+were in his pockets, and he held an unlighted cigar between his teeth.
+He looked the Rev. Mr. Ware over calmly, and nodded recognition.
+
+Theron had halted instinctively. On the instant he would have given
+a great deal not to have stopped at all. It was stupid of him to have
+paused, but it would not do now to go on without words of some sort. He
+moved over to the door-way, and made a half-hearted pretence of looking
+at the photographs in one of the show-cases at its side. As Mr. Gorringe
+did not take his hands from his pockets, there was no occasion for any
+formal greeting.
+
+“I had no idea that they took such good pictures in Octavius,” Theron
+remarked after a minute's silence, still bending in examination of the
+photographs.
+
+“They ought to; they charge New York prices,” observed the lawyer,
+sententiously.
+
+Theron found in the words confirmation of his feeling that Gorringe was
+not naturally a lavish or extravagant man. Rather was he a careful and
+calculating man, who spent money only for a purpose. Though the minister
+continued gazing at the stiff presentments of local beauties and
+swains, his eyes seemed to see salmon-hued hollyhocks and spotted lilies
+instead. Suddenly a resolve came to him. He stood erect, and faced his
+trustee.
+
+“Speaking of the price of things,” he said, with an effort of arrogance
+in his measured tone, “I have never had an opportunity before of
+mentioning the subject of the flowers you have so kindly furnished for
+my--for MY garden.”
+
+“Why mention it now?” queried Gorringe, with nonchalance. He turned his
+cigar about with a movement of his lips, and worked it into the corner
+of his mouth. He did not find it necessary to look at Theron at all.
+
+“Because--” began Mr. Ware, and then hesitated--“because--well, it
+raises a question of my being under obligation, which I--”
+
+“Oh, no, sir,” said the lawyer; “put that out of your mind. You are no
+more under obligation to me than I am to you. Oh, no, make yourself easy
+about that. Neither of us owes the other anything.”
+
+“Not even good-will--I take that to be your meaning,” retorted Theron,
+with some heat.
+
+“The words are yours, sir,” responded Gorringe, coolly. “I do not object
+to them.”
+
+“As you like,” put in the other. “If it be so, why, then all the more
+reason why I should, under the circumstances--”
+
+“Under what circumstances?” interposed the lawyer. “Let us be clear
+about this thing as we go along. To what circumstances do you refer?”
+
+He had turned his eyes now, and looked Theron in the face. A slight
+protrusion of his lower jaw had given the cigar an upward tilt under the
+black mustache.
+
+“The circumstances are that you have brought or sent to my garden a
+great many very expensive flower-plants and bushes and so on.”
+
+“And you object? I had not supposed that clergymen in general--and you
+in particular--were so sensitive. Have donation parties, then, gone out
+of date?”
+
+“I understand your sneer well enough,” retorted Theron, “but that
+can pass. The main point is, that you did me the honor to send these
+plants--or to smuggle them in--but never once deigned to hint to me that
+you had done so. No one told me. Except by mere accident, I should not
+have known to this day where they came from.”
+
+Mr. Gorringe twisted the cigar at another angle, with lines of grim
+amusement about the corner of his mouth. “I should have thought,” he
+said with dry deliberation, “that possibly this fact might have raised
+in your mind the conceivable hypothesis that the plants might not be
+intended for you at all.”
+
+“That is precisely it, sir,” said Theron. There were people passing, and
+he was forced to keep his voice down. It would have been a relief, he
+felt, to shout. “That is it--they were not intended for me.”
+
+“Well, then, what are you talking about?” The lawyer's speech had become
+abrupt almost to incivility.
+
+“I think my remarks have been perfectly clear,” said the minister, with
+dignity. It was a new experience to be addressed in that fashion.
+It occurred to him to add, “Please remember that I am not in the
+witness-box, to be bullied or insulted by a professional.”
+
+Gorringe studied Theron's face attentively with a cold, searching
+scrutiny. “You may thank your stars you're not!” he said, with
+significance.
+
+What on earth could he mean? The words and the menacing tone greatly
+impressed Theron. Indeed, upon reflection, he found that they frightened
+him. The disposition to adopt a high tone with the lawyer was melting
+away.
+
+“I do not see,” he began, and then deliberately allowed his voice to
+take on an injured and plaintive inflection--“I do not see why you
+should adopt this tone toward me--Brother Gorringe.”
+
+The lawyer scowled, and bit sharply into the cigar, but said nothing.
+
+“If I have unconsciously offended you in any way,” Theron went on, “I
+beg you to tell me how. I liked you from the beginning of my pastorate
+here, and the thought that latterly we seemed to be drifting apart has
+given me much pain. But now it is still more distressing to find you
+actually disposed to quarrel with me. Surely, Brother Gorringe, between
+a pastor and a probationer who--”
+
+“No,” Gorringe broke in; “quarrel isn't the word for it. There isn't any
+quarrel, Mr. Ware.” He stepped down from the door-stone to the sidewalk
+as he spoke, and stood face to face with Theron. Working-men with
+dinner-pails, and factory girls, were passing close to them, and he
+lowered his voice to a sharp, incisive half-whisper as he added, “It
+wouldn't be worth any grown man's while to quarrel with so poor a
+creature as you are.”
+
+Theron stood confounded, with an empty stare of bewilderment on his
+face. It rose in his mind that the right thing to feel was rage,
+righteous indignation, fury; but for the life of him, he could not
+muster any manly anger. The character of the insult stupefied him.
+
+“I do not know that I have anything to say to you in reply,” he
+remarked, after what seemed to him a silence of minutes. His lips
+framed the words automatically, but they expressed well enough the blank
+vacancy of his mind. The suggestion that anybody deemed him a “poor
+creature” grew more astounding, incomprehensible, as it swelled in his
+brain.
+
+“No, I suppose not,” snapped Gorringe. “You're not the sort to stand up
+to men; your form is to go round the corner and take it out of somebody
+weaker than yourself--a defenceless woman, for instance.”
+
+“Oh--ho!” said Theron. The exclamation had uttered itself. The sound of
+it seemed to clarify his muddled thoughts; and as they ranged themselves
+in order, he began to understand. “Oh--ho!” he said again, and nodded
+his head in token of comprehension.
+
+The lawyer, chewing his cigar with increased activity, glared at him.
+“What do you mean?” he demanded peremptorily.
+
+“Mean?” said the minister. “Oh, nothing that I feel called upon to
+explain to you.”
+
+It was passing strange, but his self-possession had all at once returned
+to him. As it became more apparent that the lawyer was losing his
+temper, Theron found the courage to turn up the corners of his lips in
+show of a bitter little smile of confidence. He looked into the other's
+dusky face, and flaunted this smile at it in contemptuous defiance. “It
+is not a subject that I can discuss with propriety--at this stage,” he
+added.
+
+“Damn you! Are you talking about those flowers?”
+
+“Oh, I am not talking about anything in particular,” returned Theron,
+“not even the curious choice of language which my latest probationer
+seems to prefer.”
+
+“Go and strike my name off the list!” said Gorringe, with rising
+passion. “I was a fool to ever have it there. To think of being a
+probationer of yours--my God!”
+
+“That will be a pity--from one point of view,” remarked Theron, still
+with the ironical smile on his lips. “You seemed to enter upon the new
+life with such deliberation and fixity of purpose, too! I can imagine
+the regrets your withdrawal will cause, in certain quarters. I only hope
+that it will not discourage those who accompanied you to the altar,
+and shared your enthusiasm at the time.” He had spoken throughout with
+studied slowness and an insolent nicety of utterance.
+
+“You had better go away!” broke forth Gorringe. “If you don't, I shall
+forget myself.”
+
+“For the first time?” asked Theron. Then, warned by the flash in the
+lawyer's eye, he turned on his heel and sauntered, with a painstaking
+assumption of a mind quite at ease, up the street.
+
+Gorringe's own face twitched and his veins tingled as he looked after
+him. He spat the shapeless cigar out of his mouth into the gutter, and,
+drawing forth another from his pocket, clenched it between his teeth,
+his gaze following the tall form of the Methodist minister till it was
+merged in the crowd.
+
+“Well, I'm damned!” he said aloud to himself.
+
+The photographer had come down to take in his showcases for the night.
+He looked up from his task at the exclamation, and grinned inquiringly.
+
+“I've just been talking to a man,” said the lawyer, “who's so much
+meaner than any other man I ever heard of that it takes my breath away.
+He's got a wife that's as pure and good as gold, and he knows it, and
+she worships the ground he walks on, and he knows that too. And yet the
+scoundrel is around trying to sniff out some shadow of a pretext for
+misusing her worse than he's already done. Yes, sir; he'd be actually
+tickled to death if he could nose up some hint of a scandal about
+her--something that he could pretend to believe, and work for his own
+advantage to levy blackmail, or get rid of her, or whatever suited his
+book. I didn't think there was such an out-and-out cur on this whole
+footstool. I almost wish, by God, I'd thrown him into the canal!”
+
+“Yes, you lawyers must run against some pretty snide specimens,”
+ remarked the photographer, lifting one of the cases from its sockets.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+Theron spent half an hour in aimless strolling about the streets. From
+earliest boyhood his mind had always worked most clearly when he walked
+alone. Every mental process which had left a mark upon his memory and
+his career--the daydreams of future academic greatness and fame which
+had fashioned themselves in his brain as a farm lad; the meditations,
+raptures, and high resolves of his student period at the seminary; the
+more notable sermons and powerful discourse by which he had revealed the
+genius that was in him to astonished and delighted assemblages--all were
+associated in his retrospective thoughts with solitary rambles.
+
+He had a very direct and vivid consciousness now that it was good to be
+on his legs, and alone. He had never in his life been more sensible of
+the charm of his own companionship. The encounter with Gorringe seemed
+to have cleared all the clouds out of his brain, and restored lightness
+to his heart. After such an object lesson, the impossibility of his
+continuing to sacrifice himself to a notion of duty to these low-minded
+and coarse-natured villagers was beyond all argument. There could no
+longer be any doubt about his moral right to turn his back upon them, to
+wash his hands of the miserable combination of hypocrisy and hysterics
+which they called their spiritual life.
+
+And the question of Gorringe and Alice, that too stood precisely where
+he wanted it. Even in his own thoughts, he preferred to pursue it no
+further. Between them somewhere an offence of concealment, it might be
+of conspiracy, had been committed against him. It was no business of his
+to say more, or to think more. He rested his case simply on the fact,
+which could not be denied, and which he was not in the least interested
+to have explained, one way or the other. The recollection of Gorringe's
+obvious disturbance of mind was especially pleasant to him. He himself
+had been magnanimous almost to the point of weakness. He had gone out
+of his way to call the man “brother,” and to give him an opportunity of
+behaving like a gentleman; but his kindly forbearance had been wasted.
+Gorringe was not the man to understand generous feelings, much less rise
+to their level. He had merely shown that he would be vicious if he knew
+how. It was more important and satisfactory to recall that he had also
+shown a complete comprehension of the injured husband's grievance. The
+fact that he had recognized it was enough--was, in fact, everything.
+
+In the background of his thoughts Theron had carried along a notion of
+going and dining with Father Forbes when the time for the evening meal
+should arrive. The idea in itself attracted him, as a fitting capstone
+to his resolve not to go home to supper. It gave just the right kind
+of character to his domestic revolt. But when at last he stood on the
+doorstep of the pastorate, waiting for an answer to the tinkle of the
+electric bell he had heard ring inside, his mind contained only the
+single thought that now he should hear something about Celia. Perhaps he
+might even find her there; but he put that suggestion aside as slightly
+unpleasant.
+
+The hag-faced housekeeper led him, as before, into the dining-room. It
+was still daylight, and he saw on the glance that the priest was alone
+at the table, with a book beside him to read from as he ate.
+
+Father Forbes rose and came forward, greeting his visitor with profuse
+urbanity and smiles. If there was a perfunctory note in the invitation
+to sit down and share the meal, Theron did not catch it. He frankly
+displayed his pleasure as he laid aside his hat, and took the chair
+opposite his host.
+
+“It is really only a few months since I was here, in this room, before,”
+ he remarked, as the priest closed his book and tossed it to one side,
+and the housekeeper came in to lay another place. “Yet it might have
+been years, many long years, so tremendous is the difference that the
+lapse of time has wrought in me.”
+
+“I am afraid we have nothing to tempt you very much, Mr. Ware,” remarked
+Father Forbes, with a gesture of his plump white hand which embraced the
+dishes in the centre of the table. “May I send you a bit of this boiled
+mutton? I have very homely tastes when I am by myself.”
+
+“I was saying,” Theron observed, after some moments had passed in
+silence, “that I date such a tremendous revolution in my thoughts, my
+beliefs, my whole mind and character, from my first meeting with you,
+my first coming here. I don't know how to describe to you the enormous
+change that has come over me; and I owe it all to you.”
+
+“I can only hope, then, that it is entirely of a satisfactory nature,”
+ said the priest, politely smiling.
+
+“Oh, it is so splendidly satisfactory!” said Theron, with fervor. “I
+look back at myself now with wonder and pity. It seems incredible
+that, such a little while ago, I should have been such an ignorant
+and unimaginative clod of earth, content with such petty ambitions and
+actually proud of my limitations.”
+
+“And you have larger ambitions now?” asked the other. “Pray let me help
+you to some potatoes. I am afraid that ambitions only get in our way and
+trip us up. We clergymen are like street-car horses. The more steadily
+we jog along between the rails, the better it is for us.”
+
+“Oh, I don't intend to remain in the ministry,” declared Theron. The
+statement seemed to him a little bald, now that he had made it; and as
+his companion lifted his brows in surprise, he added stumblingly: “That
+is, as I feel now, it seems to me impossible that I should remain much
+longer. With you, of course, it is different. You have a thousand things
+to interest and pleasantly occupy you in your work and its ceremonies,
+so that mere belief or non-belief in the dogma hardly matters. But in
+our church dogma is everything. If you take that away, or cease to have
+its support, the rest is intolerable, hideous.”
+
+Father Forbes cut another slice of mutton for himself. “It is a pretty
+serious business to make such a change at your time of life. I take it
+for granted you will think it all over very carefully before you commit
+yourself.” He said this with an almost indifferent air, which rather
+chilled his listener's enthusiasm.
+
+“Oh, yes,”, Theron made answer; “I shall do nothing rash. But I have a
+good many plans for the future.”
+
+Father Forbes did not ask what these were, and a brief further period of
+silence fell upon the table.
+
+“I hope everything went off smoothly at the picnic,” Theron ventured, at
+last. “I have not seen any of you since then.”
+
+The priest shook his head and sighed. “No,” he said. “It is a bad
+business. I have had a great deal of unhappiness out of it this past
+fortnight. That young man who was rude to you--of course it was mere
+drunken, irresponsible nonsense on his part--has got himself into a
+serious scrape, I'm afraid. It is being kept quite within the family,
+and we hope to manage so that it will remain there, but it has terribly
+upset his father and his sister. But that, after all, is not so hard
+to bear as the other affliction that has come upon the Maddens. You
+remember Michael, the other brother? He seems to have taken cold that
+evening, or perhaps over-exerted himself. He has been seized with quick
+consumption. He will hardly last till snow flies.”
+
+“Oh, I am GRIEVED to hear that!” Theron spoke with tremulous
+earnestness. It seemed to him as if Michael were in some way related to
+him.
+
+“It is very hard upon them all,” the priest went on. “Michael is as
+sweet and holy a character as it is possible for any one to think of. He
+is the apple of his father's eye. They were inseparable, those two. Do
+you know the father, Mr. Madden?”
+
+Theron shook his head. “I think I have seen him,” he said. “A small man,
+with gray whiskers.”
+
+“A peasant,” said Father Forbes, “but with a heart of gold. Poor man! he
+has had little enough out of his riches. Ah, the West Coast people, what
+tragedies I have seen among them over here! They have rudimentary lung
+organizations, like a frog's, to fit the mild, wet soft air they live
+in. The sharp air here kills them off like flies in a frost. Whole
+families go. I should think there are a dozen of old Jeremiah's children
+in the cemetery. If Michael could have passed his twenty-eighth year,
+there would have been hope for him, at least till his thirty-fifth.
+These pulmonary things seem to go by sevens, you know.”
+
+“I didn't know,” said Theron. “It is very strange--and very sad.” His
+startled mind was busy, all at once, with conjectures as to Celia's age.
+
+“The sister--Miss Madden--seems extremely strong,” he remarked
+tentatively.
+
+“Celia may escape the general doom,” said the priest. His guest noted
+that he clenched his shapely white hand on the table as he spoke, and
+that his gentle, carefully modulated voice had a gritty hardness in its
+tone. “THAT would be too dreadful to think of,” he added.
+
+Theron shuddered in silence, and strove to shut his mind against the
+thought.
+
+“She has taken Michael's illness so deeply to heart,” the priest
+proceeded, “and devoted herself to him so untiringly that I get a little
+nervous about her. I have been urging her to go away and get a change of
+air and scene, if only for a few days. She does not sleep well, and that
+is always a bad thing.”
+
+“I think I remember her telling me once that sometimes she had sleepless
+spells,” said Theron. “She said that then she banged on her piano at
+all hours, or dragged the cushions about from room to room, like a wild
+woman. A very interesting young lady, don't you find her so?”
+
+Father Forbes let a wan smile play on his lips. “What, our Celia?”
+ he said. “Interesting! Why, Mr. Ware, there is no one like her in the
+world. She is as unique as--what shall I say?--as the Irish are among
+races. Her father and mother were both born in mud-cabins, and she--she
+might be the daughter of a hundred kings, except that they seem mostly
+rather under-witted than otherwise. She always impresses me as a sort of
+atavistic idealization of the old Kelt at his finest and best. There in
+Ireland you got a strange mixture of elementary early peoples, walled
+off from the outer world by the four seas, and free to work out their
+own racial amalgam on their own lines. They brought with them at the
+outset a great inheritance of Eastern mysticism. Others lost it, but the
+Irish, all alone on their island, kept it alive and brooded on it, and
+rooted their whole spiritual side in it. Their religion is full of it;
+their blood is full of it; our Celia is fuller of it than anybody else.
+The Ireland of two thousand years ago is incarnated in her. They are the
+merriest people and the saddest, the most turbulent and the most docile,
+the most talented and the most unproductive, the most practical and the
+most visionary, the most devout and the most pagan. These impossible
+contradictions war ceaselessly in their blood. When I look at Celia,
+I seem to see in my mind's eye the fair young-ancestral mother of them
+all.”
+
+Theron gazed at the speaker with open admiration. “I love to hear you
+talk,” he said simply.
+
+An unbidden memory flitted upward in his mind. Those were the very words
+that Alice had so often on her lips in their old courtship days. How
+curious it was! He looked at the priest, and had a quaint sensation of
+feeling as a romantic woman must feel in the presence of a specially
+impressive masculine personality. It was indeed strange that this
+soft-voiced, portly creature in a gown, with his white, fat hands and
+his feline suavity of manner, should produce such a commanding and
+unique effect of virility. No doubt this was a part of the great sex
+mystery which historically surrounded the figure of the celibate priest
+as with an atmosphere. Women had always been prostrating themselves
+before it. Theron, watching his companion's full, pallid face in the
+lamp-light, tried to fancy himself in the priest's place, looking down
+upon these worshipping female forms. He wondered what the celibate's
+attitude really was. The enigma fascinated him.
+
+Father Forbes, after his rhetorical outburst, had been eating. He pushed
+aside his cheese-plate. “I grow enthusiastic on the subject of my race
+sometimes,” he remarked, with the suggestion of an apology. “But I make
+up for it other times--most of the time--by scolding them. If it were
+not such a noble thing to be an Irishman, it would be ridiculous.”
+
+“Ah,” said Theron, deprecatingly, “who would not be enthusiastic in
+talking of Miss Madden? What you said about her was perfect. As you
+spoke, I was thinking how proud and thankful we ought to be for the
+privilege of knowing her--we who do know her well--although of course
+your friendship with her is vastly more intimate than mine--than mine
+could ever hope to be.”
+
+The priest offered no comment, and Theron went on: “I hardly know how to
+describe the remarkable impression she makes upon me. I can't imagine to
+myself any other young woman so brilliant or broad in her views, or so
+courageous. Of course, her being so rich makes it easier for her to do
+just what she wants to do, but her bravery is astonishing all the same.
+We had a long and very sympathetic talk in the woods, that day of the
+picnic, after we left you. I don't know whether she spoke to you about
+it?”
+
+Father Forbes made a movement of the head and eyes which seemed to
+negative the suggestion.
+
+“Her talk,” continued Theron, “gave me quite new ideas of the range and
+capacity of the female mind. I wonder that everybody in Octavius isn't
+full of praise and admiration for her talents and exceptional character.
+In such a small town as this, you would think she would be the centre of
+attention--the pride of the place.”
+
+“I think she has as much praise as is good for her,” remarked the
+priest, quietly.
+
+“And here's a thing that puzzles me,” pursued Mr. Ware. “I was immensely
+surprised to find that Dr. Ledsmar doesn't even think she is smart--or
+at least he professes the utmost intellectual contempt for her, and says
+he dislikes her into the bargain. But of course she dislikes him, too,
+so that's only natural. But I can't understand his denying her great
+ability.”
+
+The priest smiled in a dubious way. “Don't borrow unnecessary alarm
+about that, Mr. Ware,” he said, with studied smoothness of modulated
+tones. “These two good friends of mine have much enjoyment out of
+the idea that they are fighting for the mastery over my poor unstable
+character. It has grown to be a habit with them, and a hobby as well,
+and they pursue it with tireless zest. There are not many intellectual
+diversions open to us here, and they make the most of this one. It
+amuses them, and it is not without its charms for me, in my capacity
+as an interested observer. It is a part of the game that they should
+pretend to themselves that they detest each other. In reality I fancy
+that they like each other very much. At any rate, there is nothing to be
+disturbed about.”
+
+His mellifluous tones had somehow the effect of suggesting to Theron
+that he was an outsider and would better mind his own business. Ah, if
+this purring pussy-cat of a priest only knew how little of an outsider
+he really was! The thought gave him an easy self-control.
+
+“Of course,” he said, “our warm mutual friendship makes the observation
+of these little individual vagaries merely a part of a delightful whole.
+I should not dream of discussing Miss Madden's confidences to me, or the
+doctor's either, outside our own little group.”
+
+Father Forbes reached behind him and took from a chair his black
+three-cornered cap with the tassel. “Unfortunately I have a sick call
+waiting me,” he said, gathering up his gown and slowly rising.
+
+“Yes, I saw the man sitting in the hall,” remarked Theron, getting to
+his feet.
+
+“I would ask you to go upstairs and wait,” the priest went on, “but my
+return, unhappily, is quite uncertain. Another evening I may be more
+fortunate. I am leaving town tomorrow for some days, but when I get
+back--”
+
+The polite sentence did not complete itself. Father Forbes had come out
+into the hall, giving a cool nod to the working-man, who rose from the
+bench as they passed, and shook hands with his guest on the doorstep.
+
+When the door had closed upon Mr. Ware, the priest turned to the man.
+“You have come about those frames,” he said. “If you will come upstairs,
+I will show you the prints, and you can give me a notion of what can
+be done with them. I rather fancy the idea of a triptych in carved old
+English, if you can manage it.”
+
+After the workman had gone away, Father Forbes put on slippers and an
+old loose soutane, lighted a cigar, and, pushing an easy-chair over to
+the reading lamp, sat down with a book. Then something occurred to him,
+and he touched the house-bell at his elbow.
+
+“Maggie,” he said gently, when the housekeeper appeared at the door, “I
+will have the coffee and FINE CHAMPAGNE up here, if it is no trouble.
+And--oh, Maggie--I was compelled this evening to turn the blameless
+visit of the framemaker into a venial sin, and that involves a needless
+wear and tear of conscience. I think that--hereafter--you understand?--I
+am not invariably at home when the Rev. Mr. Ware does me the honor to
+call.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+That night brought the first frost of the season worth counting. In
+the morning, when Theron came downstairs, his casual glance through
+the window caught a desolate picture of blackened dahlia stalks and
+shrivelled blooms. The gayety and color of the garden were gone, and in
+their place was shabby and dishevelled ruin. He flung the sash up and
+leaned out. The nipping autumn air was good to breathe. He looked about
+him, surveying the havoc the frost had wrought among the flowers, and
+smiled.
+
+At breakfast he smiled again--a mirthless and calculated smile. “I
+see that Brother Gorringe's flowers have come to grief over night,” he
+remarked.
+
+Alice looked at him before she spoke, and saw on his face a confirmation
+of the hostile hint in his voice. She nodded in a constrained way, and
+said nothing.
+
+“Or rather, I should say,” Theron went on, with deliberate words, “the
+late Brother Gorringe's flowers.”
+
+“How do you mean--LATE” asked his wife, swiftly.
+
+“Oh, calm yourself!” replied the husband. “He is not dead. He has only
+intimated to me his desire to sever his connection. I may add that he
+did so in a highly offensive manner.”
+
+“I am very sorry,” said Alice, in a low tone, and with her eyes on her
+plate.
+
+“I took it for granted you would be grieved at his backsliding,”
+ remarked Theron, making his phrases as pointed as he could. “He was
+such a promising probationer, and you took such a keen interest in his
+spiritual awakening. But the frost has nipped his zeal--along with the
+hundred or more dollars' worth of flowers by which he testified his
+faith. I find something interesting in their having been blasted
+simultaneously.”
+
+Alice dropped all pretence of interest in her breakfast. With a flushed
+face and lips tightly compressed, she made a movement as if to rise from
+her chair. Then, changing her mind, she sat bolt upright and faced her
+husband.
+
+“I think we had better have this out right now,” she said, in a voice
+which Theron hardly recognized. “You have been hinting round the subject
+long enough--too long. There are some things nobody is obliged to put
+up with, and this is one of them. You will oblige me by saying out in so
+many words what it is you are driving at.”
+
+The outburst astounded Theron. He laid down his knife and fork, and
+gazed at his wife in frank surprise. She had so accustomed him, of late,
+to a demeanor almost abject in its depressed docility that he had quite
+forgotten the Alice of the old days, when she had spirit and courage
+enough for two, and a notable tongue of her own. The flash in her
+eyes and the lines of resolution about her mouth and chin for a moment
+daunted him. Then he observed by a flutter of the frill at her wrist
+that she was trembling.
+
+“I am sure I have nothing to 'say out in so many words,' as you put
+it,” he replied, forcing his voice into cool, impassive tones. “I merely
+commented upon a coincidence, that was all. If, for any reason under
+the sun, the subject chances to be unpleasant to you, I have no earthly
+desire to pursue it.”
+
+“But I insist upon having it pursued!” returned Alice. “I've had just
+all I can stand of your insinuations and innuendoes, and it's high time
+we had some plain talk. Ever since the revival, you have been dropping
+sly, underhand hints about Mr. Gorringe and--and me. Now I ask you what
+you mean by it.”
+
+Yes, there was a shake in her voice, and he could see how her bosom
+heaved in a tremor of nervousness. It was easy for him to be very calm.
+
+“It is you who introduce these astonishing suggestions, not I,” he
+replied coldly. “It is you who couple your name with his--somewhat to my
+surprise, I admit--but let me suggest that we drop the subject. You
+are excited just now, and you might say things that you would prefer to
+leave unsaid. It would surely be better for all concerned to say no more
+about it.”
+
+Alice, staring across the table at him with knitted brows, emitted a
+sharp little snort of indignation. “Well, I never! Theron, I wouldn't
+have thought it of you!”
+
+“There are so many things you wouldn't have thought, on such a variety
+of subjects,” he observed, with a show of resuming his breakfast. “But
+why continue? We are only angering each other.”
+
+“Never mind that,” she replied, with more control over her speech. “I
+guess things have come to a pass where a little anger won't do any harm.
+I have a right to insist on knowing what you mean by your insinuations.”
+
+Theron sighed. “Why will you keep harping on the thing?” he asked
+wearily. “I have displayed no curiosity. I don't ask for any
+explanations. I think I mentioned that the man had behaved insultingly
+to me--but that doesn't matter. I don't bring it up as a grievance. I
+am very well able to take care of myself. I have no wish to recur to the
+incident in any way. So far as I am concerned, the topic is dismissed.”
+
+“Listen to me!” broke in Alice, with eager gravity. She hesitated, as he
+looked up with a nod of attention, and reflected as well as she was able
+among her thoughts for a minute or two. “This is what I want to say to
+you. Ever since we came to this hateful Octavius, you and I have been
+drifting apart--or no, that doesn't express it--simply rushing away from
+each other. It only began last spring, and now the space between us
+is so wide that we are worse than complete strangers. For strangers at
+least don't hate each other, and I've had a good many occasions lately
+to see that you positively do hate me--”
+
+“What grotesque absurdity” interposed Theron, impatiently.
+
+“No, it isn't absurdity; it's gospel truth,” retorted Alice. “And--don't
+interrupt me--there have been times, too, when I have had to ask myself
+if I wasn't getting almost to hate you in return. I tell you this
+frankly.”
+
+“Yes, you are undoubtedly frank,” commented the husband, toying with his
+teaspoon. “A hypercritical person might consider, almost too frank.”
+
+Alice scanned his face closely while he spoke, and held her breath as
+if in expectant suspense. Her countenance clouded once more. “You don't
+realize, Theron,” she said gravely; “your voice when you speak to me,
+your look, your manner, they have all changed. You are like another
+man--some man who never loved me, and doesn't even know me, much less
+like me. I want to know what the end of it is to be. Up to the time of
+your sickness last summer, until after the Soulsbys went away, I didn't
+let myself get downright discouraged. It seemed too monstrous for
+belief that you should go away out of my life like that. It didn't seem
+possible that God could allow such a thing. It came to me that I had
+been lax in my Christian life, especially in my position as a minister's
+wife, and that this was my punishment. I went to the altar, to intercede
+with Him, and to try to loose my burden at His feet. But nothing has
+come of it. I got no help from you.”
+
+“Really, Alice,” broke in Theron, “I explained over and over again to
+you how preoccupied I was--with the book--and affairs generally.”
+
+“I got no assistance from Heaven either,” she went on, declining the
+diversion he offered. “I don't want to talk impiously, but if there is a
+God, he has forgotten me, his poor heart-broken hand-maiden.”
+
+“You are talking impiously, Alice,” observed her husband. “And you are
+doing me cruel injustice, into the bargain.”
+
+“I only wish I were!” she replied; “I only wish to God I were!”
+
+“Well, then, accept my complete assurance that you ARE--that your whole
+conception of me, and of what you are pleased to describe as my change
+toward you, is an entire and utter mistake. Of course, the married
+state is no more exempt from the universal law of growth, development,
+alteration, than any other human institution. On its spiritual side, of
+course, viewed either as a sacrament, or as--”
+
+“Don't let us go into that,” interposed Alice, abruptly. “In fact, there
+is no good in talking any more at all. It is as if we didn't speak the
+same language. You don't understand what I say; it makes no impression
+upon your mind.”
+
+“Quite to the contrary,” he assured her; “I have been deeply interested
+and concerned in all you have said. I think you are laboring under a
+great delusion, and I have tried my best to convince you of it; but
+I have never heard you speak more intelligibly or, I might say,
+effectively.”
+
+A little gleam of softness stole over Alice's face. “If you only gave me
+a little more credit for intelligence,” she said, “you would find that I
+am not such a blockhead as you think I am.”
+
+“Come, come!” he said, with a smiling show of impatience. “You really
+mustn't impute things to me wholesale, like that.”
+
+She was glad to answer the smile in kind. “No; but truly,” she pleaded,
+“you don't realize it, but you have grown into a way of treating me as
+if I had absolutely no mind at all.”
+
+“You have a very admirable mind,” he responded, and took up his teaspoon
+again. She reached for his cup, and poured out hot coffee for him. An
+almost cheerful spirit had suddenly descended upon the breakfast table.
+
+“And now let me say the thing I have been aching to say for months,” she
+began in less burdened voice.
+
+He lifted his brows. “Haven't things been discussed pretty fully
+already?” he asked.
+
+The doubtful, harassed expression clouded upon her face at his
+words, and she paused. “No,” she said resolutely, after an
+instant's reflection; “it is my duty to discuss this, too. It is a
+misunderstanding all round. You remember that I told you Mr. Gorringe
+had given me some plants, which he got from some garden or other?”
+
+“If you really wish to go on with the subject--yes I have a recollection
+of that particular falsehood of his.”
+
+“He did it with the kindest and friendliest motives in the world!”
+ protested Alice. “He saw how down-in-the-mouth and moping I was here,
+among these strangers--and I really was getting quite peaked and
+run-down--and he said I stayed indoors too much and it would do me all
+sorts of good to work in the garden, and he would send me some plants.
+The next I knew, here they were, with a book about mixing soils and
+planting, and so on. When I saw him next, and thanked him, I suppose I
+showed some apprehension about his having laid out money on them, and
+he, just to ease my mind, invented the story about his getting them for
+nothing. When I found out the truth--I got it out of that boy, Harvey
+Semple--he admitted it quite frankly--said he was wrong to deceive me.”
+
+“This was in the fine first fervor of his term of probation, I suppose,”
+ put in Theron. He made no effort to dissemble the sneer in his voice.
+
+“Well,” answered Alice, with a touch of acerbity, “I have told you
+now, and it is off my mind. There never would have been the slightest
+concealment about it, if you hadn't begun by keeping me at arm's length,
+and making it next door to impossible to speak to you at all, and if--”
+
+“And if he hadn't lied.” Theron, as he finished her sentence for her,
+rose from the table. Dallying for a brief moment by his chair, there
+seemed the magnetic premonition in the air of some further and kindlier
+word. Then he turned and walked sedately into the next room, and closed
+the door behind him. The talk was finished; and Alice, left alone,
+passed the knuckle of her thumb over one swimming eye and then the
+other, and bit her lips and swallowed down the sob that rose in her
+throat.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+It was early afternoon when Theron walked out of his yard, bestowing no
+glance upon the withered and tarnished show of the garden, and started
+with a definite step down the street. The tendency to ruminative
+loitering, which those who saw him abroad always associated with his
+tall, spare figure, was not suggested today. He moved forward like a man
+with a purpose.
+
+All the forenoon in the seclusion of the sitting-room, with a book
+opened before him, he had been thinking hard. It was not the talk with
+Alice that occupied his thoughts. That rose in his mind from time to
+time, only as a disagreeable blur, and he refused to dwell upon it. It
+was nothing to him, he said to himself, what Gorringe's motives in lying
+had been. As for Alice, he hardened his heart against her. Just now
+it was her mood to try and make up to him. But it had been something
+different yesterday, and who could say what it would be tomorrow? He
+really had passed the limit of patience with her shifting emotional
+vagaries, now lurching in this direction, now in that. She had had her
+chance to maintain a hold upon his interest and imagination, and had
+let it slip. These were the accidents of life, the inevitable harsh
+happenings in the great tragedy of Nature. They could not be helped, and
+there was nothing more to be said.
+
+He had bestowed much more attention upon what the priest had said the
+previous evening. He passed in review all the glowing tributes Father
+Forbes had paid to Celia. They warmed his senses as he recalled them,
+but they also, in a curious, indefinite way, caused him uneasiness.
+There had been a personal fervor about them which was something more
+than priestly. He remembered how the priest had turned pale and faltered
+when the question whether Celia would escape the general doom of her
+family came up. It was not a merely pastoral agitation that, he felt
+sure.
+
+A hundred obscure hints, doubts, stray little suspicions, crowded upward
+together in his thoughts. It became apparent to him now that from the
+outset he had been conscious of something queer--yes, from that very
+first day when he saw the priest and Celia together, and noted their
+glance of recognition inside the house of death. He realized now, upon
+reflection, that the tone of other people, his own parishioners and his
+casual acquaintances in Octavius alike, had always had a certain note of
+reservation in it when it touched upon Miss Madden. Her running in and
+out of the pastorate at all hours, the way the priest patted her on
+the shoulder before others, the obvious dislike the priest's ugly old
+housekeeper bore her, the astonishing freedom of their talk with each
+other--these dark memories loomed forth out of a mass of sinister
+conjecture.
+
+He could bear the uncertainty no longer. Was it indeed not entirely his
+own fault that it had existed thus long? No man with the spirit of a
+mouse would have shilly-shallied in this preposterous fashion, week
+after week, with the fever of a beautiful woman's kiss in his blood, and
+the woman herself living only round the corner. The whole world had been
+as good as offered to him--a bewildering world of wealth and beauty and
+spiritual exaltation and love--and he, like a weak fool, had waited for
+it to be brought to him on a salver, as it were, and actually forced
+upon his acceptance! “That is my failing,” he reflected; “these
+miserable ecclesiastical bandages of mine have dwarfed my manly side.
+The meanest of Thurston's clerks would have shown a more adventurous
+spirit and a bolder nerve. If I do not act at once, with courage and
+resolution, everything will be lost. Already she must think me unworthy
+of the honor it was in her sweet will to bestow.” Then he remembered
+that she was now always at home. “Not another hour of foolish
+indecision!” he whispered to himself. “I will put my destiny to the
+test. I will see her today!”
+
+A middle-aged, plain-faced servant answered his ring at the door-bell
+of the Madden mansion. She was palpably Irish, and looked at him with a
+saddened preoccupation in her gray eyes, holding the door only a little
+ajar.
+
+Theron had got out one of his cards. “I wish to make inquiry about
+young Mr. Madden--Mr. Michael Madden,” he said, holding the card forth
+tentatively. “I have only just heard of his illness, and it has been a
+great grief to me.”
+
+“He is no better,” answered the woman, briefly.
+
+“I am the Rev. Mr. Ware,” he went on, “and you may say that, if he is
+well enough, I should be glad to see him.”
+
+The servant peered out at him with a suddenly altered expression, then
+shook her head. “I don't think he would be wishing to see YOU,” she
+replied. It was evident from her tone that she suspected the visitor's
+intentions.
+
+Theron smiled in spite of himself. “I have not come as a clergyman,” he
+explained, “but as a friend of the family. If you will tell Miss Madden
+that I am here, it will do just as well. Yes, we won't bother him. If
+you will kindly hand my card to his sister.”
+
+When the domestic turned at this and went in, Theron felt like throwing
+his hat in the air, there where he stood. The woman's churlish sectarian
+prejudices had played ideally into his hands. In no other imaginable way
+could he have asked for Celia so naturally. He wondered a little that a
+servant at such a grand house as this should leave callers standing on
+the doorstep. Still more he wondered what he should say to the lady of
+his dream when he came into her presence.
+
+“Will you please to walk this way?” The woman had returned. She closed
+the door noiselessly behind him, and led the way, not up the sumptuous
+staircase, as Theron had expected, but along through the broad hall,
+past several large doors, to a small curtained archway at the end.
+She pushed aside this curtain, and Theron found himself in a sort of
+conservatory, full of the hot, vague light of sunshine falling through
+ground-glass. The air was moist and close, and heavy with the smell of
+verdure and wet earth. A tall bank of palms, with ferns sprawling at
+their base, reared itself directly in front of him. The floor was of
+mosaic, and he saw now that there were rugs upon it, and that there were
+chairs and sofas, and other signs of habitation. It was, indeed, only
+half a greenhouse, for the lower part of it was in rosewood panels, with
+floral paintings on them, like a room.
+
+Moving to one side of the barrier of palms, he discovered, to his great
+surprise, the figure of Michael, sitting propped up with pillows in
+a huge easy-chair. The sick man was looking at him with big, gravely
+intent eyes. His face did not show as much change as Theron had in fancy
+pictured. It had seemed almost as bony and cadaverous on the day of the
+picnic. The hands spread out on the chair-arms were very white and
+thin, though, and the gaze in the blue eyes had a spectral quality which
+disturbed him.
+
+Michael raised his right hand, and Theron, stepping forward, took it
+limply in his for an instant. Then he laid it down again. The touch of
+people about to die had always been repugnant to him. He could feel on
+his own warm palm the very damp of the grave.
+
+“I only heard from Father Forbes last evening of your--your ill-health,”
+ he said, somewhat hesitatingly. He seated himself on a bench beneath
+the palms, facing the invalid, but still holding his hat. “I hope very
+sincerely that you will soon be all right again.”
+
+“My sister is lying down in her room,” answered Michael. He had not once
+taken his sombre and embarrassing gaze from the other's face. The voice
+in which he uttered this uncalled-for remark was thin in fibre, cold
+and impassive. It fell upon Theron's ears with a suggestion of hidden
+meaning. He looked uneasily into Michael's eyes, and then away again.
+They seemed to be looking straight through him, and there was no
+shirking the sensation that they saw and comprehended things with an
+unnatural prescience.
+
+“I hope she is feeling better,” Theron found himself saying. “Father
+Forbes mentioned that she was a little under the weather. I dined with
+him last night.”
+
+“I am glad that you came,” said Michael, after a little pause. His
+earnest, unblinking eyes seemed to supplement his tongue with speech of
+their own. “I do be thinking a great deal about you. I have matters to
+speak of to you, now that you are here.”
+
+Theron bowed his head gently, in token of grateful attention. He tried
+the experiment of looking away from Michael, but his glance went back
+again irresistibly, and fastened itself upon the sick man's gaze, and
+clung there.
+
+“I am next door to a dead man,” he went on, paying no heed to the
+other's deprecatory gesture. “It is not years or months with me, but
+weeks. Then I go away to stand up for judgment on my sins, and if it is
+His merciful will, I shall see God. So I say my good-byes now, and so
+you will let me speak plainly, and not think ill of what I say. You
+are much changed, Mr. Ware, since you came to Octavius, and it is not a
+change for the good.”
+
+Theron lifted his brows in unaffected surprise, and put inquiry into his
+glance.
+
+“I don't know if Protestants will be saved, in God's good time, or not,”
+ continued Michael. “I find there are different opinions among the clergy
+about that, and of course it is not for me, only a plain mechanic, to be
+sure where learned and pious scholars are in doubt. But I am sure about
+one thing. Those Protestants, and others too, mind you, who profess
+and preach good deeds, and themselves do bad deeds--they will never be
+saved. They will have no chance at all to escape hell-fire.”
+
+“I think we are all agreed upon that, Mr. Madden,” said Theron, with
+surface suavity.
+
+“Then I say to you, Mr. Ware, you are yourself in a bad path. Take the
+warning of a dying man, sir, and turn from it!”
+
+The impulse to smile tugged at Theron's facial muscles. This was
+really too droll. He looked up at the ceiling, the while he forced his
+countenance into a polite composure, then turned again to Michael, with
+some conciliatory commonplace ready for utterance. But he said nothing,
+and all suggestion of levity left his mind, under the searching
+inspection bent upon him by the young man's hollow eyes. What did
+Michael suspect? What did he know? What was he hinting at, in this
+strange talk of his?
+
+“I saw you often on the street when first you came here,” continued
+Michael. “I knew the man who was here before you--that is, by sight--and
+he was not a good man. But your face, when you came, pleased me. I liked
+to look at you. I was tormented just then, do you see, that so many
+decent, kindly people, old school-mates and friends and neighbors of
+mine--and, for that matter, others all over the country must lose their
+souls because they were Protestants. At my boyhood and young manhood,
+that thought took the joy out of me. Sometimes I usen't to sleep a whole
+night long, for thinking that some lad I had been playing with, perhaps
+in his own house, that very day, would be taken when he died, and his
+mother too, when she died, and thrown into the flames of hell for
+all eternity. It made me so unhappy that finally I wouldn't go to any
+Protestant boy's house, and have his mother be nice to me, and give me
+cake and apples--and me thinking all the while that they were bound to
+be damned, no matter how good they were to me.”
+
+The primitive humanity of this touched Theron, and he nodded approbation
+with a tender smile in his eyes, forgetting for the moment that a
+personal application of the monologue had been hinted at.
+
+“But then later, as I grew up,” the sick man went on, “I learned that it
+was not altogether certain. Some of the authorities, I found, maintained
+that it was doubtful, and some said openly that there must be salvation
+possible for good people who lived in ignorance of the truth through no
+fault of their own. Then I had hope one day, and no hope the next, and
+as I did my work I thought it over, and in the evenings my father and
+I talked it over, and we settled nothing of it at all. Of course, how
+could we?”
+
+“Did you ever discuss the question with your sister?” it occurred
+suddenly to Theron to interpose. He was conscious of some daring in
+doing so, and he fancied that Michael's drawn face clouded a little at
+his words.
+
+“My sister is no theologian,” he answered briefly. “Women have no call
+to meddle with such matters. But I was saying--it was in the middle of
+these doubtings of mine that you came here to Octavius, and I noticed
+you on the streets, and once in the evening--I made no secret of it to
+my people--I sat in the back of your church and heard you preach. As I
+say, I liked you. It was your face, and what I thought it showed of the
+man underneath it, that helped settle my mind more than anything else. I
+said to myself: 'Here is a young man, only about my own age, and he has
+education and talents, and he does not seek to make money for himself,
+or a great name, but he is content to live humbly on the salary of a
+book-keeper, and devote all his time to prayer and the meditation of
+his religion, and preaching, and visiting the sick and the poor, and
+comforting them. His very face is a pleasure and a help for those in
+suffering and trouble to look at. The very sight of it makes one believe
+in pure thoughts and merciful deeds. I will not credit it that God
+intends damning such a man as that, or any like him!'”
+
+Theron bowed, with a slow, hesitating gravity of manner, and deep, not
+wholly complacent, attention on his face. Evidently all this was by way
+of preparation for something unpleasant.
+
+“That was only last spring,” said Michael. His tired voice sank for
+a sentence or two into a meditative half-whisper. “And it was MY last
+spring of all. I shall not be growing weak any more, or drawing hard
+breaths, when the first warm weather comes. It will be one season to
+me hereafter, always the same.” He lifted his voice with perceptible
+effort. “I am talking too much. The rest I can say in a word. Only half
+a year has gone by, and you have another face on you entirely. I had
+noticed the small changes before, one by one. I saw the great change,
+all of a sudden, the day of the picnic. I see it a hundred times more
+now, as you sit there. If it seemed to me like the face of a saint
+before, it is more like the face of a bar-keeper now!”
+
+This was quite too much. Theron rose, flushed to the temples, and
+scowled down at the helpless man in the chair. He swallowed the sharp
+words which came uppermost, and bit and moistened his lips as he forced
+himself to remember that this was a dying man, and Celia's brother, to
+whom she was devoted, and whom he himself felt he wanted to be very fond
+of. He got the shadow of a smile on to his countenance.
+
+“I fear you HAVE tired yourself unduly,” he said, in as non-contentious
+a tone as he could manage. He even contrived a little deprecatory laugh.
+“I am afraid your real quarrel is with the air of Octavius. It agrees
+with me so wonderfully--I am getting as fat as a seal. But I do hope I
+am not paying for it by such a wholesale deterioration inside. If my own
+opinion could be of any value, I should assure you that I feel myself
+an infinitely better and broader and stronger man than I was when I came
+here.”
+
+Michael shook his head dogmatically. “That is the greatest pity of all,”
+ he said, with renewed earnestness. “You are entirely deceived about
+yourself. You do not at all realize how you have altered your direction,
+or where you are going. It was a great misfortune for you, sir, that
+you did not keep among your own people. That poor half-brother of mine,
+though the drink was in him when he said that same to you, never spoke
+a truer word. Keep among your own people, Mr. Ware! When you go among
+others--you know what I mean--you have no proper understanding of what
+their sayings and doings really mean. You do not realize that they are
+held up by the power of the true Church, as a little child learning to
+walk is held up with a belt by its nurse. They can say and do things,
+and no harm at all come to them, which would mean destruction to you,
+because they have help, and you are walking alone. And so be said by me,
+Mr. Ware! Go back to the way you were brought up in, and leave alone the
+people whose ways are different from yours. You are a married man, and
+you are the preacher of a religion, such as it is. There can be nothing
+better for you than to go and strive to be a good husband, and to set a
+good example to the people of your Church, who look up to you--and mix
+yourself up no more with outside people and outside notions that only do
+you mischief. And that is what I wanted to say to you.”
+
+Theron took up his hat. “I take in all kindness what you have felt it
+your duty to say to me, Mr. Madden,” he said. “I am not sure that I have
+altogether followed you, but I am very sure you mean it well.”
+
+“I mean well by you,” replied Michael, wearily moving his head on the
+pillow, and speaking in an undertone of languor and pain, “and I mean
+well by others, that are nearer to me, and that I have a right to care
+more about. When a man lies by the site of his open grave, he does not
+be meaning ill to any human soul.”
+
+“Yes--thanks--quite so!” faltered Theron. He dallied for an instant
+with the temptation to seek some further explanation, but the sight of
+Michael's half-closed eyes and worn-out expression decided him against
+it. It did not seem to be expected, either, that he should shake hands,
+and with a few perfunctory words of hope for the invalid's recovery,
+which fell with a jarring note of falsehood upon his own ears, he turned
+and left the room. As he did so, Michael touched a bell on the table
+beside him.
+
+Theron drew a long breath in the hall, as the curtain fell behind him.
+It was an immense relief to escape from the oppressive humidity and heat
+of the flower-room, and from that ridiculous bore of a Michael as well.
+
+The middle-aged, grave-faced servant, warned by the bell, stood waiting
+to conduct him to the door.
+
+“I am sorry to have missed Miss Madden,” he said to her. “She must be
+quite worn out. Perhaps later in the day--”
+
+“She will not be seeing anybody today,” returned the woman. “She is
+going to New York this evening, and she is taking some rest against the
+journey.”
+
+“Will she be away long?” he asked mechanically. The servant's answer, “I
+have no idea,” hardly penetrated his consciousness at all.
+
+He moved down the steps, and along the gravel to the street, in a maze
+of mental confusion. When he reached the sidewalk, under the familiar
+elms, he paused, and made a definite effort to pull his thoughts
+together, and take stock of what had happened, of what was going to
+happen; but the thing baffled him. It was as if some drug had stupefied
+his faculties.
+
+He began to walk, and gradually saw that what he was thinking about was
+the fact of Celia's departure for New York that evening. He stared
+at this fact, at first in its nakedness, then clothed with reassuring
+suggestions that this was no doubt a trip she very often made. There was
+a blind sense of comfort in this idea, and he rested himself upon it.
+Yes, of course, she travelled a great deal. New York must be as familiar
+to her as Octavius was to him. Her going there now was quite a matter of
+course--the most natural thing in the world.
+
+Then there burst suddenly uppermost in his mind the other fact--that
+Father Forbes was also going to New York that evening. The two things
+spindled upward, side by side, yet separately, in his mental vision;
+then they twisted and twined themselves together. He followed their
+convolutions miserably, walking as if his eyes were shut.
+
+In slow fashion matters defined and arranged themselves before him.
+The process of tracing their sequence was all torture, but there was no
+possibility, no notion, of shirking any detail of the pain. The priest
+had spoken of his efforts to persuade Celia to go away for a few days,
+for rest and change of air and scene. He must have known only too well
+that she was going, but of that he had been careful to drop no hint. The
+possibility of accident was too slight to be worth considering. People
+on such intimate terms as Celia and the priest--people with such
+facilities for seeing each other whenever they desired--did not find
+themselves on the same train of cars, with the same long journey in
+view, by mere chance.
+
+Theron walked until dusk began to close in upon the autumn day. It grew
+colder, as he turned his face homeward. He wondered if it would freeze
+again over-night, and then remembered the shrivelled flowers in his
+wife's garden. For a moment they shaped themselves in a picture before
+his mind's eye; he saw their blackened foliage, their sicklied, drooping
+stalks, and wilted blooms, and as he looked, they restored themselves to
+the vigor and grace and richness of color of summer-time, as vividly as
+if they had been painted on a canvas. Or no, the picture he stared at
+was not on canvas, but on the glossy, varnished panel of a luxurious
+sleeping-car. He shook his head angrily and blinked his eyes again and
+again, to prevent their seeing, seated together in the open window above
+this panel, the two people he knew were there, gloved and habited for
+the night's journey, waiting for the train to start.
+
+
+
+“Very much to my surprise,” he found himself saying to Alice, watching
+her nervously as she laid the supper-table, “I find I must go to Albany
+tonight. That is, it isn't absolutely necessary, for that matter, but
+I think it may easily turn out to be greatly to my advantage to go.
+Something has arisen--I can't speak about it as yet--but the sooner I
+see the Bishop about it the better. Things like that occur in a man's
+life, where boldly striking out a line of action, and following it up
+without an instant's delay, may make all the difference in the world
+to him. Tomorrow it might be too late; and, besides, I can be home the
+sooner again.”
+
+Alice's face showed surprise, but no trace of suspicion. She spoke with
+studied amiability during the meal, and deferred with such unexpected
+tact to his implied desire not to be questioned as to the mysterious
+motives of the journey, that his mood instinctively softened and warmed
+toward her, as they finished supper.
+
+He smiled a little. “I do hope I shan't have to go on tomorrow to New
+York; but these Bishops of ours are such gad-abouts one never knows
+where to catch them. As like as not Sanderson may be down in New York,
+on Book-Concern business or something; and if he is, I shall have to
+chase him up. But, after all, perhaps the trip will do me good--the
+change of air and scene, you know.”
+
+“I'm sure I hope so,” said Alice, honestly enough. “If you do go on to
+New York, I suppose you'll go by the river-boat. Everybody talks so much
+of that beautiful sail down the Hudson.”
+
+“That's an idea!” exclaimed Theron, welcoming it with enthusiasm. “It
+hadn't occurred to me. If I do have to go, and it is as lovely as they
+make out, the next time I promise I won't go without you, my girl. I
+HAVE been rather out of sorts lately,” he continued. “When I come back,
+I daresay I shall be feeling better, more like my old self. Then I'm
+going to try, Alice, to be nicer to you than I have been of late. I'm
+afraid there was only too much truth in what you said this morning.”
+
+“Never mind what I said this morning--or any other time,” broke in
+Alice, softly. “Don't ever remember it again, Theron, if only--only--”
+
+He rose as she spoke, moved round the table to where she sat, and,
+bending over her, stopped the faltering sentence with a kiss. When was
+it, he wondered, that he had last kissed her? It seemed years, ages,
+ago.
+
+An hour later, with hat and overcoat on, and his valise in his hand, he
+stood on the doorstep of the parsonage, and kissed her once more before
+he turned and descended into the darkness. He felt like whistling as his
+feet sounded firmly on the plank sidewalk beyond the gate. It seemed as
+if he had never been in such capital good spirits before in his life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+The train was at a standstill somewhere, and the dull, ashen beginnings
+of daylight had made a first feeble start toward effacing the lamps in
+the car-roof, when the new day opened for Theron. A man who had just
+come in stopped at the seat upon which he had been stretched through the
+night, and, tapping him brusquely on the knee, said, “I'm afraid I must
+trouble you, sir.” After a moment of sleep-burdened confusion, he sat
+up, and the man took the other half of the seat and opened a newspaper,
+still damp from the press. It was morning, then.
+
+Theron rubbed a clear space upon the clouded window with his thumb, and
+looked out. There was nothing to be seen but a broad stretch of tracks,
+and beyond this the shadowed outlines of wagons and machinery in a yard,
+with a background of factory buildings.
+
+The atmosphere in the car was vile beyond belief. He thought of opening
+the window, but feared that the peremptory-looking man with the paper,
+who had wakened him and made him sit up, might object. They were the
+only people in the car who were sitting up. Backwards and forwards,
+on either side of the narrow aisle, the dim light disclosed recumbent
+forms, curled uncomfortably into corners, or sprawling at difficult
+angles which involved the least interference with one another. Here and
+there an upturned face gave a livid patch of surface for the mingled
+play of the gray dawn and the yellow lamp-light. A ceaseless noise of
+snoring was in the air.
+
+He got up and walked to the tank of ice-water at the end of the aisle,
+and took a drink from the most inaccessible portion of the common
+tin-cup's rim. The happy idea of going out on the platform struck him,
+and he acted upon it. The morning air was deliciously cool and fresh
+by contrast, and he filled his lungs with it again and again. Standing
+here, he could discern beyond the buildings to the right the faint
+purplish outlines of great rounded hills. Some workmen, one of them
+bearing a torch, were crouching along under the side of the train,
+pounding upon the resonant wheels with small hammers. He recalled having
+heard the same sound in the watches of the night, during a prolonged
+halt. Some one had said it was Albany. He smiled in spite of himself at
+the thought that Bishop Sanderson would never know about the visit he
+had missed.
+
+Swinging himself to the ground, he bent sidewise and looked forward down
+the long train. There were five, six, perhaps more, sleeping-cars on
+in front. Which one of them, he wondered--and then there came the sharp
+“All aboard!” from the other side, and he bundled up the steps again,
+and entered the car as the train slowly resumed its progress.
+
+He was wide-awake now, and quite at his ease. He took his seat, and
+diverted himself by winking gravely at a little child facing him on the
+next seat but one. There were four other children in the family party,
+encamped about the tired and still sleeping mother whose back was turned
+to Theron. He recalled now having noticed this poor woman last night,
+in the first stage of his journey--how she fed her brood from one of the
+numerous baskets piled under their feet, and brought water in a tin dish
+of her own from the tank to use in washing their faces with a rag, and
+loosened their clothes to dispose them for the night's sleep. The face
+of the woman, her manner and slatternly aspect, and the general effect
+of her belongings, bespoke squalid ignorance and poverty. Watching her,
+Theron had felt curiously interested in the performance. In one sense,
+it was scarcely more human than the spectacle of a cat licking her
+kittens, or a cow giving suck to her calf. Yet, in another, was there
+anything more human?
+
+The child who had wakened before the rest regarded him with placidity,
+declining to be amused by his winkings, but exhibiting no other emotion.
+She had been playing by herself with a couple of buttons tied on
+a string, and after giving a civil amount of attention to Theron's
+grimaces, she turned again to the superior attractions of this toy. Her
+self-possession, her capacity for self-entertainment, the care she took
+not to arouse the others, all impressed him very much. He felt in his
+pocket for a small coin, and, reaching forward, offered it to her. She
+took it calmly, bestowed a tranquil gaze upon him for a moment, and went
+back to the buttons. Her indifference produced an unpleasant sensation
+upon him somehow, and he rubbed the steaming window clear again, and
+stared out of it.
+
+The wide river lay before him, flanked by a precipitous wall of
+cliffs which he knew instantly must be the Palisades. There was an
+advertisement painted on them which he tried in vain to read. He was
+surprised to find they interested him so slightly. He had heard all his
+life of the Hudson, and especially of it just at this point. The reality
+seemed to him almost commonplace. His failure to be thrilled depressed
+him for the moment.
+
+“I suppose those ARE the Palisades?” he asked his neighbor.
+
+The man glanced up from his paper, nodded, and made as if to resume his
+reading. But his eye had caught something in the prospect through the
+window which arrested his attention. “By George!” he exclaimed, and
+lifted himself to get a clearer view.
+
+“What is it?” asked Theron, peering forth as well.
+
+“Nothing; only Barclay Wendover's yacht is still there. There's been a
+hitch of some sort. They were to have left yesterday.”
+
+“Is that it--that long black thing?” queried Theron. “That can't be a
+yacht, can it?”
+
+“What do you think it is?” answered the other. They were looking at a
+slim, narrow hull, lying at anchor, silent and motionless on the drab
+expanse of water. “If that ain't a yacht, they haven't begun building
+any yet. They're taking her over to the Mediterranean for a cruise, you
+know--around India and Japan for the winter, and home by the South Sea
+islands. Friend o' mine's in the party. Wouldn't mind the trip myself.”
+
+“But do you mean to say,” asked Theron, “that that little shell of a
+thing can sail across the ocean? Why, how many people would she hold?”
+
+The man laughed. “Well,” he said, “there's room for two sets of
+quadrilles in the chief saloon, if the rest keep their legs well up on
+the sofas. But there's only ten or a dozen in the party this time.
+More than that rather get in one another's way, especially with so many
+ladies on board.”
+
+Theron asked no more questions, but bent his head to see the last of
+this wonderful craft. The sight of it, and what he had heard about it,
+suddenly gave point and focus to his thoughts. He knew at last what it
+was that had lurked, formless and undesignated, these many days in the
+background of his dreams. The picture rose in his mind now of Celia as
+the mistress of a yacht. He could see her reclining in a low easy-chair
+upon the polished deck, with the big white sails billowing behind her,
+and the sun shining upon the deep blue waves, and glistening through the
+splash of spray in the air, and weaving a halo of glowing gold about
+her fair head. Ah, how the tender visions crowded now upon him! Eternal
+summer basked round this enchanted yacht of his fancy--summer sought
+now in Scottish firths or Norwegian fiords, now in quaint old Southern
+harbors, ablaze with the hues of strange costumes and half-tropical
+flowers and fruits, now in far-away Oriental bays and lagoons, or among
+the coral reefs and palm-trees of the luxurious Pacific. He dwelt upon
+these new imaginings with the fervent longing of an inland-born boy.
+Every vague yearning he had ever felt toward salt-water stirred again in
+his blood at the thought of the sea--with Celia.
+
+Why not? She had never visited any foreign land. “Sometime,” she had
+said, “sometime, no doubt I will.” He could hear again the wistful,
+musing tone of her voice. The thought had fascinations for her, it was
+clear. How irresistibly would it not appeal to her, presented with the
+added charm of a roving, vagrant independence on the high seas, free
+to speed in her snow-winged chariot wherever she willed over the deep,
+loitering in this place, or up-helm-and-away to another, with no more
+care or weight of responsibility than the gulls tossing through the air
+in her wake!
+
+Theron felt, rather than phrased to himself, that there would not be
+“ten or a dozen in the party” on that yacht. Without defining anything
+in his mind, he breathed in fancy the same bold ocean breeze which
+filled the sails, and toyed with Celia's hair; he looked with her as she
+sat by the rail, and saw the same waves racing past, the same vast dome
+of cloud and ether that were mirrored in her brown eyes, and there was
+no one else anywhere near them. Even the men in sailors' clothes,
+who would be pulling at ropes, or climbing up tarred ladders, kept
+themselves considerately outside the picture. Only Celia sat there, and
+at her feet, gazing up again into her face as in the forest, the man
+whose whole being had been consecrated to her service, her worship, by
+the kiss.
+
+“You've passed it now. I was trying to point out the Jumel house to
+you--where Aaron Burr lived, you know.”
+
+Theron roused himself from his day-dream, and nodded with a confused
+smile at his neighbor. “Thanks,” he faltered; “I didn't hear you. The
+train makes such a noise, and I must have been dozing.”
+
+He looked about him. The night aspect, as of a tramps' lodging-house,
+had quite disappeared from the car. Everybody was sitting up; and the
+more impatient were beginning to collect their bundles and hand-bags
+from the racks and floor. An expressman came through, jangling a huge
+bunch of brass checks on leathern thongs over his arm, and held parley
+with passengers along the aisle. Outside, citified streets, with stores
+and factories, were alternating in the moving panorama with open fields;
+and, even as he looked, these vacant spaces ceased altogether, and
+successive regular lines of pavement, between two tall rows of houses
+all alike, began to stretch out, wheel to the right, and swing off out
+of view, for all the world like the avenues of hop-poles he remembered
+as a boy. Then was a long tunnel, its darkness broken at stated
+intervals by brief bursts of daylight from overhead, and out of this all
+at once the train drew up its full length in some vast, vaguely lighted
+enclosure, and stopped.
+
+“Yes, this is New York,” said the man, folding up his paper, and
+springing to his feet. The narrow aisle was filled with many others who
+had been prompter still; and Theron stood, bag in hand, waiting till
+this energetic throng should have pushed itself bodily past him forth
+from the car. Then he himself made his way out, drifting with a sense of
+helplessness in their resolute wake. There rose in his mind the sudden
+conviction that he would be too late. All the passengers in the forward
+sleepers would be gone before he could get there. Yet even this terror
+gave him no new power to get ahead of anybody else in the tightly packed
+throng.
+
+Once on the broad platform, the others started off briskly; they all
+seemed to know just where they wanted to go, and to feel that no instant
+of time was to be lost in getting there. Theron himself caught some of
+this urgent spirit, and hurled himself along in the throng with reckless
+haste, knocking his bag against peoples' legs, but never pausing for
+apology or comment until he found himself abreast of the locomotive at
+the head of the train. He drew aside from the main current here, and
+began searching the platform, far and near, for those he had travelled
+so far to find.
+
+The platform emptied itself. Theron lingered on in puzzled hesitation,
+and looked about him. In the whole immense station, with its acres of
+tracks and footways, and its incessantly shifting processions of people,
+there was visible nobody else who seemed also in doubt, or who appeared
+capable of sympathizing with indecision in any form. Another train came
+in, some way over to the right, and before it had fairly stopped,
+swarms of eager men began boiling out of each end of each car, literally
+precipitating themselves over one another, it seemed to Theron, in their
+excited dash down the steps. As they caught their footing below, they
+started racing pell-mell down the platform to its end; there he saw
+them, looking more than ever like clustered bees in the distance,
+struggling vehemently in a dense mass up a staircase in the remote
+corner of the building.
+
+“What are those folks running for? Is there a fire?” he asked an
+amiable-faced young mulatto, in the uniform of the sleeping-car service,
+who passed him with some light hand-bags.
+
+“No; they's Harlem people, I guess--jes' catchin' the Elevated--that's
+all, sir,” he answered obligingly.
+
+At the moment some passengers emerged slowly from one of the
+sleeping-cars, and came loitering toward him.
+
+“Why, are there people still in these cars?” he asked eagerly. “Haven't
+they all gone?”
+
+“Some has; some ain't,” the porter replied. “They most generally take
+their time about it. They ain't no hurry, so long's they get out 'fore
+we're drawn round to the drill-yard.”
+
+There was still hope, then. Theron took up his bag and walked forward,
+intent upon finding some place from which he could watch unobserved the
+belated stragglers issuing from the sleeping-cars. He started back
+all at once, confronted by a semi-circle of violent men with whips
+and badges, who stunned his hearing by a sudden vociferous outburst of
+shouts and yells. They made furious gestures at him with their whips
+and fists, to enforce the incoherent babel of their voices; and in these
+gestures, as in their faces and cries, there seemed a great deal of
+menace and very little invitation. There was a big policeman sauntering
+near by, and Theron got the idea that it was his presence alone which
+protected him from open violence at the hands of these savage hackmen.
+He tightened his clutch on his valise, and, turning his back on them
+and their uproar, tried to brave it out and stand where he was. But the
+policeman came lounging slowly toward him, with such authority in his
+swaying gait, and such urban omniscience written all over his broad,
+sandy face, that he lost heart, and beat an abrupt retreat off to the
+right, where there were a number of doorways, near which other people
+had ventured to put down baggage on the floor.
+
+Here, somewhat screened from observation, he stood for a long time,
+watching at odd moments the ceaselessly varying phases of the strange
+scene about him, but always keeping an eye on the train he had himself
+arrived in. It was slow and dispiriting work. A dozen times his heart
+failed him, and he said to himself mournfully that he had had his
+journey for nothing. Then some new figure would appear, alighting from
+the steps of a sleeper, and hope revived in his breast.
+
+At last, when over half an hour of expectancy had been marked off by the
+big clock overhead, his suspense came to an end. He saw Father Forbes'
+erect and substantial form, standing on the car platform nearest of
+all, balancing himself with his white hands on the rails, waiting for
+something. Then after a little he came down, followed by a black porter,
+whose arms were burdened by numerous bags and parcels. The two stood
+a minute or so more in hesitation at the side of the steps. Then Celia
+descended, and the three advanced.
+
+The importance of not being discovered was uppermost in Theron's mind,
+now that he saw them actually coming toward him. He had avoided this the
+previous evening, in the Octavius depot, with some skill, he flattered
+himself. It gave him a pleasurable sense of being a man of affairs,
+almost a detective, to be confronted by the necessity now of baffling
+observation once again. He was still rather without plans for keeping
+them in view, once they left the station. He had supposed that he would
+be able to hear what hotel they directed their driver to take them to,
+and, failing that, he had fostered a notion, based upon a story he had
+read when a boy, of throwing himself into another carriage, and bidding
+his driver to pursue them in hot haste, and on his life not fail to
+track them down. These devices seemed somewhat empty, now that the
+urgent moment was at hand; and as he drew back behind some other
+loiterers, out of view, he sharply racked his wits for some way of
+coping with this most pressing problem.
+
+It turned out, however, that there was no difficulty at all. Father
+Forbes and Celia seemed to have no use for the hackmen, but moved
+straight forward toward the street, through the doorway next to that
+in which Theron cowered. He stole round, and followed them at a safe
+distance, making Celia's hat, and the portmanteau perched on the
+shoulder of the porter behind her, his guides. To his surprise, they
+still kept on their course when they had reached the sidewalk, and went
+over the pavement across an open square which spread itself directly
+in front of the station. Hanging as far behind as he dared, he saw them
+pass to the other sidewalk diagonally opposite, proceed for a block or
+so along this, and then separate at a corner. Celia and the negro lad
+went down a side street, and entered the door of a vast, tall red-brick
+building which occupied the whole block. The priest, turning on his
+heel, came back again and went boldly up the broad steps of the front
+entrance to this same structure, which Theron now discovered to be the
+Murray Hill Hotel.
+
+Fortune had indeed favored him. He not only knew where they were, but he
+had been himself a witness to the furtive way in which they entered
+the house by different doors. Nothing in his own limited experience of
+hotels helped him to comprehend the notion of a separate entrance
+for ladies and their luggage. He did not feel quite sure about the
+significance of what he had observed, in his own mind. But it was
+apparent to him that there was something underhanded about it.
+
+After lingering awhile on the steps of the hotel, and satisfying himself
+by peeps through the glass doors that the coast was clear, he ventured
+inside. The great corridor contained many people, coming, going, or
+standing about, but none of them paid any attention to him. At last
+he made up his mind, and beckoned a colored boy to him from a group
+gathered in the shadows of the big central staircase. Explaining that
+he did not at that moment wish a room, but desired to leave his bag, the
+boy took him to a cloak-room, and got him a check for the thing. With
+this in his pocket he felt himself more at his ease, and turned to walk
+away. Then suddenly he wheeled, and, bending his body over the counter
+of the cloak-room, astonished the attendant inside by the eagerness with
+which he scrutinized the piled rows of portmanteaus, trunks, overcoats,
+and bundles in the little enclosure.
+
+“What is it you want? Here's your bag, if you're looking for that,” this
+man said to him.
+
+“No, thanks; it's nothing,” replied Theron, straightening himself again.
+He had had a narrow escape. Father Forbes and Celia, walking side by
+side, had come down the small passage in which he stood, and had passed
+him so closely that he had felt her dress brush against him. Fortunately
+he had seen them in time, and by throwing himself half into the
+cloak-room, had rendered recognition impossible.
+
+He walked now in the direction they had taken, till he came to the
+polite colored man at an open door on the left, who was bowing people
+into the breakfast room. Standing in the doorway, he looked about him
+till his eye lighted upon his two friends, seated at a small table by
+a distant window, with a black waiter, card in hand, bending over in
+consultation with them.
+
+Returning to the corridor, he made bold now to march up to the desk and
+examine the register. The priest's name was not there. He found only the
+brief entry, “Miss Madden, Octavius,” written, not by her, but by Father
+Forbes. On the line were two numbers in pencil, with an “and” between
+them. An indirect question to one of the clerks helped him to an
+explanation of this. When there were two numbers, it meant that the
+guest in question had a parlor as well as a bedroom.
+
+Here he drew a long, satisfied breath, and turned away. The first half
+of his quest stood completed--and that much more fully and easily than
+he had dared to hope. He could not but feel a certain new respect for
+himself as a man of resource and energy. He had demonstrated that people
+could not fool with him with impunity.
+
+It remained to decide what he would do with his discovery, now that
+it had been so satisfactorily made. As yet, he had given this hardly a
+thought. Even now, it did not thrust itself forward as a thing demanding
+instant attention. It was much more important, first of all, to get a
+good breakfast. He had learned that there was another and less formal
+eating-place, downstairs in the basement by the bar, with an entrance
+from the street. He walked down by the inner stairway instead, feeling
+himself already at home in the big hotel. He ordered an ample breakfast,
+and came out while it was being served to wash and have his boots
+blacked, and he gave the man a quarter of a dollar. His pockets were
+filled with silver quarters, half-dollars, and dollars almost to a
+burdensome point, and in his valise was a bag full of smaller change,
+including many rolls of copper cents which Alice always counted and
+packed up on Mondays. In the hurry of leaving he had brought with him
+the church collections for the past two weeks. It occurred to him that
+he must keep a strict account of his expenditure. Meanwhile he gave ten
+cents to another man in a silk-sleeved cardigan jacket, who had merely
+stood by and looked at him while his boots were being polished. There
+was a sense of metropolitan affluence in the very atmosphere.
+
+The little table in the adjoining room, on which Theron found his meal
+in waiting for him, seemed a vision of delicate napery and refined
+appointments in his eyes. He was wolfishly hungry, and the dishes he
+looked upon gave him back assurances by sight and smell that he was very
+happy as well. The servant in attendance had an extremely white apron
+and a kindly black face. He bowed when Theron looked at him, with the
+air of a lifelong admirer and humble friend.
+
+“I suppose you'll have claret with your breakfast, sir?” he remarked, as
+if it were a matter of course.
+
+“Why, certainly,” answered Theron, stretching his legs contentedly
+under the table, and tucking the corner of his napkin in his
+neckband.--“Certainly, my good man.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+At ten o'clock Theron, loitering near the bookstall in the corridor, saw
+Father Forbes come downstairs, pass out through the big front doors, get
+into a carriage, and drive away.
+
+This relieved him of a certain sense of responsibility, and he retired
+to a corner sofa and sat down. The detective side of him being off duty,
+so to speak, there was leisure at last for reflection upon the other
+aspects of his mission. Yes; it was high time for him to consider what
+he should do next.
+
+It was easier to recognize this fact, however, than to act upon it.
+His mind was full of tricksy devices for eluding this task of serious
+thought which he sought to impose upon it. It seemed so much pleasanter
+not to think at all--but just to drift. He found himself watching with
+envy the men who, as they came out from their breakfast, walked over to
+the bookstall, and bought cigars from the row of boxes nestling there
+among the newspaper piles. They had such evident delight in the work
+of selection; they took off the ends of the cigars so carefully, and
+lighted them with such meditative attention,--he could see that he was
+wofully handicapped by not knowing how to smoke. He had had the most
+wonderful breakfast of his life, but even in the consciousness of
+comfortable repletion which pervaded his being, there was an obstinate
+sense of something lacking. No doubt a good cigar was the thing needed
+to round out the perfection of such a breakfast. He half rose once,
+fired by a sudden resolution to go over and get one. But of course that
+was nonsense; it would only make him sick. He sat down, and determinedly
+set himself to thinking.
+
+The effort finally brought fruit--and of a kind which gave him a very
+unhappy quarter of an hour. The lover part of him was uppermost now,
+insistently exposing all its raw surfaces to the stings and scalds of
+jealousy. Up to this moment, his brain had always evaded the direct
+question of how he and the priest relatively stood in Celia's
+estimation. It forced itself remorselessly upon him now; and his
+thoughts, so far from shirking the subject, seemed to rise up to meet
+it. It was extremely unpleasant, all this.
+
+But then a calmer view asserted itself. Why go out of his way to
+invent anguish for himself? The relations between Celia and the priest,
+whatever they might be, were certainly of old standing. They had begun
+before his time. His own romance was a more recent affair, and must take
+its place, of course, subject to existing conditions.
+
+It was all right for him to come to New York, and satisfy his legitimate
+curiosity as to the exact character and scope of these conditions. But
+it was foolish to pretend to be amazed or dismayed at the discovery of
+their existence. They were a part of the situation which he, with his
+eyes wide open, had accepted. It was his function to triumph over them,
+to supplant them, to rear the edifice of his own victorious passion upon
+their ruins. It was to this that Celia's kiss had invited him. It was
+for this that he had come to New York. To let his purpose be hampered or
+thwarted now by childish doubts and jealousies would be ridiculous.
+
+He rose, and holding himself very erect, walked with measured
+deliberation across the corridor and up the broad staircase. There was
+an elevator near at hand, he had noticed, but he preferred the stairs.
+One or two of the colored boys clustered about the foot of the stairs
+looked at him, and he had a moment of dreadful apprehension lest they
+should stop his progress. Nothing was said, and he went on. The numbers
+on the first floor were not what he wanted, and after some wandering
+about he ascended to the next, and then to the third. Every now and then
+he encountered attendants, but intuitively he bore himself with an air
+of knowing what he was about which protected him from inquiry.
+
+Finally he came upon the hall-way he sought. Passing along, he found
+the doors bearing the numbers he had memorized so well. They were quite
+close together, and there was nothing to help him guess which belonged
+to the parlor. He hesitated, gazing wistfully from one to the other. In
+the instant of indecision, even while his alert ear caught the sound of
+feet coming along toward the passage in which he stood, a thought came
+to quicken his resolve. It became apparent to him that his discovery
+gave him a certain new measure of freedom with Celia, a sort of right to
+take things more for granted than heretofore. He chose a door at random,
+and rapped distinctly on the panel.
+
+“Come!”
+
+The voice he knew for Celia's. The single word, however, recalled
+the usage of Father Forbes, which he had noted more than once at the
+pastorate, when Maggie had knocked.
+
+He straightened his shoulders, took his hat off, and pushed open the
+door. It WAS the parlor--a room of sofas, pianos, big easy-chairs, and
+luxurious bric-a-brac. A tall woman was walking up and down in it, with
+bowed head. Her back was at the moment toward him; and he looked at her,
+saying to himself that this was the lady of his dreams, the enchantress
+of the kiss, the woman who loved him--but somehow it did not seem to his
+senses to be Celia.
+
+She turned, and moved a step or two in his direction before she
+mechanically lifted her eyes and saw who was standing in her doorway.
+She stopped short, and regarded him. Her face was in the shadow, and he
+could make out nothing of its expression, save that there was a general
+effect of gravity about it.
+
+“I cannot receive you,” she said. “You must go away. You have no
+business to come like this without sending up your card.”
+
+Theron smiled at her. The notion of taking in earnest her inhospitable
+words did not at all occur to him. He could see now that her face had
+vexed and saddened lines upon it, and the sharpness of her tone remained
+in his ears. But he smiled again gently, to reassure her.
+
+“I ought to have sent up my name, I know,” he said, “but I couldn't bear
+to wait. I just saw your name on the register and--you WILL forgive me,
+won't you?--I ran to you at once. I know you won't have the heart to
+send me away!”
+
+She stood where she had halted, her arms behind her, looking him fixedly
+in the face. He had made a movement to advance, and offer his hand in
+greeting, but her posture checked the impulse. His courage began to
+falter under her inspection.
+
+“Must I really go down again?” he pleaded. “It's a crushing penalty to
+suffer for such little indiscretion. I was so excited to find you were
+here--I never stopped to think. Don't send me away; please don't!”
+
+Celia raised her head. “Well, shut the door, then,” she said, “since you
+are so anxious to stay. You would have done much better, though, very
+much better indeed, to have taken the hint and gone away.”
+
+“Will you shake hands with me, Celia?” he asked softly, as he came near
+her.
+
+“Sit there, please!” she made answer, indicating a chair in the middle
+of the room. He obeyed her, but to his surprise, instead of seating
+herself as well, she began walking up and down the length of the floor
+again. After a turn or two she stopped in front of him, and looked him
+full in the eye. The light from the windows was on her countenance now,
+and its revelations vaguely troubled him. It was a Celia he had never
+seen before who confronted him.
+
+“I am much occupied by other matters,” she said, speaking with cold
+impassivity, “but still I find myself curious to know just what limits
+you set to your dishonesty.”
+
+Theron stared up at her. His lips quivered, but no speech came to them.
+If this was all merely fond playfulness, it was being carried to a
+heart-aching point.
+
+“I saw you hiding about in the depot at home last evening,” she went on.
+“You come up here, pretending to have discovered me by accident, but I
+saw you following me from the Grand Central this morning.”
+
+“Yes, I did both these things,” said Theron, boldly. A fine bravery
+tingled in his veins all at once. He looked into her face and found the
+spirit to disregard its frowning aspect. “Yes, I did them,” he repeated
+defiantly. “That is not the hundredth part, or the thousandth part,
+of what I would do for your sake. I have got way beyond caring for any
+consequences. Position, reputation, the good opinion of fools--what are
+they? Life itself--what does it amount to? Nothing at all--with you in
+the balance!”
+
+“Yes--but I am not in the balance,” observed Celia, quietly. “That is
+where you have made your mistake.”
+
+Theron laid aside his hat. Women were curious creatures, he reflected.
+Some were susceptible to one line of treatment, some to another. His own
+reading of Celia had always been that she liked opposition, of a smart,
+rattling, almost cheeky, sort. One got on best with her by saying bright
+things. He searched his brain now for some clever quip that would strike
+sparks from the adamantine mood which for the moment it was her whim to
+assume. To cover the process, he smiled a little. Then her beauty,
+as she stood before him, her queenly form clad in a more stiffly
+fashionable dress than he had seen her wearing before, appealed afresh
+and overwhelmingly to him. He rose to his feet.
+
+“Have you forgotten our talk in the woods?” he murmured with a wooing
+note. “Have you forgotten the kiss?”
+
+She shook her head calmly. “I have forgotten nothing.”
+
+“Then why play with me so cruelly now?” he went on, in a voice of tender
+deprecation. “I know you don't mean it, but all the same it bruises my
+heart a little. I build myself so wholly upon you, I have made existence
+itself depend so completely upon your smile, upon a soft glance in your
+eyes, that when they are not there, why, I suffer, I don't know how to
+live at all. So be kinder to me, Celia!”
+
+“I was kinder, as you call it, when you came in,” she replied. “I
+told you to go away. That was pure kindness--more kindness than you
+deserved.”
+
+Theron looked at his hat, where it stood on the carpet by his feet. He
+felt tears coming into his eyes. “You tell me that you remember,” he
+said, in depressed tones, “and yet you treat me like this! Perhaps I am
+wrong. No doubt it is my own fault. I suppose I ought not to have come
+down here at all.”
+
+Celia nodded her head in assent to this view.
+
+“But I swear that I was helpless in the matter,” he burst forth. “I HAD
+to come! It would have been literally impossible for me to have stayed
+at home, knowing that you were here, and knowing also that--that--”
+
+“Go on!” said Celia, thrusting forth her under-lip a trifle, and
+hardening still further the gleam in her eye, as he stumbled over his
+sentence and left it unfinished. “What was the other thing that you were
+'knowing'?”
+
+“Knowing--” he took up the word hesitatingly--“knowing that life would
+be insupportable to me if I could not be near you.”
+
+She curled her lip at him. “You skated over the thin spot very well,”
+ she commented. “It was on the tip of your tongue to mention the fact
+that Father Forbes came with me. Oh, I can read you through and through,
+Mr. Ware.”
+
+In a misty way Theron felt things slipping from his grasp. The rising
+moisture blurred his eyes as their gaze clung to Celia.
+
+“Then if you do read me,” he protested, “you must know how utterly my
+heart and brain are filled with you. No other man in all the world can
+yield himself so absolutely to the woman he worships as I can. You have
+taken possession of me so wholly, I am not in the least master of myself
+any more. I don't know what I say or what I do. I am not worthy of you,
+I know. No man alive could be that. But no one else will idolize and
+reverence you as I do. Believe me when I say that, Celia! And how can
+you blame me, in your heart, for following you? 'Whither thou goest,
+I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my
+people, and thy God my God; where thou diest, will I die, and there will
+I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death
+part thee and me!'”
+
+Celia shrugged her shoulders, and moved a few steps away from him.
+Something like despair seized upon him.
+
+“Surely,” he urged with passion, “surely I have a right to remind you of
+the kiss!”
+
+She turned. “The kiss,” she said meditatively. “Yes, you have a right
+to remind me of it. Oh, yes, an undoubted right. You have another right
+too--the right to have the kiss explained to you. It was of the good-bye
+order. It signified that we weren't to meet again, and that just for one
+little moment I permitted myself to be sorry for you. That was all.”
+
+He held himself erect under the incredible words, and gazed blankly at
+her. The magnitude of what he confronted bewildered him; his mind was
+incapable of taking it in. “You mean--” he started to say, and then
+stopped, helplessly staring into her face, with a dropped jaw. It was
+too much to try to think what she meant.
+
+A little side-thought sprouted in the confusion of his brain. It grew
+until it spread a bitter smile over his pale face. “I know so little
+about kisses,” he said; “I am such a greenhorn at that sort of thing.
+You should have had pity on my inexperience, and told me just what brand
+of kiss it was I was getting. Probably I ought to have been able to
+distinguish, but you see I was brought up in the country--on a farm.
+They don't have kisses in assorted varieties there.”
+
+She bowed her head slightly. “Yes, you are entitled to say that,” she
+assented. “I was to blame, and it is quite fair that you should tell
+me so. You spoke of your inexperience, your innocence. That was why I
+kissed you in saying good-bye. It was in memory of that innocence of
+yours, to which you yourself had been busy saying good-bye ever since I
+first saw you. The idea seemed to me to mean something at the moment. I
+see now that it was too subtle. I do not usually err on that side.”
+
+Theron kept his hold upon her gaze, as if it afforded him bodily
+support. He felt that he ought to stoop and take up his hat, but he
+dared not look away from her. “Do you not err now, on the side of
+cruelty?” he asked her piteously.
+
+It seemed for the instant as if she were wavering, and he swiftly thrust
+forth other pleas. “I admit that I did wrong to follow you to New York.
+I see that now. But it was an offence committed in entire good faith.
+Think of it, Celia! I have never seen you since that day--that day in
+the woods. I have waited--and waited--with no sign from you, no chance
+of seeing you at all. Think what that meant to me! Everything in the
+world had been altered for me, torn up by the roots. I was a new being,
+plunged into a new existence. The kiss had done that. But until I saw
+you again, I could not tell whether this vast change in me and my life
+was for good or for bad--whether the kiss had come to me as a blessing
+or a curse. The suspense was killing me, Celia! That is why, when I
+learned that you were coming here, I threw everything to the winds and
+followed you. You blame me for it, and I bow my head and accept the
+blame. But are you justified in punishing me so terribly--in going on
+after I have confessed my error, and cutting my heart into little
+strips, putting me to death by torture?”
+
+“Sit down,” said Celia, with a softened weariness in her voice. She
+seated herself in front of him as he sank into his chair again. “I don't
+want to give you unnecessary pain, but you have insisted on forcing
+yourself into a position where there isn't anything else but pain. I
+warned you to go away, but you wouldn't. No matter how gently I may try
+to explain things to you, you are bound to get nothing but suffering out
+of the explanation. Now shall I still go on?”
+
+He inclined his head in token of assent, and did not lift it again, but
+raised toward her a disconsolate gaze from a pallid, drooping face.
+
+“It is all in a single word, Mr. Ware,” she proceeded, in low tones.
+“I speak for others as well as myself, mind you--we find that you are a
+bore.”
+
+Theron's stiffened countenance remained immovable. He continued to stare
+unblinkingly up into her eyes.
+
+“We were disposed to like you very much when we first knew you,”
+ Celia went on. “You impressed us as an innocent, simple, genuine young
+character, full of mother's milk. It was like the smell of early spring
+in the country to come in contact with you. Your honesty of nature,
+your sincerity in that absurd religion of yours, your general NAIVETE of
+mental and spiritual get-up, all pleased us a great deal. We thought you
+were going to be a real acquisition.”
+
+“Just a moment--whom do you mean by 'we'?” He asked the question calmly
+enough, but in a voice with an effect of distance in it.
+
+“It may not be necessary to enter into that,” she replied. “Let me go
+on. But then it became apparent, little by little, that we had misjudged
+you. We liked you, as I have said, because you were unsophisticated and
+delightfully fresh and natural. Somehow we took it for granted you would
+stay so. But that is just what you didn't do--just what you hadn't the
+sense to try to do. Instead, we found you inflating yourself with
+all sorts of egotisms and vanities. We found you presuming upon the
+friendships which had been mistakenly extended to you. Do you want
+instances? You went to Dr. Ledsmar's house that very day after I had
+been with you to get a piano at Thurston's, and tried to inveigle him
+into talking scandal about me. You came to me with tales about him. You
+went to Father Forbes, and sought to get him to gossip about us both.
+Neither of those men will ever ask you inside his house again. But that
+is only one part of it. Your whole mind became an unpleasant thing
+to contemplate. You thought it would amuse and impress us to hear you
+ridiculing and reviling the people of your church, whose money supports
+you, and making a mock of the things they believe in, and which you for
+your life wouldn't dare let them know you didn't believe in. You talked
+to us slightingly about your wife. What were you thinking of, not
+to comprehend that that would disgust us? You showed me once--do you
+remember?--a life of George Sand that you had just bought,--bought
+because you had just discovered that she had an unclean side to her
+life. You chuckled as you spoke to me about it, and you were for all the
+world like a little nasty boy, giggling over something dirty that older
+people had learned not to notice. These are merely random incidents.
+They are just samples, picked hap-hazard, of the things in you which
+have been opening our eyes, little by little, to our mistake. I
+can understand that all the while you really fancied that you were
+expanding, growing, in all directions. What you took to be improvement
+was degeneration. When you thought that you were impressing us most by
+your smart sayings and doings, you were reminding us most of the fable
+about the donkey trying to play lap-dog. And it wasn't even an honest,
+straightforward donkey at that!”
+
+She uttered these last words sorrowfully, her hands clasped in her lap,
+and her eyes sinking to the floor. A silence ensued. Then Theron reached
+a groping hand out for his hat, and, rising, walked with a lifeless,
+automatic step to the door.
+
+He had it half open, when the impossibility of leaving in this way
+towered suddenly in his path and overwhelmed him. He slammed the door
+to, and turned as if he had been whirled round by some mighty wind.
+He came toward her, with something almost menacing in the vigor of his
+movements, and in the wild look upon his white, set face. Halting
+before her, he covered the tailor-clad figure, the coiled red hair, the
+upturned face with its simulated calm, the big brown eyes, the rings
+upon the clasped fingers, with a sweeping, comprehensive glare of
+passion.
+
+“This is what you have done to me, then!”
+
+His voice was unrecognizable in his own ears--hoarse and broken, but
+with a fright-compelling something in it which stimulated his rage. The
+horrible notion of killing her, there where she sat, spread over the
+chaos of his mind with an effect of unearthly light--red and abnormally
+evil. It was like that first devilish radiance ushering in Creation, of
+which the first-fruit was Cain. Why should he not kill her? In all ages,
+women had been slain for less. Yes--and men had been hanged. Something
+rose and stuck in his dry throat; and as he swallowed it down, the
+sinister flare of murderous fascination died suddenly away into
+darkness. The world was all black again--plunged in the Egyptian night
+which lay upon the face of the deep while the earth was yet without form
+and void. He was alone on it--alone among awful, planetary solitudes
+which crushed him.
+
+The sight of Celia, sitting motionless only a pace in front of him, was
+plain enough to his eyes. It was an illusion. She was really a star,
+many millions of miles away. These things were hard to understand; but
+they were true, none the less. People seemed to be about him, but in
+fact he was alone. He recalled that even the little child in the car,
+playing with those two buttons on a string, would have nothing to do
+with him. Take his money, yes; take all he would give her--but not smile
+at him, not come within reach of him! Men closed the doors of their
+houses against him. The universe held him at arm's length as a nuisance.
+
+He was standing with one knee upon a sofa. Unconsciously he had moved
+round to the side of Celia; and as he caught the effect of her face now
+in profile, memory-pictures began at once building themselves in his
+brain--pictures of her standing in the darkened room of the cottage of
+death, declaiming the CONFITEOR; of her seated at the piano, under the
+pure, mellowed candle-light; of her leaning her chin on her hands, and
+gazing meditatively at the leafy background of the woods they were in;
+of her lying back, indolently content, in the deck-chair on the yacht of
+his fancy--that yacht which a few hours before had seemed so brilliantly
+and bewitchingly real to him, and now--now--!
+
+He sank in a heap upon the couch, and, burying his face among its
+cushions, wept and groaned aloud. His collapse was absolute. He sobbed
+with the abandonment of one who, in the veritable presence of death,
+lets go all sense of relation to life.
+
+Presently some one was touching him on the shoulder--an incisive,
+pointed touch--and he checked himself, and lifted his face.
+
+“You will have to get up, and present some sort of an appearance, and
+go away at once,” Celia said to him in low, rapid tones. “Some gentlemen
+are at the door, whom I have been waiting for.”
+
+As he stupidly sat up and tried to collect his faculties, Celia had
+opened the door and admitted two visitors. The foremost was Father
+Forbes; and he, with some whispered, smiling words, presented to her his
+companion, a tall, robust, florid man of middle-age, with a frock-coat
+and a gray mustache, sharply waxed. The three spoke for a moment
+together. Then the priest's wandering eye suddenly lighted upon the
+figure on the sofa. He stared, knitted his brows, and then lifted them
+in inquiry as he turned to Celia.
+
+“Poor man!” she said readily, in tones loud enough to reach Theron. “It
+is our neighbor, Father, the Rev. Mr. Ware. He hit upon my name in
+the register quite unexpectedly, and I had him come up. He is in sore
+distress--a great and sudden bereavement. He is going now. Won't you
+speak to him in the hall--a few words, Father? It would please him. He
+is terribly depressed.”
+
+The words had drawn Theron to his feet, as by some mechanical process.
+He took up his hat and moved dumbly to the door. It seemed to him that
+Celia intended offering to shake hands; but he went past her with only
+some confused exchange of glances and a murmured word or two. The tall
+stranger, who drew aside to let him pass, had acted as if he expected to
+be introduced. Theron, emerging into the hall, leaned against the wall
+and looked dreamily at the priest, who had stepped out with him.
+
+“I am very sorry to learn that you are in trouble, Mr. Ware,” Father
+Forbes said, gently enough, but in hurried tones. “Miss Madden is also
+in trouble. I mentioned to you that her brother had got into a serious
+scrape. I have brought my old friend, General Brady, to consult with
+her about the matter. He knows all the parties concerned, and he can set
+things right if anybody can.”
+
+“It's a mistake about me--I 'm not in any trouble at all,” said Theron.
+“I just dropped in to make a friendly call.”
+
+The priest glanced sharply at him, noting with a swift, informed
+scrutiny how he sprawled against the wall, and what vacuity his eyes and
+loosened lips expressed.
+
+“Then you have a talent for the inopportune amounting to positive
+genius,” said Father Forbes, with a stormy smile.
+
+“Tell me this, Father Forbes,” the other demanded, with impulsive
+suddenness, “is it true that you don't want me in your house again? Is
+that the truth or not?”
+
+“The truth is always relative, Mr. Ware,” replied the priest, turning
+away, and closing the door of the parlor behind him with a decisive
+sound.
+
+Left alone, Theron started to make his way downstairs. He found his
+legs wavering under him and making zigzag movements of their own in a
+bewildering fashion. He referred this at first, in an outburst of fresh
+despair, to the effects of his great grief. Then, as he held tight to
+the banister and governed his descent step by step, it occurred to him
+that it must be the wine he had had for breakfast. Upon examination, he
+was not so unhappy, after all.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+At the second peal of the door-bell, Brother Soulsby sat up in bed.
+It was still pitch-dark, and the memory of the first ringing fluttered
+musically in his awakening consciousness as a part of some dream he had
+been having.
+
+“Who the deuce can that be?” he mused aloud, in querulous resentment at
+the interruption.
+
+“Put your head out of the window, and ask,” suggested his wife,
+drowsily.
+
+The bell-pull scraped violently in its socket, and a third outburst of
+shrill reverberations clamored through the silent house.
+
+“Whatever you do, I'd do it before he yanked the whole thing to pieces,”
+ added the wife, with more decision.
+
+Brother Soulsby was wide awake now. He sprang to the floor, and, groping
+about in the obscurity, began drawing on some of his clothes. He rapped
+on the window during the process, to show that the house was astir, and
+a minute afterward made his way out of the room and down the stairs, the
+boards creaking under his stockinged feet as he went.
+
+Nearly a quarter of an hour passed before he returned. Sister Soulsby,
+lying in sleepy quiescence, heard vague sounds of voices at the front
+door, and did not feel interested enough to lift her head and listen.
+A noise of footsteps on the sidewalk followed, first receding from the
+door, then turning toward it, this second time marking the presence of
+more than one person. There seemed in this the implication of a guest,
+and she shook off the dozing impulses which enveloped her faculties,
+and waited to hear more. There came up, after further muttering of male
+voices, the undeniable chink of coins striking against one another. Then
+more footsteps, the resonant slam of a carriage door out in the street,
+the grinding of wheels turning on the frosty road, and the racket of a
+vehicle and horses going off at a smart pace into the night. Somebody
+had come, then. She yawned at the thought, but remained well awake,
+tracing idly in her mind, as various slight sounds rose from the lower
+floor, the different things Soulsby was probably doing. Their spare room
+was down there, directly underneath, but curiously enough no one seemed
+to enter it. The faint murmur of conversation which from time to
+time reached her came from the parlor instead. At last she heard her
+husband's soft tread coming up the staircase, and still there had been
+no hint of employing the guest-chamber. What could he be about? she
+wondered.
+
+Brother Soulsby came in, bearing a small lamp in his hand, the reddish
+light of which, flaring upward, revealed an unlooked-for display of
+amusement on his thin, beardless face. He advanced to the bedside,
+shading the glare from her blinking eyes with his palm, and grinned.
+
+“A thousand guesses, old lady,” he said, with a dry chuckle, “and you
+wouldn't have a ghost of a chance. You might guess till Hades froze over
+seven feet thick, and still you wouldn't hit it.”
+
+She sat up in turn. “Good gracious, man,” she began, “you don't mean--”
+ Here the cheerful gleam in his small eyes reassured her, and she sighed
+relief, then smiled confusedly. “I half thought, just for the minute,”
+ she explained, “it might be some bounder who'd come East to try and
+blackmail me. But no, who is it--and what on earth have you done with
+him?”
+
+Brother Soulsby cackled in merriment. “It's Brother Ware of Octavius,
+out on a little bat, all by himself. He says he's been on the loose only
+two days; but it looks more like a fortnight.”
+
+“OUR Brother Ware?” she regarded him with open-eyed surprise.
+
+“Well, yes, I suppose he's OUR Brother Ware--some,” returned Soulsby,
+genially. “He seems to think so, anyway.”
+
+“But tell me about it!” she urged eagerly. “What's the matter with him?
+How does he explain it?”
+
+“Well, he explains it pretty badly, if you ask me,” said Soulsby, with
+a droll, joking eye and a mock-serious voice. He seated himself on the
+side of the bed, facing her, and still considerately shielding her
+from the light of the lamp he held. “But don't think I suggested any
+explanations. I've been a mother myself. He's merely filled himself up
+to the neck with rum, in the simple, ordinary, good old-fashioned way.
+That's all. What is there to explain about that?”
+
+She looked meditatively at him for a time, shaking her head. “No,
+Soulsby,” she said gravely, at last. “This isn't any laughing matter.
+You may be sure something bad has happened, to set him off like that.
+I'm going to get up and dress right now. What time is it?”
+
+“Now don't you do anything of the sort,” he urged persuasively. “It
+isn't five o'clock; it'll be dark for nearly an hour yet. Just you turn
+over, and have another nap. He's all right. I put him on the sofa, with
+the buffalo robe round him. You'll find him there, safe and sound, when
+it's time for white folks to get up. You know how it breaks you up all
+day, not to get your full sleep.”
+
+“I don't care if it makes me look as old as the everlasting hills,” she
+said. “Can't you understand, Soulsby? The thing worries me--gets on my
+nerves. I couldn't close an eye, if I tried. I took a great fancy to
+that young man. I told you so at the time.”
+
+Soulsby nodded, and turned down the wick of his lamp a trifle. “Yes, I
+know you did,” he remarked in placidly non-contentious tones. “I
+can't say I saw much in him myself, but I daresay you're right.” There
+followed a moment's silence, during which he experimented in turning the
+wick up again. “But, anyway,” he went on, “there isn't anything you can
+do. He'll sleep it off, and the longer he's left alone the better. It
+isn't as if we had a hired girl, who'd come down and find him there, and
+give the whole thing away. He's fixed up there perfectly comfortable;
+and when he's had his sleep out, and wakes up on his own account, he'll
+be feeling a heap better.”
+
+The argument might have carried conviction, but on the instant the sound
+of footsteps came to them from the room below. The subdued noise rose
+regularly, as of one pacing to and fro.
+
+“No, Soulsby, YOU come back to bed, and get YOUR sleep out. I'm going
+downstairs. It's no good talking; I'm going.”
+
+Brother Soulsby offered no further opposition, either by talk or
+demeanor, but returned contentedly to bed, pulling the comforter over
+his ears, and falling into the slow, measured respiration of tranquil
+slumber before his wife was ready to leave the room.
+
+The dim, cold gray of twilight was sifting furtively through the lace
+curtains of the front windows when Mrs. Soulsby, lamp in hand, entered
+the parlor. She confronted a figure she would have hardly recognized.
+The man seemed to have been submerged in a bath of disgrace. From the
+crown of his head to the soles of his feet, everything about him was
+altered, distorted, smeared with an intangible effect of shame. In the
+vague gloom of the middle distance, between lamp and window, she noticed
+that his shoulders were crouched, like those of some shambling tramp.
+The frowsy shadows of a stubble beard lay on his jaw and throat. His
+clothes were crumpled and hung awry; his boots were stained with mud.
+The silk hat on the piano told its battered story with dumb eloquence.
+
+Lifting the lamp, she moved forward a step, and threw its light upon his
+face. A little groan sounded involuntarily upon her lips. Out of a mask
+of unpleasant features, swollen with drink and weighted by the physical
+craving for rest and sleep, there stared at her two bloodshot eyes,
+shining with the wild light of hysteria. The effect of dishevelled hair,
+relaxed muscles, and rough, half-bearded lower face lent to these eyes,
+as she caught their first glance, an unnatural glare. The lamp shook
+in her hand for an instant. Then, ashamed of herself, she held out her
+other hand fearlessly to him.
+
+“Tell me all about it, Theron,” she said calmly, and with a soothing,
+motherly intonation in her voice.
+
+He did not take the hand she offered, but suddenly, with a wailing moan,
+cast himself on his knees at her feet. He was so tall a man that the
+movement could have no grace. He abased his head awkwardly, to bury
+it among the folds of the skirts at her ankles. She stood still for a
+moment, looking down upon him. Then, blowing out the light, she reached
+over and set the smoking lamp on the piano near by. The daylight made
+things distinguishable in a wan, uncertain way, throughout the room.
+
+“I have come out of hell, for the sake of hearing some human being speak
+to me like that!”
+
+The thick utterance proceeded in a muffled fashion from where his face
+grovelled against her dress. Its despairing accents appealed to her, but
+even more was she touched by the ungainly figure he made, sprawling on
+the carpet.
+
+“Well, since you are out, stay out,” she answered, as reassuringly as
+she could. “But get up and take a seat here beside me, like a sensible
+man, and tell me all about it. Come! I insist!”
+
+In obedience to her tone, and the sharp tug at his shoulder with which
+she emphasized it, he got slowly to his feet, and listlessly seated
+himself on the sofa to which she pointed. He hung his head, and began
+catching his breath with a periodical gasp, half hiccough, half sob.
+
+“First of all,” she said, in her brisk, matter-of-fact manner, “don't
+you want to lie down there again, and have me tuck you up snug with the
+buffalo robe, and go to sleep? That would be the best thing you could
+do.”
+
+He shook his head disconsolately, from side to side. “I can't!” he
+groaned, with a swifter recurrence of the sob-like convulsions. “I'm
+dying for sleep, but I'm too--too frightened!”
+
+“Come, I'll sit beside you till you drop off,” she said, with masterful
+decision. He suffered himself to be pushed into recumbency on the couch,
+and put his head with docility on the pillow she brought from the spare
+room. When she had spread the fur over him, and pushed her chair close
+to the sofa, she stood by it for a little, looking down in meditation at
+his demoralized face. Under the painful surface-blur of wretchedness
+and fatigued debauchery, she traced reflectively the lineaments of the
+younger and cleanlier countenance she had seen a few months before.
+Nothing essential had been taken away. There was only this pestiferous
+overlaying of shame and cowardice to be removed. The face underneath was
+still all right.
+
+With a soft, maternal touch, she smoothed the hair from his forehead
+into order. Then she seated herself, and, when he got his hand out from
+under the robe and thrust it forth timidly, she took it in hers and
+held it in a warm, sympathetic grasp. He closed his eyes at this, and
+gradually the paroxysmal catch in his breathing lapsed. The daylight
+strengthened, until at last tiny flecks of sunshine twinkled in the
+meshes of the further curtains at the window. She fancied him asleep,
+and gently sought to disengage her hand, but his fingers clutched at it
+with vehemence, and his eyes were wide open.
+
+“I can't sleep at all,” he murmured. “I want to talk.”
+
+“There 's nothing in the world to hinder you,” she commented smilingly.
+
+“I tell you the solemn truth,” he said, lifting his voice in dogged
+assertion: “the best sermon I ever preached in my life, I preached only
+three weeks ago, at the camp-meeting. It was admitted by everybody to be
+far and away my finest effort! They will tell you the same!”
+
+“It's quite likely,” assented Sister Soulsby. “I quite believe it.”
+
+“Then how can anybody say that I've degenerated, that I've become a
+fool?” he demanded.
+
+“I haven't heard anybody hint at such a thing,” she answered quietly.
+
+“No, of course, YOU haven't heard them!” he cried. “I heard them,
+though!” Then, forcing himself to a sitting posture, against the
+restraint of her hand, he flung back the covering. “I'm burning hot
+already! Yes, those were the identical words: I haven't improved; I've
+degenerated. People hate me; they won't have me in their houses. They
+say I'm a nuisance and a bore. I'm like a little nasty boy. That's what
+they say. Even a young man who was dying--lying right on the edge of his
+open grave--told me solemnly that I reminded him of a saint once, but I
+was only fit for a barkeeper now. They say I really don't know anything
+at all. And I'm not only a fool, they say, I'm a dishonest fool into the
+bargain!”
+
+“But who says such twaddle as that?” she returned consolingly. The
+violence of his emotion disturbed her. “You mustn't imagine such things.
+You are among friends here. Other people are your friends, too. They
+have the very highest opinion of you.”
+
+“I haven't a friend on earth but you!” he declared solemnly. His eyes
+glowed fiercely, and his voice sank into a grave intensity of tone. “I
+was going to kill myself. I went on to the big bridge to throw myself
+off, and a policeman saw me trying to climb over the railing, and he
+grabbed me and marched me away. Then he threw me out at the entrance,
+and said he would club my head off if I came there again. And then I
+went and stood and let the cable-cars pass close by me, and twenty times
+I thought I had the nerve to throw myself under the next one, and then
+I waited for the next--and I was afraid! And then I was in a crowd
+somewhere, and the warning came to me that I was going to die. The fool
+needn't go kill himself: God would take care of that. It was my heart,
+you know. I've had that terrible fluttering once before. It seized me
+this time, and I fell down in the crowd, and some people walked over
+me, but some one else helped me up, and let me sit down in a big lighted
+hallway, the entrance to some theatre, and some one brought me some
+brandy, but somebody else said I was drunk, and they took it away again,
+and put me out. They could see I was a fool, that I hadn't a friend
+on earth. And when I went out, there was a big picture of a woman in
+tights, and the word 'Amazons' overhead--and then I remembered you. I
+knew you were my friend--the only one I have on earth.”
+
+“It is very flattering--to be remembered like that,” said Sister
+Soulsby, gently. The disposition to laugh was smothered by a pained
+perception of the suffering he was undergoing. His face had grown drawn
+and haggard under the burden of his memories as he rambled on.
+
+“So I came straight to you,” he began again. “I had just money enough
+left to pay my fare. The rest is in my valise at the hotel--the Murray
+Hill Hotel. It belongs to the church. I stole it from the church. When I
+am dead they can get it back again!”
+
+Sister Soulsby forced a smile to her lips. “What nonsense you
+talk--about dying!” she exclaimed. “Why, man alive, you'll sleep this
+all off like a top, if you'll only lie down and give yourself a chance.
+Come, now, you must do as you're told.”
+
+With a resolute hand, she made him lie down again, and once more covered
+him with the fur. He submitted, and did not even offer to put out his
+arm this time, but looked in piteous dumbness at her for a long time.
+While she sat thus in silence, the sound of Brother Soulsby moving about
+upstairs became audible.
+
+Theron heard it, and the importance of hurrying on some further
+disclosure seemed to suggest itself. “I can see you think I'm just
+drunk,” he said, in low, sombre tones. “Of course that's what HE
+thought. The hackman thought so, and so did the conductor, and
+everybody. But I hoped you would know better. I was sure you would see
+that it was something worse than that. See here, I'll tell you. Then
+you'll understand. I've been drinking for two days and one whole night,
+on my feet all the while, wandering alone in that big strange New York,
+going through places where they murdered men for ten cents, mixing
+myself up with the worst people in low bar-rooms and dance-houses, and
+they saw I had money in my pocket, too, and yet nobody touched me, or
+offered to lay a finger on me. Do you know why? They understood that I
+wanted to get drunk, and couldn't. The Indians won't harm an idiot, or
+lunatic, you know. Well, it was the same with these vilest of the vile.
+They saw that I was a fool whom God had taken hold of, to break his
+heart first, and then to craze his brain, and then to fling him on a
+dunghill to die like a dog. They believe in God, those people. They're
+the only ones who do, it seems to me. And they wouldn't interfere when
+they saw what He was doing to me. But I tell you I wasn't drunk. I
+haven't been drunk. I'm only heart-broken, and crushed out of shape
+and life--that's all. And I've crawled here just to have a friend by me
+when--when I come to the end.”
+
+“You're not talking very sensibly, or very bravely either, Theron Ware,”
+ remarked his companion. “It's cowardly to give way to notions like
+that.”
+
+“Oh, I 'm not afraid to die; don't think that,” he remonstrated wearily.
+“If there is a Judgment, it has hit me as hard as it can already. There
+can't be any hell worse than that I've gone through. Here I am talking
+about hell,” he continued, with a pained contraction of the muscles
+about his mouth--a stillborn, malformed smile--“as if I believed in one!
+I've got way through all my beliefs, you know. I tell you that frankly.”
+
+“It's none of my business,” she reassured him. “I'm not your Bishop, or
+your confessor. I'm just your friend, your pal, that's all.”
+
+“Look here!” he broke in, with some animation and a new intensity of
+glance and voice. “If I was going to live, I'd have some funny things to
+tell. Six months ago I was a good man. I not only seemed to be good, to
+others and to myself, but I was good. I had a soul; I had a conscience.
+I was going along doing my duty, and I was happy in it. We were poor,
+Alice and I, and people behaved rather hard toward us, and sometimes we
+were a little down in the mouth about it; but that was all. We really
+were happy; and I--I really was a good man. Here's the kind of joke God
+plays! You see me here six months after. Look at me! I haven't got an
+honest hair in my head. I'm a bad man through and through, that's what
+I am. I look all around at myself, and there isn't an atom left anywhere
+of the good man I used to be. And, mind you, I never lifted a finger
+to prevent the change. I didn't resist once; I didn't make any fight.
+I just walked deliberately down-hill, with my eyes wide open. I told
+myself all the while that I was climbing uphill instead, but I knew in
+my heart that it was a lie. Everything about me was a lie. I wouldn't be
+telling the truth, even now, if--if I hadn't come to the end of my rope.
+Now, how do you explain that? How can it be explained? Was I really
+rotten to the core all the time, years ago, when I seemed to everybody,
+myself and the rest, to be good and straight and sincere? Was it all a
+sham, or does God take a good man and turn him into an out-and-out bad
+one, in just a few months--in the time that it takes an ear of corn to
+form and ripen and go off with the mildew? Or isn't there any God at
+all--but only men who live and die like animals? And that would explain
+my case, wouldn't it? I got bitten and went vicious and crazy, and
+they've had to chase me out and hunt me to my death like a mad dog! Yes,
+that makes it all very simple. It isn't worth while to discuss me at
+all as if I had a soul, is it? I'm just one more mongrel cur that's gone
+mad, and must be put out of the way. That's all.”
+
+“See here,” said Sister Soulsby, alertly, “I half believe that a good
+cuffing is what you really stand in need of. Now you stop all this
+nonsense, and lie quiet and keep still! Do you hear me?”
+
+The jocose sternness which she assumed, in words and manner, seemed to
+soothe him. He almost smiled up at her in a melancholy way, and sighed
+profoundly.
+
+“I've told you MY religion before,” she went on with gentleness. “The
+sheep and the goats are to be separated on Judgment Day, but not a
+minute sooner. In other words, as long as human life lasts, good, bad,
+and indifferent are all braided up together in every man's nature, and
+every woman's too. You weren't altogether good a year ago, any more than
+you're altogether bad now. You were some of both then; you're some
+of both now. If you've been making an extra sort of fool of yourself
+lately, why, now that you recognize it, the only thing to do is to slow
+steam, pull up, and back engine in the other direction. In that way
+you'll find things will even themselves up. It's a see-saw with all
+of us, Theron Ware--sometimes up; sometimes down. But nobody is rotten
+clear to the core.”
+
+He closed his eyes, and lay in silence for a time.
+
+“This is what day of the week?” he asked, at last.
+
+“Friday, the nineteenth.”
+
+“Wednesday--that would be the seventeenth. That was the day ordained for
+my slaughter. On that morning, I was the happiest man in the world.
+No king could have been so proud and confident as I was. A wonderful
+romance had come to me. The most beautiful young woman in the world, the
+most talented too, was waiting for me. An express train was carrying me
+to her, and it couldn't go fast enough to keep up with my eagerness. She
+was very rich, and she loved me, and we were to live in eternal summer,
+wherever we liked, on a big, beautiful yacht. No one else had such a
+life before him as that. It seemed almost too good for me, but I thought
+I had grown and developed so much that perhaps I would be worthy of it.
+Oh, how happy I was! I tell you this because--because YOU are not like
+the others. You will understand.”
+
+“Yes, I understand,” she said patiently. “Well--you were being so
+happy.”
+
+“That was in the morning--Wednesday the seventeenth--early in the
+morning. There was a little girl in the car, playing with some buttons,
+and when I tried to make friends with her, she looked at me, and she
+saw, right at a glance, that I was a fool. 'Out of the mouths of babes
+and sucklings,' you know. She was the first to find it out. It began
+like that, early in the morning. But then after that everybody knew it.
+They had only to look at me and they said: 'Why, this is a fool--like a
+little nasty boy; we won't let him into our houses; we find him a bore.'
+That is what they said.”
+
+“Did SHE say it?” Sister Soulsby permitted herself to ask.
+
+For answer Theron bit his lips, and drew his chin under the fur, and
+pushed his scowling face into the pillow. The spasmodic, sob-like gasps
+began to shake him again. She laid a compassionate hand upon his hot
+brow.
+
+“That is why I made my way here to you,” he groaned piteously. “I knew
+you would sympathize; I could tell it all to you. And it was so awful,
+to die there alone in the strange city--I couldn't do it--with nobody
+near me who liked me, or thought well of me. Alice would hate me. There
+was no one but you. I wanted to be with you--at the last.”
+
+His quavering voice broke off in a gust of weeping, and his face frankly
+surrendered itself to the distortions of a crying child's countenance,
+wide-mouthed and tragically grotesque in its abandonment of control.
+
+Sister Soulsby, as her husband's boots were heard descending the stairs,
+rose, and drew the robe up to half cover his agonized visage. She patted
+the sufferer softly on the head, and then went to the stair-door.
+
+“I think he'll go to sleep now,” she said, lifting her voice to the
+new-comer, and with a backward nod toward the couch. “Come out into the
+kitchen while I get breakfast, or into the sitting-room, or somewhere,
+so as not to disturb him. He's promised me to lie perfectly quiet, and
+try to sleep.”
+
+When they had passed together out of the room, she turned. “Soulsby,”
+ she said with half-playful asperity, “I'm disappointed in you. For a man
+who's knocked about as much as you have, I must say you've picked up an
+astonishingly small outfit of gumption. That poor creature in there is
+no more drunk than I am. He's been drinking--yes, drinking like a
+fish; but it wasn't able to make him drunk. He's past being drunk; he's
+grief-crazy. It's a case of 'woman.' Some girl has made a fool of him,
+and decoyed him up in a balloon, and let him drop. He's been hurt bad,
+too.”
+
+“We have all been hurt in our day and generation,” responded Brother
+Soulsby, genially. “Don't you worry; he'll sleep that off too. It takes
+longer than drink, and it doesn't begin to be so pleasant, but it can be
+slept off. Take my word for it, he'll be a different man by noon.”
+
+When noon came, however, Brother Soulsby was on his way to summon one
+of the village doctors. Toward nightfall, he went out again to telegraph
+for Alice.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+Spring fell early upon the pleasant southern slopes of the Susquehanna
+country. The snow went off as by magic. The trees budded and leaved
+before their time. The birds came and set up their chorus in the elms,
+while winter seemed still a thing of yesterday.
+
+Alice, clad gravely in black, stood again upon a kitchen-stoop, and
+looked across an intervening space of back-yards and fences to where the
+tall boughs, fresh in their new verdure, were silhouetted against the
+pure blue sky. The prospect recalled to her irresistibly another sunlit
+morning, a year ago, when she had stood in the doorway of her own
+kitchen, and surveyed a scene not unlike this; it might have been with
+the same carolling robins, the same trees, the same azure segment of
+the tranquil, speckless dome. Then she was looking out upon surroundings
+novel and strange to her, among which she must make herself at home as
+best she could. But at least the ground was secure under her feet; at
+least she had a home, and a word from her lips could summon her husband
+out, to stand beside her with his arm about her, and share her buoyant,
+hopeful joy in the promises of spring.
+
+To think that that was only one little year ago--the mere revolution of
+four brief seasons! And now--!
+
+Sister Soulsby, wiping her hands on her apron, came briskly out upon
+the stoop. Some cheerful commonplace was on her tongue, but a glance at
+Alice's wistful face kept it back. She passed an arm around her waist
+instead, and stood in silence, looking at the elms.
+
+“It brings back memories to me--all this,” said Alice, nodding her head,
+and not seeking to dissemble the tears which sprang to her eyes.
+
+“The men will be down in a minute, dear,” the other reminded her.
+“They'd nearly finished packing before I put the biscuits in the oven.
+We mustn't wear long faces before folks, you know.”
+
+“Yes, I know,” murmured Alice. Then, with a sudden impulse, she turned
+to her companion. “Candace,” she said fervently, “we're alone here for
+the moment; I must tell you that if I don't talk gratitude to you, it's
+simply and solely because I don't know where to begin, or what to say.
+I'm just dumfounded at your goodness. It takes my speech away. I only
+know this, Candace: God will be very good to you.”
+
+“Tut! tut!” replied Sister Soulsby, “that's all right, you dear thing. I
+know just how you feel. Don't dream of being under obligation to explain
+it to me, or to thank us at all. We've had all sorts of comfort out of
+the thing--Soulsby and I. We used to get downright lonesome, here all
+by ourselves, and we've simply had a winter of pleasant company instead,
+that s all. Besides, there's solid satisfaction in knowing that at
+last, for once in our lives we've had a chance to be of some real use to
+somebody who truly needed it. You can't imagine how stuck up that makes
+us in our own conceit. We feel as if we were George Peabody and Lady
+Burdett-Coutts, and several other philanthropists thrown in. No,
+seriously, don't think of it again. We're glad to have been able to do
+it all; and if you only go ahead now, and prosper and be happy, why,
+that will be the only reward we want.”
+
+“I hope we shall do well,” said Alice. “Only tell me this, Candace. You
+do think I was right, don't you, in insisting on Theron's leaving the
+ministry altogether? He seems convinced enough now that it was the right
+thing to do; but I grow nervous sometimes lest he should find it harder
+than he thought to get along in business, and regret the change--and
+blame me.”
+
+“I think you may rest easy in your mind about that,” the other
+responded. “Whatever else he does, he will never want to come within
+gunshot of a pulpit again. It came too near murdering him for that.”
+
+Alice looked at her doubtfully. “Something came near murdering him, I
+know. But it doesn't seem to me that I would say it was the ministry.
+And I guess you know pretty well yourself what it was. Of course, I've
+never asked any questions, and I've hushed up everybody at Octavius
+who tried to quiz me about it--his disappearance and my packing up
+and leaving, and all that--and I've never discussed the question with
+you--but--”
+
+“No, and there's no good going into it now,” put in Sister Soulsby,
+with amiable decisiveness. “It's all past and gone. In fact, I hardly
+remember much about it now myself. He simply got into deep water, poor
+soul, and we've floated him out again, safe and sound. That's all.
+But all the same, I was right in what I said. He was a mistake in the
+ministry.”
+
+“But if you'd known him in previous years,” urged Alice, plaintively,
+“before we were sent to that awful Octavius. He was the very ideal of
+all a young minister should be. People used to simply worship him,
+he was such a perfect preacher, and so pure-minded and friendly
+with everybody, and threw himself into his work so. It was all that
+miserable, contemptible Octavius that did the mischief.”
+
+Sister Soulsby slowly shook her head. “If there hadn't been a screw
+loose somewhere,” she said gently, “Octavius wouldn't have hurt him. No,
+take my word for it, he never was the right man for the place. He seemed
+to be, no doubt, but he wasn't. When pressure was put on him, it found
+out his weak spot like a shot, and pushed on it, and--well, it came near
+smashing him, that's all.”
+
+“And do you think he'll always be a--a back-slider,” mourned Alice.
+
+“For mercy's sake, don't ever try to have him pretend to be anything
+else!” exclaimed the other. “The last state of that man would be worse
+than the first. You must make up your mind to that. And you mustn't show
+that you're nervous about it. You mustn't get nervous! You mustn't be
+afraid of things. Just you keep a stiff upper lip, and say you WILL get
+along, you WILL be happy. That's your only chance, Alice. He isn't going
+to be an angel of light, or a saint, or anything of that sort, and it's
+no good expecting it. But he'll be just an average kind of man--a little
+sore about some things, a little wiser than he was about some others.
+You can get along perfectly with him, if you only keep your courage up,
+and don't show the white feather.”
+
+“Yes, I know; but I've had it pretty well taken out of me,” commented
+Alice. “It used to come easy to me to be cheerful and resolute and all
+that; but it's different now.”
+
+Sister Soulsby stole a swift glance at the unsuspecting face of her
+companion which was not all admiration, but her voice remained patiently
+affectionate. “Oh, that'll all come back to you, right enough. You'll
+have your hands full, you know, finding a house, and unpacking all your
+old furniture, and buying new things, and getting your home settled.
+It'll keep you so busy you won't have time to feel strange or lonesome,
+one bit. You'll see how it'll tone you up. In a year's time you won't
+know yourself in the looking-glass.”
+
+“Oh, my health is good enough,” said Alice; “but I can't help thinking,
+suppose Theron should be taken sick again, away out there among
+strangers. You know he's never appeared to me to have quite got his
+strength back. These long illnesses, you know, they always leave a mark
+on a man.”
+
+“Nonsense! He's strong as an ox,” insisted Sister Soulsby. “You mark my
+word, he'll thrive in Seattle like a green bay-tree.”
+
+“Seattle!” echoed Alice, meditatively. “It sounds like the other end of
+the world, doesn't it?”
+
+The noise of feet in the house broke upon the colloquy, and the women
+went indoors, to join the breakfast party. During the meal, it was
+Brother Soulsby who bore the burden of the conversation. He was full of
+the future of Seattle and the magnificent impending development of that
+Pacific section. He had been out there, years ago, when it was next door
+to uninhabited. He had visited the district twice since, and the changes
+discoverable each new time were more wonderful than anything Aladdin's
+lamp ever wrought. He had secured for Theron, through some of his
+friends in Portland, the superintendency of a land and real estate
+company, which had its headquarters in Seattle, but ambitiously linked
+its affairs with the future of all Washington Territory. In an hour's
+time the hack would come to take the Wares and their baggage to the
+depot, the first stage in their long journey across the continent
+to their new home. Brother Soulsby amiably filled the interval with
+reminiscences of the Oregon of twenty years back, with instructive
+dissertations upon the soil, climate, and seasons of Puget Sound and the
+Columbia valley, and, above all, with helpful characterizations of the
+social life which had begun to take form in this remotest West. He had
+nothing but confidence, to all appearances, in the success of his young
+friend, now embarking on this new career. He seemed so sanguine about
+it that the whole atmosphere of the breakfast room lightened up, and the
+parting meal, surrounded by so many temptations to distraught broodings
+and silences as it was, became almost jovial in its spirit.
+
+At last, it was time to look for the carriage. The trunks and hand-bags
+were ready in the hall, and Sister Soulsby was tying up a package of
+sandwiches for Alice to keep by her in the train.
+
+Theron, with hat in hand, and overcoat on arm, loitered restlessly into
+the kitchen, and watched this proceeding for a moment. Then he sauntered
+out upon the stoop, and, lifting his head and drawing as long a breath
+as he could, looked over at the elms.
+
+Perhaps the face was older and graver; it was hard to tell. The long
+winter's illness, with its recurring crises and sustained confinement,
+had bleached his skin and reduced his figure to gauntness, but there was
+none the less an air of restored and secure good health about him. Only
+in the eyes themselves, as they rested briefly upon the prospect, did
+a substantial change suggest itself. They did not dwell fondly upon the
+picture of the lofty, spreading boughs, with their waves of sap-green
+leafage stirring against the blue. They did not soften and glow this
+time, at the thought of how wholly one felt sure of God's goodness in
+these wonderful new mornings of spring.
+
+They looked instead straight through the fairest and most moving
+spectacle in nature's processional, and saw afar off, in conjectural
+vision, a formless sort of place which was Seattle. They surveyed its
+impalpable outlines, its undefined dimensions, with a certain cool
+glitter of hard-and-fast resolve. There rose before his fancy, out of
+the chaos of these shapeless imaginings, some faces of men, then more
+behind them, then a great concourse of uplifted countenances, crowded
+close together as far as the eye could reach. They were attentive faces
+all, rapt, eager, credulous to a degree. Their eyes were admiringly bent
+upon a common object of excited interest. They were looking at HIM; they
+strained their ears to miss no cadence of his voice. Involuntarily
+he straightened himself, stretched forth his hand with the pale, thin
+fingers gracefully disposed, and passed it slowly before him from side
+to side, in a comprehensive, stately gesture. The audience rose at him,
+as he dropped his hand, and filled his day-dream with a mighty roar of
+applause, in volume like an ocean tempest, yet pitched for his hearing
+alone.
+
+He smiled, shook himself with a little delighted tremor, and turned on
+the stoop to the open door.
+
+“What Soulsby said about politics out there interested me enormously,”
+ he remarked to the two women. “I shouldn't be surprised if I found
+myself doing something in that line. I can speak, you know, if I can't
+do anything else. Talk is what tells, these days. Who knows? I may turn
+up in Washington a full-blown senator before I'm forty. Stranger things
+have happened than that, out West!”
+
+“We'll come down and visit you then, Soulsby and I,” said Sister
+Soulsby, cheerfully. “You shall take us to the White House, Alice, and
+introduce us.”
+
+“Oh, it isn't likely I would come East,” said Alice, pensively. “Most
+probably I'd be left to amuse myself in Seattle. But there--I think
+that's the carriage driving up to the door.”
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 133 ***
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Damnation of Theron Ware | Project Gutenberg
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
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+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
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+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
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+  </head>
+  <body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 133 ***</div>
+    <h1>
+      THE DAMNATION OF THERON WARE
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      by Harold Frederic
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_PART1"> <b>PART I</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_PART2"> <b>PART II</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_PART3"> <b>PART III</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER XXII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER XXIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER XXIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_PART4"> <b>PART IV</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0025"> CHAPTER XXV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0026"> CHAPTER XXVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0027"> CHAPTER XXVII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0028"> CHAPTER XXVIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0029"> CHAPTER XXIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0030"> CHAPTER XXX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0031"> CHAPTER XXXI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0032"> CHAPTER XXXII </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART1" id="link2H_PART1">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      PART I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      No such throng had ever before been seen in the building during all its
+      eight years of existence. People were wedged together most uncomfortably
+      upon the seats; they stood packed in the aisles and overflowed the
+      galleries; at the back, in the shadows underneath these galleries, they
+      formed broad, dense masses about the doors, through which it would be
+      hopeless to attempt a passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The light, given out from numerous tin-lined circles of flaring gas-jets
+      arranged on the ceiling, fell full upon a thousand uplifted faces&mdash;some
+      framed in bonnets or juvenile curls, others bearded or crowned with
+      shining baldness&mdash;but all alike under the spell of a dominant emotion
+      which held features in abstracted suspense and focussed every eye upon a
+      common objective point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The excitement of expectancy reigned upon each row of countenances, was
+      visible in every attitude&mdash;nay, seemed a part of the close,
+      overheated atmosphere itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An observer, looking over these compact lines of faces and noting the
+      uniform concentration of eagerness they exhibited, might have guessed that
+      they were watching for either the jury's verdict in some peculiarly
+      absorbing criminal trial, or the announcement of the lucky numbers in a
+      great lottery. These two expressions seemed to alternate, and even to
+      mingle vaguely, upon the upturned lineaments of the waiting throng&mdash;the
+      hope of some unnamed stroke of fortune and the dread of some adverse
+      decree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a glance forward at the object of this universal gaze would have
+      sufficed to shatter both hypotheses. Here was neither a court of justice
+      nor a tombola. It was instead the closing session of the annual Nedahma
+      Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Bishop was about to
+      read out the list of ministerial appointments for the coming year. This
+      list was evidently written in a hand strange to him, and the slow,
+      near-sighted old gentleman, having at last sufficiently rubbed the glasses
+      of his spectacles, and then adjusted them over his nose with annoying
+      deliberation, was now silently rehearsing his task to himself&mdash;the
+      while the clergymen round about ground their teeth and restlessly shuffled
+      their feet in impatience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon a closer inspection of the assemblage, there were a great many of
+      these clergymen. A dozen or more dignified, and for the most part elderly,
+      brethren sat grouped about the Bishop in the pulpit. As many others, not
+      quite so staid in mien, and indeed with here and there almost a suggestion
+      of frivolity in their postures, were seated on the steps leading down from
+      this platform. A score of their fellows sat facing the audience, on chairs
+      tightly wedged into the space railed off round the pulpit; and then came
+      five or six rows of pews, stretching across the whole breadth of the
+      church, and almost solidly filled with preachers of the Word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were very old men among these&mdash;bent and decrepit veterans who
+      had known Lorenzo Dow, and had been ordained by elders who remembered
+      Francis Asbury and even Whitefield. They sat now in front places, leaning
+      forward with trembling and misshapen hands behind their hairy ears,
+      waiting to hear their names read out on the superannuated list, it might
+      be for the last time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sight of these venerable Fathers in Israel was good to the eyes,
+      conjuring up, as it did, pictures of a time when a plain and homely people
+      had been served by a fervent and devoted clergy&mdash;by preachers who
+      lacked in learning and polish, no doubt, but who gave their lives without
+      dream of earthly reward to poverty and to the danger and wearing toil of
+      itinerant missions through the rude frontier settlements. These pictures
+      had for their primitive accessories log-huts, rough household implements,
+      coarse clothes, and patched old saddles which told of weary years of
+      journeying; but to even the least sympathetic vision there shone upon them
+      the glorified light of the Cross and Crown. Reverend survivors of the
+      heroic times, their very presence there&mdash;sitting meekly at the
+      altar-rail to hear again the published record of their uselessness and of
+      their dependence upon church charity&mdash;was in the nature of a
+      benediction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The large majority of those surrounding these patriarchs were middle-aged
+      men, generally of a robust type, with burly shoulders, and bushing beards
+      framing shaven upper lips, and who looked for the most part like honest
+      and prosperous farmers attired in their Sunday clothes. As exceptions to
+      this rule, there were scattered stray specimens of a more urban class,
+      worthies with neatly trimmed whiskers, white neckcloths, and even
+      indications of hair-oil&mdash;all eloquent of citified charges; and now
+      and again the eye singled out a striking and scholarly face, at once
+      strong and simple, and instinctively referred it to the faculty of one of
+      the several theological seminaries belonging to the Conference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect of these faces as a whole was toward goodness, candor, and
+      imperturbable self-complacency rather than learning or mental astuteness;
+      and curiously enough it wore its pleasantest aspect on the countenances of
+      the older men. The impress of zeal and moral worth seemed to diminish by
+      regular gradations as one passed to younger faces; and among the very
+      beginners, who had been ordained only within the past day or two, this
+      decline was peculiarly marked. It was almost a relief to note the relative
+      smallness of their number, so plainly was it to be seen that they were not
+      the men their forbears had been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And if those aged, worn-out preachers facing the pulpit had gazed instead
+      backward over the congregation, it may be that here too their old eyes
+      would have detected a difference&mdash;what at least they would have
+      deemed a decline.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But nothing was further from the minds of the members of the First M. E.
+      Church of Tecumseh than the suggestion that they were not an improvement
+      on those who had gone before them. They were undoubtedly the smartest and
+      most important congregation within the limits of the Nedahma Conference,
+      and this new church edifice of theirs represented alike a scale of outlay
+      and a standard of progressive taste in devotional architecture unique in
+      the Methodism of that whole section of the State. They had a right to be
+      proud of themselves, too. They belonged to the substantial order of the
+      community, with perhaps not so many very rich men as the Presbyterians
+      had, but on the other hand with far fewer extremely poor folk than the
+      Baptists were encumbered with. The pews in the first four rows of their
+      church rented for one hundred dollars apiece&mdash;quite up to the
+      Presbyterian highwater mark&mdash;and they now had almost abolished free
+      pews altogether. The oyster suppers given by their Ladies' Aid Society in
+      the basement of the church during the winter had established rank among
+      the fashionable events in Tecumseh's social calendar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A comprehensive and satisfied perception of these advantages was uppermost
+      in the minds of this local audience, as they waited for the Bishop to
+      begin his reading. They had entertained this Bishop and his Presiding
+      Elders, and the rank and file of common preachers, in a style which could
+      not have been remotely approached by any other congregation in the
+      Conference. Where else, one would like to know, could the Bishop have been
+      domiciled in a Methodist house where he might have a sitting-room all to
+      himself, with his bedroom leading out of it? Every clergyman present had
+      been provided for in a private residence&mdash;even down to the Licensed
+      Exhorters, who were not really ministers at all when you came to think of
+      it, and who might well thank their stars that the Conference had assembled
+      among such open-handed people. There existed a dim feeling that these
+      Licensed Exhorters&mdash;an uncouth crew, with country store-keepers and
+      lumbermen and even a horse-doctor among their number&mdash;had taken
+      rather too much for granted, and were not exhibiting quite the proper
+      degree of gratitude over their reception.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a more important issue hung now imminent in the balance&mdash;was
+      Tecumseh to be fairly and honorably rewarded for her hospitality by being
+      given the pastor of her choice?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All were agreed&mdash;at least among those who paid pew-rents&mdash;upon
+      the great importance of a change in the pulpit of the First M. E. Church.
+      A change in persons must of course take place, for their present pastor
+      had exhausted the three-year maximum of the itinerant system, but there
+      was needed much more than that. For a handsome and expensive church
+      building like this, and with such a modern and go-ahead congregation, it
+      was simply a vital necessity to secure an attractive and fashionable
+      preacher. They had held their own against the Presbyterians these past few
+      years only by the most strenuous efforts, and under the depressing
+      disadvantage of a minister who preached dreary out-of-date sermons, and
+      who lacked even the most rudimentary sense of social distinctions. The
+      Presbyterians had captured the new cashier of the Adams County Bank, who
+      had always gone to the Methodist Church in the town he came from, but now
+      was lost solely because of this tiresome old fossil of theirs; and there
+      were numerous other instances of the same sort, scarcely less grievous.
+      That this state of things must be altered was clear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The unusually large local attendance upon the sessions of the Conference
+      had given some of the more guileless of visiting brethren a high notion of
+      Tecumseh's piety; and perhaps even the most sophisticated stranger never
+      quite realized how strictly it was to be explained by the anxiety to pick
+      out a suitable champion for the fierce Presbyterian competition. Big
+      gatherings assembled evening after evening to hear the sermons of those
+      selected to preach, and the church had been almost impossibly crowded at
+      each of the three Sunday services. Opinions had naturally differed a good
+      deal during the earlier stages of this scrutiny, but after last night's
+      sermon there could be but one feeling. The man for Tecumseh was the
+      Reverend Theron Ware.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The choice was an admirable one, from points of view much more exalted
+      than those of the local congregation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You could see Mr. Ware sitting there at the end of the row inside the
+      altar-rail&mdash;the tall, slender young man with the broad white brow,
+      thoughtful eyes, and features moulded into that regularity of strength
+      which used to characterize the American Senatorial type in those far-away
+      days of clean-shaven faces and moderate incomes before the War. The
+      bright-faced, comely, and vivacious young woman in the second side pew was
+      his wife&mdash;and Tecumseh noted with approbation that she knew how to
+      dress. There were really no two better or worthier people in the building
+      than this young couple, who sat waiting along with the rest to hear their
+      fate. But unhappily they had come to know of the effort being made to
+      bring them to Tecumseh; and their simple pride in the triumph of the
+      husband's fine sermon had become swallowed up in a terribly anxious
+      conflict of hope and fear. Neither of them could maintain a satisfactory
+      show of composure as the decisive moment approached. The vision of
+      translation from poverty and obscurity to such a splendid post as this&mdash;truly
+      it was too dazzling for tranquil nerves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tedious Bishop had at last begun to call his roll of names, and the
+      good people of Tecumseh mentally ticked them off, one by one, as the list
+      expanded. They felt that it was like this Bishop&mdash;an unimportant and
+      commonplace figure in Methodism, not to be mentioned in the same breath
+      with Simpson and Janes and Kingsley&mdash;that he should begin with the
+      backwoods counties, and thrust all these remote and pitifully rustic
+      stations ahead of their own metropolitan charge. To these they listened
+      but listlessly&mdash;indifferent alike to the joy and to the dismay which
+      he was scattering among the divines before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The announcements were being doled out with stumbling hesitation. After
+      each one a little half-rustling movement through the crowded rows of
+      clergymen passed mute judgment upon the cruel blow this brother had
+      received, the reward justly given to this other, the favoritism by which a
+      third had profited. The Presiding Elders, whose work all this was, stared
+      with gloomy and impersonal abstraction down upon the rows of blackcoated
+      humanity spread before them. The ministers returned this fixed and
+      perfunctory gaze with pale, set faces, only feebly masking the emotions
+      which each new name stirred somewhere among them. The Bishop droned on
+      laboriously, mispronouncing words and repeating himself as if he were
+      reading a catalogue of unfamiliar seeds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First church of Tecumseh&mdash;Brother Abram G. Tisdale!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no doubt about it! These were actually the words that had been
+      uttered. After all this outlay, all this lavish hospitality, all this
+      sacrifice of time and patience in sitting through those sermons, to draw
+      from the grab-bag nothing better than&mdash;a Tisdale!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A hum of outraged astonishment&mdash;half groan, half wrathful snort
+      bounded along from pew to pew throughout the body of the church. An echo
+      of it reached the Bishop, and so confused him that he haltingly repeated
+      the obnoxious line. Every local eye turned as by intuition to where the
+      calamitous Tisdale sat, and fastened malignantly upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Could anything be worse? This Brother Tisdale was past fifty&mdash;a
+      spindling, rickety, gaunt old man, with a long horse-like head and
+      vacantly solemn face, who kept one or the other of his hands continually
+      fumbling his bony jaw. He had been withdrawn from routine service for a
+      number of years, doing a little insurance canvassing on his own account,
+      and also travelling for the Book Concern. Now that he wished to return to
+      parochial work, the richest prize in the whole list, Tecumseh, was given
+      to him&mdash;to him who had never been asked to preach at a Conference,
+      and whose archaic nasal singing of &ldquo;Greenland's Icy Mountains&rdquo; had made
+      even the Licensed Exhorters grin! It was too intolerably dreadful to think
+      of!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An embittered whisper to the effect that Tisdale was the Bishop's cousin
+      ran round from pew to pew. This did not happen to be true, but indignant
+      Tecumseh gave it entire credit. The throngs about the doors dwindled as by
+      magic, and the aisles cleared. Local interest was dead; and even some of
+      the pewholders rose and made their way out. One of these murmured audibly
+      to his neighbors as he departed that HIS pew could be had now for sixty
+      dollars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So it happened that when, a little later on, the appointment of Theron
+      Ware to Octavius was read out, none of the people of Tecumseh either noted
+      or cared. They had been deeply interested in him so long as it seemed
+      likely that he was to come to them&mdash;before their clearly expressed
+      desire for him had been so monstrously ignored. But now what became of him
+      was no earthly concern of theirs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the Doxology had been sung and the Conference formally declared
+      ended, the Wares would fain have escaped from the flood of handshakings
+      and boisterous farewells which spread over the front part of the church.
+      But the clergymen were unusually insistent upon demonstrations of
+      cordiality among themselves&mdash;the more, perhaps, because it was
+      evident that the friendliness of their local hosts had suddenly evaporated&mdash;and,
+      of all men in the world, the present incumbent of the Octavius pulpit now
+      bore down upon them with noisy effusiveness, and defied evasion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brother Ware&mdash;we have never been interduced&mdash;but let me clasp
+      your hand! And&mdash;Sister Ware, I presume&mdash;yours too!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a portly man, who held his head back so that his face seemed all
+      jowl and mouth and sandy chin-whisker. He smiled broadly upon them with
+      half-closed eyes, and shook hands again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said to 'em,&rdquo; he went on with loud pretence of heartiness, &ldquo;the minute
+      I heerd your name called out for our dear Octavius, 'I must go over an'
+      interduce myself.' It will be a heavy cross to part with those dear
+      people, Brother Ware, but if anything could wean me to the notion, so to
+      speak, it would be the knowledge that you are to take up my labors in
+      their midst. Perhaps&mdash;ah&mdash;perhaps they ARE jest a trifle close
+      in money matters, but they come out strong on revivals. They'll need a
+      good deal o' stirrin' up about parsonage expenses, but, oh! such seasons
+      of grace as we've experienced there together!&rdquo; He shook his head, and
+      closed his eyes altogether, as if transported by his memories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Ware smiled faintly in decorous response, and bowed in silence;
+      but his wife resented the unctuous beaming of content on the other's wide
+      countenance, and could not restrain her tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem to bear up tolerably well under this heavy cross, as you call
+      it,&rdquo; she said sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The will o' the Lord, Sister Ware&mdash;the will o' the Lord!&rdquo; he
+      responded, disposed for the instant to put on his pompous manner with her,
+      and then deciding to smile again as he moved off. The circumstance that he
+      was to get an additional three hundred dollars yearly in his new place was
+      not mentioned between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By a mutual impulse the young couple, when they had at last gained the
+      cool open air, crossed the street to the side where over-hanging trees
+      shaded the infrequent lamps, and they might be comparatively alone. The
+      wife had taken her husband's arm, and pressed closely upon it as they
+      walked. For a time no word passed, but finally he said, in a grave voice,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is hard upon you, poor girl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she stopped short, buried her face against his shoulder, and fell to
+      sobbing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He strove with gentle, whispered remonstrance to win her from this mood,
+      and after a few moments she lifted her head and they resumed their walk,
+      she wiping her eyes as they went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I couldn't keep it in a minute longer!&rdquo; she said, catching her breath
+      between phrases. &ldquo;Oh, WHY do they behave so badly to us, Theron?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled down momentarily upon her as they moved along, and patted her
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Somebody must have the poor places, Alice,&rdquo; he said consolingly. &ldquo;I am a
+      young man yet, remember. We must take our turn, and be patient. For 'we
+      know that all things work together for good.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And your sermon was so head-and-shoulders above all the others!&rdquo; she went
+      on breathlessly. &ldquo;Everybody said so! And Mrs. Parshall heard it so DIRECT
+      that you were to be sent here, and I know she told everybody how much I
+      was lotting on it&mdash;I wish we could go right off tonight without going
+      to her house&mdash;I shall be ashamed to look her in the face&mdash;and of
+      course she knows we're poked off to that miserable Octavius.&mdash;Why,
+      Theron, they tell me it's a worse place even than we've got now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, not at all,&rdquo; he put in reassuringly. &ldquo;It has grown to be a large town&mdash;oh,
+      quite twice the size of Tyre. It's a great Irish place, I've heard. Our
+      own church seems to be a good deal run down there. We must build it up
+      again; and the salary is better&mdash;a little.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he too was depressed, and they walked on toward their temporary
+      lodging in a silence full of mutual grief. It was not until they had come
+      within sight of this goal that he prefaced by a little sigh of resignation
+      these further words,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come&mdash;let us make the best of it, my girl! After all, we are in the
+      hands of the Lord.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, don't, Theron!&rdquo; she said hastily. &ldquo;Don't talk to me about the Lord
+      tonight; I can't bear it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Theron! Come out here! This is the funniest thing we have heard yet!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Ware stood on the platform of her new kitchen stoop. The bright flood
+      of May-morning sunshine completely enveloped her girlish form, clad in a
+      simple, fresh-starched calico gown, and shone in golden patches upon her
+      light-brown hair. She had a smile on her face, as she looked down at the
+      milk boy standing on the bottom step&mdash;a smile of a doubtful sort,
+      stormily mirthful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come out a minute, Theron!&rdquo; she called again; and in obedience to the
+      summons the tall lank figure of her husband appeared in the open doorway
+      behind her. A long loose, open dressing-gown dangled to his knees, and his
+      sallow, clean-shaven, thoughtful face wore a morning undress expression of
+      youthful good-nature. He leaned against the door-sill, crossed his large
+      carpet slippers, and looked up into the sky, drawing a long satisfied
+      breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a beautiful morning!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;The elms over there are full of
+      robins. We must get up earlier these mornings, and take some walks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife indicated the boy with the milk-pail on his arm, by a wave of her
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Guess what he tells me!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It wasn't a mistake at all, our
+      getting no milk yesterday or the Sunday before. It seems that that's the
+      custom here, at least so far as the parsonage is concerned.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter, boy?&rdquo; asked the young minister, drawling his words a
+      little, and putting a sense of placid irony into them. &ldquo;Don't the cows
+      give milk on Sunday, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was not going to be chaffed. &ldquo;Oh, I'll bring you milk fast enough
+      on Sundays, if you give me the word,&rdquo; he said with nonchalance. &ldquo;Only it
+      won't last long.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you mean&mdash;'won't last long'?&rdquo;, asked Mrs. Ware, briskly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy liked her&mdash;both for herself, and for the doughnuts fried with
+      her own hands, which she gave him on his morning round. He dropped his
+      half-defiant tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The thing of it's this,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;Every new minister starts in
+      saying we can deliver to this house on Sundays, an' then gives us notice
+      to stop before the month's out. It's the trustees that does it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Theron Ware uncrossed his feet and moved out on to the stoop
+      beside his wife. &ldquo;What's that you say?&rdquo; he interjected. &ldquo;Don't THEY take
+      milk on Sundays?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nope!&rdquo; answered the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young couple looked each other in the face for a puzzled moment, then
+      broke into a laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, we'll try it, anyway,&rdquo; said the preacher. &ldquo;You can go on bringing
+      it Sundays till&mdash;till&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Till you cave in an' tell me to stop,&rdquo; put in the boy. &ldquo;All right!&rdquo; and
+      he was off on the instant, the dipper jangling loud incredulity in his
+      pail as he went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Wares exchanged another glance as he disappeared round the corner of
+      the house, and another mutual laugh seemed imminent. Then the wife's face
+      clouded over, and she thrust her under-lip a trifle forward out of its
+      place in the straight and gently firm profile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's just what Wendell Phillips said,&rdquo; she declared. &ldquo;'The Puritan's idea
+      of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister stroked his chin thoughtfully, and let his gaze wander
+      over the backyard in silence. The garden parts had not been spaded up, but
+      lay, a useless stretch of muddy earth, broken only by last year's
+      cabbage-stumps and the general litter of dead roots and vegetation. The
+      door of the tenantless chicken-coop hung wide open. Before it was a great
+      heap of ashes and cinders, soaked into grimy hardness by the recent spring
+      rains, and nearer still an ancient chopping-block, round which were
+      scattered old weather-beaten hardwood knots which had defied the axe,
+      parts of broken barrels and packing-boxes, and a nameless debris of tin
+      cans, clam-shells, and general rubbish. It was pleasanter to lift the
+      eyes, and look across the neighbors' fences to the green, waving tops of
+      the elms on the street beyond. How lofty and beautiful they were in the
+      morning sunlight, and with what matchless charm came the song of the
+      robins, freshly installed in their haunts among the new pale-green leaves!
+      Above them, in the fresh, scented air, glowed the great blue dome, radiant
+      with light and the purification of spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron lifted his thin, long-fingered hand, and passed it in a slow arch
+      of movement to comprehend this glorious upper picture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What matter anyone's ideas of hell,&rdquo; he said, in soft, grave tones, &ldquo;when
+      we have that to look at, and listen to, and fill our lungs with? It seems
+      to me that we never FEEL quite so sure of God's goodness at other times as
+      we do in these wonderful new mornings of spring.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The wife followed his gesture, and her eyes rested for a brief moment,
+      with pleased interest, upon the trees and the sky. Then they reverted,
+      with a harsher scrutiny, to the immediate foreground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those Van Sizers ought to be downright ashamed of themselves,&rdquo; she said,
+      &ldquo;to leave everything in such a muss as this. You MUST see about getting a
+      man to clean up the yard, Theron. It's no use your thinking of doing it
+      yourself. In the first place, it wouldn't look quite the thing, and,
+      second, you'd never get at it in all your born days. Or if a man would
+      cost too much, we might get a boy. I daresay Harvey would come around,
+      after he'd finished with his milk-route in the forenoon. We could give him
+      his dinner, you know, and I'd bake him some cookies. He's got the greatest
+      sweet-tooth you ever heard of. And then perhaps if we gave him a quarter,
+      or say half a dollar, he'd be quite satisfied. I'll speak to him in the
+      morning. We can save a dollar or so that way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose every little does help,&rdquo; commented Mr. Ware, with a doleful
+      lack of conviction. Then his face brightened. &ldquo;I tell you what let's do!&rdquo;
+       he exclaimed. &ldquo;Get on your street dress, and we'll take a long walk, way
+      out into the country. You've never seen the basin, where they float the
+      log-rafts in, or the big sawmills. The hills beyond give you almost
+      mountain effects, they are so steep; and they say there's a sulphur spring
+      among the slate on the hill-side, somewhere, with trees all about it; and
+      we could take some sandwiches with us&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You forget,&rdquo; put in Mrs. Ware,&mdash;&ldquo;those trustees are coming at
+      eleven.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So they are!&rdquo; assented the young minister, with something like a sigh. He
+      cast another reluctant, lingering glance at the sunlit elm boughs, and,
+      turning, went indoors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He loitered for an aimless minute in the kitchen, where his wife, her
+      sleeves rolled to the elbow, now resumed the interrupted washing of the
+      breakfast dishes&mdash;perhaps with vague visions of that ever-receding
+      time to come when they might have a hired girl to do such work. Then he
+      wandered off into the room beyond, which served them alike as living-room
+      and study, and let his eye run along the two rows of books that
+      constituted his library. He saw nothing which he wanted to read. Finally
+      he did take down &ldquo;Paley's Evidences,&rdquo; and seated himself in the big
+      armchair&mdash;that costly and oversized anomaly among his humble
+      house-hold gods; but the book lay unopened on his knee, and his eyelids
+      half closed themselves in sign of revery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was his third charge&mdash;this Octavius which they both knew they
+      were going to dislike so much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first had been in the pleasant dairy and hop country many miles to the
+      south, on another watershed and among a different kind of people. Perhaps,
+      in truth, the grinding labor, the poverty of ideas, the systematic
+      selfishness of later rural experience, had not been lacking there; but
+      they played no part in the memories which now he passed in tender review.
+      He recalled instead the warm sunshine on the fertile expanse of fields;
+      the sleek, well-fed herds of &ldquo;milkers&rdquo; coming lowing down the road under
+      the maples; the prosperous and hospitable farmhouses, with their orchards
+      in blossom and their spacious red barns; the bountiful boiled dinners
+      which cheery housewives served up with their own skilled hands. Of course,
+      he admitted to himself, it would not be the same if he were to go back
+      there again. He was conscious of having moved along&mdash;was it, after
+      all, an advance?&mdash;to a point where it was unpleasant to sit at table
+      with the unfragrant hired man, and still worse to encounter the bucolic
+      confusion between the functions of knives and forks. But in those happy
+      days&mdash;young, zealous, himself farm-bred&mdash;these trifles had been
+      invisible to him, and life there among those kindly husbandmen had seemed,
+      by contrast with the gaunt surroundings and gloomy rule of the theological
+      seminary, luxuriously abundant and free.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was there too that the crowning blessedness of his youth&mdash;nay,
+      should he not say of all his days?&mdash;had come to him. There he had
+      first seen Alice Hastings,&mdash;the bright-eyed, frank-faced, serenely
+      self-reliant girl, who now, less than four years thereafter, could be
+      heard washing the dishes out in the parsonage kitchen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How wonderful she had seemed to him then! How beautiful and all-beneficent
+      the miracle still appeared! Though herself the daughter of a farmer, her
+      presence on a visit within the borders of his remote country charge had
+      seemed to make everything, there a hundred times more countrified than it
+      had ever been before. She was fresh from the refinements of a town
+      seminary: she read books; it was known that she could play upon the piano.
+      Her clothes, her manners, her way of speaking, the readiness of her
+      thoughts and sprightly tongue&mdash;not least, perhaps, the imposing
+      current understanding as to her father's wealth&mdash;placed her on a
+      glorified pinnacle far away from the girls of the neighborhood. These
+      honest and good-hearted creatures indeed called ceaseless attention to her
+      superiority by their deference and open-mouthed admiration, and treated it
+      as the most natural thing in the world that their young minister should be
+      visibly &ldquo;taken&rdquo; with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron Ware, in truth, left this first pastorate of his the following
+      spring, in a transfiguring halo of romance. His new appointment was to
+      Tyre&mdash;a somewhat distant village of traditional local pride and
+      substance&mdash;and he was to be married only a day or so before entering
+      upon his pastoral duties there. The good people among whom he had begun
+      his ministry took kindly credit to themselves that he had met his bride
+      while she was &ldquo;visiting round&rdquo; their countryside. In part by jocose
+      inquiries addressed to the expectant groom, in part by the confidences of
+      the postmaster at the corners concerning the bulk and frequency of the
+      correspondence passing between Theron and the now remote Alice&mdash;they
+      had followed the progress of the courtship through the autumn and winter
+      with friendly zest. When he returned from the Conference, to say good-bye
+      and confess the happiness that awaited him, they gave him a &ldquo;donation&rdquo;&mdash;quite
+      as if he were a married pastor with a home of his own, instead of a shy
+      young bachelor, who received his guests and their contributions in the
+      house where he boarded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went away with tears of mingled regret and proud joy in his eyes,
+      thinking a good deal upon their predictions of a distinguished career
+      before him, feeling infinitely strengthened and upborne by the hearty
+      fervor of their God-speed, and taking with him nearly two wagon-loads of
+      vegetables, apples, canned preserves, assorted furniture, glass dishes,
+      cheeses, pieced bedquilts, honey, feathers, and kitchen utensils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the three years' term in Tyre, it was pleasantest to dwell upon the
+      beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young couple&mdash;after being married out at Alice's home in an
+      adjoining county, under the depressing conditions of a hopelessly
+      bedridden mother, and a father and brothers whose perceptions were
+      obviously closed to the advantages of a matrimonial connection with
+      Methodism&mdash;came straight to the house which their new congregation
+      rented as a parsonage. The impulse of reaction from the rather grim
+      cheerlessness of their wedding lent fresh gayety to their lighthearted,
+      whimsical start at housekeeping. They had never laughed so much in all
+      their lives as they did now in these first months&mdash;over their weird
+      ignorance of domestic details; with its mishaps, mistakes, and
+      entertaining discoveries; over the comical super-abundances and
+      shortcomings of their &ldquo;donation&rdquo; outfit; over the thousand and one quaint
+      experiences of their novel relation to each other, to the congregation,
+      and to the world of Tyre at large.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron, indeed, might be said never to have laughed before. Up to that
+      time no friendly student of his character, cataloguing his admirable
+      qualities, would have thought of including among them a sense of humor,
+      much less a bent toward levity. Neither his early strenuous battle to get
+      away from the farm and achieve such education as should serve to open to
+      him the gates of professional life, nor the later wave of religious
+      enthusiasm which caught him up as he stood on the border-land of manhood,
+      and swept him off into a veritable new world of views and aspirations, had
+      been a likely school of merriment. People had prized him for his innocent
+      candor and guileless mind, for his good heart, his pious zeal, his modesty
+      about gifts notably above the average, but it had occurred to none to
+      suspect in him a latent funny side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But who could be solemn where Alice was?&mdash;Alice in a quandary over
+      the complications of her cooking stove; Alice boiling her potatoes all
+      day, and her eggs for half an hour; Alice ordering twenty pounds of steak
+      and half a pound of sugar, and striving to extract a breakfast beverage
+      from the unground coffee-bean? Clearly not so tenderly fond and
+      sympathetic a husband as Theron. He began by laughing because she laughed,
+      and grew by swift stages to comprehend, then frankly to share, her
+      amusement. From this it seemed only a step to the development of a humor
+      of his own, doubling, as it were, their sportive resources. He found
+      himself discovering a new droll aspect in men and things; his phraseology
+      took on a dryly playful form, fittingly to present conceits which danced
+      up, unabashed, quite into the presence of lofty and majestic truths. He
+      got from this nothing but satisfaction; it obviously involved increased
+      claims to popularity among his parishioners, and consequently magnified
+      powers of usefulness, and it made life so much more a joy and a thing to
+      be thankful for. Often, in the midst of the exchange of merry quip and
+      whimsical suggestion, bright blossoms on that tree of strength and
+      knowledge which he felt expanding now with a mighty outward pushing in all
+      directions, he would lapse into deep gravity, and ponder with a swelling
+      heart the vast unspeakable marvel of his blessedness, in being thus
+      enriched and humanized by daily communion with the most worshipful of
+      womankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This happy and good young couple took the affections of Tyre by storm. The
+      Methodist Church there had at no time held its head very high among the
+      denominations, and for some years back had been in a deplorably sinking
+      state, owing first to the secession of the Free Methodists and then to the
+      incumbency of a pastor who scandalized the community by marrying a black
+      man to a white woman. But the Wares changed all this. Within a month the
+      report of Theron's charm and force in the pulpit was crowding the church
+      building to its utmost capacity&mdash;and that, too, with some of Tyre's
+      best people. Equally winning was the atmosphere of jollity and juvenile
+      high spirits which pervaded the parsonage under these new conditions, and
+      which Theron and Alice seemed to diffuse wherever they went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus swimmingly their first year sped, amid universal acclaim. Mrs. Ware
+      had a recognized social place, quite outside the restricted limits of
+      Methodism, and shone in it with an unflagging brilliancy altogether beyond
+      the traditions of Tyre. Delightful as she was in other people's houses,
+      she was still more naively fascinating in her own quaint and somewhat
+      harum-scarum domicile; and the drab, two-storied, tin-roofed little
+      parsonage might well have rattled its clapboards to see if it was not in
+      dreamland&mdash;so gay was the company, so light were the hearts, which it
+      sheltered in these new days. As for Theron, the period was one of
+      incredible fructification and output. He scarcely recognized for his own
+      the mind which now was reaching out on all sides with the arms of an
+      octopus, exploring unsuspected mines of thought, bringing in rich
+      treasures of deduction, assimilating, building, propounding as if by some
+      force quite independent of him. He could not look without blinking
+      timidity at the radiance of the path stretched out before him, leading
+      upward to dazzling heights of greatness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the end of this first year the Wares suddenly discovered that they were
+      eight hundred dollars in debt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second year was spent in arriving, by slow stages and with a cruel
+      wealth of pathetic detail, at a realization of what being eight hundred
+      dollars in debt meant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not in their elastic and buoyant natures to grasp the full
+      significance of the thing at once, or easily. Their position in the social
+      structure, too, was all against clear-sightedness in material matters. A
+      general, for example, uniformed and in the saddle, advancing through the
+      streets with his staff in the proud wake of his division's massed walls of
+      bayonets, cannot be imagined as quailing at the glance thrown at him by
+      his tailor on the sidewalk. Similarly, a man invested with sacerdotal
+      authority, who baptizes, marries, and buries, who delivers judgments from
+      the pulpit which may not be questioned in his hearing, and who receives
+      from all his fellow-men a special deference of manner and speech, is in
+      the nature of things prone to see the grocer's book and the butcher's bill
+      through the little end of the telescope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Wares at the outset had thought it right to trade as exclusively as
+      possible with members of their own church society. This loyalty became a
+      principal element of martyrdom. Theron had his creditors seated in serried
+      rows before him, Sunday after Sunday. Alice had her critics consolidated
+      among those whom it was her chief duty to visit and profess friendship
+      for. These situations now began, by regular gradations, to unfold their
+      terrors. At the first intimation of discontent, the Wares made what seemed
+      to them a sweeping reduction in expenditure. When they heard that Brother
+      Potter had spoken of them as &ldquo;poor pay,&rdquo; they dismissed their hired girl.
+      A little later, Theron brought himself to drop a laboriously casual
+      suggestion as to a possible increase of salary, and saw with sinking
+      spirits the faces of the stewards freeze with dumb disapprobation. Then
+      Alice paid a visit to her parents, only to find her brothers doggedly
+      hostile to the notion of her being helped, and her father so much under
+      their influence that the paltry sum he dared offer barely covered the
+      expenses of her journey. With another turn of the screw, they sold the
+      piano she had brought with her from home, and cut themselves down to the
+      bare necessities of life, neither receiving company nor going out. They
+      never laughed now, and even smiles grew rare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time Theron's sermons, preached under that stony glare of people
+      to whom he owed money, had degenerated to a pitiful level of commonplace.
+      As a consequence, the attendance became once more confined to the
+      insufficient membership of the church, and the trustees complained of
+      grievously diminished receipts. When the Wares, grown desperate, ventured
+      upon the experiment of trading outside the bounds of the congregation, the
+      trustees complained again, this time peremptorily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus the second year dragged itself miserably to an end. Nor was relief
+      possible, because the Presiding Elder knew something of the circumstances,
+      and felt it his duty to send Theron back for a third year, to pay his
+      debts, and drain the cup of disciplinary medicine to its dregs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The worst has been told. Beginning in utter blackness, this third year, in
+      the second month, brought a change as welcome as it was unlooked for. An
+      elderly and important citizen of Tyre, by name Abram Beekman, whom Theron
+      knew slightly, and had on occasions seen sitting in one of the back pews
+      near the door, called one morning at the parsonage, and electrified its
+      inhabitants by expressing a desire to wipe off all their old scores for
+      them, and give them a fresh start in life. As he put the suggestion, they
+      could find no excuse for rejecting it. He had watched them, and heard a
+      good deal about them, and took a fatherly sort of interest in them. He did
+      not deprecate their regarding the aid he proffered them in the nature of a
+      loan, but they were to make themselves perfectly easy about it, and never
+      return it at all unless they could spare it sometime with entire
+      convenience, and felt that they wanted to do so. As this amazing windfall
+      finally took shape, it enabled the Wares to live respectably through the
+      year, and to leave Tyre with something over one hundred dollars in hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It enabled them, too, to revive in a chastened form their old dream of
+      ultimate success and distinction for Theron. He had demonstrated clearly
+      enough to himself, during that brief season of unrestrained effulgence,
+      that he had within him the making of a great pulpit orator. He set to work
+      now, with resolute purpose, to puzzle out and master all the principles
+      which underlie this art, and all the tricks that adorn its superstructure.
+      He studied it, fastened his thoughts upon it, talked daily with Alice
+      about it. In the pulpit, addressing those people who had so darkened his
+      life and crushed the first happiness out of his home, he withheld himself
+      from any oratorical display which could afford them gratification. He put
+      aside, as well; the thought of attracting once more the non-Methodists of
+      Tyre, whose early enthusiasm had spread such pitfalls for his unwary feet.
+      He practised effects now by piecemeal, with an alert ear, and calculation
+      in every tone. An ambition, at once embittered and tearfully solicitous,
+      possessed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reflected now, this morning, with a certain incredulous interest, upon
+      that unworthy epoch in his life history, which seemed so far behind him,
+      and yet had come to a close only a few weeks ago. The opportunity had been
+      given him, there at the Tecumseh Conference, to reveal his quality. He had
+      risen to its full limit of possibilities, and preached a great sermon in a
+      manner which he at least knew was unapproachable. He had made his most
+      powerful bid for the prize place, had trebly deserved success&mdash;and
+      had been banished instead to Octavius!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The curious thing was that he did not resent his failure. Alice had taken
+      it hard, but he himself was conscious of a sense of spiritual gain. The
+      influence of the Conference, with its songs and seasons of prayer and high
+      pressure of emotional excitement, was still strong upon him. It seemed
+      years and years since the religious side of him had been so stirred into
+      motion. He felt, as he lay back in the chair, and folded his hands over
+      the book on his knee, that he had indeed come forth from the fire purified
+      and strengthened. The ministry to souls diseased beckoned him with a new
+      and urgent significance. He smiled to remember that Mr. Beekman, speaking
+      in his shrewd and pointed way, had asked him whether, looking it all over,
+      he didn't think it would be better for him to study law, with a view to
+      sliding out of the ministry when a good chance offered. It amazed him now
+      to recall that he had taken this hint seriously, and even gone to the
+      length of finding out what books law-students began upon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thank God! all that was past and gone now. The Call sounded, resonant and
+      imperative, in his ears, and there was no impulse of his heart, no fibre
+      of his being, which did not stir in devout response. He closed his eyes,
+      to be the more wholly alone with the Spirit, that moved him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The jangling of a bell in the hallway broke sharply upon his meditations,
+      and on the instant his wife thrust in her head from the kitchen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll have to go to the door, Theron!&rdquo; she warned him, in a loud, swift
+      whisper. &ldquo;I'm not fit to be seen. It is the trustees.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he said, and rose slowly from sprawling recumbency to his
+      feet. &ldquo;I'll go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And don't forget,&rdquo; she added strenuously; &ldquo;I believe in Levi Gorringe!
+      I've seen him go past here with his rod and fish-basket twice in eight
+      days, and that's a good sign. He's got a soft side somewhere. And just
+      keep a stiff upper lip about the gas, and don't you let them jew you down
+      a solitary cent on that sidewalk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said Theron, again, and moved reluctantly toward the hall
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When the three trustees had been shown in by the Rev. Mr. Ware, and had
+      taken seats, an awkward little pause ensued. The young minister looked
+      doubtingly from one face to another, the while they glanced with inquiring
+      interest about the room, noting the pictures and appraising the furniture
+      in their minds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The obvious leader of the party, Loren Pierce, a rich quarryman, was an
+      old man of medium size and mean attire, with a square, beardless face as
+      hard and impassive in expression as one of his blocks of limestone. The
+      irregular, thin-lipped mouth, slightly sunken, and shut with vice-like
+      firmness, the short snub nose, and the little eyes squinting from
+      half-closed lids beneath slightly marked brows, seemed scarcely to attain
+      to the dignity of features, but evaded attention instead, as if feeling
+      that they were only there at all from plain necessity, and ought not to be
+      taken into account. Mr. Pierce's face did not know how to smile&mdash;what
+      was the use of smiles?&mdash;but its whole surface radiated secretiveness.
+      Portrayed on canvas by a master brush, with a ruff or a red robe for
+      masquerade, generations of imaginative amateurs would have seen in it vast
+      reaching plots, the skeletons of a dozen dynastic cupboards, the guarded
+      mysteries of half a century's international diplomacy. The amateurs would
+      have been wrong again. There was nothing behind Mr. Pierce's juiceless
+      countenance more weighty than a general determination to exact seven per
+      cent for his money, and some specific notions about capturing certain
+      brickyards which were interfering with his quarry-sales. But Octavius
+      watched him shamble along its sidewalks quite as the Vienna of dead and
+      forgotten yesterday might have watched Metternich.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Erastus Winch was of a breezier sort&mdash;a florid, stout, and sandy man,
+      who spent most of his life driving over evil country roads in a buggy,
+      securing orders for dairy furniture and certain allied lines of farm
+      utensils. This practice had given him a loud voice and a deceptively
+      hearty manner, to which the other avocation of cheese-buyer, which he
+      pursued at the Board of Trade meetings every Monday afternoon, had added a
+      considerable command of persuasive yet non-committal language. To look at
+      him, still more to hear him, one would have sworn he was a good fellow, a
+      trifle rough and noisy, perhaps, but all right at bottom. But the County
+      Clerk of Dearborn County could have told you of agriculturists who knew
+      Erastus from long and unhappy experience, and who held him to be even a
+      tighter man than Loren Pierce in the matter of a mortgage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third trustee, Levi Gorringe, set one wondering at the very first
+      glance what on earth he was doing in that company. Those who had known him
+      longest had the least notion; but it may be added that no one knew him
+      well. He was a lawyer, and had lived in Octavius for upwards of ten years;
+      that is to say, since early manhood. He had an office on the main street,
+      just under the principal photograph gallery. Doubtless he was sometimes in
+      this office; but his fellow-townsmen saw him more often in the street
+      doorway, with the stairs behind him, and the flaring show-cases of the
+      photographer on either side, standing with his hands in his pockets and an
+      unlighted cigar in his mouth, looking at nothing in particular. About
+      every other day he went off after breakfast into the country roundabout,
+      sometimes with a rod, sometimes with a gun, but always alone. He was a
+      bachelor, and slept in a room at the back of his office, cooking some of
+      his meals himself, getting others at a restaurant close by. Though he had
+      little visible practice, he was understood to be well-to-do and even more,
+      and people tacitly inferred that he &ldquo;shaved notes.&rdquo; The Methodists of
+      Octavius looked upon him as a queer fish, and through nearly a dozen years
+      had never quite outgrown their hebdomadal tendency to surprise at seeing
+      him enter their church. He had never, it is true, professed religion, but
+      they had elected him as a trustee now for a number of terms, all the same&mdash;partly
+      because he was their only lawyer, partly because he, like both his
+      colleagues, held a mortgage on the church edifice and lot. In person, Mr.
+      Gorringe was a slender man, with a skin of a clear, uniform citron tint,
+      black waving hair, and dark gray eyes, and a thin, high-featured face. He
+      wore a mustache and pointed chin-tuft; and, though he was of New England
+      parentage and had never been further south than Ocean Grove, he presented
+      a general effect of old Mississippian traditions and tastes startlingly at
+      variance with the standards of Dearborn County Methodism. Nothing could
+      convince some of the elder sisters that he was not a drinking man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The three visitors had completed their survey of the room now; and Loren
+      Pierce emitted a dry, harsh little cough, as a signal that business was
+      about to begin. At this sound, Winch drew up his feet, and Gorringe untied
+      a parcel of account-books and papers that he held on his knee. Theron felt
+      that his countenance must be exhibiting to the assembled brethren an
+      unfortunate sense of helplessness in their hands. He tried to look more
+      resolute, and forced his lips into a smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brother Gorringe allus acts as Seckertary,&rdquo; said Erastus Winch, beaming
+      broadly upon the minister, as if the mere mention of the fact promoted
+      jollity. &ldquo;That's it, Brother Gorringe,&mdash;take your seat at Brother
+      Ware's desk. Mind the Dominie's pen don't play tricks on you, an' start
+      off writin' out sermons instid of figgers.&rdquo; The humorist turned to Theron
+      as the lawyer walked over to the desk at the window. &ldquo;I allus have to
+      caution him about that,&rdquo; he remarked with great joviality. &ldquo;An' do YOU
+      look out afterwards, Brother Ware, or else you'll catch that pen o' yours
+      scribblin' lawyer's lingo in place o' the Word.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron felt bound to exhibit a grin in acknowledgment of this pleasantry.
+      The lawyer's change of position had involved some shifting of the others'
+      chairs, and the young minister found himself directly confronted by
+      Brother Pierce's hard and colorless old visage. Its little eyes were
+      watching him, as through a mask, and under their influence the smile of
+      politeness fled from his lips. The lawyer on his right, the cheese-buyer
+      to the left, seemed to recede into distance as he for the moment returned
+      the gaze of the quarryman. He waited now for him to speak, as if the
+      others were of no importance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are a plain sort o' folks up in these parts,&rdquo; said Brother Pierce,
+      after a slight further pause. His voice was as dry and rasping as his
+      cough, and its intonations were those of authority. &ldquo;We walk here,&rdquo; he
+      went on, eying the minister with a sour regard, &ldquo;in a meek an' humble
+      spirit, in the straight an' narrow way which leadeth unto life. We ain't
+      gone traipsin' after strange gods, like some people that call themselves
+      Methodists in other places. We stick by the Discipline an' the ways of our
+      fathers in Israel. No new-fangled notions can go down here. Your wife'd
+      better take them flowers out of her bunnit afore next Sunday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Silence possessed the room for a few moments, the while Theron, pale-faced
+      and with brows knit, studied the pattern of the ingrain carpet. Then he
+      lifted his head, and nodded it in assent. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;we will do
+      nothing by which our 'brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made
+      weak.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Pierce's parchment face showed no sign of surprise or pleasure at
+      this easy submission. &ldquo;Another thing: We don't want no book-learnin' or
+      dictionary words in our pulpit,&rdquo; he went on coldly. &ldquo;Some folks may
+      stomach 'em; we won't. Them two sermons o' yours, p'r'aps they'd do down
+      in some city place; but they're like your wife's bunnit here, they're too
+      flowery to suit us. What we want to hear is the plain, old-fashioned Word
+      of God, without any palaver or 'hems and ha's. They tell me there's some
+      parts where hell's treated as played-out&mdash;where our ministers don't
+      like to talk much about it because people don't want to hear about it.
+      Such preachers ought to be put out. They ain't Methodists at all. What we
+      want here, sir, is straight-out, flat-footed hell&mdash;the burnin' lake
+      o' fire an' brim-stone. Pour it into 'em, hot an' strong. We can't have
+      too much of it. Work in them awful deathbeds of Voltaire an' Tom Paine,
+      with the Devil right there in the room, reachin' for 'em, an' they yellin'
+      for fright; that's what fills the anxious seat an' brings in souls hand
+      over fist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron's tongue dallied for an instant with the temptation to comment upon
+      these old-wife fables, which were so dear to the rural religious heart
+      when he and I were boys. But it seemed wiser to only nod again, and let
+      his mentor go on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We ain't had no trouble with the Free Methodists here,&rdquo; continued Brother
+      Pierce, &ldquo;jest because we kept to the old paths, an' seek for salvation in
+      the good old way. Everybody can shout 'Amen!' as loud and as long as the
+      Spirit moves him, with us. Some one was sayin' you thought we ought to
+      have a choir and an organ. No, sirree! No such tom-foolery for us! You'll
+      only stir up feelin' agin yourself by hintin' at such things. And then,
+      too, our folks don't take no stock in all that pack o' nonsense about
+      science, such as tellin' the age of the earth by crackin' up stones. I've
+      b'en in the quarry line all my life, an' I know it's all humbug! Why, they
+      say some folks are goin' round now preachin' that our grandfathers were
+      all monkeys. That comes from departin' from the ways of our forefathers,
+      an puttin' in organs an' choirs, an' deckin' our women-folks out with
+      gewgaws, an' apin' the fashions of the worldly. I shouldn't wonder if them
+      kind did have some monkey blood in 'em. You'll find we're a different sort
+      here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister preserved silence for a little, until it became
+      apparent that the old trustee had had his say out. Even then he raised his
+      head slowly, and at last made answer in a hesitating and irresolute way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been very frank,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I am obliged to you. A clergyman
+      coming to a new charge cannot be better served than by having laid before
+      him a clear statement of the views and&mdash;and spiritual tendencies&mdash;of
+      his new flock, quite at the outset. I feel it to be of especial value in
+      this case, because I am young in years and in my ministry, and am
+      conscious of a great weakness of the flesh. I can see how daily contact
+      with a people so attached to the old, simple, primitive Methodism of
+      Wesley and Asbury may be a source of much strength to me. I may take it,&rdquo;
+       he added upon second thought, with an inquiring glance at Mr. Winch, &ldquo;that
+      Brother Pierce's description of our charge, and its tastes and needs,
+      meets with your approval?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Erastus Winch nodded his head and smiled expansively. &ldquo;Whatever Brother
+      Pierce says, goes!&rdquo; he declared. The lawyer, sitting behind at the desk by
+      the window, said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The place is jest overrun with Irish,&rdquo; Brother Pierce began again.
+      &ldquo;They've got two Catholic churches here now to our one, and they do jest
+      as they blamed please at the Charter elections. It'd be a good idee to
+      pitch into Catholics in general whenever you can. You could make a hit
+      that way. I say the State ought to make 'em pay taxes on their church
+      property. They've no right to be exempted, because they ain't Christians
+      at all. They're idolaters, that's what they are! I know 'em! I've had 'em
+      in my quarries for years, an' they ain't got no idee of decency or fair
+      dealin'. Every time the price of stone went up, every man of 'em would
+      jine to screw more wages out o' me. Why, they used to keep account o' the
+      amount o' business I done, an' figger up my profits, an' have the face to
+      come an' talk to me about 'em, as if that had anything to do with wages.
+      It's my belief their priests put 'em up to it. People don't begin to
+      reelize&mdash;that church of idolatry 'll be the ruin o' this country, if
+      it ain't checked in time. Jest you go at 'em hammer 'n' tongs! I've got
+      Eyetalians in the quarries now. They're sensible fellows: they know when
+      they're well off&mdash;a dollar a day, an' they're satisfied, an'
+      everything goes smooth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they're Catholics, the same as the Irish,&rdquo; suddenly interjected the
+      lawyer, from his place by the window. Theron pricked up his ears at the
+      sound of his voice. There was an anti-Pierce note in it, so to speak,
+      which it did him good to hear. The consciousness of sympathy began on the
+      instant to inspire him with courage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know some people SAY they are,&rdquo; Brother Pierce guardedly retorted &ldquo;but
+      I've summered an' wintered both kinds, an' I hold to it they're different.
+      I grant ye, the Eyetalians ARE some given to jabbin' knives into each
+      other, but they never git up strikes, an' they don't grumble about wages.
+      Why, look at the way they live&mdash;jest some weeds an' yarbs dug up on
+      the roadside, an' stewed in a kettle with a piece o' fat the size o' your
+      finger, an' a loaf o' bread, an' they're happy as a king. There's some
+      sense in THAT; but the Irish, they've got to have meat an' potatoes an'
+      butter jest as if&mdash;as if&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As if they'd b'en used to 'em at home,&rdquo; put in Mr. Winch, to help his
+      colleague out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lawyer ostentatiously drew up his chair to the desk, and began turning
+      over the leaves of his biggest book. &ldquo;It's getting on toward noon,
+      gentlemen,&rdquo; he said, in an impatient voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The business meeting which followed was for a considerable time confined
+      to hearing extracts from the books and papers read in a swift and formal
+      fashion by Mr. Gorringe. If this was intended to inform the new pastor of
+      the exact financial situation in Octavius, it lamentably failed of its
+      purpose. Theron had little knowledge of figures; and though he tried hard
+      to listen, and to assume an air of comprehension, he did not understand
+      much of what he heard. In a general way he gathered that the church
+      property was put down at $12,000, on which there was a debt of $4,800. The
+      annual expenses were $2,250, of which the principal items were $800 for
+      his salary, $170 for the rent of the parsonage, and $319 for interest on
+      the debt. It seemed that last year the receipts had fallen just under
+      $2,000, and they now confronted the necessity of making good this deficit
+      during the coming year, as well as increasing the regular revenues.
+      Without much discussion, it was agreed that they should endeavor to secure
+      the services of a celebrated &ldquo;debt-raiser,&rdquo; early in the autumn, and
+      utilize him in the closing days of a revival.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron knew this &ldquo;debt-raiser,&rdquo; and had seen him at work&mdash;a burly,
+      bustling, vulgar man who took possession of the pulpit as if it were an
+      auctioneer's block, and pursued the task of exciting liberality in the
+      bosoms of the congregation by alternating prayer, anecdote, song, and
+      cheap buffoonery in a manner truly sickening. Would it not be preferable,
+      he feebly suggested, to raise the money by a festival, or fair, or some
+      other form of entertainment which the ladies could manage?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Pierce shook his head with contemptuous emphasis. &ldquo;Our women-folks
+      ain't that kind,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They did try to hold a sociable once, but
+      nobody came, and we didn't raise more 'n three or four dollars. It ain't
+      their line. They lack the worldly arts. As the Discipline commands, they
+      avoid the evil of putting on gold and costly apparel, and taking such
+      diversions as cannot be used in the name of the Lord Jesus.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;of course&mdash;if you prefer the 'debt-raiser'&mdash;&rdquo; Theron
+      began, and took the itemized account from Gorringe's knee as an excuse for
+      not finishing the hateful sentence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked down the foolscap sheet, line by line, with no special sense of
+      what it signified, until his eye caught upon this little section of the
+      report, bracketed by itself in the Secretary's neat hand:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     INTEREST CHARGE.
+
+     First mortgage (1873) .. $1,000 ... (E. Winch)    @7.. $ 70
+     Second mortgage (1776)..  1,700 ... (L. Gorringe) @6..  102
+     Third mortgage (1878)...  2,100 ... (L. Pierce)   @7..  147
+     &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;-                       &mdash;&mdash;-
+     $4,800                        $319
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It was no news to him that the three mortgages on the church property were
+      held by the three trustees. But as he looked once more, another feature of
+      the thing struck him as curious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I notice that the rates of interest vary,&rdquo; he remarked without thinking,
+      and then wished the words unsaid, for the two trustees in view moved
+      uneasily on their seats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that's nothing,&rdquo; exclaimed Erastus Winch, with a boisterous display
+      of jollity. &ldquo;It's only Brother Gorringe's pleasant little way of making a
+      contribution to our funds. You will notice that, at the date of all these
+      mortgages, the State rate of interest was seven per cent. Since then it's
+      b'en lowered to six. Well, when that happened, you see, Brother Gorringe,
+      not being a professin' member, and so not bound by our rules, he could
+      just as well as not let his interest down a cent. But Brother Pierce an'
+      me, we talked it over, an' we made up our minds we were tied hand an' foot
+      by our contract. You know how strong the Discipline lays it down that we
+      must be bound to the letter of our agreements. That bein' so, we seen it
+      in the light of duty not to change what we'd set our hands to. That's how
+      it is, Brother Ware.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand,&rdquo; said Theron, with an effort at polite calmness of tone.
+      &ldquo;And&mdash;is there anything else?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's this,&rdquo; broke in Brother Pierce: &ldquo;we're commanded to be
+      law-abiding people, an' seven per cent WAS the law an' would be now if
+      them ragamuffins in the Legislation&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely we needn't go further into that,&rdquo; interrupted the minister,
+      conscious of a growing stiffness in his moral spine. &ldquo;Have we any other
+      business before us?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Pierce's little eyes snapped, and the wrinkles in his forehead
+      deepened angrily. &ldquo;Business?&rdquo; he demanded. &ldquo;Yes, plenty of it. We've got
+      to reduce expenses. We're nigh onto $300 behind-hand this minute. Besides
+      your house-rent, you get $800 free an' clear&mdash;that is $15.38 every
+      week, an' only you an' your wife to keep out of it. Why, when I was your
+      age, young man, and after that too, I was glad to get $4 a week.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think my salary is under discussion, Mr. Pierce&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;BROTHER Pierce!&rdquo; suggested Winch, in a half-shuckling undertone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brother Pierce, then!&rdquo; echoed Theron, impatiently. &ldquo;The Quarterly
+      Conference and the Estimating Committee deal with that. The trustees have
+      no more to do with it than the man in the moon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come, Brother Ware,&rdquo; put in Erastus Winch, &ldquo;we mustn't have no hard
+      feelin's. Brotherly love is what we're all lookin' after. Brother Pierce's
+      meanin' wasn't agin your drawin' your full salary, every cent of it, only&mdash;only
+      there are certain little things connected with the parsonage here that we
+      feel you ought to bear. F'r instance, there's the new sidewalk we had to
+      lay in front of the house here only a month ago. Of course, if the
+      treasury was flush we wouldn't say a word about it. An' then there's the
+      gas bill here. Seein' as you get your rent for nothin', it don't seem much
+      to ask that you should see to lightin' the place yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I don't think that either is a proper charge upon me,&rdquo; interposed
+      Theron. &ldquo;I decline to pay them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can have the gas shut off,&rdquo; remarked Brother Pierce, coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As soon as you like,&rdquo; responded the minister, sitting erect and tapping
+      the carpet nervously with his foot. &ldquo;Only you must understand that I will
+      take the whole matter to the Quarterly Conference in July. I already see a
+      good many other interesting questions about the financial management of
+      this church which might be appropriately discussed there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, come, Brother Ware!&rdquo; broke in Trustee Winch, with a somewhat agitated
+      assumption of good-feeling. &ldquo;Surely these are matters we ought to settle
+      amongst ourselves. We never yet asked outsiders to meddle with our
+      business here. It's our motto, Brother Ware. I say, if you've got a motto,
+      stand by it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, my motto,&rdquo; said Theron, &ldquo;is to be behaved decently to by those with
+      whom I have to deal; and I also propose to stand by it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Pierce rose gingerly to his feet, with the hesitation of an old
+      man not sure about his knees. When he had straightened himself, he put on
+      his hat, and eyed the minister sternly from beneath its brim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Lord gives us crosses grievous to our natur',&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;an' we're
+      told to bear 'em cheerfully as long as they're on our backs; but there
+      ain't nothin' said agin our unloadin' 'em in the ditch the minute we git
+      the chance. I guess you won't last here more 'n a twelvemonth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He pulled his soft and discolored old hat down over his brows with a
+      significantly hostile nod, and, turning, stumped toward the hall-door
+      without offering to shake hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other trustees had risen likewise, in tacit recognition that the
+      meeting was over. Winch clasped the minister's hand in his own broad, hard
+      palm, and squeezed it in an exuberant grip. &ldquo;Don't mind his little ways,
+      Brother Ware,&rdquo; he urged in a loud, unctuous whisper, with a grinning
+      backward nod: &ldquo;he's a trifle skittish sometimes when you don't give him
+      free rein; but he's all wool an' a yard wide when it comes to right-down
+      hard-pan religion. My love to Sister Ware;&rdquo; and he followed the senior
+      trustee into the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gorringe had been tying up his books and papers. He came now with the
+      bulky parcel under his arm, and his hat and stick in the other hand. He
+      could give little but his thumb to Theron to shake. His face wore a grave
+      expression, and not a line relaxed as, catching the minister's look, he
+      slowly covered his left eye in a deliberate wink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&mdash;and how did it go off?&rdquo; asked Alice, from where she knelt by
+      the oven door, a few minutes later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For answer, Theron threw himself wearily into the big old farm
+      rocking-chair on the other side of the stove, and shook his head with a
+      lengthened sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it wasn't for that man Gorringe of yours,&rdquo; he said dejectedly, &ldquo;I
+      think I should feel like going off&mdash;and learning a trade.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On the following Sunday, young Mrs. Ware sat alone in the preacher's pew
+      through the morning service, and everybody noted that the roses had been
+      taken from her bonnet. In the evening she was absent, and after the
+      doxology and benediction several people, under the pretence of solicitude
+      for her health, tried to pump her husband as to the reason. He answered
+      their inquiries civilly enough, but with brevity: she had stayed at home
+      because she did not feel like coming out&mdash;this and nothing more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The congregation dispersed under a gossip-laden cloud of consciousness
+      that there must be something queer about Sister Ware. There was a
+      tolerably general agreement, however, that the two sermons of the day had
+      been excellent. Not even Loren Pierce's railing commentary on the pastor's
+      introduction of an outlandish word like &ldquo;epitome&rdquo;&mdash;clearly forbidden
+      by the Discipline's injunction to plain language understood of the people&mdash;availed
+      to sap the satisfaction of the majority.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron himself comprehended that he had pleased the bulk of his auditors;
+      the knowledge left him curiously hot and cold. On the one hand, there was
+      joy in the apparent prospect that the congregation would back him up in a
+      stand against the trustees, if worst came to worst. But, on the other
+      hand, the bonnet episode entered his soul. It had been a source of bitter
+      humiliation to him to see his wife sitting there beneath the pulpit, shorn
+      by despotic order of the adornments natural to her pretty head. But he had
+      even greater pain in contemplating the effect it had produced on Alice
+      herself. She had said not a word on the subject, but her every glance and
+      gesture seemed to him eloquent of deep feeling about it. He made sure that
+      she blamed him for having defended his own gas and sidewalk rights with
+      successful vigor, but permitted the sacrifice of her poor little
+      inoffensive roses without a protest. In this view of the matter, indeed,
+      he blamed himself. Was it too late to make the error good? He ventured a
+      hint on this Sunday evening, when he returned to the parsonage and found
+      her reading an old weekly newspaper by the light of the kitchen lamp, to
+      the effect that he fancied there would be no great danger in putting those
+      roses back into her bonnet. Without lifting her eyes from the paper, she
+      answered that she had no earthly desire to wear roses in her bonnet, and
+      went on with her reading.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At breakfast the next morning Theron found himself in command of an
+      unusual fund of humorous good spirits, and was at pains to make the most
+      of it, passing whimsical comments on subjects which the opening day
+      suggested, recalling quaint and comical memories of the past, and striving
+      his best to force Alice into a laugh. Formerly her merry temper had always
+      ignited at the merest spark of gayety. Now she gave his jokes only a
+      dutiful half-smile, and uttered scarcely a word in response to his running
+      fire of talk. When the meal was finished, she went silently to work to
+      clear away the dishes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron turned over in his mind the project of offering to help her, as he
+      had done so often in those dear old days when they laughingly began life
+      together. Something decided this project in the negative for him, and
+      after lingering moments he put on his hat and went out for a walk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not even the most doleful and trying hour of his bitter experience in Tyre
+      had depressed him like this. Looking back upon these past troubles, he
+      persuaded himself that he had borne them all with a light and cheerful
+      heart, simply because Alice had been one with him in every thought and
+      emotion. How perfect, how ideally complete, their sympathy had always
+      been! With what absolute unity of mind and soul they had trod that
+      difficult path together! And now&mdash;henceforth&mdash;was it to be
+      different? The mere suggestion of such a thing chilled his veins. He said
+      aloud to himself as he walked that life would be an intolerable curse if
+      Alice were to cease sharing it with him in every conceivable phase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had made his way out of town, and tramped along the country hill-road
+      for a considerable distance, before a merciful light began to lessen the
+      shadows in the picture of gloom with which his mind tortured itself. All
+      at once he stopped short, lifted his head, and looked about him. The broad
+      valley lay warm and tranquil in the May sunshine at his feet. In the
+      thicket up the side-hill above him a gray squirrel was chattering shrilly,
+      and the birds sang in a tireless choral confusion. Theron smiled, and drew
+      a long breath. The gay clamor of the woodland songsters, the placid
+      radiance of the landscape, were suddenly taken in and made a part of his
+      new mood. He listened, smiled once more, and then started in a leisurely
+      way back toward Octavius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How could he have been so ridiculous as to fancy that Alice&mdash;his
+      Alice&mdash;had been changed into someone else? He marvelled now at his
+      own perverse folly. She was overworked&mdash;tired out&mdash;that was all.
+      The task of moving in, of setting the new household to rights, had been
+      too much for her. She must have a rest. They must get in a hired girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once this decision about a servant fixed itself in the young minister's
+      mind, it drove out the last vestage of discomfort. He strode along now in
+      great content, revolving idly a dozen different plans for gilding and
+      beautifying this new life of leisure into which his sanguine thoughts
+      projected Alice. One of these particularly pleased him, and waxed in
+      definiteness as he turned it over and over. He would get another piano for
+      her, in place of that which had been sacrificed in Tyre. That beneficient
+      modern invention, the instalment plan, made this quite feasible&mdash;so
+      easy, in fact, that it almost seemed as if he should find his wife playing
+      on the new instrument when he got home. He would stop in at the music
+      store and see about it that very day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, now that these important resolutions had been taken, it would
+      be a good thing if he could do something to bring in some extra money.
+      This was by no means a new notion. He had mused over the possibility in a
+      formless way ever since that memorable discovery of indebtedness in Tyre,
+      and had long ago recognized the hopelessness of endeavor in every channel
+      save that of literature. Latterly his fancy had been stimulated by reading
+      an account of the profits which Canon Farrar had derived from his &ldquo;Life of
+      Christ.&rdquo; If such a book could command such a bewildering multitude of
+      readers, Theron felt there ought to be a chance for him. So clear did
+      constant rumination render this assumption that the young pastor in time
+      had come to regard this prospective book of his as a substantial asset,
+      which could be realized without trouble whenever he got around to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not, it is true, gone to the length of seriously considering what
+      should be the subject of his book. That had not seemed to him to matter
+      much, so long as it was scriptural. Familiarity with the process of
+      extracting a fixed amount of spiritual and intellectual meat from any
+      casual text, week after week, had given him an idea that any one of many
+      subjects would do, when the time came for him to make a choice. He
+      realized now that the time for a selection had arrived, and almost
+      simultaneously found himself with a ready-made decision in his mind. The
+      book should be about Abraham!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron Ware was extremely interested in the mechanism of his own brain,
+      and followed its workings with a lively curiosity. Nothing could be more
+      remarkable, he thought, than to thus discover that, on the instant of his
+      formulating a desire to know what he should write upon, lo, and behold!
+      there his mind, quite on its own initiative, had the answer waiting for
+      him! When he had gone a little further, and the powerful range of
+      possibilities in the son's revolt against the idolatry of his father, the
+      image-maker, in the exodus from the unholy city of Ur, and in the
+      influence of the new nomadic life upon the little deistic family group,
+      had begun to unfold itself before him, he felt that the hand of Providence
+      was plainly discernible in the matter. The book was to be blessed from its
+      very inception.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Walking homeward briskly now, with his eyes on the sidewalk and his mind
+      all aglow with crowding suggestions for the new work, and impatience to be
+      at it, he came abruptly upon a group of men and boys who occupied the
+      whole path, and were moving forward so noiselessly that he had not heard
+      them coming. He almost ran into the leader of this little procession, and
+      began a stammering apology, the final words of which were left unspoken,
+      so solemnly heedless of him and his talk were all the faces he saw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the centre of the group were four working-men, bearing between them an
+      extemporized litter of two poles and a blanket hastily secured across them
+      with spikes. Most of what this litter held was covered by another blanket,
+      rounded in coarse folds over a shapeless bulk. From beneath its farther
+      end protruded a big broom-like black beard, thrown upward at such an angle
+      as to hide everything beyond to those in front. The tall young minister,
+      stepping aside and standing tip-toe, could see sloping downward behind
+      this hedge of beard a pinched and chalk-like face, with wide-open, staring
+      eyes. Its lips, of a dull lilac hue, were moving ceaselessly, and made a
+      dry, clicking sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron instinctively joined himself to those who followed the litter&mdash;a
+      motley dozen of street idlers, chiefly boys. One of these in whispers
+      explained to him that the man was one of Jerry Madden's workmen in the
+      wagon-shops, who had been deployed to trim an elm-tree in front of his
+      employer's house, and, being unused to such work, had fallen from the top
+      and broken all his bones. They would have cared for him at Madden's house,
+      but he had insisted upon being taken home. His name was MacEvoy, and he
+      was Joey MacEvoy's father, and likewise Jim's and Hughey's and Martin's.
+      After a pause the lad, a bright-eyed, freckled, barefooted wee Irishman,
+      volunteered the further information that his big brother had run to bring
+      &ldquo;Father Forbess,&rdquo; on the chance that he might be in time to administer
+      &ldquo;extry munction.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The way of the silent little procession led through back streets&mdash;where
+      women hanging up clothes in the yards hurried to the gates, their aprons
+      full of clothes-pins, to stare open-mouthed at the passers-by&mdash;and
+      came to a halt at last in an irregular and muddy lane, before one of a
+      half dozen shanties reared among the ash-heaps and debris of the town's
+      most bedraggled outskirts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A stout, middle-aged, red-armed woman, already warned by some messenger of
+      calamity, stood waiting on the roadside bank. There were whimpering
+      children clinging to her skirts, and a surrounding cluster of women of the
+      neighborhood, some of the more elderly of whom, shrivelled little crones
+      in tidy caps, and with their aprons to their eyes, were beginning in a
+      low-murmured minor the wail which presently should rise into the keen of
+      death. Mrs. MacEvoy herself made no moan, and her broad ruddy face was
+      stern in expression rather than sorrowful. When the litter stopped beside
+      her, she laid a hand for an instant on her husband's wet brow, and looked&mdash;one
+      could have sworn impassively&mdash;into his staring eyes. Then, still
+      without a word, she waved the bearers toward the door, and led the way
+      herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron, somewhat wonderingly, found himself, a minute later, inside a dark
+      and ill-smelling room, the air of which was humid with the steam from a
+      boiler of clothes on the stove, and not in other ways improved by the
+      presence of a jostling score of women, all straining their gaze upon the
+      open door of the only other apartment&mdash;the bed-chamber. Through this
+      they could see the workmen laying MacEvoy on the bed, and standing
+      awkwardly about thereafter, getting in the way of the wife and old Maggie
+      Quirk as they strove to remove the garments from his crushed limbs. As the
+      neighbors watched what could be seen of these proceedings, they whispered
+      among themselves eulogies of the injured man's industry and good temper,
+      his habit of bringing his money home to his wife, and the way he kept his
+      Father Mathew pledge and attended to his religious duties. They admitted
+      freely that, by the light of his example, their own husbands and sons left
+      much to be desired, and from this wandered easily off into domestic
+      digressions of their own. But all the while their eyes were bent upon the
+      bedroom door; and Theron made out, after he had grown accustomed to the
+      gloom and the smell, that many of them were telling their beads even while
+      they kept the muttered conversation alive. None of them paid any attention
+      to him, or seemed to regard his presence there as unusual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently he saw enter through the sunlit street doorway a person of a
+      different class. The bright light shone for a passing instant upon a
+      fashionable, flowered hat, and upon some remarkably brilliant shade of red
+      hair beneath it. In another moment there had edged along through the
+      throng, to almost within touch of him, a tall young woman, the owner of
+      this hat and wonderful hair. She was clad in light and pleasing spring
+      attire, and carried a parasol with a long oxidized silver handle of a
+      quaint pattern. She looked at him, and he saw that her face was of a
+      lengthened oval, with a luminous rose-tinted skin, full red lips, and big
+      brown, frank eyes with heavy auburn lashes. She made a grave little
+      inclination of her head toward him, and he bowed in response. Since her
+      arrival, he noted, the chattering of the others had entirely ceased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I followed the others in, in the hope that I might be of some
+      assistance,&rdquo; he ventured to explain to her in a low murmur, feeling that
+      at last here was some one to whom an explanation of his presence in this
+      Romish house was due. &ldquo;I hope they won't feel that I have intruded.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded her head as if she quite understood. &ldquo;They'll take the will for
+      the deed,&rdquo; she whispered back. &ldquo;Father Forbes will be here in a minute. Do
+      you know is it too late?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Even as she spoke, the outer doorway was darkened by the commanding bulk
+      of a newcomer's figure. The flash of a silk hat, and the deferential way
+      in which the assembled neighbors fell back to clear a passage, made his
+      identity clear. Theron felt his blood tingle in an unaccustomed way as
+      this priest of a strange church advanced across the room&mdash;a
+      broad-shouldered, portly man of more than middle height, with a shapely,
+      strong-lined face of almost waxen pallor, and a firm, commanding tread. He
+      carried in his hands, besides his hat, a small leather-bound case. To this
+      and to him the women courtesied and bowed their heads as he passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come with me,&rdquo; whispered the tall girl with the parasol to Theron; and he
+      found himself pushing along in her wake until they intercepted the priest
+      just outside the bedroom door. She touched Father Forbes on the arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just to tell you that I am here,&rdquo; she said. The priest nodded with a
+      grave face, and passed into the other room. In a minute or two the
+      workmen, Mrs. MacEvoy, and her helper came out, and the door was shut
+      behind them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is making his confession,&rdquo; explained the young lady. &ldquo;Stay here for a
+      minute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved over to where the woman of the house stood, glum-faced and
+      tearless, and whispered something to her. A confused movement among the
+      crowd followed, and out of it presently resulted a small table, covered
+      with a white cloth, and bearing on it two unlighted candles, a basin of
+      water, and a spoon, which was brought forward and placed in readiness
+      before the closed door. Some of those nearest this cleared space were
+      kneeling now, and murmuring a low buzz of prayer to the click of beads on
+      their rosaries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door opened, and Theron saw the priest standing in the doorway with an
+      uplifted hand. He wore now a surplice, with a purple band over his
+      shoulders, and on his pale face there shone a tranquil and tender light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the workmen fetched from the stove a brand, lighted the two
+      candles, and bore the table with its contents into the bedroom. The young
+      woman plucked Theron's sleeve, and he dumbly followed her into the chamber
+      of death, making one of the group of a dozen, headed by Mrs. MacEvoy and
+      her children, which filled the little room, and overflowed now outward to
+      the street door. He found himself bowing with the others to receive the
+      sprinkled holy water from the priest's white fingers; kneeling with the
+      others for the prayers; following in impressed silence with the others the
+      strange ceremonial by which the priest traced crosses of holy oil with his
+      thumb upon the eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands, and feet of the dying
+      man, wiping off the oil with a piece of cotton-batting each time after he
+      had repeated the invocation to forgiveness for that particular sense. But
+      most of all he was moved by the rich, novel sound of the Latin as the
+      priest rolled it forth in the ASPERGES ME, DOMINE, and MISEREATUR VESTRI
+      OMNIPOTENS DEUS, with its soft Continental vowels and liquid R's. It
+      seemed to him that he had never really heard Latin before. Then the
+      astonishing young woman with the red hair declaimed the CONFITEOR,
+      vigorously and with a resonant distinctness of enunciation. It was a
+      different Latin, harsher and more sonorous; and while it still dominated
+      the murmured undertone of the other's prayers, the last moment came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had stood face to face with death at many other bedsides; no other
+      final scene had stirred him like this. It must have been the girl's Latin
+      chant, with its clanging reiteration of the great names&mdash;BEATUM
+      MICHAELEM ARCHANGELUM, BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, SANCTOS APOSTOLOS PETRUM
+      ET PAULUM&mdash;invoked with such proud confidence in this squalid little
+      shanty, which so strangely affected him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came out with the others at last&mdash;the candles and the folded hands
+      over the crucifix left behind&mdash;and walked as one in a dream. Even by
+      the time that he had gained the outer doorway, and stood blinking at the
+      bright light and filling his lungs with honest air once more, it had begun
+      to seem incredible to him that he had seen and done all this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      While Mr. Ware stood thus on the doorstep, through a minute of formless
+      musing, the priest and the girl came out, and, somewhat to his confusion,
+      made him one of their party. He felt himself flushing under the idea that
+      they would think he had waited for them&mdash;was thrusting himself upon
+      them. The notion prompted him to bow frigidly in response to Father
+      Forbes' pleasant &ldquo;I am glad to meet you, sir,&rdquo; and his outstretched hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dropped in by the&mdash;the merest accident,&rdquo; Theron said. &ldquo;I met them
+      bringing the poor man home, and&mdash;and quite without thinking, I obeyed
+      the impulse to follow them in, and didn't realize&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped short, annoyed by the reflection that this was his second
+      apology. The girl smiled placidly at him, the while she put up her
+      parasol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It did me good to see you there,&rdquo; she said, quite as if she had known him
+      all her life. &ldquo;And so it did the rest of us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes permitted himself a soft little chuckle, approving rather
+      than mirthful, and patted her on the shoulder with the air of being fifty
+      years her senior instead of fifteen. To the minister's relief, he changed
+      the subject as the three started together toward the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, again, no doctor was sent for!&rdquo; he exclaimed, as if resuming a
+      familiar subject with the girl. Then he turned to Theron. &ldquo;I dare-say you
+      have no such trouble; but with our poorer people it is very vexing. They
+      will not call in a physician, but hurry off first for the clergyman. I
+      don't know that it is altogether to avoid doctor's bills, but it amounts
+      to that in effect. Of course in this case it made no difference; but I
+      have had to make it a rule not to go out at night unless they bring me a
+      physician's card with his assurance that it is a genuine affair. Why, only
+      last winter, I was routed up after midnight, and brought off in the mud
+      and pelting rain up one of the new streets on the hillside there, simply
+      because a factory girl who was laced too tight had fainted at a dance. I
+      slipped and fell into a puddle in the darkness, ruined a new overcoat, and
+      got drenched to the skin; and when I arrived the girl had recovered and
+      was dancing away again, thirteen to the dozen. It was then that I made the
+      rule. I hope, Mr. Ware, that Octavius is producing a pleasant impression
+      upon you so far?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I scarcely know yet,&rdquo; answered Theron. The genial talk of the priest,
+      with its whimsical anecdote, had in truth passed over his head. His mind
+      still had room for nothing but that novel death-bed scene, with the winged
+      captain of the angelic host, the Baptist, the glorified Fisherman and the
+      Preacher, all being summoned down in the pomp of liturgical Latin to help
+      MacEvoy to die. &ldquo;If you don't mind my saying so,&rdquo; he added hesitatingly,
+      &ldquo;what I have just seen in there DID make a very powerful impression upon
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a very ancient ceremony,&rdquo; said the priest; &ldquo;probably Persian, like
+      the baptismal form, although, for that matter, we can never dig deep
+      enough for the roots of these things. They all turn up Turanian if we
+      probe far enough. Our ways separate here, I'm afraid. I am delighted to
+      have made your acquaintance, Mr. Ware. Pray look in upon me, if you can as
+      well as not. We are near neighbors, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes had shaken hands, and moved off up another street some
+      distance, before the voice of the girl recalled Theron to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course you knew HIM by name,&rdquo; she was saying, &ldquo;and he knew you by
+      sight, and had talked of you; but MY poor inferior sex has to be
+      introduced. I am Celia Madden. My father has the wagon-shops, and I&mdash;I
+      play the organ at the church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I am delighted to make your acquaintance,&rdquo; said Theron, conscious
+      as he spoke that he had slavishly echoed the formula of the priest. He
+      could think of nothing better to add than, &ldquo;Unfortunately, we have no
+      organ in our church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl laughed, as they resumed their walk down the street. &ldquo;I'm afraid
+      I couldn't undertake two,&rdquo; she said, and laughed again. Then she spoke
+      more seriously. &ldquo;That ceremony must have interested you a good deal, never
+      having seen it before. I saw that it was all new to you, and so I made
+      bold to take you under my wing, so to speak.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were very kind,&rdquo; said the young minister. &ldquo;It was really a great
+      experience for me. May&mdash;may I ask, is it a part of your functions, in
+      the church, I mean, to attend these last rites?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mercy, no!&rdquo; replied the girl, spinning the parasol on her shoulder and
+      smiling at the thought. &ldquo;No; it was only because MacEvoy was one of our
+      workmen, and really came by his death through father sending him up to
+      trim a tree. Ann MacEvoy will never forgive us that, the longest day she
+      lives. Did you notice her? She wouldn't speak to me. After you came out, I
+      tried to tell her that we would look out for her and the children; but all
+      she would say to me was: 'An' fwat would a wheelwright, an' him the father
+      of a family, be doin' up a tree?'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They had come now upon the main street of the village, with its flagstone
+      sidewalk overhung by a lofty canopy of elm-boughs. Here, for the space of
+      a block, was concentrated such fashionable elegance of mansions and
+      ornamental lawns as Octavius had to offer; and it was presented with the
+      irregularity so characteristic of our restless civilization. Two or three
+      of the houses survived untouched from the earlier days&mdash;prim,
+      decorous structures, each with its gabled centre and lower wings, each
+      with its row of fluted columns supporting the classical roof of a piazza
+      across its whole front, each vying with the others in the whiteness of
+      those wooden walls enveloping its bright green blinds. One had to look
+      over picket fences to see these houses, and in doing so caught the notion
+      that they thus railed themselves off in pride at being able to remember
+      before the railroad came to the village, or the wagon-works were thought
+      of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the neighboring properties the fences had been swept away, so that
+      one might stroll from the sidewalk straight across the well-trimmed sward
+      to any one of a dozen elaborately modern doorways. Some of the residences,
+      thus frankly proffering friendship to the passer-by, were of wood painted
+      in drabs and dusky reds, with bulging windows which marked the native
+      yearning for the mediaeval, and shingles that strove to be accounted
+      tiles. Others&mdash;a prouder, less pretentious sort&mdash;were of brick
+      or stone, with terra-cotta mouldings set into the walls, and with real
+      slates covering the riot of turrets and peaks and dormer peepholes
+      overhead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia Madden stopped in front of the largest and most important-looking of
+      these new edifices, and said, holding out her hand: &ldquo;Here I am, once more.
+      Good-morning, Mr. Ware.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron hoped that his manner did not betray the flash of surprise he felt
+      in discovering that his new acquaintance lived in the biggest house in
+      Octavius. He remembered now that some one had pointed it out as the abode
+      of the owner of the wagon factories; but it had not occurred to him before
+      to associate this girl with that village magnate. It was stupid of him, of
+      course, because she had herself mentioned her father. He looked at her
+      again with an awkward smile, as he formally shook the gloved hand she gave
+      him, and lifted his soft hat. The strong noon sunlight, forcing its way
+      down between the elms, and beating upon her parasol of lace-edged, creamy
+      silk, made a halo about her hair and face at once brilliant and tender. He
+      had not seen before how beautiful she was. She nodded in recognition of
+      his salute, and moved up the lawn walk, spinning the sunshade on her
+      shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though the parsonage was only three blocks away, the young minister had
+      time to think about a good many things before he reached home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First of all, he had to revise in part the arrangement of his notions
+      about the Irish. Save for an occasional isolated and taciturn figure among
+      the nomadic portion of the hired help in the farm country, Theron had
+      scarcely ever spoken to a person of this curiously alien race before. He
+      remembered now that there had been some dozen or more Irish families in
+      Tyre, quartered in the outskirts among the brickyards, but he had never
+      come in contact with any of them, or given to their existence even a
+      passing thought. So far as personal acquaintance went, the Irish had been
+      to him only a name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what a sinister and repellent name! His views on this general subject
+      were merely those common to his communion and his environment. He took it
+      for granted, for example, that in the large cities most of the poverty and
+      all the drunkenness, crime, and political corruption were due to the
+      perverse qualities of this foreign people&mdash;qualities accentuated and
+      emphasized in every evil direction by the baleful influence of a false and
+      idolatrous religion. It is hardly too much to say that he had never
+      encountered a dissenting opinion on this point. His boyhood had been spent
+      in those bitter days when social, political, and blood prejudices were
+      fused at white heat in the public crucible together. When he went to the
+      Church Seminary, it was a matter of course that every member of the
+      faculty was a Republican, and that every one of his classmates had come
+      from a Republican household. When, later on, he entered the ministry, the
+      rule was still incredulous of exceptions. One might as well have looked in
+      the Nedahma Conference for a divergence of opinion on the Trinity as for a
+      difference in political conviction. Indeed, even among the laity, Theron
+      could not feel sure that he had ever known a Democrat; that is, at all
+      closely. He understood very little about politics, it is true. If he had
+      been driven into a corner, and forced to attempt an explanation of this
+      tremendous partisan unity in which he had a share, he would probably have
+      first mentioned the War&mdash;the last shots of which were fired while he
+      was still in petticoats. Certainly his second reason, however, would have
+      been that the Irish were on the other side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had never before had occasion to formulate, even in his own thoughts,
+      this tacit race and religious aversion in which he had been bred. It rose
+      now suddenly in front of him, as he sauntered from patch to patch of
+      sunlight under the elms, like some huge, shadowy, and symbolic monument.
+      He looked at it with wondering curiosity, as at something he had heard of
+      all his life, but never seen before&mdash;an abhorrent spectacle, truly!
+      The foundations upon which its dark bulk reared itself were ignorance,
+      squalor, brutality and vice. Pigs wallowed in the mire before its base,
+      and burrowing into this base were a myriad of narrow doors, each bearing
+      the hateful sign of a saloon, and giving forth from its recesses of night
+      the sounds of screams and curses. Above were sculptured rows of lowering,
+      ape-like faces from Nast's and Keppler's cartoons, and out of these sprang
+      into the vague upper gloom&mdash;on the one side, lamp-posts from which
+      negroes hung by the neck, and on the other gibbets for dynamiters and
+      Molly Maguires, and between the two glowed a spectral picture of some
+      black-robed tonsured men, with leering satanic masks, making a bonfire of
+      the Bible in the public schools.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron stared this phantasm hard in the face, and recognized it for a very
+      tolerable embodiment of what he had heretofore supposed he thought about
+      the Irish. For an instant, the sight of it made him shiver, as if the
+      sunny May had of a sudden lapsed back into bleak December. Then he smiled,
+      and the bad vision went off into space. He saw instead Father Forbes, in
+      the white and purple vestments, standing by poor MacEvoy's bedside, with
+      his pale, chiselled, luminous, uplifted face, and he heard only the proud,
+      confident clanging of the girl's recital,&mdash;BEATUM MICHAELEM
+      ARCHANGELUM, BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, PETRUM ET PAULUM&mdash;EM!&mdash;AM!&mdash;UM!&mdash;like
+      strokes on a great resonant alarm-bell, attuned for the hearing of heaven.
+      He caught himself on the very verge of feeling that heaven must have
+      heard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he smiled again, and laid the matter aside, with a parting admission
+      that it had been undoubtedly picturesque and impressive, and that it had
+      been a valuable experience to him to see it. At least the Irish, with all
+      their faults, must have a poetic strain, or they would not have clung so
+      tenaciously to those curious and ancient forms. He recalled having heard
+      somewhere, or read, it might be, that they were a people much given to
+      songs and music. And the young lady, that very handsome and friendly Miss
+      Madden, had told him that she was a musician! He had a new pleasure in
+      turning this over in his mind. Of all the closed doors which his choice of
+      a career had left along his pathway, no other had for him such a magical
+      fascination as that on which was graven the lute of Orpheus. He knew not
+      even the alphabet of music, and his conceptions of its possibilities ran
+      but little beyond the best of the hymn-singing he had heard at
+      Conferences, yet none the less the longing for it raised on occasion such
+      mutiny in his soul that more than once he had specifically prayed against
+      it as a temptation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dangerous though some of its tendencies might be, there was no gainsaying
+      the fact that a love for music was in the main an uplifting influence&mdash;an
+      attribute of cultivation. The world was the sweeter and more gentle for
+      it. And this brought him to musing upon the odd chance that the two people
+      of Octavius who had given him the first notion of polish and intellectual
+      culture in the town should be Irish. The Romish priest must have been
+      vastly surprised at his intrusion, yet had been at the greatest pains to
+      act as if it were quite the usual thing to have Methodist ministers assist
+      at Extreme Unction. And the young woman&mdash;how gracefully, with what
+      delicacy, had she comprehended his position and robbed it of all its
+      possible embarrassments! It occurred to him that they must have passed,
+      there in front of her home, the very tree from which the luckless
+      wheelwright had fallen some hours before; and the fact that she had
+      forborne to point it out to him took form in his mind as an added proof of
+      her refinement of nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The midday dinner was a little more than ready when Theron reached home,
+      and let himself in by the front door. On Mondays, owing to the moisture
+      and &ldquo;clutter&rdquo; of the weekly washing in the kitchen, the table was laid in
+      the sitting-room, and as he entered from the hall the partner of his joys
+      bustled in by the other door, bearing the steaming platter of corned beef,
+      dumplings, cabbages, and carrots, with arms bared to the elbows, and a red
+      face. It gave him great comfort, however, to note that there were no signs
+      of the morning's displeasure remaining on this face; and he immediately
+      remembered again those interrupted projects of his about the piano and the
+      hired girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well! I'd just about begun to reckon that I was a widow,&rdquo; said Alice,
+      putting down her fragrant burden. There was such an obvious suggestion of
+      propitiation in her tone that Theron went around and kissed her. He
+      thought of saying something about keeping out of the way because it was
+      &ldquo;Blue Monday,&rdquo; but held it back lest it should sound like a reproach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what kind of a washerwoman does THIS one turn out to be?&rdquo; he asked,
+      after they were seated, and he had invoked a blessing and was cutting
+      vigorously into the meat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, so-so,&rdquo; replied Alice; &ldquo;she seems to be particular, but she's mortal
+      slow. If I hadn't stood right over her, we shouldn't have had the clothes
+      out till goodness knows when. And of course she's Irish!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what of THAT?&rdquo; asked the minister, with a fine unconcern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice looked up from her plate, with knife and fork suspended in air.
+      &ldquo;Why, you know we were talking only the other day of what a pity it was
+      that none of our own people went out washing,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;That Welsh woman
+      we heard of couldn't come, after all; and they say, too, that she presumes
+      dreadfully upon the acquaintance, being a church member, you know. So we
+      simply had to fall back on the Irish. And even if they do go and tell
+      their priest everything they see and hear, why, there's one comfort, they
+      can tell about US and welcome. Of course I see to it she doesn't snoop
+      around in here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron smiled. &ldquo;That's all nonsense about their telling such things to
+      their priests,&rdquo; he said with easy confidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, you told me so yourself,&rdquo; replied Alice, briskly. &ldquo;And I've always
+      understood so, too; they're bound to tell EVERYTHING in confession. That's
+      what gives the Catholic Church such a tremendous hold. You've spoken of it
+      often.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It must have been by way of a figure of speech,&rdquo; remarked Theron, not
+      with entire directness. &ldquo;Women are great hands to separate one's
+      observations from their context, and so give them meanings quite
+      unintended. They are also great hands,&rdquo; he added genially, &ldquo;or at least
+      one of them is, at making the most delicious dumplings in the world. I
+      believe these are the best even you ever made.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice was not unmindful of the compliment, but her thoughts were on other
+      things. &ldquo;I shouldn't like that woman's priest, for example,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;to
+      know that we had no piano.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if he comes and stands outside our house every night and listens&mdash;as
+      of course he will,&rdquo; said Theron, with mock gravity, &ldquo;it is only a question
+      of time when he must reach that conclusion for himself. Our only chance,
+      however, is that there are some sixteen hundred other houses for him to
+      watch, so that he may not get around to us for quite a spell. Why,
+      seriously, Alice, what on earth do you suppose Father Forbes knows or
+      cares about our poor little affairs, or those of any other Protestant
+      household in this whole village? He has his work to do, just as I have
+      mine&mdash;only his is ten times as exacting in everything except sermons&mdash;and
+      you may be sure he is only too glad when it is over each day, without
+      bothering about things that are none of his business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the same I'm afraid of them,&rdquo; said Alice, as if argument were
+      exhausted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On the following morning young Mr. Ware anticipated events by inscribing
+      in his diary for the day, immediately after breakfast, these remarks:
+      &ldquo;Arranged about piano. Began work upon book.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The date indeed deserved to be distinguished from its fellows. Theron was
+      so conscious of its importance that he not only prophesied in the little
+      morocco-bound diary which Alice had given him for Christmas, but returned
+      after he had got out upon the front steps of the parsonage to have his hat
+      brushed afresh by her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wonders will never cease,&rdquo; she said jocosely. &ldquo;With you getting
+      particular about your clothes, there isn't anything in this wide world
+      that can't happen now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One doesn't go out to bring home a piano every day,&rdquo; he made answer.
+      &ldquo;Besides, I want to make such an impression upon the man that he will deal
+      gently with that first cash payment down. Do you know,&rdquo; he added, watching
+      her turn the felt brim under the wisp-broom's strokes, &ldquo;I'm thinking some
+      of getting me a regular silk stove-pipe hat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don't you, then?&rdquo; she rejoined, but without any ring of glad
+      acquiescence in her tone. He fancied that her face lengthened a little,
+      and he instantly ascribed it to recollections of the way in which the
+      roses had been bullied out of her own headgear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are quite sure, now, pet,&rdquo; he made haste to change the subject, &ldquo;that
+      the hired girl can wait just as well as not until fall?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, MY, yes!&rdquo; Alice replied, putting the hat on his head, and smoothing
+      back his hair behind his ears. &ldquo;She'd only be in the way now. You see,
+      with hot weather coming on, there won't be much cooking. We'll take all
+      our meals out here, and that saves so much work that really what remains
+      is hardly more than taking care of a bird-cage. And, besides, not having
+      her will almost half pay for the piano.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But when cold weather comes, you're sure you'll consent?&rdquo; he urged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like a shot!&rdquo; she assured him, and, after a happy little caress, he
+      started out again on his momentous mission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thurston's&rdquo; was a place concerning which opinions differed in Octavius.
+      That it typified progress, and helped more than any other feature of the
+      village to bring it up to date, no one indeed disputed. One might move
+      about a great deal, in truth, and hear no other view expressed. But then
+      again one might stumble into conversation with one small storekeeper after
+      another, and learn that they united in resenting the existence of
+      &ldquo;Thurston's,&rdquo; as rival farmers might join to curse a protracted drought.
+      Each had his special flaming grievance. The little dry-goods dealers asked
+      mournfully how they could be expected to compete with an establishment
+      which could buy bankrupt stocks at a hundred different points, and make a
+      profit if only one-third of the articles were sold for more than they
+      would cost from the jobber? The little boot and shoe dealers, clothiers,
+      hatters, and furriers, the small merchants in carpets, crockery, and
+      furniture, the venders of hardware and household utensils, of leathern
+      goods and picture-frames, of wall-paper, musical instruments, and even
+      toys&mdash;all had the same pathetically unanswerable question to
+      propound. But mostly they put it to themselves, because the others were at
+      &ldquo;Thurston's.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Theron Ware had entertained rather strong views on this subject,
+      and that only a week or two ago. One of his first acquaintances in
+      Octavius had been the owner of the principal book-store in the place&mdash;a
+      gentle and bald old man who produced the complete impression of a
+      bibliophile upon what the slightest investigation showed to be only a
+      meagre acquaintance with publishers' circulars. But at least he had the
+      air of loving his business, and the young minister had enjoyed a long talk
+      with, or rather, at him. Out of this talk had come the information that
+      the store was losing money. Not even the stationery department now showed
+      a profit worth mentioning. When Octavius had contained only five thousand
+      inhabitants, it boasted four book-stores, two of them good ones. Now, with
+      a population more than doubled, only these latter two survived, and they
+      must soon go to the wall. The reason? It was in a nutshell. A book which
+      sold at retail for one dollar and a half cost the bookseller ninety cents.
+      If it was at all a popular book, &ldquo;Thurston's&rdquo; advertised it at eighty-nine
+      cents&mdash;and in any case at a profit of only two or three cents. Of
+      course it was done to widen the establishment's patronage&mdash;to bring
+      people into the store. Equally of course, it was destroying the book
+      business and debauching the reading tastes of the community. Without the
+      profits from the light and ephemeral popular literature of the season, the
+      book-store proper could not keep up its stock of more solid works, and
+      indeed could not long keep open at all. On the other hand, &ldquo;Thurston's&rdquo;
+       dealt with nothing save the demand of the moment, and offered only the
+      books which were the talk of the week. Thus, in plain words, the book
+      trade was going to the dogs, and it was the same with pretty nearly every
+      other trade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron was indignant at this, and on his return home told Alice that he
+      desired her to make no purchases whatever at &ldquo;Thurston's.&rdquo; He even
+      resolved to preach a sermon on the subject of the modern idea of admiring
+      the great for crushing the small, and sketched out some notes for it which
+      he thought solved the problem of flaying the local abuse without
+      mentioning it by name. They had lain on his desk now for ten days or more,
+      and on only the previous Friday he had speculated upon using them that
+      coming Sunday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On this bright and cheerful Tuesday morning he walked with a blithe step
+      unhesitatingly down the main street to &ldquo;Thurston's,&rdquo; and entered without
+      any show of repugnance the door next to the window wherein, flanked by
+      dangling banjos and key-bugles built in pyramids, was displayed the sign,
+      &ldquo;Pianos on the Instalment Plan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was recognized by some responsible persons, and treated with
+      distinguished deference. They were charmed with the intelligence that he
+      desired a piano, and fascinated by his wish to pay for it only a little at
+      a time. They had special terms for clergymen, and made him feel as if
+      these were being extended to him on a silver charger by kneeling admirers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was so easy to buy things here that he was a trifle disturbed to find
+      his flowing course interrupted by his own entire ignorance as to what kind
+      of piano he wanted. He looked at all they had in stock, and heard them
+      played upon. They differed greatly in price, and, so he fancied, almost as
+      much in tone. It discouraged him to note, however, that several of those
+      he thought the finest in tone were among the very cheapest in the lot.
+      Pondering this, and staring in hopeless puzzlement from one to another of
+      the big black shiny monsters, he suddenly thought of something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would rather not decide for myself,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I know so little about
+      it. If you don't mind, I will have a friend of mine, a skilled musician,
+      step in and make a selection. I have so much confidence in&mdash;in her
+      judgment.&rdquo; He added hurriedly, &ldquo;It will involve only a day or two's
+      delay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next moment he was sorry he had spoken. What would they think when
+      they saw the organist of the Catholic church come to pick out a piano for
+      the Methodist parsonage? And how could he decorously prefer the request to
+      her to undertake this task? He might not meet her again for ages, and to
+      his provincial notions writing would have seemed out of the question. And
+      would it not be disagreeable to have her know that he was buying a piano
+      by part payments? Poor Alice's dread of the washerwoman's gossip occurred
+      to him, at this, and he smiled in spite of himself. Then all at once the
+      difficulty vanished. Of course it would come all right somehow. Everything
+      did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was on firmer ground, buying the materials for the new book, over on
+      the stationery side. His original intention had been to bestow this
+      patronage upon the old bookseller, but these suavely smart people in
+      &ldquo;Thurston's&rdquo; had had the effect of putting him on his honor when they
+      asked, &ldquo;Would there be anything else?&rdquo; and he had followed them
+      unresistingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He indulged to the full his whim that everything entering into the
+      construction of &ldquo;Abraham&rdquo; should be spick-and-span. He watched with his
+      own eyes a whole ream of broad glazed white paper being sliced down by the
+      cutter into single sheets, and thrilled with a novel ecstasy as he laid
+      his hand upon the spotless bulk, so wooingly did it invite him to begin.
+      He tried a score of pens before the right one came to hand. When a box of
+      these had been laid aside, with ink and pen-holders and a little bronze
+      inkstand, he made a sign that the outfit was complete. Or no&mdash;there
+      must be some blotting-paper. He had always used those blotting-pads given
+      away by insurance companies&mdash;his congregations never failed to
+      contain one or more agents, who had these to bestow by the armful&mdash;but
+      the book deserved a virgin blotter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron stood by while all these things were being tied up together in a
+      parcel. The suggestion that they should be sent almost hurt him. Oh, no,
+      he would carry them home himself. So strongly did they appeal to his
+      sanguine imagination that he could not forbear hinting to the man who had
+      shown him the pianos and was now accompanying him to the door that this
+      package under his arm represented potentially the price of the piano he
+      was going to have. He did it in a roundabout way, with one of his droll,
+      hesitating smiles. The man did not understand at all, and Theron had not
+      the temerity to repeat the remark. He strode home with the precious bundle
+      as fast as he could.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought it best, after all, not to commit myself to a selection,&rdquo; he
+      explained about the piano at dinner-time. &ldquo;In such a matter as this, the
+      opinion of an expert is everything. I am going to have one of the
+      principal musicians of the town go and try them all, and tell me which we
+      ought to have.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And while he's about it,&rdquo; said Alice, &ldquo;you might ask him to make a little
+      list of some of the new music. I've got way behind the times, being
+      without a piano so long. Tell him not any VERY difficult pieces, you
+      know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I know,&rdquo; put in Theron, almost hastily, and began talking of other
+      things. His conversation was of the most rambling and desultory sort,
+      because all the while the two lobes of his brain, as it were, kept up a
+      dispute as to whether Alice ought to have been told that this &ldquo;principal
+      musician&rdquo; was of her own sex. It would certainly have been better, at the
+      outset, he decided; but to mention it now would be to invest the fact with
+      undue importance. Yes, that was quite clear; only the clearer it became,
+      from one point of view, the shadier it waxed from the other. The problem
+      really disturbed the young minister's mind throughout the meal, and his
+      abstraction became so marked at last that his wife commented upon it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A penny for your thoughts!&rdquo; she said, with cheerful briskness. This
+      ancient formula of the farm-land had always rather jarred on Theron. It
+      presented itself now to his mind as a peculiarly aggravating banality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to begin my book this afternoon,&rdquo; he remarked impressively.
+      &ldquo;There is a great deal to think about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It turned out that there was even more to think about than he had
+      imagined. After hours of solitary musing at his desk, or of pacing up and
+      down before his open book-shelves, Theron found the first shadows of a
+      May-day twilight beginning to fall upon that beautiful pile of white
+      paper, still unstained by ink. He saw the book he wanted to write before
+      him, in his mental vision, much more distinctly than ever, but the idea of
+      beginning it impetuously, and hurling it off hot and glowing week by week,
+      had faded away like a dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This long afternoon, spent face to face with a project born of his own
+      brain but yesterday, yet already so much bigger than himself, was really a
+      most fruitful time for the young clergyman. The lessons which cut most
+      deeply into our consciousness are those we learn from our children.
+      Theron, in this first day's contact with the offspring of his fancy, found
+      revealed to him an unsuspected and staggering truth. It was that he was an
+      extremely ignorant and rudely untrained young man, whose pretensions to
+      intellectual authority among any educated people would be laughed at with
+      deserved contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Strangely enough, after he had weathered the first shock, this discovery
+      did not dismay Theron Ware. The very completeness of the conviction it
+      carried with it, saturated his mind with a feeling as if the fact had
+      really been known to him all along. And there came, too, after a little,
+      an almost pleasurable sense of the importance of the revelation. He had
+      been merely drifting in fatuous and conceited blindness. Now all at once
+      his eyes were open; he knew what he had to do. Ignorance was a thing to be
+      remedied, and he would forthwith bend all his energies to cultivating his
+      mind till it should blossom like a garden. In this mood, Theron mentally
+      measured himself against the more conspicuous of his colleagues in the
+      Conference. They also were ignorant, clownishly ignorant: the difference
+      was that they were doomed by native incapacity to go on all their lives
+      without ever finding it out. It was obvious to him that his case was
+      better. There was bright promise in the very fact that he had discovered
+      his shortcomings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had begun the afternoon by taking down from their places the various
+      works in his meagre library which bore more or less relation to the task
+      in hand. The threescore books which constituted his printed possessions
+      were almost wholly from the press of the Book Concern; the few exceptions
+      were volumes which, though published elsewhere, had come to him through
+      that giant circulating agency of the General Conference, and wore the
+      stamp of its approval. Perhaps it was the sight of these half-filled
+      shelves which started this day's great revolution in Theron's opinions of
+      himself. He had never thought much before about owning books. He had been
+      too poor to buy many, and the conditions of canvassing about among one's
+      parishioners which the thrifty Book Concern imposes upon those who would
+      have without buying, had always repelled him. Now, suddenly, as he moved
+      along the two shelves, he felt ashamed at their beggarly showing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Land and the Book,&rdquo; in three portly volumes, was the most pretentious
+      of the aids which he finally culled from his collection. Beside it he laid
+      out &ldquo;Bible Lands,&rdquo; &ldquo;Rivers and Lakes of Scripture,&rdquo; &ldquo;Bible Manners and
+      Customs,&rdquo; the &ldquo;Genesis and Exodus&rdquo; volume of Whedon's Commentary, some old
+      numbers of the &ldquo;Methodist Quarterly Review,&rdquo; and a copy of &ldquo;Josephus&rdquo;
+       which had belonged to his grandmother, and had seen him through many a
+      weary Sunday afternoon in boyhood. He glanced casually through these, one
+      by one, as he took them down, and began to fear that they were not going
+      to be of so much use as he had thought. Then, seating himself, he read
+      carefully through the thirteen chapters of Genesis which chronicle the
+      story of the founder of Israel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course he had known this story from his earliest years. In almost every
+      chapter he came now upon a phrase or an incident which had served him as
+      the basis for a sermon. He had preached about Hagar in the wilderness,
+      about Lot's wife, about the visit of the angels, about the intended
+      sacrifice of Isaac, about a dozen other things suggested by the ancient
+      narrative. Somehow this time it all seemed different to him. The people he
+      read about were altered to his vision. Heretofore a poetic light had shone
+      about them, where indeed they had not glowed in a halo of sanctification.
+      Now, by some chance, this light was gone, and he saw them instead as
+      untutored and unwashed barbarians, filled with animal lusts and
+      ferocities, struggling by violence and foul chicanery to secure a foothold
+      in a country which did not belong to them&mdash;all rude tramps and
+      robbers of the uncivilized plain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The apparent fact that Abram was a Chaldean struck him with peculiar
+      force. How was it, he wondered, that this had never occurred to him
+      before? Examining himself, he found that he had supposed vaguely that
+      there had been Jews from the beginning, or at least, say, from the flood.
+      But, no, Abram was introduced simply as a citizen of the Chaldean town of
+      Ur, and there was no hint of any difference in race between him and his
+      neighbors. It was specially mentioned that his brother, Lot's father, died
+      in Ur, the city of his nativity. Evidently the family belonged there, and
+      were Chaldeans like the rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not cite this as at all a striking discovery, but it did have a
+      curious effect upon Theron Ware. Up to that very afternoon, his notion of
+      the kind of book he wanted to write had been founded upon a popular book
+      called &ldquo;Ruth the Moabitess,&rdquo; written by a clergyman he knew very well, the
+      Rev. E. Ray Mifflin. This model performance troubled itself not at all
+      with difficult points, but went swimmingly along through scented summer
+      seas of pretty rhetoric, teaching nothing, it is true, but pleasing a good
+      deal and selling like hot cakes. Now, all at once Theron felt that he
+      hated that sort of book. HIS work should be of a vastly different order.
+      He might fairly assume, he thought, that if the fact that Abram was a
+      Chaldean was new to him, it would fall upon the world in general as a
+      novelty. Very well, then, there was his chance. He would write a learned
+      book, showing who the Chaldeans were, and how their manners and beliefs
+      differed from, and influenced&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was at this psychological instant that the wave of self-condemnation
+      suddenly burst upon and submerged the young clergyman. It passed again,
+      leaving him staring fixedly at the pile of books he had taken down from
+      the shelves, and gasping a little, as if for breath. Then the humorous
+      side of the thing, perversely enough, appealed to him, and he grinned
+      feebly to himself at the joke of his having imagined that he could write
+      learnedly about the Chaldeans, or anything else. But, no, it shouldn't
+      remain a joke! His long mobile face grew serious under the new resolve. He
+      would learn what there was to be learned about the Chaldeans. He rose and
+      walked up and down the room, gathering fresh strength of purpose as this
+      inviting field of research spread out its vistas before him. Perhaps&mdash;yes,
+      he would incidentally explore the mysteries of the Moabitic past as well,
+      and thus put the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin to confusion on his own subject. That
+      would in itself be a useful thing, because Mifflin wore kid gloves at the
+      Conference, and affected an intolerable superiority of dress and demeanor,
+      and there would be general satisfaction among the plainer and worthier
+      brethren at seeing him taken down a peg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now for the first time there rose distinctly in Theron's mind that casual
+      allusion which Father Forbes had made to the Turanians. He recalled, too,
+      his momentary feeling of mortification at not knowing who the Turanians
+      were, at the time. Possibly, if he had probed this matter more deeply, now
+      as he walked and pondered in the little living-room, he might have traced
+      the whole of the afternoon's mental experiences to that chance remark of
+      the Romish priest. But this speculation did not detain him. He mused
+      instead upon the splendid library Father Forbes must have.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, how does the book come on? Have you got to 'my Lady Keturah' yet?'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Alice who spoke, opening the door from the kitchen, and putting in
+      her head with a pretence of great and solemn caution, but with a
+      correcting twinkle in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't got to anybody yet,&rdquo; answered Theron, absently. &ldquo;These big
+      things must be approached slowly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come out to supper, then, while the beans are hot,&rdquo; said Alice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister sat through this other meal, again in deep abstraction.
+      His wife pursued her little pleasantry about Keturah, the second wife,
+      urging him with mock gravity to scold her roundly for daring to usurp
+      Sarah's place, but Theron scarcely heard her, and said next to nothing. He
+      ate sparingly, and fidgeted in his seat, waiting with obvious impatience
+      for the finish of the meal. At last he rose abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got a call to make&mdash;something with reference to the book,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;I'll run out now, I think, before it gets dark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put on his hat, and strode out of the house as if his errand was of the
+      utmost urgency. Once upon the street, however, his pace slackened. There
+      was still a good deal of daylight outside, and he loitered aimlessly
+      about, walking with bowed head and hands clasped behind him, until dusk
+      fell. Then he squared his shoulders, and started straight as the crow
+      flies toward the residence of Father Forbes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The new Catholic church was the largest and most imposing public building
+      in Octavius. Even in its unfinished condition, with a bald roofing of
+      weather-beaten boards marking on the stunted tower the place where a spire
+      was to begin later on, it dwarfed every other edifice of the sort in the
+      town, just as it put them all to shame in the matter of the throngs it
+      drew, rain or shine, to its services.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These facts had not heretofore been a source of satisfaction to the Rev.
+      Theron Ware. He had even alluded to the subject in terms which gave his
+      wife the impression that he actively deplored the strength and size of the
+      Catholic denomination in this new home of theirs, and was troubled in his
+      mind about Rome generally. But this evening he walked along the extended
+      side of the big structure, which occupied nearly half the block, and then,
+      turning the corner, passed in review its wide-doored, looming front,
+      without any hostile emotions whatever. In the gathering dusk it seemed
+      more massive than ever before, but he found himself only passively
+      considering the odd statement he had heard that all Catholic Church
+      property was deeded absolutely in the name of the Bishop of the diocese.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only a narrow passage-way separated the church from the pastorate&mdash;a
+      fine new brick residence standing flush upon the street. Theron mounted
+      the steps, and looked about for a bell-pull. Search revealed instead a
+      little ivory button set in a ring of metal work. He picked at this for a
+      time with his finger-nail, before he made out the injunction, printed
+      across it, to push. Of course! how stupid of him! This was one of those
+      electric bells he had heard so much of, but which had not as yet made
+      their way to the class of homes he knew. For custodians of a mediaeval
+      superstition and fanaticism, the Catholic clergy seemed very much up to
+      date. This bell made him feel rather more a countryman than ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door was opened by a tall gaunt woman, who stood in black relief
+      against the radiance of the hall-way while Theron, choosing his words with
+      some diffidence, asked if the Rev. Mr. Forbes was in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is&rdquo; came the hush-voiced answer. &ldquo;He's at dinner, though.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It took the young minister a second or two to bring into association in
+      his mind this evening hour and this midday meal. Then he began to say that
+      he would call again&mdash;it was nothing special&mdash;but the woman
+      suddenly cut him short by throwing the door wide open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's Mr. Ware, is it not?&rdquo; she asked, in a greatly altered tone. &ldquo;Sure,
+      he'd not have you go away. Come inside&mdash;do, sir!&mdash;I'll tell
+      him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron, with a dumb show of reluctance, crossed the threshold. He noted
+      now that the woman, who had bustled down the hall on her errand, was
+      gray-haired and incredibly ugly, with a dark sour face, glowering black
+      eyes, and a twisted mouth. Then he saw that he was not alone in the
+      hall-way. Three men and two women, all poorly clad and obviously working
+      people, were seated in meek silence on a bench beyond the hat-rack. They
+      glanced up at him for an instant, then resumed their patient study of the
+      linoleum pattern on the floor at their feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And will you kindly step in, sir?&rdquo; the elderly Gorgon had returned to
+      ask. She led Mr. Ware along the hall-way to a door near the end, and
+      opened it for him to pass before her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He entered a room in which for the moment he could see nothing but a
+      central glare of dazzling light beating down from a great shaded lamp upon
+      a circular patch of white table linen. Inside this ring of illumination
+      points of fire sparkled from silver and porcelain, and two bars of burning
+      crimson tracked across the cloth in reflection from tall glasses filled
+      with wine. The rest of the room was vague darkness; but the gloom seemed
+      saturated with novel aromatic odors, the appetizing scent of which bore
+      clear relation to what Theron's blinking eyes rested upon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was able now to discern two figures at the table, outside the glowing
+      circle of the lamp. They had both risen, and one came toward him with
+      cordial celerity, holding out a white plump hand in greeting. He took this
+      proffered hand rather limply, not wholly sure in the half-light that this
+      really was Father Forbes, and began once more that everlasting apology to
+      which he seemed doomed in the presence of the priest. It was broken
+      abruptly off by the other's protesting laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Mr. Ware, I beg of you,&rdquo; the priest urged, chuckling with
+      hospitable mirth, &ldquo;don't, don't apologize! I give you my word, nothing in
+      the world could have pleased us better than your joining us here tonight.
+      It was quite dramatic, your coming in as you did. We were speaking of you
+      at that very moment. Oh, I forgot&mdash;let me make you acquainted with my
+      friend&mdash;my very particular friend, Dr. Ledsmar. Let me take your hat;
+      pray draw up a chair. Maggie will have a place laid for you in a minute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I assure you&mdash;I couldn't think of it&mdash;I've just eaten my&mdash;my&mdash;dinner,&rdquo;
+       expostulated Theron. He murmured more inarticulate remonstrances a moment
+      later, when the grim old domestic appeared with plates, serviette, and
+      tableware for his use, but she went on spreading them before him as if she
+      heard nothing. Thus committed against a decent show of resistance, the
+      young minister did eat a little here and there of what was set before him,
+      and was human enough to regret frankly that he could not eat more. It
+      seemed to him very remarkable cookery, transfiguring so simple a thing as
+      a steak, for example, quite out of recognition, and investing the humble
+      potato with a charm he had never dreamed of. He wondered from time to time
+      if it would be polite to ask how the potatoes were cooked, so that he
+      might tell Alice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation at the table was not continuous, or even enlivened. After
+      the lapses into silence became marked, Theron began to suspect that his
+      refusal to drink wine had annoyed them&mdash;the more so as he had
+      drenched a large section of table-cloth in his efforts to manipulate a
+      siphon instead. He was greatly relieved, therefore, when Father Forbes
+      explained in an incidental way that Dr. Ledsmar and he customarily ate
+      their meals almost without a word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a philosophic fad of his,&rdquo; the priest went on smilingly, &ldquo;and I have
+      fallen in with it for the sake of a quiet life; so that when we do have
+      company&mdash;that is to say, once in a blue moon&mdash;we display no
+      manners to speak of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had always supposed&mdash;that is, I've always heard&mdash;that it was
+      more healthful to talk at meals,&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;Of course&mdash;what I
+      mean&mdash;I took it for granted all physicians thought so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar laughed. &ldquo;That depends so much upon the quality of the meals!&rdquo;
+       he remarked, holding his glass up to the light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seemed a man of middle age and an equable disposition. Theron, stealing
+      stray glances at him around the lampshade, saw most distinctly of all a
+      broad, impressive dome of skull, which, though obviously the result of
+      baldness, gave the effect of quite belonging to the face. There were
+      gold-rimmed spectacles, through which shone now and again the vivid
+      sparkle of sharp, alert eyes, and there was a nose of some sort not easy
+      to classify, at once long and thick. The rest was thin hair and short
+      round beard, mouse-colored where the light caught them, but losing their
+      outlines in the shadows of the background. Theron had not heard of him
+      among the physicians of Octavius. He wondered if he might not be a doctor
+      of something else than medicine, and decided upon venturing the question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, it is medicine,&rdquo; replied Ledsmar. &ldquo;I am a doctor three or four
+      times over, so far as parchments can make one. In some other respects,
+      though, I should think I am probably less of a doctor than anybody else
+      now living. I haven't practised&mdash;that is, regularly&mdash;for many
+      years, and I take no interest whatever in keeping abreast of what the
+      profession regards as its progress. I know nothing beyond what was being
+      taught in the sixties, and that I am glad to say I have mostly forgotten.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear me!&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;I had always supposed that Science was the most
+      engrossing of pursuits&mdash;that once a man took it up he never left it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that would imply a connection between Science and Medicine!&rdquo;
+       commented the doctor. &ldquo;My dear sir, they are not even on speaking terms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall we go upstairs?&rdquo; put in the priest, rising from his chair. &ldquo;It will
+      be more comfortable to have our coffee there&mdash;unless indeed, Mr.
+      Ware, tobacco is unpleasant to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, my, no!&rdquo; the young minister exclaimed, eager to free himself from the
+      suggestion of being a kill-joy. &ldquo;I don't smoke myself; but I am very fond
+      of the odor, I assure you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes led the way out. It could be seen now that he wore a long
+      house-gown of black silk, skilfully moulded to his erect, shapely, and
+      rounded form. Though he carried this with the natural grace of a proud and
+      beautiful belle, there was no hint of the feminine in his bearing, or in
+      the contour of his pale, firm-set, handsome face. As he moved through the
+      hall-way, the five people whom Theron had seen waiting rose from their
+      bench, and two of the women began in humble murmurs, &ldquo;If you please,
+      Father,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Good-evening to your Riverence;&rdquo; but the priest merely
+      nodded and passed on up the staircase, followed by his guests. The people
+      sat down on their bench again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few minutes later, reclining at his ease in a huge low chair, and
+      feeling himself unaccountably at home in the most luxuriously appointed
+      and delightful little room he had ever seen, the Rev. Theron Ware sipped
+      his unaccustomed coffee and embarked upon an explanation of his errand.
+      Somehow the very profusion of scholarly symbols about him&mdash;the great
+      dark rows of encased and crowded book-shelves rising to the ceiling, the
+      classical engravings upon the wall, the revolving book-case, the
+      reading-stand, the mass of littered magazines, reviews, and papers at
+      either end of the costly and elaborate writing-desk&mdash;seemed to make
+      it the easier for him to explain without reproach that he needed
+      information about Abram. He told them quite in detail the story of his
+      book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two others sat watching him through a faint haze of scented smoke,
+      with polite encouragement on their faces. Father Forbes took the added
+      trouble to nod understandingly at the various points of the narrative, and
+      when it was finished gave one of his little approving chuckles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This skirts very closely upon sorcery,&rdquo; he said smilingly. &ldquo;Do you know,
+      there is perhaps not another man in the country who knows Assyriology so
+      thoroughly as our friend here, Dr. Ledsmar.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's putting it too strong,&rdquo; remarked the Doctor. &ldquo;I only follow at a
+      distance&mdash;a year or two behind. But I daresay I can help you. You are
+      quite welcome to anything I have: my books cover the ground pretty well up
+      to last year. Delitzsch is very interesting; but Baudissin's 'Studien zur
+      Semitischen Religionsgeschichte' would come closer to what you need. There
+      are several other important Germans&mdash;Schrader, Bunsen, Duncker,
+      Hommel, and so on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unluckily I&mdash;I don't read German readily,&rdquo; Theron explained with
+      diffidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's a pity,&rdquo; said the doctor, &ldquo;because they do the best work&mdash;not
+      only in this field, but in most others. And they do so much that the mass
+      defies translation. Well, the best thing outside of German of course is
+      Sayce. I daresay you know him, though.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head mournfully. &ldquo;I don't seem to know any
+      one,&rdquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The others exchanged glances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if I may ask, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; pursued the doctor, regarding their guest
+      with interest through his spectacles, &ldquo;why do you specially hit upon
+      Abraham? He is full of difficulties&mdash;enough, just now, at any rate,
+      to warn off the bravest scholar. Why not take something easier?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had recovered something of his confidence. &ldquo;Oh, no,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that
+      is just what attracts me to Abraham. I like the complexities and
+      contradictions in his character. Take for instance all that strange and
+      picturesque episode of Hagar: see the splendid contrast between the craft
+      and commercial guile of his dealings in Egypt and with Abimelech, and the
+      simple, straightforward godliness of his later years. No, all those
+      difficulties only attract me. Do you happen to know&mdash;of course you
+      would know&mdash;do those German books, or the others, give anywhere any
+      additional details of the man himself and his sayings and doings&mdash;little
+      things which help, you know, to round out one's conception of the
+      individual?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the priest and the doctor stole a furtive glance across the young
+      minister's head. It was Father Forbes who replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I fear that you are taking our friend Abraham too literally, Mr. Ware,&rdquo;
+       he said, in that gentle semblance of paternal tones which seemed to go so
+      well with his gown. &ldquo;Modern research, you know, quite wipes him out of
+      existence as an individual. The word 'Abram' is merely an eponym&mdash;it
+      means 'exalted father.' Practically all the names in the Genesis
+      chronologies are what we call eponymous. Abram is not a person at all: he
+      is a tribe, a sept, a clan. In the same way, Shem is not intended for a
+      man; it is the name of a great division of the human race. Heber is simply
+      the throwing back into allegorical substance, so to speak, of the Hebrews;
+      Heth of the Hittites; Asshur of Assyria.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this is something very new, this theory, isn't it?&rdquo; queried Theron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest smiled and shook his head. &ldquo;Bless you, no! My dear sir, there
+      is nothing new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian theory
+      more than two thousand years ago. As for this eponym thing, why Saint
+      Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago. In his 'De
+      Civitate Dei,' he expressly says of these genealogical names, 'GENTES NON
+      HOMINES;' that is, 'peoples, not persons.' It was as obvious to him&mdash;as
+      much a commonplace of knowledge&mdash;as it was to Ezekiel eight hundred
+      years before him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems passing strange that we should not know it now, then,&rdquo; commented
+      Theron; &ldquo;I mean, that everybody shouldn't know it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes gave a little purring chuckle. &ldquo;Ah, there we get upon
+      contentious ground,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;Why should 'everybody' be supposed to
+      know anything at all? What business is it of 'everybody's' to know things?
+      The earth was just as round in the days when people supposed it to be
+      flat, as it is now. So the truth remains always the truth, even though you
+      give a charter to ten hundred thousand separate numskulls to examine it by
+      the light of their private judgment, and report that it is as many
+      different varieties of something else. But of course that whole question
+      of private judgment versus authority is No-Man's-Land for us. We were
+      speaking of eponyms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Theron; &ldquo;it is very interesting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a curious phase of the subject which hasn't been worked out
+      much,&rdquo; continued the priest. &ldquo;Probably the Germans will get at that too,
+      sometime. They are doing the best Irish work in other fields, as it is. I
+      spoke of Heber and Heth, in Genesis, as meaning the Hebrews and the
+      Hittites. Now my own people, the Irish, have far more ancient legends and
+      traditions than any other nation west of Athens; and you find in their
+      myth of the Milesian invasion and conquest two principal leaders called
+      Heber and Ith, or Heth. That is supposed to be comparatively modern&mdash;about
+      the time of Solomon's Temple. But these independent Irish myths go back to
+      the fall of the Tower of Babel, and they have there an ancestor, grandson
+      of Japhet, named Fenius Farsa, and they ascribe to him the invention of
+      the alphabet. They took their ancient name of Feine, the modern Fenian,
+      from him. Oddly enough, that is the name which the Romans knew the
+      Phoenicians by, and to them also is ascribed the invention of the
+      alphabet. The Irish have a holy salmon of knowledge, just like the
+      Chaldean man-fish. The Druids' tree-worship is identical with that of the
+      Chaldeans&mdash;those pagan groves, you know, which the Jews were always
+      being punished for building. You see, there is nothing new. Everything is
+      built on the ruins of something else. Just as the material earth is made
+      up of countless billions of dead men's bones, so the mental world is all
+      alive with the ghosts of dead men's thoughts and beliefs, the wraiths of
+      dead races' faiths and imaginings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes paused, then added with a twinkle in his eye: &ldquo;That
+      peroration is from an old sermon of mine, in the days when I used to
+      preach. I remember rather liking it, at the time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you still preach?&rdquo; asked the Rev. Mr. Ware, with lifted brows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! no more! I only talk now and again,&rdquo; answered the priest, with what
+      seemed a suggestion of curtness. He made haste to take the conversation
+      back again. &ldquo;The names of these dead-and-gone things are singularly
+      pertinacious, though. They survive indefinitely. Take the modern name
+      Marmaduke, for example. It strikes one as peculiarly modern, up-to-date,
+      doesn't it? Well, it is the oldest name on earth&mdash;thousands of years
+      older than Adam. It is the ancient Chaldean Meridug, or Merodach. He was
+      the young god who interceded continually between the angry, omnipotent Ea,
+      his father, and the humble and unhappy Damkina, or Earth, who was his
+      mother. This is interesting from another point of view, because this
+      Merodach or Marmaduke is, so far as we can see now, the original prototype
+      of our 'divine intermediary' idea. I daresay, though, that if we could go
+      back still other scores of centuries, we should find whole receding series
+      of types of this Christ-myth of ours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron Ware sat upright at the fall of these words, and flung a swift,
+      startled look about the room&mdash;the instinctive glance of a man
+      unexpectedly confronted with peril, and casting desperately about for
+      means of defence and escape. For the instant his mind was aflame with this
+      vivid impression&mdash;that he was among sinister enemies, at the mercy of
+      criminals. He half rose under the impelling stress of this feeling, with
+      the sweat standing on his brow, and his jaw dropped in a scared and
+      bewildered stare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, quite as suddenly, the sense of shock was gone; and it was as if
+      nothing at all had happened. He drew a long breath, took another sip of
+      his coffee, and found himself all at once reflecting almost pleasurably
+      upon the charm of contact with really educated people. He leaned back in
+      the big chair again, and smiled to show these men of the world how much at
+      his ease he was. It required an effort, he discovered, but he made it
+      bravely, and hoped he was succeeding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It hasn't been in my power to at all lay hold of what the world keeps on
+      learning nowadays about its babyhood,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;All I have done is to try
+      to preserve an open mind, and to maintain my faith that the more we know,
+      the nearer we shall approach the Throne.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar abruptly scuffled his feet on the floor, and took out his
+      watch. &ldquo;I'm afraid&mdash;&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no! There's plenty of time,&rdquo; remarked the priest, with his soft
+      half-smile and purring tones. &ldquo;You finish your cigar here with Mr. Ware,
+      and excuse me while I run down and get rid of the people in the hall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes tossed his cigar-end into the fender. Then he took from the
+      mantel a strange three-cornered black-velvet cap, with a dangling silk
+      tassel at the side, put it on his head, and went out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron, being left alone with the doctor, hardly knew what to do or say.
+      He took up a paper from the floor beside him, but realized that it would
+      be impolite to go farther, and laid it on his knee. Some trace of that
+      earlier momentary feeling that he was in hostile hands came back, and
+      worried him. He lifted himself upright in the chair, and then became
+      conscious that what really disturbed him was the fact that Dr. Ledsmar had
+      turned in his seat, crossed his legs, and was contemplating him with a
+      gravely concentrated scrutiny through his spectacles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This uncomfortable gaze kept itself up a long way beyond the point of good
+      manners; but the doctor seemed not to mind that at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When Dr. Ledsmar finally spoke, it was in a kindlier tone than the young
+      minister had looked for. &ldquo;I had half a notion of going to hear you preach
+      the other evening,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;but at the last minute I backed out. I
+      daresay I shall pluck up the courage, sooner or later, and really go. It
+      must be fully twenty years since I last heard a sermon, and I had supposed
+      that that would suffice for the rest of my life. But they tell me that you
+      are worth while; and, for some reason or other, I find myself curious on
+      the subject.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Involved and dubious though the compliment might be, Theron felt himself
+      flushing with satisfaction. He nodded his acknowledgment, and changed the
+      topic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was surprised to hear Father Forbes say that he did not preach,&rdquo; he
+      remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should he?&rdquo; asked the doctor, indifferently. &ldquo;I suppose he hasn't
+      more than fifteen parishioners in a thousand who would understand him if
+      he did, and of these probably twelve would join in a complaint to his
+      Bishop about the heterodox tone of his sermon. There is no point in his
+      going to all that pains, merely to incur that risk. Nobody wants him to
+      preach, and he has reached an age where personal vanity no longer tempts
+      him to do so. What IS wanted of him is that he should be the paternal,
+      ceremonial, authoritative head and centre of his flock, adviser, monitor,
+      overseer, elder brother, friend, patron, seigneur&mdash;whatever you like&mdash;everything
+      except a bore. They draw the line at that. You see how diametrically
+      opposed this Catholic point of view is to the Protestant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The difference does seem extremely curious to me,&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;Now,
+      those people in the hall&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; put in the doctor, as the other faltered hesitatingly. &ldquo;I know
+      what you were going to say. It struck you as odd that he should let them
+      wait on the bench there, while he came up here to smoke.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron smiled faintly. &ldquo;I WAS thinking that my&mdash;my parishioners
+      wouldn't have taken it so quietly. But of course&mdash;it is all so
+      different!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As chalk from cheese!&rdquo; said Dr. Ledsmar, lighting a fresh cigar. &ldquo;I
+      daresay every one you saw there had come either to take the pledge, or see
+      to it that one of the others took it. That is the chief industry in the
+      hall, so far as I have observed. Now discipline is an important element in
+      the machinery here. Coming to take the pledge implies that you have been
+      drunk and are now ashamed. Both states have their values, but they are
+      opposed. Sitting on that bench tends to develop penitence to the prejudice
+      of alcoholism. But at no stage would it ever occur to the occupant of the
+      bench that he was the best judge of how long he was to sit there, or that
+      his priest should interrupt his dinner or general personal routine, in
+      order to administer that pledge. Now, I daresay you have no people at all
+      coming to 'swear off.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head. &ldquo;No; if a man with us got as bad as all
+      that, he wouldn't come near the church at all. He'd simply drop out, and
+      there would be an end to it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; interjected the doctor. &ldquo;That is the voluntary system. But
+      these fellows can't drop out. There's no bottom to the Catholic Church.
+      Everything that's in, stays in. If you don't mind my saying so&mdash;of
+      course I view you all impartially from the outside&mdash;but it seems
+      logical to me that a church should exist for those who need its help, and
+      not for those who by their own profession are so good already that it is
+      they who help the church. Now, you turn a man out of your church who
+      behaves badly: that must be on the theory that his remaining in would
+      injure the church, and that in turn involves the idea that it is the
+      excellent character of the parishioners which imparts virtue to the
+      church. The Catholics' conception, you see, is quite the converse. Such
+      virtue as they keep in stock is on tap, so to speak, here in the church
+      itself, and the parishioners come and get some for themselves according to
+      their need for it. Some come every day, some only once a year, some
+      perhaps never between their baptism and their funeral. But they all have a
+      right here, the professional burglar every whit as much as the speckless
+      saint. The only stipulation is that they oughtn't to come under false
+      pretences: the burglar is in honor bound not to pass himself off to his
+      priest as the saint. But that is merely a moral obligation, established in
+      the burglar's own interest. It does him no good to come unless he feels
+      that he is playing the rules of the game, and one of these is confession.
+      If he cheats there, he knows that he is cheating nobody but himself, and
+      might much better have stopped away altogether.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron nodded his head comprehendingly. He had a great many views about
+      the Romanish rite of confession which did not at all square with this
+      statement of the case, but this did not seem a specially fit time for
+      bringing them forth. There was indeed a sense of languid repletion in his
+      mind, as if it had been overfed and wanted to lie down for awhile. He
+      contented himself with nodding again, and murmuring reflectively, &ldquo;Yes, it
+      is all strangely different.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His tone was an invitation to silence; and the doctor turned his attention
+      to the cigar, studying its ash for a minute with an air of deep
+      meditation, and then solemnly blowing out a slow series of smoke-rings.
+      Theron watched him with an indolent, placid eye, wondering lazily if it
+      was, after all, so very pleasant to smoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There fell upon this silence&mdash;with a softness so delicate that it
+      came almost like a progression in the hush&mdash;the sound of sweet music.
+      For a little, strain and source were alike indefinite&mdash;an impalpable
+      setting to harmony of the mellowed light, the perfumed opalescence of the
+      air, the luxury and charm of the room. Then it rose as by a sweeping curve
+      of beauty, into a firm, calm, severe melody, delicious to the ear, but as
+      cold in the mind's vision as moonlit sculpture. It went on upward with
+      stately collectedness of power, till the atmosphere seemed all alive with
+      the trembling consciousness of the presence of lofty souls, sternly pure
+      and pitilessly great.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron found himself moved as he had never been before. He almost resented
+      the discovery, when it was presented to him by the prosaic, mechanical
+      side of his brain, that he was listening to organ-music, and that it came
+      through the open window from the church close by. He would fain have
+      reclined in his chair and closed his eyes, and saturated himself with the
+      uttermost fulness of the sensation. Yet, in absurd despite of himself, he
+      rose and moved over to the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only a narrow alley separated the pastorate from the church; Mr. Ware
+      could have touched with a walking-stick the opposite wall. Indirectly
+      facing him was the arched and mullioned top of a great window. A dim light
+      from within shone through the more translucent portions of the glass
+      below, throwing out faint little bars of party-colored radiance upon the
+      blackness of the deep passage-way. He could vaguely trace by these the
+      outlines of some sort of picture on the window. There were human figures
+      in it, and&mdash;yes&mdash;up here in the centre, nearest him, was a
+      woman's head. There was a halo about it, engirdling rich, flowing waves of
+      reddish hair, the lights in which glowed like flame. The face itself was
+      barely distinguishable, but its half-suggested form raised a curious sense
+      of resemblance to some other face. He looked at it closely, blankly, the
+      noble music throbbing through his brain meanwhile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's that Madden girl!&rdquo; he suddenly heard a voice say by his side. Dr.
+      Ledsmar had followed him to the window, and was close at his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron's thoughts were upon the puzzling shadowed lineaments on the
+      stained glass. He saw now in a flash the resemblance which had baffled
+      him. &ldquo;It IS like her, of course,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, unfortunately, it IS just like her,&rdquo; replied the doctor, with a
+      hostile note in his voice. &ldquo;Whenever I am dining here, she always goes in
+      and kicks up that racket. She knows I hate it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you mean that it is she who is playing,&rdquo; remarked Theron. &ldquo;I thought
+      you referred to&mdash;at least&mdash;I was thinking of&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His sentence died off in inconsequence. He had a feeling that he did not
+      want to talk with the doctor about the stained-glass likeness. The music
+      had sunk away now into fragmentary and unconnected passages, broken here
+      and there by abrupt stops. Dr. Ledsmar stretched an arm out past him and
+      shut the window. &ldquo;Let's hear as little of the row as we can,&rdquo; he said, and
+      the two went back to their chairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon me for the question,&rdquo; the Rev. Mr. Ware said, after a pause which
+      began to affect him as constrained, &ldquo;but something you said about dining&mdash;you
+      don't live here, then? In the house, I mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor laughed&mdash;a characteristically abrupt, dry little laugh,
+      which struck Theron at once as bearing a sort of black-sheep relationship
+      to the priest's habitual chuckle. &ldquo;That must have been puzzling you no
+      end,&rdquo; he said&mdash;&ldquo;that notion that the pastorate kept a devil's
+      advocate on the premises. No, Mr. Ware, I don't live here. I inhabit a
+      house of my own&mdash;you may have seen it&mdash;an old-fashioned place up
+      beyond the race-course, with a sort of tower at the back, and a big
+      garden. But I dine here three or four times a week. It is an old
+      arrangement of ours. Vincent and I have been friends for many years now.
+      We are quite alone in the world, we two&mdash;much to our mutual
+      satisfaction. You must come up and see me some time; come up and have a
+      look over the books we were speaking of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am much obliged,&rdquo; said Theron, without enthusiasm. The thought of the
+      doctor by himself did not attract him greatly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reservation in his tone seemed to interest the doctor. &ldquo;I suppose you
+      are the first man I have asked in a dozen years,&rdquo; he remarked, frankly
+      willing that the young minister should appreciate the favor extended him.
+      &ldquo;It must be fully that since anybody but Vincent Forbes has been under my
+      roof; that is, of my own species, I mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You live there quite alone,&rdquo; commented Theron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite&mdash;with my dogs and cats and lizards&mdash;and my Chinaman. I
+      mustn't forget him.&rdquo; The doctor noted the inquiry in the other's lifted
+      brows, and smilingly explained. &ldquo;He is my solitary servant. Possibly he
+      might not appeal to you much; but I can assure you he used to interest
+      Octavius a great deal when I first brought him here, ten years ago or so.
+      He afforded occupation for all the idle boys in the village for a
+      twelve-month at least. They used to lie in wait for him all day long, with
+      stones or horse-chestnuts or snowballs, according to the season. The
+      Irishmen from the wagon-works nearly killed him once or twice, but he
+      patiently lived it all down. The Chinaman has the patience to live
+      everything down&mdash;the Caucasian races included. He will see us all to
+      bed, will that gentleman with the pigtail!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The music over in the church had lifted itself again into form and
+      sequence, and defied the closed window. If anything, it was louder than
+      before, and the sonorous roar of the bass-pedals seemed to be shaking the
+      very walls. It was something with a big-lunged, exultant, triumphing swing
+      in it&mdash;something which ought to have been sung on the battlefield at
+      the close of day by the whole jubilant army of victors. It was impossible
+      to pretend not to be listening to it; but the doctor submitted with an
+      obvious scowl, and bit off the tip of his third cigar with an annoyed air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't seem to care much for music,&rdquo; suggested Mr. Ware, when a lull
+      came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar looked up, lighted match in hand. &ldquo;Say musicians!&rdquo; he growled.
+      &ldquo;Has it ever occurred to you,&rdquo; he went on, between puffs at the flame,
+      &ldquo;that the only animals who make the noises we call music are of the bird
+      family&mdash;a debased offshoot of the reptilian creation&mdash;the very
+      lowest types of the vertebrata now in existence? I insist upon the
+      parallel among humans. I have in my time, sir, had considerable
+      opportunities for studying close at hand the various orders of mammalia
+      who devote themselves to what they describe as the arts. It may sound a
+      harsh judgement, but I am convinced that musicians stand on the very
+      bottom rung of the ladder in the sub-cellar of human intelligence, even
+      lower than painters and actors.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This seemed such unqualified nonsense to the Rev. Mr. Ware that he offered
+      no comment whatever upon it. He tried instead to divert his thoughts to
+      the stormy strains which rolled in through the vibrating brickwork, and to
+      picture to himself the large, capable figure of Miss Madden seated in the
+      half-light at the organ-board, swaying to and fro in a splendid ecstasy of
+      power as she evoked at will this superb and ordered uproar. But the doctor
+      broke insistently in upon his musings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All art, so-called, is decay,&rdquo; he said, raising his voice. &ldquo;When a race
+      begins to brood on the beautiful&mdash;so-called&mdash;it is a sign of
+      rot, of getting ready to fall from the tree. Take the Jews&mdash;those
+      marvellous old fellows&mdash;who were never more than a handful, yet have
+      imposed the rule of their ideas and their gods upon us for fifteen hundred
+      years. Why? They were forbidden by their most fundamental law to make
+      sculptures or pictures. That was at a time when the Egyptians, when the
+      Assyrians, and other Semites, were running to artistic riot. Every great
+      museum in the world now has whole floors devoted to statues from the Nile,
+      and marvellous carvings from the palaces of Sargon and Assurbanipal. You
+      can get the artistic remains of the Jews during that whole period into a
+      child's wheelbarrow. They had the sense and strength to penalize art; they
+      alone survived. They saw the Egyptians go, the Assyrians go, the Greeks
+      go, the late Romans go, the Moors in Spain go&mdash;all the artistic
+      peoples perish. They remained triumphing over all. Now at last their
+      long-belated apogee is here; their decline is at hand. I am told that in
+      this present generation in Europe the Jews are producing a great lot of
+      young painters and sculptors and actors, just as for a century they have
+      been producing famous composers and musicians. That means the end of the
+      Jews!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! have you only got as far as that?&rdquo; came the welcome interruption of
+      a cheery voice. Father Forbes had entered the room, and stood looking down
+      with a whimsical twinkle in his eye from one to the other of his guests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must have been taken over the ground at a very slow pace, Mr. Ware,&rdquo;
+       he continued, chuckling softly, &ldquo;to have arrived merely at the collapse of
+      the New Jerusalem. I fancied I had given him time enough to bring you
+      straight up to the end of all of us, with that Chinaman of his gently
+      slapping our graves with his pigtail. That's where the doctor always winds
+      up, if he's allowed to run his course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has all been very interesting, extremely so, I assure you,&rdquo; faltered
+      Theron. It had become suddenly apparent to him that he desired nothing so
+      much as to make his escape&mdash;that he had indeed only been waiting for
+      the host's return to do so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose at this, and explained that he must be going. No special effort
+      being put forth to restrain him, he presently made his way out, Father
+      Forbes hospitably following him down to the door, and putting a very
+      gracious cordiality into his adieux.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The night was warm and black. Theron stood still in it the moment the
+      pastorate door had closed; the sudden darkness was so thick that it was as
+      if he had closed his eyes. His dominant sensation was of a deep relief and
+      rest after some undue fatigue. It crossed his mind that drunken men
+      probably felt like that as they leaned against things on their way home.
+      He was affected himself, he saw, by the weariness and half-nausea
+      following a mental intoxication. The conceit pleased him, and he smiled to
+      himself as he turned and took the first homeward steps. It must be growing
+      late, he thought. Alice would be wondering as she waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a street lamp at the corner, and as he walked toward it he noted
+      all at once that his feet were keeping step to the movement of the music
+      proceeding from the organ within the church&mdash;a vaguely processional
+      air, marked enough in measure, but still with a dreamy effect. It became a
+      pleasure to identify his progress with the quaint rhythm of sound as he
+      sauntered along. He discovered, as he neared the light, that he was
+      instinctively stepping over the seams in the flagstone sidewalk as he had
+      done as a boy. He smiled again at this. There was something exceptionally
+      juvenile and buoyant about his mood, now that he examined it. He set it
+      down as a reaction from that doctor's extravagant and incendiary talk. One
+      thing was certain&mdash;he would never be caught up at that house beyond
+      the race-course, with its reptiles and its Chinaman. Should he ever even
+      go to the pastorate again? He decided not to quite definitely answer THAT
+      in the negative, but as he felt now, the chances were all against it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning the corner, and walking off into the shadows along the side of the
+      huge church building, Theron noted, almost at the end of the edifice, a
+      small door&mdash;the entrance to a porch coming out to the sidewalk&mdash;which
+      stood wide open. A thin, pale, vertical line of light showed that the
+      inner door, too, was ajar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through this wee aperture the organ-music, reduced and mellowed by
+      distance, came to him again with that same curious, intimate, personal
+      relation which had so moved him at the start, before the doctor closed the
+      window. It was as if it was being played for him alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused for a doubting minute or two, with bowed head, listening to the
+      exquisite harmony which floated out to caress and soothe and enfold him.
+      There was no spiritual, or at least pious, effect in it now. He fancied
+      that it must be secular music, or, if not, then something adapted to
+      marriage ceremonies&mdash;rich, vivid, passionate, a celebration of beauty
+      and the glory of possession, with its ruling note of joy only heightened
+      by soft, wooing interludes, and here and there the tremor of a fond, timid
+      little sob.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron turned away irresolutely, half frightened at the undreamt-of
+      impression this music was making upon him. Then, all at once, he wheeled
+      and stepped boldly into the porch, pushing the inner door open and hearing
+      it rustle against its leathern frame as it swung to behind him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had never been inside a Catholic church before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Jeremiah Madden was supposed to be probably the richest man in Octavius.
+      There was no doubt at all about his being its least pretentious citizen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The huge and ornate modern mansion which he had built, putting to shame
+      every other house in the place, gave an effect of ostentation to the
+      Maddens as a family; it seemed only to accentuate the air of humility
+      which enveloped Jeremiah as with a garment. Everybody knew some version of
+      the many tales afloat which, in a kindly spirit, illustrated the
+      incongruity between him and his splendid habitation. Some had it that he
+      slept in the shed. Others told whimsical stories of his sitting alone in
+      the kitchen evenings, smoking his old clay pipe, and sorrowing because the
+      second Mrs. Madden would not suffer the pigs and chickens to come in and
+      bear him company. But no matter how comic the exaggeration, these legends
+      were invariably amiable. It lay in no man's mouth to speak harshly of
+      Jeremiah Madden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had been born a Connemara peasant, and he would die one. When he was
+      ten years old he had seen some of his own family, and most of his
+      neighbors, starve to death. He could remember looking at the stiffened
+      figure of a woman stretched on the stones by the roadside, with the green
+      stain of nettles on her white lips. A girl five years or so older than
+      himself, also a Madden and distantly related, had started in despair off
+      across the mountains to the town where it was said the poor-law officers
+      were dealing out food. He could recall her coming back next day, wild-eyed
+      with hunger and the fever; the officers had refused her relief because her
+      bare legs were not wholly shrunken to the bone. &ldquo;While there's a calf on
+      the shank, there's no starvation,&rdquo; they had explained to her. The girl
+      died without profiting by this official apothegm. The boy found it burned
+      ineffaceably upon his brain. Now, after a lapse of more than forty years,
+      it seemed the thing that he remembered best about Ireland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had drifted westward as an unconsidered, unresisting item in that vast
+      flight of the famine years. Others whom he rubbed against in that
+      melancholy exodus, and deemed of much greater promise than himself, had
+      done badly. Somehow he did well. He learned the wheelwright's trade, and
+      really that seemed all there was to tell. The rest had been calm and
+      sequent progression&mdash;steady employment as a journeyman first; then
+      marriage and a house and lot; the modest start as a master; the move to
+      Octavius and cheap lumber; the growth of his business, always marked of
+      late years stupendous&mdash;all following naturally, easily, one thing out
+      of another. Jeremiah encountered the idea among his fellows, now and
+      again, that he was entitled to feel proud of all this. He smiled to
+      himself at the thought, and then sent a sigh after the smile. What was it
+      all but empty and transient vanity? The score of other Connemara boys he
+      had known&mdash;none very fortunate, several broken tragically in prison
+      or the gutter, nearly all now gone the way of flesh&mdash;were as good as
+      he. He could not have it in his heart to take credit for his success; it
+      would have been like sneering over their poor graves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeremiah Madden was now fifty-three&mdash;a little man of a reddened,
+      weather-worn skin and a meditative, almost saddened, aspect. He had blue
+      eyes, but his scanty iron-gray hair showed raven black in its shadows. The
+      width and prominence of his cheek-bones dominated all one's recollections
+      of his face. The long vertical upper-lip and irregular teeth made, in
+      repose, an unshapely mouth; its smile, though, sweetened the whole
+      countenance. He wore a fringe of stiff, steel-colored beard, passing from
+      ear to ear under his chin. His week-day clothes were as simple as his
+      workaday manners, fitting his short black pipe and his steadfast devotion
+      to his business. On Sundays he dressed with a certain rigor of
+      respectability, all in black, and laid aside tobacco, at least to the
+      public view. He never missed going to the early Low Mass, quite alone. His
+      family always came later, at the ten o'clock High Mass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been, at one time or another, a good many members of this
+      family. Two wives had borne Jeremiah Madden a total of over a dozen
+      children. Of these there survived now only two of the first Mrs. Madden's
+      offspring&mdash;Michael and Celia&mdash;and a son of the present wife, who
+      had been baptized Terence, but called himself Theodore. This minority of
+      the family inhabited the great new house on Main Street. Jeremiah went
+      every Sunday afternoon by himself to kneel in the presence of the
+      majority, there where they lay in Saint Agnes' consecrated ground. If the
+      weather was good, he generally extended his walk through the fields to an
+      old deserted Catholic burial-field, which had been used only in the first
+      years after the famine invasion, and now was clean forgotten. The old
+      wagon-maker liked to look over the primitive, neglected stones which
+      marked the graves of these earlier exiles. Fully half of the inscriptions
+      mentioned his County Galway&mdash;there were two naming the very parish
+      adjoining his. The latest date on any stone was of the remoter 'fifties.
+      They had all been stricken down, here in this strange land with its bitter
+      winters, while the memory of their own soft, humid, gentle west-coast air
+      was fresh within them. Musing upon the clumsy sculpture, with its
+      &ldquo;R.I.P.,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Pray for the Soul of,&rdquo; half to be guessed under the stain
+      and moss of a generation, there would seem to him but a step from this
+      present to that heart-rending, awful past. What had happened between was a
+      meaningless vision&mdash;as impersonal as the passing of the planets
+      overhead. He rarely had an impulse to tears in the new cemetery, where his
+      ten children were. He never left this weed-grown, forsaken old God's-acre
+      dry-eyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One must not construct from all this the image of a melancholy man, as his
+      fellows met and knew him. Mr. Madden kept his griefs, racial and
+      individual, for his own use. To the men about him in the offices and the
+      shops he presented day after day, year after year, an imperturbable
+      cheeriness of demeanor. He had been always fortunate in the selection of
+      lieutenants and chief helpers. Two of these had grown now into partners,
+      and were almost as much a part of the big enterprise as Jeremiah himself.
+      They spoke often of their inability to remember any unjust or petulant
+      word of his&mdash;much less any unworthy deed. Once they had seen him in a
+      great rage, all the more impressive because he said next to nothing. A
+      thoughtless fellow told a dirty story in the presence of some apprentices;
+      and Madden, listening to this, drove the offender implacably from his
+      employ. It was years now since any one who knew him had ventured upon lewd
+      pleasantries in his hearing. Jokes of the sort which women might hear he
+      was very fond of though he had not much humor of his own. Of books he knew
+      nothing whatever, and he made only the most perfunctory pretence now and
+      again of reading the newspapers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The elder son Michael was very like his father&mdash;diligent, unassuming,
+      kindly, and simple&mdash;a plain, tall, thin red man of nearly thirty, who
+      toiled in paper cap and rolled-up shirt-sleeves as the superintendent in
+      the saw-mill, and put on no airs whatever as the son of the master. If
+      there was surprise felt at his not being taken into the firm as a partner,
+      he gave no hint of sharing it. He attended to his religious duties with
+      great zeal, and was President of the Sodality as a matter of course. This
+      was regarded as his blind side; and young employees who cultivated it, and
+      made broad their phylacteries under his notice, certainly had an added
+      chance of getting on well in the works. To some few whom he knew specially
+      well, Michael would confess that if he had had the brains for it, he
+      should have wished to be a priest. He displayed no inclination to marry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other son, Terence, was some eight years younger, and seemed the
+      product of a wholly different race. The contrast between Michael's sandy
+      skin and long gaunt visage and this dark boy's handsome, rounded face,
+      with its prettily curling black hair, large, heavily fringed brown eyes,
+      and delicately modelled features, was not more obvious than their
+      temperamental separation. This second lad had been away for years at
+      school,&mdash;indeed, at a good many schools, for no one seemed to manage
+      to keep him long. He had been with the Jesuits at Georgetown, with the
+      Christian Brothers at Manhattan; the sectarian Mt. St. Mary's and the
+      severely secular Annapolis had both been tried, and proved misfits. The
+      young man was home again now, and save that his name had become Theodore,
+      he appeared in no wise changed from the beautiful, wilful, bold, and showy
+      boy who had gone away in his teens. He was still rather small for his
+      years, but so gracefully moulded in form, and so perfectly tailored, that
+      the fact seemed rather an advantage than otherwise. He never dreamed of
+      going near the wagon-works, but he did go a good deal&mdash;in fact, most
+      of the time&mdash;to the Nedahma Club. His mother spoke often to her
+      friends about her fears for his health. He never spoke to his friends
+      about his mother at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second Mrs. Madden did not, indeed, appeal strongly to the family
+      pride. She had been a Miss Foley, a dress-maker, and an old maid. Jeremiah
+      had married her after a brief widowerhood, principally because she was the
+      sister of his parish priest, and had a considerable reputation for piety.
+      It was at a time when the expansion of his business was promising certain
+      wealth, and suggesting the removal to Octavius. He was conscious of a
+      notion that his obligations to social respectability were increasing; it
+      was certain that the embarrassments of a motherless family were. Miss
+      Foley had shown a good deal of attention to his little children. She was
+      not ill-looking; she bore herself with modesty; she was the priest's
+      sister&mdash;the niece once removed of a vicar-general. And so it came
+      about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although those most concerned did not say so, everybody could see from the
+      outset the pity of its ever having come about at all. The pious and
+      stiffly respectable priest's sister had been harmless enough as a
+      spinster. It made the heart ache to contemplate her as a wife. Incredibly
+      narrow-minded, ignorant, suspicious, vain, and sour-tempered, she must
+      have driven a less equable and well-rooted man than Jeremiah Madden to
+      drink or flight. He may have had his temptations, but they made no mark on
+      the even record of his life. He only worked the harder, concentrating upon
+      his business those extra hours which another sort of home-life would have
+      claimed instead. The end of twenty years found him a rich man, but still
+      toiling pertinaciously day by day, as if he had his wage to earn. In the
+      great house which had been built to please, or rather placate, his wife,
+      he kept to himself as much as possible. The popular story of his smoking
+      alone in the kitchen was more or less true; only Michael as a rule sat
+      with him, too weak-lunged for tobacco himself, but reading stray scraps
+      from the papers to the lonely old man, and talking with him about the
+      works, the while Jeremiah meditatively sucked his clay pipe. One or two
+      evenings in the week the twain spent up in Celia's part of the house,
+      listening with the awe of simple, honest mechanics to the music she played
+      for them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia was to them something indefinably less, indescribably more, than a
+      daughter and sister. They could not think there had ever been anything
+      like her before in the world; the notion of criticising any deed or word
+      of hers would have appeared to them monstrous and unnatural.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to have come up to this radiant and wise and marvellously
+      talented womanhood of hers, to their minds, quite spontaneously. There had
+      been a little Celia&mdash;a red-headed, sulky, mutinous slip of a girl,
+      always at war with her step-mother, and affording no special comfort or
+      hope to the rest of the family. Then there was a long gap, during which
+      the father, four times a year, handed Michael a letter he had received
+      from the superioress of a distant convent, referring with cold formality
+      to the studies and discipline by which Miss Madden might profit more if
+      she had been better brought up, and enclosing a large bill. Then all at
+      once they beheld a big Celia, whom they spoke of as being home again, but
+      who really seemed never to have been there before&mdash;a tall, handsome,
+      confident young woman, swift of tongue and apprehension, appearing to know
+      everything there was to be known by the most learned, able to paint
+      pictures, carve wood, speak in divers languages, and make music for the
+      gods, yet with it all a very proud lady, one might say a queen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The miracle of such a Celia as this impressed itself even upon the
+      step-mother. Mrs. Madden had looked forward with a certain grim tightening
+      of her combative jaws to the home-coming of the &ldquo;red-head.&rdquo; She felt
+      herself much more the fine lady now than she had been when the girl went
+      away. She had her carriage now, and the magnificent new house was nearly
+      finished, and she had a greater number of ailments, and spent far more
+      money on doctor's bills, than any other lady in the whole section. The
+      flush of pride in her greatest achievement up to date&mdash;having the
+      most celebrated of New York physicians brought up to Octavius by special
+      train&mdash;still prickled in her blood. It was in all the papers, and the
+      admiration of the flatterers and &ldquo;soft-sawdherers&rdquo;&mdash;wives of Irish
+      merchants and smaller professional men who formed her social circle&mdash;was
+      raising visions in her poor head of going next year with Theodore to
+      Saratoga, and fastening the attention of the whole fashionable republic
+      upon the variety and resources of her invalidism. Mrs. Madden's fancy did
+      not run to the length of seeing her step-daughter also at Saratoga; it
+      pictured her still as the sullen and hated &ldquo;red-head,&rdquo; moping defiantly in
+      corners, or courting by her insolence the punishments which leaped against
+      their leash in the step-mother's mind to get at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The real Celia, when she came, fairly took Mrs. Madden's breath away. The
+      peevish little plans for annoyance and tyranny, the resolutions born of
+      ignorant and jealous egotism, found themselves swept out of sight by the
+      very first swirl of Celia's dress-train, when she came down from her room
+      robed in peacock blue. The step-mother could only stare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, after two years of it, Mrs. Madden still viewed her step-daughter
+      with round-eyed uncertainty, not unmixed with wrathful fear. She still
+      drove about behind two magnificent horses; the new house had become almost
+      tiresome by familiarity; her pre-eminence in the interested minds of the
+      Dearborn County Medical Society was as towering as ever, but somehow it
+      was all different. There was a note of unreality nowadays in Mrs.
+      Donnelly's professions of wonder at her bearing up under her multiplied
+      maladies; there was almost a leer of mockery in the sympathetic smirk with
+      which the Misses Mangan listened to her symptoms. Even the doctors, though
+      they kept their faces turned toward her, obviously did not pay much
+      attention; the people in the street seemed no longer to look at her and
+      her equipage at all. Worst of all, something of the meaning of this
+      managed to penetrate her own mind. She caught now and again a dim glimpse
+      of herself as others must have been seeing her for years&mdash;as a
+      stupid, ugly, boastful, and bad-tempered old nuisance. And it was always
+      as if she saw this in a mirror held up by Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of open discord there had been next to none. Celia would not permit it,
+      and showed this so clearly from the start that there was scarcely need for
+      her saying it. It seemed hardly necessary for her to put into words any of
+      her desires, for that matter. All existing arrangements in the Madden
+      household seemed to shrink automatically and make room for her, whichever
+      way she walked. A whole quarter of the unfinished house set itself apart
+      for her. Partitions altered themselves; door-ways moved across to opposite
+      sides; a recess opened itself, tall and deep, for it knew not what statue&mdash;simply
+      because, it seemed, the Lady Celia willed it so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the family moved into this mansion, it was with a consciousness that
+      the only one who really belonged there was Celia. She alone could behave
+      like one perfectly at home. It seemed entirely natural to the others that
+      she should do just what she liked, shut them off from her portion of the
+      house, take her meals there if she felt disposed, and keep such hours as
+      pleased her instant whim. If she awakened them at midnight by her piano,
+      or deferred her breakfast to the late afternoon, they felt that it must be
+      all right, since Celia did it. She had one room furnished with only divans
+      and huge, soft cushions, its walls covered with large copies of statuary
+      not too strictly clothed, which she would suffer no one, not even the
+      servants, to enter. Michael fancied sometimes, when he passed the draped
+      entrance to this sacred chamber, that the portiere smelt of tobacco, but
+      he would not have spoken of it, even had he been sure. Old Jeremiah, whose
+      established habit it was to audit minutely the expenses of his household,
+      covered over round sums to Celia's separate banking account, upon the mere
+      playful hint of her holding her check-book up, without a dream of
+      questioning her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the step-mother had joy, or indeed anything but gall and wormwood,
+      out of all this is not to be pretended. There lingered along in the
+      recollection of the family some vague memories of her having tried to
+      assert an authority over Celia's comings and goings at the outset, but
+      they grouped themselves as only parts of the general disorder of moving
+      and settling, which a fort-night or so quite righted. Mrs. Madden still
+      permitted herself a certain license of hostile comment when her
+      step-daughter was not present, and listened with gratification to what the
+      women of her acquaintance ventured upon saying in the same spirit; but
+      actual interference or remonstrance she never offered nowadays. The two
+      rarely met, for that matter, and exchanged only the baldest and curtest
+      forms of speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia Madden interested all Octavius deeply. This she must have done in
+      any case, if only because she was the only daughter of its richest
+      citizen. But the bold, luxuriant quality of her beauty, the original and
+      piquant freedom of her manners, the stories told in gossip about her
+      lawlessness at home, her intellectual attainments, and artistic vagaries&mdash;these
+      were even more exciting. The unlikelihood of her marrying any one&mdash;at
+      least any Octavian&mdash;was felt to add a certain romantic zest to the
+      image she made on the local perceptions. There was no visible young
+      Irishman at all approaching the social and financial standard of the
+      Maddens; it was taken for granted that a mixed marriage was quite out of
+      the question in this case. She seemed to have more business about the
+      church than even the priest. She was always playing the organ, or drilling
+      the choir, or decorating the altars with flowers, or looking over the
+      robes of the acolytes for rents and stains, or going in or out of the
+      pastorate. Clearly this was not the sort of girl to take a Protestant
+      husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gossip of the town concerning her was, however, exclusively
+      Protestant. The Irish spoke of her, even among themselves, but seldom.
+      There was no occasion for them to pretend to like her: they did not know
+      her, except in the most distant and formal fashion. Even the members of
+      the choir, of both sexes, had the sense of being held away from her at
+      haughty arm's length. No single parishioner dreamed of calling her friend.
+      But when they referred to her, it was always with a cautious and
+      respectful reticence. For one thing, she was the daughter of their chief
+      man, the man they most esteemed and loved. For another, reservations they
+      may have had in their souls about her touched close upon a delicately sore
+      spot. It could not escape their notice that their Protestant neighbors
+      were watching her with vigilant curiosity, and with a certain tendency to
+      wink when her name came into conversation along with that of Father
+      Forbes. It had never yet got beyond a tendency&mdash;the barest fluttering
+      suggestion of a tempted eyelid&mdash;but the whole Irish population of the
+      place felt themselves to be waiting, with clenched fists but sinking
+      hearts, for the wink itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Theron Ware had not caught even the faintest hint of these
+      overtures to suspicion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he had entered the huge, dark, cool vault of the church, he could see
+      nothing at first but a faint light up over the gallery, far at the other
+      end. Then, little by little, his surroundings shaped themselves out of the
+      gloom. To his right was a rail and some broad steps rising toward a softly
+      confused mass of little gray vertical bars and the pale twinkle of tiny
+      spots of gilded reflection, which he made out in the dusk to be the
+      candles and trappings of the altar. Overhead the great arches faded away
+      from foundations of dimly discernible capitals into utter blackness. There
+      was a strange medicinal odor&mdash;as of cubeb cigarettes&mdash;in the
+      air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a little pause, he tiptoed noiselessly up the side aisle toward the
+      end of the church&mdash;toward the light above the gallery. This radiance
+      from a single gas-jet expanded as he advanced, and spread itself upward
+      over a burnished row of monster metal pipes, which went towering into the
+      darkness like giants. They were roaring at him now&mdash;a sonorous,
+      deafening, angry bellow, which made everything about him vibrate. The
+      gallery balustrade hid the keyboard and the organist from view. There were
+      only these jostling brazen tubes, as big round as trees and as tall,
+      trembling with their own furious thunder. It was for all the world as if
+      he had wandered into some vast tragical, enchanted cave, and was being
+      drawn against his will&mdash;like fascinated bird and python&mdash;toward
+      fate at the savage hands of these swollen and enraged genii.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stumbled in the obscure light over a kneeling-bench, making a
+      considerable racket. On the instant the noise from the organ ceased, and
+      he saw the black figure of a woman rise above the gallery-rail and look
+      down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is it?&rdquo; the indubitable voice of Miss Madden demanded sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had a sudden sheepish notion of turning and running. With the best
+      grace he could summon, he called out an explanation instead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait a minute. I'm through now. I'm coming down,&rdquo; she returned. He
+      thought there was a note of amusement in her tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She came to him a moment later, accompanied by a thin, tall man, whom
+      Theron could barely see in the dark, now that the organ-light too was
+      gone. This man lighted a match or two to enable them to make their way
+      out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they were on the sidewalk, Celia spoke: &ldquo;Walk on ahead, Michael!&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;I have some matters to speak of with Mr. Ware.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what did you think of Dr. Ledsmar?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl's abrupt question came as a relief to Theron. They were walking
+      along in a darkness so nearly complete that he could see next to nothing
+      of his companion. For some reason, this seemed to suggest a sort of
+      impropriety. He had listened to the footsteps of the man ahead&mdash;whom
+      he guessed to be a servant&mdash;and pictured him as intent upon getting
+      up early next morning to tell everybody that the Methodist minister had
+      stolen into the Catholic church at night to walk home with Miss Madden.
+      That was going to be very awkward&mdash;yes, worse than awkward! It might
+      mean ruin itself. She had mentioned aloud that she had matters to talk
+      over with him: that of course implied confidences, and the man might put
+      heaven only knew what construction on that. It was notorious that servants
+      did ascribe the very worst motives to those they worked for. The bare
+      thought of the delight an Irish servant would have in also dragging a
+      Protestant clergyman into the thing was sickening. And what could she want
+      to talk to him about, anyway? The minute of silence stretched itself out
+      upon his nerves into an interminable period of anxious unhappiness. Her
+      mention of the doctor at last somehow, seemed to lighten the situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I thought he was very smart.&rdquo; he made haste to answer. &ldquo;Wouldn't it
+      be better&mdash;to&mdash;keep close to your man? He&mdash;may&mdash;think
+      we've gone some other way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It wouldn't matter if he did,&rdquo; remarked Celia. She appeared to comprehend
+      his nervousness and take pity on it, for she added, &ldquo;It is my brother
+      Michael, as good a soul as ever lived. He is quite used to my ways.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware drew a long comforting breath. &ldquo;Oh, I see! He went with
+      you to&mdash;bring you home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To blow the organ,&rdquo; said the girl in the dark, correctingly. &ldquo;But about
+      that doctor; did you like him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; Theron began, &ldquo;'like' is rather a strong word for so short an
+      acquaintance. He talked very well; that is, fluently. But he is so
+      different from any other man I have come into contact with that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I wanted you to say was that you hated him,&rdquo; put in Celia, firmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't make a practice of saying that of anybody,&rdquo; returned Theron, so
+      much at his ease again that he put an effect of gentle, smiling reproof
+      into the words. &ldquo;And why specially should I make an exception for him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because he's a beast!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron fancied that he understood. &ldquo;I noticed that he seemed not to have
+      much of an ear for music,&rdquo; he commented, with a little laugh. &ldquo;He shut
+      down the window when you began to play. His doing so annoyed me, because I&mdash;I
+      wanted very much to hear it all. I never heard such music before. I&mdash;I
+      came into the church to hear more of it; but then you stopped!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will play for you some other time,&rdquo; Celia said, answering the reproach
+      in his tone. &ldquo;But tonight I wanted to talk with you instead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She kept silent, in spite of this, so long now that Theron was on the
+      point of jestingly asking when the talk was to begin. Then she put a
+      question abruptly&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a conventional way of putting it, but are you fond of poetry, Mr.
+      Ware?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, yes, I suppose I am,&rdquo; replied Theron, much mystified. &ldquo;I can't say
+      that I am any great judge; but I like the things that I like&mdash;and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Meredith,&rdquo; interposed Celia, &ldquo;makes one of his women, Emilia in England,
+      say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always
+      going to one end and back again. Does it impress you that way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know that it does,&rdquo; said he, dubiously. It seemed, however, to be
+      her whim to talk literature, and he went on: &ldquo;I've hardly read Meredith at
+      all. I once borrowed his 'Lucile,' but somehow I never got interested in
+      it. I heard a recitation of his once, though&mdash;a piece about a dead
+      wife, and the husband and another man quarrelling as to whose portrait was
+      in the locket on her neck, and of their going up to settle the dispute,
+      and finding that it was the likeness of a third man, a young priest&mdash;and
+      though it was very striking, it didn't give me a thirst to know his other
+      poems. I fancied I shouldn't like them. But I daresay I was wrong. As I
+      get older, I find that I take less narrow views of literature&mdash;that
+      is, of course, of light literature&mdash;and that&mdash;that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia mercifully stopped him. &ldquo;The reason I asked you was&mdash;&rdquo; she
+      began, and then herself paused. &ldquo;Or no,&mdash;never mind that&mdash;tell
+      me something else. Are you fond of pictures, statuary, the beautiful
+      things of the world? Do great works of art, the big achievements of the
+      big artists, appeal to you, stir you up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alas! that is something I can only guess at myself,&rdquo; answered Theron,
+      humbly. &ldquo;I have always lived in little places. I suppose, from your point
+      of view, I have never seen a good painting in my life. I can only say
+      this, though&mdash;that it has always weighed on my mind as a great and
+      sore deprivation, this being shut out from knowing what others mean when
+      they talk and write about art. Perhaps that may help you to get at what
+      you are after. If I ever went to New York, I feel that one of the first
+      things I should do would be to see all the picture galleries; is that what
+      you meant? And&mdash;would you mind telling me&mdash;why you&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why I asked you?&rdquo; Celia supplied his halting question. &ldquo;No, I DON'T mind.
+      I have a reason for wanting to know&mdash;to satisfy myself whether I had
+      guessed rightly or not&mdash;about the kind of man you are. I mean in the
+      matter of temperament and bent of mind and tastes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl seemed to be speaking seriously, and without intent to offend.
+      Theron did not find any comment ready, but walked along by her side,
+      wondering much what it was all about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I daresay you think me 'too familiar on short acquaintance,'&rdquo; she
+      continued, after a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Miss Madden!&rdquo; he protested perfunctorily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; it is a matter of a good deal of importance,&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;I can see
+      that you are going to be thrown into friendship, close contact, with
+      Father Forbes. He likes you, and you can't help liking him. There is
+      nobody else in this raw, overgrown, empty-headed place for you and him TO
+      like, nobody except that man, that Dr. Ledsmar. And if you like HIM, I
+      shall hate you! He has done mischief enough already. I am counting on you
+      to help undo it, and to choke him off from doing more. It would be
+      different if you were an ordinary Orthodox minister, all encased like a
+      terrapin in prejudices and nonsense. Of course, if you had been THAT kind,
+      we should never have got to know you at all. But when I saw you in
+      MacEvoy's cottage there, it was plain that you were one of US&mdash;I mean
+      a MAN, and not a marionette or a mummy. I am talking very frankly to you,
+      you see. I want you on my side, against that doctor and his heartless,
+      bloodless science.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel myself very heartily on your side,&rdquo; replied Theron. She had set
+      their progress at a slower pace, now that the lights of the main street
+      were drawing near, as if to prolong their talk. All his earlier
+      reservations had fled. It was almost as if she were a parishioner of his
+      own. &ldquo;I need hardly tell you that the doctor's whole attitude toward&mdash;toward
+      revelation&mdash;was deeply repugnant to me. It doesn't make it any the
+      less hateful to call it science. I am afraid, though,&rdquo; he went on
+      hesitatingly, &ldquo;that there are difficulties in the way of my helping, as
+      you call it. You see, the very fact of my being a Methodist minister, and
+      his being a Catholic priest, rather puts my interference out of the
+      question.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; that doesn't matter a button,&rdquo; said Celia, lightly. &ldquo;None of us think
+      of that at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is the other embarrassment, then,&rdquo; pursued Theron, diffidently,
+      &ldquo;that Father Forbes is a vastly broader and deeper scholar&mdash;in all
+      these matters&mdash;than I am. How could I possibly hope to influence him
+      by my poor arguments? I don't know even the alphabet of the language he
+      thinks in&mdash;on these subjects, I mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course you don't!&rdquo; interposed the girl, with a confidence which the
+      other, for all his meekness, rather winced under. &ldquo;That wasn't what I
+      meant at all. We don't want arguments from our friends: we want
+      sympathies, sensibilities, emotional bonds. The right person's silence is
+      worth more for companionship than the wisest talk in the world from
+      anybody else. It isn't your mind that is needed here, or what you know; it
+      is your heart, and what you feel. You are full of poetry, of ideals, of
+      generous, unselfish impulses. You see the human, the warm-blooded side of
+      things. THAT is what is really valuable. THAT is how you can help!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You overestimate me sadly,&rdquo; protested Theron, though with considerable
+      tolerance for her error in his tone. &ldquo;But you ought to tell me something
+      about this Dr. Ledsmar. He spoke of being an old friend of the pr&mdash;of
+      Father Forbes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, they've always known each other; that is, for many years. They
+      were professors together in a college once, heaven only knows how long
+      ago. Then they separated, I fancy they quarrelled, too, before they
+      parted. The doctor came here, where some relative had left him the place
+      he lives in. Then in time the Bishop chanced to send Father Forbes here&mdash;that
+      was about three years ago,&mdash;and the two men after a while renewed
+      their old relations. They dine together; that is the doctor's stronghold.
+      He knows more about eating than any other man alive, I believe. He studies
+      it as you would study a language. He has taught old Maggie, at the
+      pastorate there, to cook like the mother of all the Delmonicos. And while
+      they sit and stuff themselves, or loll about afterward like gorged snakes,
+      they think it is smart to laugh at all the sweet and beautiful things in
+      life, and to sneer at people who believe in ideals, and to talk about
+      mankind being merely a fortuitous product of fermentation, and twaddle of
+      that sort. It makes me sick!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can readily see,&rdquo; said Theron, with sympathy, &ldquo;how such a cold,
+      material, and infidel influence as that must shock and revolt an
+      essentially religious temperament like yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Madden looked up at him. They had turned into the main street, and
+      there was light enough for him to detect something startlingly like a grin
+      on her beautiful face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I'm not religious at all, you know,&rdquo; he heard her say. &ldquo;I'm as Pagan
+      as&mdash;anything! Of course there are forms to be observed, and so on; I
+      rather like them than otherwise. I can make them serve very well for my
+      own system; for I am myself, you know, an out-an-out Greek.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, I had supposed that you were full blooded Irish,&rdquo; the Rev. Mr. Ware
+      found himself remarking, and then on the instant was overwhelmed by the
+      consciousness that he had said a foolish thing. Precisely where the folly
+      lay he did not know, but it was impossible to mistake the gesture of
+      annoyance which his companion had instinctively made at his words. She had
+      widened the distance between them now, and quickened her step. They went
+      on in silence till they were within a block of her house. Several people
+      had passed them who Theron felt sure must have recognized them both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I meant was,&rdquo; the girl all at once began, drawing nearer again, and
+      speaking with patient slowness, &ldquo;that I find myself much more in sympathy
+      with the Greek thought, the Greek theology of the beautiful and the
+      strong, the Greek philosophy of life, and all that, than what is taught
+      nowadays. Personally, I take much more stock in Plato than I do in Peter.
+      But of course it is a wholly personal affair; I had no business to bother
+      you with it. And for that matter, I oughtn't to have troubled you with any
+      of our&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I assure you, Miss Madden!&rdquo; the young minister began, with fervor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she broke in, in a resigned and even downcast tone; &ldquo;let it all be
+      as if I hadn't spoken. Don't mind anything I have said. If it is to be, it
+      will be. You can't say more than that, can you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked into his face again, and her large eyes produced an impression
+      of deep melancholy, which Theron found himself somehow impelled to share.
+      Things seemed all at once to have become very sad indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is one of my unhappy nights,&rdquo; she explained, in gloomy confidence. &ldquo;I
+      get them every once in a while&mdash;as if some vicious planet or other
+      was crossing in front of my good star&mdash;and then I'm a caution to
+      snakes. I shut myself up&mdash;that's the only thing to do&mdash;and have
+      it out with myself I didn't know but the organ-music would calm me down,
+      but it hasn't. I shan't sleep a wink tonight, but just rage around from
+      one room to another, piling all the cushions from the divans on to the
+      floor, and then kicking them away again. Do YOU ever have fits like that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron was able to reply with a good conscience in the negative. It
+      occurred to him to add, with jocose intent: &ldquo;I am curious to know, do
+      these fits, as you call them, occupy a prominent part in Grecian
+      philosophy as a general rule?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia gave a little snort, which might have signified amusement, but did
+      not speak until they were upon her own sidewalk. &ldquo;There is my brother,
+      waiting at the gate,&rdquo; she said then, briefly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, I will bid you good-night here, I think,&rdquo; Theron remarked,
+      coming to a halt, and offering his hand. &ldquo;It must be getting very late,
+      and my&mdash;that is&mdash;I have to be up particularly early tomorrow. So
+      good-night; I hope you will be feeling ever so much better in spirits in
+      the morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that doesn't matter,&rdquo; replied the girl, listlessly. &ldquo;It's a very
+      paltry little affair, this life of ours, at the best of it. Luckily it's
+      soon done with&mdash;like a bad dream.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tut! Tut! I won't have you talk like that!&rdquo; interrupted Theron, with a
+      swift and smart assumption of authority. &ldquo;Such talk isn't sensible, and it
+      isn't good. I have no patience with it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, try and have a little patience with ME, anyway, just for tonight,&rdquo;
+       said Celia, taking the reproof with gentlest humility, rather to her
+      censor's surprise. &ldquo;I really am unhappy tonight, Mr. Ware, very unhappy.
+      It seems as if all at once the world had swelled out in size a
+      thousandfold, and that poor me had dwindled down to the merest wee little
+      red-headed atom&mdash;the most helpless and forlorn and lonesome of atoms
+      at that.&rdquo; She seemed to force a sorrowful smile on her face as she added:
+      &ldquo;But all the same it has done me good to be with you&mdash;I am sure it
+      has&mdash;and I daresay that by tomorrow I shall be quite out of the
+      blues. Good-night, Mr. Ware. Forgive my making such an exhibition of
+      myself I WAS going to be such a fine early Greek, you know, and I have
+      turned out only a late Milesian&mdash;quite of the decadence. I shall do
+      better next time. And good-night again, and ever so many thanks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was walking briskly away toward the gate now, where the shadowy
+      Michael still patiently stood. Theron strode off in the opposite
+      direction, taking long, deliberate steps, and bowing his head in thought.
+      He had his hands behind his back, as was his wont, and the sense of their
+      recent contact with her firm, ungloved hands was, curiously enough, the
+      thing which pushed itself uppermost in his mind. There had been a frank,
+      almost manly vigor in her grasp; he said to himself that of course that
+      came from her playing so much on the keyboard; the exercise naturally
+      would give her large, robust hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he remembered about the piano; he had quite forgotten to solicit
+      her aid in selecting it. He turned, upon the impulse, to go back. She had
+      not entered the gate as yet, but stood, shiningly visible under the street
+      lamp, on the sidewalk, and she was looking in his direction. He turned
+      again like a shot, and started homeward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The front door of the parsonage was unlocked, and he made his way on
+      tiptoe through the unlighted hall to the living-room. The stuffy air here
+      was almost suffocating with the evil smell of a kerosene lamp turned down
+      too low. Alice sat asleep in her old farmhouse rocking-chair, with an
+      inelegant darning-basket on the table by her side. The whole effect of the
+      room was as bare and squalid to Theron's newly informed eye as the
+      atmosphere was offensive to his nostrils. He coughed sharply, and his wife
+      sat up and looked at the clock. It was after eleven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where on earth have you been?&rdquo; she asked, with a yawn, turning up the
+      wick of her sewing-lamp again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ought never to turn down a light like that,&rdquo; said Theron, with a
+      complaining note in his voice. &ldquo;It smells up the whole place. I never
+      dreamed of your sitting up for me like this. You ought to have gone to
+      bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how could I guess that you were going to be so late?,&rdquo; she retorted.
+      &ldquo;And you haven't told me where you were. Is this book of yours going to
+      keep you up like this right along?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The episode of the book was buried in the young minister's mind beneath
+      such a mass of subsequent experiences that it required an effort for him
+      to grasp what she was talking about. It seemed as if months had elapsed
+      since he was in earnest about that book; and yet he had left the house
+      full of it only a few hours before. He shook his wits together, and made
+      answer&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, bless you, no! Only there arose a very curious question. You have no
+      idea, literally no conception, of the interesting and important problems
+      which are raised by the mere fact of Abraham leaving the city of Ur. It's
+      amazing, I assure you. I hadn't realized it myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; remarked Alice, rising&mdash;and with good-humor and petulance
+      struggling sleepily ill her tone&mdash;&ldquo;all I've got to say is, that if
+      Abraham hasn't anything better to do than to keep young ministers of the
+      gospel out, goodness knows where, till all hours of the night, I wish to
+      gracious he'd stayed in the city of Ur right straight along.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have no idea what a scholarly man Dr. Ledsmar is,&rdquo; Theron suddenly
+      found himself inspired to volunteer. &ldquo;He has the most marvellous
+      collection of books&mdash;a whole library devoted to this very subject&mdash;and
+      he has put them all quite freely at my disposal. Extremely kind of him,
+      isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ledsmar? Ledsmar?&rdquo; queried Alice. &ldquo;I don't seem to remember the name. He
+      isn't the little man with the birthmark, who sits in the pew behind the
+      Lovejoys, is he? I think some one said he was a doctor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, a horse doctor!&rdquo; said Theron, with a sniff. &ldquo;No; you haven't seen
+      this Dr. Ledsmar at all. I&mdash;I don't know that he attends any church
+      regularly. I scraped his acquaintance quite by accident. He is really a
+      character. He lives in the big house, just beyond the race-course, you
+      know&mdash;the one with the tower at the back&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I don't know. How should I? I've hardly poked my nose outside of the
+      yard since I have been here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you shall go,&rdquo; said the husband, consolingly. &ldquo;You HAVE been cooped
+      up here too much, poor girl. I must take you out more, really. I don't
+      know that I could take you to the doctor's place&mdash;without an
+      invitation, I mean. He is very queer about some things. He lives there all
+      alone, for instance, with only a Chinaman for a servant. He told me I was
+      almost the only man he had asked under his roof for years. He isn't a
+      practising physician at all, you know. He is a scientist; he makes
+      experiments with lizards&mdash;and things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Theron,&rdquo; the wife said, pausing lamp in hand on her way to the bedroom,
+      &ldquo;do you be careful, now! For all you know this doctor may be a loose man,
+      or pretty near an infidel. You've got to be mighty particular in such
+      matters, you know, or you'll have the trustees down on you like a
+      'thousand of bricks.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will thank the trustees to mind their own business,&rdquo; said Theron,
+      stiffly, and the subject dropped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bedroom window upstairs was open, and upon the fresh night air was
+      borne in the shrill, jangling sound of a piano, being played off somewhere
+      in the distance, but so vehemently that the noise imposed itself upon the
+      silence far and wide. Theron listened to this as he undressed. It
+      proceeded from the direction of the main street, and he knew, as by
+      instinct, that it was the Madden girl who was playing. The incongruity of
+      the hour escaped his notice. He mused instead upon the wild and tropical
+      tangle of moods, emotions, passions, which had grown up in that strange
+      temperament. He found something very pathetic in that picture she had
+      drawn of herself in forecast, roaming disconsolate through her rooms the
+      livelong night, unable to sleep. The woful moan of insomnia seemed to make
+      itself heard in every strain from her piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice heard it also, but being unillumined, she missed the romantic
+      pathos. &ldquo;I call it disgraceful,&rdquo; she muttered from her pillow, &ldquo;for folks
+      to be banging away on a piano at this time of night. There ought to be a
+      law to prevent it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It may be some distressed soul,&rdquo; said Theron, gently, &ldquo;seeking relief
+      from the curse of sleeplessness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The wife laughed, almost contemptuously. &ldquo;Distressed fiddlesticks!&rdquo; was
+      her only other comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The music went on for a long time&mdash;rising now to strident heights,
+      now sinking off to the merest tinkling murmur, and broken ever and again
+      by intervals of utter hush. It did not prevent Alice from at once falling
+      sound asleep; but Theron lay awake, it seemed to him, for hours, listening
+      tranquilly, and letting his mind wander at will through the pleasant
+      antechambers of Sleep, where are more unreal fantasies than Dreamland
+      itself affords.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART2" id="link2H_PART2">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For some weeks the Rev. Theron Ware saw nothing of either the priest or
+      the doctor, or the interesting Miss Madden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were, indeed, more urgent matters to think about. June had come; and
+      every succeeding day brought closer to hand the ordeal of his first
+      Quarterly Conference in Octavius. The waters grew distinctly rougher as
+      his pastoral bark neared this difficult passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would have approached the great event with an easier mind if he could
+      have made out just how he stood with his congregation. Unfortunately
+      nothing in his previous experiences helped him in the least to measure or
+      guess at the feelings of these curious Octavians. Their Methodism seemed
+      to be sound enough, and to stick quite to the letter of the Discipline, so
+      long as it was expressed in formulae. It was its spirit which he felt to
+      be complicated by all sorts of conditions wholly novel to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The existence of a line of street-cars in the town, for example, would not
+      impress the casual thinker as likely to prove a rock in the path of
+      peaceful religion. Theron, in his simplicity, had even thought, when he
+      first saw these bobtailed cars bumping along the rails in the middle of
+      the main street, that they must be a great convenience to people living in
+      the outskirts, who wished to get in to church of a Sunday morning. He was
+      imprudent enough to mention this in conversation with one of his new
+      parishioners. Then he learned, to his considerable chagrin, that when this
+      line was built, some years before, a bitter war of words had been fought
+      upon the question of its being worked on the Sabbath day. The then
+      occupant of the Methodist pulpit had so distinguished himself above the
+      rest by the solemnity and fervor of his protests against this insolent
+      desecration of God's day that the Methodists of Octavius still felt
+      themselves peculiarly bound to hold this horse-car line, its management,
+      and everything connected with it, in unbending aversion. At least once a
+      year they were accustomed to expect a sermon denouncing it and all its
+      impious Sunday patrons. Theron made a mental resolve that this year they
+      should be disappointed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another burning problem, which he had not been called upon before to
+      confront, he found now entangled with the mysterious line which divided a
+      circus from a menagerie. Those itinerant tent-shows had never come his way
+      heretofore, and he knew nothing of that fine balancing proportion between
+      ladies in tights on horseback and cages full of deeply educational
+      animals, which, even as the impartial rain, was designed to embrace alike
+      the just and the unjust. There had arisen inside the Methodist society of
+      Octavius some painful episodes, connected with members who took their
+      children &ldquo;just to see the animals,&rdquo; and were convicted of having also
+      watched the Rose-Queen of the Arena, in her unequalled flying leap through
+      eight hoops, with an ardent and unashamed eye. One of these cases still
+      remained on the censorial docket of the church; and Theron understood that
+      he was expected to name a committee of five to examine and try it. This he
+      neglected to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was no longer at all certain that the congregation as a whole liked his
+      sermons. The truth was, no doubt, that he had learned enough to cease
+      regarding the congregation as a whole. He could still rely upon carrying
+      along with him in his discourses from the pulpit a large majority of
+      interested and approving faces. But here, unhappily, was a case where the
+      majority did not rule. The minority, relatively small in numbers, was
+      prodigious in virile force.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More than twenty years had now elapsed since that minor schism in the
+      Methodist Episcopal Church, the result of which was the independent body
+      known as Free Methodists, had relieved the parent flock of its principal
+      disturbing element. The rupture came fittingly at that time when all the
+      &ldquo;isms&rdquo; of the argumentative fifties were hurled violently together into
+      the melting-pot of civil war. The great Methodist Church, South, had
+      broken bodily off on the question of State Rights. The smaller and
+      domestic fraction of Free Methodism separated itself upon an issue which
+      may be most readily described as one of civilization. The seceders
+      resented growth in material prosperity; they repudiated the introduction
+      of written sermons and organ-music; they deplored the increasing laxity in
+      meddlesome piety, the introduction of polite manners in the pulpit and
+      classroom, and the development of even a rudimentary desire among the
+      younger people of the church to be like others outside in dress and speech
+      and deportment. They did battle as long as they could, inside the fold, to
+      restore it to the severely straight and narrow path of primitive
+      Methodism. When the adverse odds became too strong for them, they quitted
+      the church and set up a Bethel for themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Octavius chanced to be one of the places where they were able to hold
+      their own within the church organization. The Methodism of the town had
+      gone along without any local secession. It still held in full fellowship
+      the radicals who elsewhere had followed their unbridled bent into the
+      strongest emotional vagaries&mdash;where excited brethren worked
+      themselves up into epileptic fits, and women whirled themselves about in
+      weird religious ecstasies, like dervishes of the Orient, till they fell
+      headlong in a state of trance. Octavian Methodism was spared extravagances
+      of this sort, it is true, but it paid a price for the immunity. The people
+      whom an open split would have taken away remained to leaven and dominate
+      the whole lump. This small advanced section, with its men of a type all
+      the more aggressive from its narrowness, and women who went about solemnly
+      in plain gray garments, with tight-fitting, unadorned, mouse-colored
+      sunbonnets, had not been able wholly to enforce its views upon the social
+      life of the church members, but of its controlling influence upon their
+      official and public actions there could be no doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The situation had begun to unfold itself to Theron from the outset. He had
+      recognized the episodes of the forbidden Sunday milk and of the flowers in
+      poor Alice's bonnet as typical of much more that was to come. No week
+      followed without bringing some new fulfilment of this foreboding. Now, at
+      the end of two months, he knew well enough that the hitherto dominant
+      minority was hostile to him and his ministry, and would do whatever it
+      could against him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though Theron at once decided to show fight, and did not at all waver in
+      that resolve, his courage was in the main of a despondent sort. Sometimes
+      it would flutter up to the point of confidence, or at least hopefulness,
+      when he met with substantial men of the church who obviously liked him,
+      and whom he found himself mentally ranging on his side, in the struggle
+      which was to come. But more often it was blankly apparent to him that, the
+      moment flags were flying and drums on the roll, these amiable fair-weather
+      friends would probably take to their heels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still, such as they were, his sole hope lay in their support. He must make
+      the best of them. He set himself doggedly to the task of gathering
+      together all those who were not his enemies into what, when the proper
+      time came, should be known as the pastor's party. There was plenty of
+      apostolic warrant for this. If there had not been, Theron felt that the
+      mere elementary demands of self-defence would have justified his use of
+      strategy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The institution of pastoral calling, particularly that inquisitorial form
+      of it laid down in the Discipline, had never attracted Theron. He and
+      Alice had gone about among their previous flocks in quite a haphazard
+      fashion, without thought of system, much less of deliberate purpose.
+      Theron made lists now, and devoted thought and examination to the personal
+      tastes and characteristics of the people to be cultivated. There were
+      some, for example, who would expect him to talk pretty much as the
+      Discipline ordained&mdash;that is, to ask if they had family prayer, to
+      inquire after their souls, and generally to minister grace to his hearers&mdash;and
+      these in turn subdivided themselves into classes, ranging from those who
+      would wish nothing else to those who needed only a mild spiritual flavor.
+      There were others whom he would please much better by not talking shop at
+      all. Although he could ill afford it, he subscribed now for a daily paper
+      that he might have a perpetually renewed source of good conversational
+      topics for these more worldly calls. He also bought several pounds of
+      candy, pleasing in color, but warranted to be entirely harmless, and he
+      made a large mysterious mark on the inside of his new silk hat to remind
+      him not to go out calling without some of this in his pocket for the
+      children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice, he felt, was not helping him in this matter as effectively as he
+      could have wished. Her attitude toward the church in Octavius might best
+      be described by the word &ldquo;sulky.&rdquo; Great allowance was to be made, he
+      realized, for her humiliation over the flowers in her bonnet. That might
+      justify her, fairly enough, in being kept away from meeting now and again
+      by headaches, or undefined megrims. But it ought not to prevent her from
+      going about and making friends among the kindlier parishioners who would
+      welcome such a thing, and whom he from time to time indicated to her. She
+      did go to some extent, it is true, but she produced, in doing so, an
+      effect of performing a duty. He did not find traces anywhere of her having
+      created a brilliant social impression. When they went out together, he was
+      peculiarly conscious of having to do the work unaided.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was not at all like the Alice of former years, of other charges. Why,
+      she had been, beyond comparison, the most popular young woman in Tyre.
+      What possessed her to mope like this in Octavius?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron looked at her attentively nowadays, when she was unaware of his
+      gaze, to try if her face offered any answer to the riddle. It could not be
+      suggested that she was ill. Never in her life had she been looking so
+      well. She had thrown herself, all at once, and with what was to him an
+      unaccountable energy, into the creation and management of a flower-garden.
+      She was out the better part of every day, rain or shine, digging,
+      transplanting, pruning, pottering generally about among her plants and
+      shrubs. This work in the open air had given her an aspect of physical
+      well-being which it was impossible to be mistaken about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband was glad, of course, that she had found some occupation which
+      at once pleased her and so obviously conduced to health. This was so much
+      a matter of course, in fact, that he said to himself over and over again
+      that he was glad. Only&mdash;only, sometimes the thought WOULD force
+      itself upon his attention that if she did not spend so much of her time in
+      her own garden, she would have more time to devote to winning friends for
+      them in the Garden of the Lord&mdash;friends whom they were going to need
+      badly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister, in taking anxious stock of the chances for and against
+      him, turned over often in his mind the fact that he had already won rank
+      as a pulpit orator. His sermons had attracted almost universal attention
+      at Tyre, and his achievement before the Conference at Tecumseh, if it did
+      fail to receive practical reward, had admittedly distanced all the other
+      preaching there. It was a part of the evil luck pursuing him that here in
+      this perversely enigmatic Octavius his special gift seemed to be of no use
+      whatever. There were times, indeed, when he was tempted to think that bad
+      preaching was what Octavius wanted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Somewhere he had heard of a Presbyterian minister, in charge of a big city
+      church, who managed to keep well in with a watchfully Orthodox
+      congregation, and at the same time establish himself in the affections of
+      the community at large, by simply preaching two kinds of sermons. In the
+      morning, when almost all who attended were his own communicants, he gave
+      them very cautious and edifying doctrinal discourses, treading loyally in
+      the path of the Westminster Confession. To the evening assemblages, made
+      up for the larger part of outsiders, he addressed broadly liberal sermons,
+      literary in form, and full of respectful allusions to modern science and
+      the philosophy of the day. Thus he filled the church at both services, and
+      put money in its treasury and his own fame before the world. There was of
+      course the obvious danger that the pious elders who in the forenoon heard
+      infant damnation vigorously proclaimed, would revolt when they heard after
+      supper that there was some doubt about even adults being damned at all.
+      But either because the same people did not attend both services, or
+      because the minister's perfect regularity in the morning was each week
+      regarded as a retraction of his latest vagaries of an evening, no trouble
+      ever came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had somewhat tentatively tried this on in Octavius. It was no good.
+      His parishioners were of the sort who would have come to church eight
+      times a day on Sunday, instead of two, if occasion offered. The hope that
+      even a portion of them would stop away, and that their places would be
+      taken in the evening by less prejudiced strangers who wished for
+      intellectual rather than theological food, fell by the wayside. The
+      yearned-for strangers did not come; the familiar faces of the morning
+      service all turned up in their accustomed places every evening. They were
+      faces which confused and disheartened Theron in the daytime. Under the
+      gaslight they seemed even harder and more unsympathetic. He timorously
+      experimented with them for an evening or two, then abandoned the effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once there had seemed the beginning of a chance. The richest banker in
+      Octavius&mdash;a fat, sensual, hog-faced old bachelor&mdash;surprised
+      everybody one evening by entering the church and taking a seat. Theron
+      happened to know who he was; even if he had not known, the suppressed
+      excitement visible in the congregation, the way the sisters turned round
+      to look, the way the more important brethren put their heads together and
+      exchanged furtive whispers&mdash;would have warned him that big game was
+      in view. He recalled afterward with something like self-disgust the eager,
+      almost tremulous pains he himself took to please this banker. There was a
+      part of the sermon, as it had been written out, which might easily give
+      offence to a single man of wealth and free notions of life. With the
+      alertness of a mental gymnast, Theron ran ahead, excised this portion, and
+      had ready when the gap was reached some very pretty general remarks, all
+      the more effective and eloquent, he felt, for having been extemporized.
+      People said it was a good sermon; and after the benediction and dispersion
+      some of the officials and principal pew-holders remained to talk over the
+      likelihood of a capture having been effected. Theron did not get away
+      without having this mentioned to him, and he was conscious of sharing
+      deeply the hope of the brethren&mdash;with the added reflection that it
+      would be a personal triumph for himself into the bargain. He was ashamed
+      of this feeling a little later, and of his trick with the sermon. But this
+      chastening product of introspection was all the fruit which the incident
+      bore. The banker never came again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron returned one afternoon, a little earlier than usual, from a group
+      of pastoral calls. Alice, who was plucking weeds in a border at the shady
+      side of the house, heard his step, and rose from her labors. He was
+      walking slowly, and seemed weary. He took off his high hat, as he saw her,
+      and wiped his brow. The broiling June sun was still high overhead.
+      Doubtless it was its insufferable heat which was accountable for the worn
+      lines in his face and the spiritless air which the wife's eye detected.
+      She went to the gate, and kissed him as he entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe if I were you,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I'd carry an umbrella such scorching
+      days as this. Nobody'd think anything of it. I don't see why a minister
+      shouldn't carry one as much as a woman carries a parasol.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron gave her a rueful, meditative sort of smile. &ldquo;I suppose people
+      really do think of us as a kind of hybrid female,&rdquo; he remarked. Then,
+      holding his hat in his hand, he drew a long breath of relief at finding
+      himself in the shade, and looked about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, you've got more posies here, on this one side of the house alone,
+      than mother had in her whole yard,&rdquo; he said, after a little. &ldquo;Let's see&mdash;I
+      know that one: that's columbine, isn't it? And that's London pride, and
+      that's ragged robin. I don't know any of the others.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice recited various unfamiliar names, as she pointed out the several
+      plants which bore them, and he listened with a kindly semblance of
+      interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They strolled thus to the rear of the house, where thick clumps of
+      fragrant pinks lined both sides of the path. She picked some of these for
+      him, and gave him more names with which to label the considerable number
+      of other plants he saw about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had no idea we were so well provided as all this,&rdquo; he commented at
+      last. &ldquo;Those Van Sizers must have been tremendous hands for flowers. You
+      were lucky in following such people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Van Sizers!&rdquo; echoed Alice, with contempt. &ldquo;All they left was old tomato
+      cans and clamshells. Why, I've put in every blessed one of these myself,
+      all except those peonies, there, and one brier on the side wall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good for you!&rdquo; exclaimed Theron, approvingly. Then it occurred to him to
+      ask, &ldquo;But where did you get them all? Around among our friends?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some few,&rdquo; responded Alice, with a note of hesitation in her voice.
+      &ldquo;Sister Bult gave me the verbenas, there, and the white pinks were a
+      present from Miss Stevens. But most of them Levi Gorringe was good enough
+      to send me&mdash;from his garden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know that Gorringe had a garden,&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;I thought he
+      lived over his law-office, in the brick block, there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I don't know that it's exactly HIS,&rdquo; explained Alice; &ldquo;but it's a
+      big garden somewhere outside, where he can have anything he likes.&rdquo; She
+      went on with a little laugh: &ldquo;I didn't like to question him too closely,
+      for fear he'd think I was looking a gift horse in the mouth&mdash;or else
+      hinting for more. It was quite his own offer, you know. He picked them all
+      out for me, and brought them here, and lent me a book telling me just what
+      to do with each one. And in a few days, now, I am to have another big
+      batch of plants&mdash;dahlias and zinnias and asters and so on; I'm almost
+      ashamed to take them. But it's such a change to find some one in this
+      Octavius who isn't all self!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Gorringe is a good fellow,&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;I wish he was a professing
+      member.&rdquo; Then some new thought struck him. &ldquo;Alice,&rdquo; he exclaimed, &ldquo;I
+      believe I'll go and see him this very afternoon. I don't know why it
+      hasn't occurred to me before: he's just the man whose advice I need most.
+      He knows these people here; he can tell me what to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren't you too tired now?&rdquo; suggested Alice, as Theron put on his hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, the sooner the better,&rdquo; he replied, moving now toward the gate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;if I were you, I wouldn't say too much about&mdash;that
+      is, I&mdash;but never mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; asked her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing whatever,&rdquo; replied Alice, positively. &ldquo;It was only some nonsense
+      of mine;&rdquo; and Theron, placidly accepting the feminine whim, went off down
+      the street again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware found Levi Gorringe's law-office readily enough, but its
+      owner was not in. He probably would be back again, though, in a quarter of
+      an hour or so, the boy said, and the minister at once decided to wait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron was interested in finding that this office-boy was no other than
+      Harvey&mdash;the lad who brought milk to the parsonage every morning. He
+      remembered now that he had heard good things of this urchin, as to the
+      hard work he did to help his mother, the Widow Semple, in her struggle to
+      keep a roof over her head; and also bad things, in that he did not come
+      regularly either to church or Sunday-school. The clergyman recalled, too,
+      that Harvey had impressed him as a character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, sonny, are you going to be a lawyer?&rdquo; he asked, as he seated
+      himself by the window, and looked about him, first at the dusty litter of
+      old papers, pamphlets, and tape-bound documents in bundles which crowded
+      the stuffy chamber, and then at the boy himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harvey was busy at a big box&mdash;a rough pine dry-goods box which bore
+      the flaring label of an express company, and also of a well-known seed
+      firm in a Western city, and which the boy had apparently just opened. He
+      was lifting from it, and placing on the table after he had shaken off the
+      sawdust and moss in which they were packed, small parcels of what looked
+      in the fading light to be half-dried plants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I don't know&mdash;I rather guess not,&rdquo; he made answer, as he
+      pursued his task. &ldquo;So far as I can make out, this wouldn't be the place to
+      start in at, if I WAS going to be a lawyer. A boy can learn here
+      first-rate how to load cartridges and clean a gun, and braid trout-flies
+      on to leaders, but I don't see much law laying around loose. Anyway,&rdquo; he
+      went on, &ldquo;I couldn't afford to read law, and not be getting any wages. I
+      have to earn money, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron felt that he liked the boy. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, with a kindly tone;
+      &ldquo;I've heard that you are a good, industrious youngster. I daresay Mr.
+      Gorringe will see to it that you get a chance to read law, and get wages
+      too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I can read all there is here and welcome,&rdquo; the boy explained,
+      stepping toward the window to decipher the label on a bundle of roots in
+      his hand, &ldquo;but that's no good unless there's regular practice coming into
+      the office all the while. THAT'S how you learn to be a lawyer. But
+      Gorringe don't have what I call a practice at all. He just sees men in the
+      other room there, with the door shut, and whatever there is to do he does
+      it all himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The minister remembered a stray hint somewhere that Mr. Gorringe was a
+      money-lender&mdash;what was colloquially called a &ldquo;note-shaver.&rdquo; To his
+      rustic sense, there was something not quite nice about that occupation. It
+      would be indecorous, he felt, to encourage further talk about it from the
+      boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing there?&rdquo; he inquired, to change the subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sorting out some plants,&rdquo; replied Harvey. &ldquo;I don't know what's got into
+      Gorringe lately. This is the third big box he's had since I've been here&mdash;that
+      is, in six weeks&mdash;besides two baskets full of rose-bushes. I don't
+      know what he does with them. He carries them off himself somewhere. I've
+      had kind of half a notion that he's figurin' on getting married. I can't
+      think of anything else that would make a man spend money like water&mdash;just
+      for flowers and bushes. They do get foolish, you know, when they've got
+      marriage on the brain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron found himself only imperfectly following the theories of the young
+      philosopher. It was his fact that monopolized the minister's attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But as I understand it,&rdquo; he remarked hesitatingly, &ldquo;Brother Gorringe&mdash;or
+      rather Mr. Gorringe&mdash;gets all the plants he wants, everything he
+      likes, from a big garden somewhere outside. I don't know that it is
+      exactly his; but I remember hearing something to that effect.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy slapped the last litter off his hands, and, as he came to the
+      window, shook his head. &ldquo;These don't come from no garden outside,&rdquo; he
+      declared. &ldquo;They come from the dealers', and he pays solid cash for 'em.
+      The invoice for this lot alone was thirty-one dollars and sixty cents.
+      There it is on the table. You can see it for yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Ware did not offer to look. &ldquo;Very likely these are for the garden I
+      was speaking of,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Of course you can't go on taking plants out of
+      a garden indefinitely without putting others in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know anything about any garden that he takes plants out of,&rdquo;
+       answered Harvey, and looked meditatively for a minute or two out upon the
+      street below. Then he turned to the minister. &ldquo;Your wife's doing a good
+      deal of gardening this spring, I notice,&rdquo; he said casually. &ldquo;You'd hardly
+      think it was the same place, she's fixed it up so. If she wants any extra
+      hoeing done, I can always get off Saturday afternoons.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will remember,&rdquo; said Theron. He also looked out of the window; and
+      nothing more was said until, a few moments later, Mr. Gorringe himself
+      came in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lawyer seemed both surprised and pleased at discovering the identity
+      of his visitor, with whom he shook hands in almost an excess of
+      cordiality. He spread a large newspaper over the pile of seedling plants
+      on the table, pushed the packing-box under the table with his foot, and
+      said almost peremptorily to the boy, &ldquo;You can go now!&rdquo; Then he turned
+      again to Theron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Mr. Ware, I'm glad to see you,&rdquo; he repeated, and drew up a chair by
+      the window. &ldquo;Things are going all right with you, I hope.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron noted again the waving black hair, the dark skin, and the carefully
+      trimmed mustache and chin-tuft which gave the lawyer's face a combined
+      effect of romance and smartness. No; it was the eyes, cool, shrewd,
+      dark-gray eyes, which suggested this latter quality. The recollection of
+      having seen one of them wink, in deliberate hostility of sarcasm, when
+      those other trustees had their backs turned, came mercifully at the moment
+      to recall the young minister to his errand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I would drop in and have a chat with you,&rdquo; he said, getting
+      better under way as he went on. &ldquo;Quarterly Conference is only a fortnight
+      off, and I am a good deal at sea about what is going to happen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not a church member, you know,&rdquo; interposed Gorringe. &ldquo;That shuts me
+      out of the Quarterly Conference.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alas, yes!&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;I wish it didn't. I'm afraid I'm not going to
+      have any friends to spare there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you afraid of?&rdquo; asked the lawyer, seeming now to be wholly at
+      his ease again &ldquo;They can't eat you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, they keep me too lean for that,&rdquo; responded Theron, with a pensive
+      smile. &ldquo;I WAS going to ask, you know, for an increase of salary, or an
+      extra allowance. I don't see how I can go on as it is. The sum fixed by
+      the last Quarterly Conference of the old year, and which I am getting now,
+      is one hundred dollars less than my predecessor had. That isn't fair, and
+      it isn't right. But so far from its looking as if I could get an increase,
+      the prospect seems rather that they will make me pay for the gas and that
+      sidewalk. I never recovered more than about half of my moving expenses, as
+      you know, and&mdash;and, frankly, I don't know which way to turn. It keeps
+      me miserable all the while.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's where you're wrong,&rdquo; said Mr. Gorringe. &ldquo;If you let things like
+      that worry you, you'll keep a sore skin all your life. You take my advice
+      and just go ahead your own gait, and let other folks do the worrying. They
+      ARE pretty close-fisted here, for a fact, but you can manage to rub along
+      somehow. If you should get into any real difficulties, why, I guess&mdash;&rdquo;
+       the lawyer paused to smile in a hesitating, significant way&mdash;&ldquo;I guess
+      some road out can be found all right. The main thing is, don't fret, and
+      don't allow your wife to&mdash;to fret either.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped abruptly. Theron nodded in recognition of his amiable tone, and
+      then found the nod lengthening itself out into almost a bow as the thought
+      spread through his mind that this had been nothing more nor less than a
+      promise to help him with money if worst came to worst. He looked at Levi
+      Gorringe, and said to himself that the intuition of women was wonderful.
+      Alice had picked him out as a friend of theirs merely by seeing him pass
+      the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I am specially anxious to keep my wife from worrying. She
+      was surrounded in her girlhood by a good deal of what, relatively, we
+      should call luxury, and that makes it all the harder for her to be a poor
+      minister's wife. I had quite decided to get her a hired girl, come what
+      might, but she thinks she'd rather get on without one. Her health is
+      better, I must admit, than it was when we came here. She works out in her
+      garden a great deal, and that seems to agree with her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Octavius is a healthy place&mdash;that's generally admitted,&rdquo; replied the
+      lawyer, with indifference. He seemed not to be interested in Mrs. Ware's
+      health, but looked intently out through the window at the buildings
+      opposite, and drummed with his fingers on the arms of his chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron made haste to revert to his errand. &ldquo;Of course, your not being in
+      the Quarterly Conference,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;renders certain things impossible.
+      But I didn't know but you might have some knowledge of how matters are
+      going, what plans the officials of the church had; they seem to have
+      agreed to tell me nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I HAVE heard this much,&rdquo; responded Gorringe. &ldquo;They're figuring on
+      getting the Soulsbys here to raise the debt and kind o' shake things up
+      generally. I guess that's about as good as settled. Hadn't you heard of
+      it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a breath!&rdquo; exclaimed Theron, mournfully. &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he added upon
+      reflection, &ldquo;I'm sorry, downright sorry. The debt-raiser seems to me about
+      the lowest-down thing we produce. I've heard of those Soulsbys; I think I
+      saw HIM indeed once at Conference, but I believe SHE is the head of the
+      firm.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; she wears the breeches, I understand,&rdquo; said Gorringe sententiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I HAD hoped,&rdquo; the young minister began with a rueful sigh, &ldquo;in fact, I
+      felt quite confident at the outset that I could pay off this debt, and put
+      the church generally on a new footing, by giving extra attention to my
+      pulpit work. It is hardly for me to say it, but in other places where I
+      have been, my preaching has been rather&mdash;rather a feature in the town
+      itself. I have always been accustomed to attract to our services a good
+      many non-members, and that, as you know, helps tremendously from a money
+      point of view. But somehow that has failed here. I doubt if the average
+      congregations are a whit larger now than they were when I came in April. I
+      know the collections are not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; commented the lawyer, slowly; &ldquo;you'll never do anything in that line
+      in Octavius. You might, of course, if you were to stay here and work hard
+      at it for five or six years&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heaven forbid!&rdquo; groaned Mr. Ware.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; put in the other. &ldquo;The point is that the Methodists here are a
+      little set by themselves. I don't know that they like one another
+      specially, but I do know that they are not what you might call popular
+      with people outside. Now, a new preacher at the Presbyterian church, or
+      even the Baptist&mdash;he might have a chance to create talk, and make a
+      stir. But Methodist&mdash;no! People who don't belong won't come near the
+      Methodist church here so long as there's any other place with a roof on it
+      to go to. Give a dog a bad name, you know. Well, the Methodists here have
+      got a bad name; and if you could preach like Henry Ward Beecher himself
+      you wouldn't change it, or get folks to come and hear you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see what you mean,&rdquo; Theron responded. &ldquo;I'm not particularly surprised
+      myself that Octavius doesn't love us, or look to us for intellectual
+      stimulation. I myself leave that pulpit more often than otherwise feeling
+      like a wet rag&mdash;utterly limp and discouraged. But, if you don't mind
+      my speaking of it, YOU don't belong, and yet YOU come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was evident that the lawyer did not mind. He spoke freely in reply.
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, I've got into the habit of it. I began going when I first came
+      here, and&mdash;and so it grew to be natural for me to go. Then, of
+      course, being the only lawyer you have, a considerable amount of my
+      business is mixed up in one way or another with your membership; you see
+      those are really the things which settle a man in a rut, and keep him
+      there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose your people were Methodists,&rdquo; said Theron, to fill in the
+      pause, &ldquo;and that is how you originally started with us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Levi Gorringe shook his head. He leaned back, half closed his eyes, put
+      his finger-tips together, and almost smiled as if something in retrospect
+      pleased and moved him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I went to the church first to see a girl who used to go
+      there. It was long before your time. All her family moved away years ago.
+      You wouldn't know any of them. I was younger then, and I didn't know as
+      much as I do now. I worshipped the very ground that girl walked on, and
+      like a fool I never gave her so much as a hint of it. Looking back now, I
+      can see that I might have had her if I'd asked her. But I went instead and
+      sat around and looked at her at church and Sunday-school and
+      prayer-meetings Thursday nights, and class-meetings after the sermon. She
+      was devoted to religion and church work; and, thinking it would please
+      her, I joined the church on probation. Men can fool themselves easier than
+      they can other people. I actually believed at the time that I had
+      experienced religion. I felt myself full of all sorts of awakenings of the
+      soul and so forth. But it was really that girl. You see I'm telling you
+      the thing just as it was. I was very happy. I think it was the happiest
+      time of my life. I remember there was a love-feast while I was on
+      probation; and I sat down in front, right beside her, and we ate the
+      little square chunks of bread and drank the water together, and I held one
+      corner of her hymn-book when we stood up and sang. That was the nearest I
+      ever got to her, or to full membership in the church. That very next week,
+      I think it was, we learned that she had got engaged to the minister's son&mdash;a
+      young man who had just become a minister himself. They got married, and
+      went away&mdash;and I&mdash;somehow I never took up my membership when the
+      six months' probation was over. That's how it was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very interesting,&rdquo; remarked Theron, softly, after a little silence&mdash;&ldquo;and
+      very full of human nature.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, now you see,&rdquo; said the lawyer, &ldquo;what I mean when I say that there
+      hasn't been another minister here since, that I should have felt like
+      telling this story to. They wouldn't have understood it at all. They would
+      have thought it was blasphemy for me to say straight out that what I took
+      for experiencing religion was really a girl. But you are different. I felt
+      that at once, the first time I saw you. In a pulpit or out of it, what I
+      like in a human being is that he SHOULD be human.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It pleases me beyond measure that you should like me, then&rdquo; returned the
+      young minister, with frank gratification shining on his face. &ldquo;The world
+      is made all the sweeter and more lovable by these&mdash;these elements of
+      romance. I am not one of those who would wish to see them banished or
+      frowned upon. I don't mind admitting to you that there is a good deal in
+      Methodism&mdash;I mean the strict practice of its letter which you find
+      here in Octavius&mdash;that is personally distasteful to me. I read the
+      other day of an English bishop who said boldly, publicly, that no modern
+      nation could practise the principles laid down in the Sermon on the Mount
+      and survive for twenty-four hours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha, ha! That's good!&rdquo; laughed the lawyer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I felt that it was good, too,&rdquo; pursued Theron. &ldquo;I am getting to see a
+      great many things differently, here in Octavius. Our Methodist Discipline
+      is like the Beatitudes&mdash;very helpful and beautiful, if treated as
+      spiritual suggestion, but more or less of a stumbling-block if insisted
+      upon literally. I declare!&rdquo; he added, sitting up in his chair, &ldquo;I never
+      talked like this to a living soul before in all my life. Your confidences
+      were contagious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware rose as he spoke, and took up his hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Must you be going?&rdquo; asked the lawyer, also rising. &ldquo;Well, I'm glad I
+      haven't shocked you. Come in oftener when you are passing. And if you see
+      anything I can help you in, always tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men shook hands, with an emphatic and lingering clasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad,&rdquo; said Theron, &ldquo;that you didn't stop coming to church just
+      because you lost the girl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Levi Gorringe answered the minister's pleasantry with a smile which curled
+      his mustache upward, and expanded in little wrinkles at the ends of his
+      eyes. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said jestingly. &ldquo;I'm death on collecting debts; and I
+      reckon that the church still owes me a girl. I'll have one yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So, with merriment the echoes of which pleasantly accompanied Theron down
+      the stairway, the two men parted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Though time lagged in passing with a slowness which seemed born of studied
+      insolence, there did arrive at last a day which had something definitive
+      about it to Theron's disturbed and restless mind. It was a Thursday, and
+      the prayer-meeting to be held that evening would be the last before the
+      Quarterly Conference, now only four days off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some reason, the young minister found himself dwelling upon this fact,
+      and investing it with importance. But yesterday the Quarterly Conference
+      had seemed a long way ahead. Today brought it alarmingly close to hand. He
+      had not heretofore regarded the weekly assemblage for prayer and song as a
+      thing calling for preparation, or for any preliminary thought. Now on this
+      Thursday morning he went to his desk after breakfast, which was a sign
+      that he wanted the room to himself, quite as if he had the task of a
+      weighty sermon before him. He sat at the desk all the forenoon, doing no
+      writing, it is true, but remembering every once in a while, when his mind
+      turned aside from the book in his hands, that there was that
+      prayer-meeting in the evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes he reached the point of vaguely wondering why this strictly
+      commonplace affair should be forcing itself thus upon his attention. Then,
+      with a kind of mental shiver at the recollection that this was Thursday,
+      and that the great struggle came on Monday, he would go back to his book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were a half-dozen volumes on the open desk before him. He had taken
+      them out from beneath a pile of old &ldquo;Sunday-School Advocates&rdquo; and church
+      magazines, where they had lain hidden from Alice's view most of the week.
+      If there had been a locked drawer in the house, he would have used it
+      instead to hold these books, which had come to him in a neat parcel, which
+      also contained an amiable note from Dr. Ledsmar, recalling a pleasant
+      evening in May, and expressing the hope that the accompanying works would
+      be of some service. Theron had glanced at the backs of the uppermost two,
+      and discovered that their author was Renan. Then he had hastily put the
+      lot in the best place he could think of to escape his wife's observation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He realized now that there had been no need for this secrecy. Of the other
+      four books, by Sayce, Budge, Smith, and Lenormant, three indeed revealed
+      themselves to be published under religious auspices. As for Renan, he
+      might have known that the name would be meaningless to Alice. The feeling
+      that he himself was not much wiser in this matter than his wife may have
+      led him to pass over the learned text-books on Chaldean antiquity, and
+      even the volume of Renan which appeared to be devoted to Oriental
+      inscriptions, and take up his other book, entitled in the translation,
+      &ldquo;Recollections of my Youth.&rdquo; This he rather glanced through, at the
+      outset, following with a certain inattention the introductory sketches and
+      essays, which dealt with an unfamiliar, and, to his notion, somewhat
+      preposterous Breton racial type. Then, little by little, it dawned upon
+      him that there was a connected story in all this; and suddenly he came
+      upon it, out in the open, as it were. It was the story of how a deeply
+      devout young man, trained from his earliest boyhood for the sacred office,
+      and desiring passionately nothing but to be worthy of it, came to a point
+      where, at infinite cost of pain to himself and of anguish to those dearest
+      to him, he had to declare that he could no longer believe at all in
+      revealed religion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron Ware read this all with an excited interest which no book had ever
+      stirred in him before. Much of it he read over and over again, to make
+      sure that he penetrated everywhere the husk of French habits of thought
+      and Catholic methods in which the kernel was wrapped. He broke off midway
+      in this part of the book to go out to the kitchen to dinner, and began the
+      meal in silence. To Alice's questions he replied briefly that he was
+      preparing himself for the evening's prayer-meeting. She lifted her brows
+      in such frank surprise at this that he made a further and somewhat
+      rambling explanation about having again taken up the work on his book&mdash;the
+      book about Abraham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought you said you'd given that up altogether,&rdquo; she remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I WAS discouraged about it for a while. But a man never
+      does anything big without getting discouraged over and over again while
+      he's doing it. I don't say now that I shall write precisely THAT book&mdash;I'm
+      merely reading scientific works about the period, just now&mdash;but if
+      not that, I shall write some other book. Else how will you get that
+      piano?&rdquo; he added, with an attempt at a smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought you had given that up, too!&rdquo; she replied ruefully. Then before
+      he could speak, she went on: &ldquo;Never mind the piano; that can wait. What
+      I've got on my mind just now isn't piano; it's potatoes. Do you know, I
+      saw some the other day at Rasbach's, splendid potatoes&mdash;these are
+      some of them&mdash;and fifteen cents a bushel cheaper than those dried-up
+      old things Brother Barnum keeps, and so I bought two bushels. And Sister
+      Barnum met me on the street this morning, and threw it in my face that the
+      Discipline commands us to trade with each other. Is there any such
+      command?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the husband. &ldquo;It's Section 33. Don't you remember? I looked it
+      up in Tyre. We are to 'evidence our desire of salvation by doing good,
+      especially to them that are of the household of faith, or groaning so to
+      be; by employing them preferably to others; buying one of another; helping
+      each other in business'&mdash;and so on. Yes, it's all there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I told her I didn't believe it was,&rdquo; put in Alice, &ldquo;and I said that
+      even if it was, there ought to be another section about selling potatoes
+      to their minister for more than they're worth&mdash;potatoes that turn all
+      green when you boil them, too. I believe I'll read up that old Discipline
+      myself, and see if it hasn't got some things that I can talk back with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The very section before that, Number 32, enjoins members against
+      'uncharitable or unprofitable conversation&mdash;particularly speaking
+      evil of magistrates or ministers.' You'd have 'em there, I think.&rdquo; Theron
+      had begun cheerfully enough, but the careworn, preoccupied look returned
+      now to his face. &ldquo;I'm sorry if we've fallen out with the Barnums,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;His brother-in-law, Davis, the Sunday-school superintendent, is a
+      member of the Quarterly Conference, you know, and I've been hoping that he
+      was on my side. I've been taking a good deal of pains to make up to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He ended with a sigh, the pathos of which impressed Alice. &ldquo;If you think
+      it will do any good,&rdquo; she volunteered, &ldquo;I'll go and call on the Davises
+      this very afternoon. I'm sure to find her at home,&mdash;she's tied hand
+      and foot with that brood of hers&mdash;and you'd better give me some of
+      that candy for them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron nodded his approval and thanks, and relapsed into silence. When the
+      meal was over, he brought out the confectionery to his wife, and without a
+      word went back to that remarkable book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Alice returned toward the close of day, to prepare the simple tea
+      which was always laid a half-hour earlier on Thursdays and Sundays, she
+      found her husband where she had left him, still busy with those new
+      scientific works. She recounted to him some incidents of her call upon
+      Mrs. Davis, as she took off her hat and put on the big kitchen apron&mdash;how
+      pleased Mrs. Davis seemed to be; how her affection for her sister-in-law,
+      the grocer's wife, disclosed itself to be not even skin-deep; how the
+      children leaped upon the candy as if they had never seen any before; and
+      how, in her belief, Mr. Davis would be heart and soul on Theron's side at
+      the Conference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To her surprise, the young minister seemed not at all interested. He
+      hardly looked at her during her narrative, but reclined in the easy-chair
+      with his head thrown back, and an abstracted gaze wandering aimlessly
+      about the ceiling. When she avowed her faith in the Sunday-school
+      superintendent's loyal partisanship, which she did with a pardonable pride
+      in having helped to make it secure, her husband even closed his eyes, and
+      moved his head with a gesture which plainly bespoke indifference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I expected you'd be tickled to death,&rdquo; she remarked, with evident
+      disappointment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've a bad headache,&rdquo; he explained, after a minute's pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No wonder!&rdquo; Alice rejoined, sympathetically enough, but with a note of
+      reproof as well. &ldquo;What can you expect, staying cooped up in here all day
+      long, poring over those books? People are all the while remarking that you
+      study too much. I tell them, of course, that you're a great hand for
+      reading, and always were; but I think myself it would be better if you got
+      out more, and took more exercise, and saw people. You know lots and
+      slathers more than THEY do now, or ever will, if you never opened another
+      book.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron regarded her with an expression which she had never seen on his
+      face before. &ldquo;You don't realize what you are saying,&rdquo; he replied slowly.
+      He sighed as he added, with increased gravity, &ldquo;I am the most ignorant man
+      alive!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice began a little laugh of wifely incredulity, and then let it die away
+      as she recognized that he was really troubled and sad in his mind. She
+      bent over to kiss him lightly on the brow, and tiptoed her way out into
+      the kitchen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe I will let you make my excuses at the prayer-meeting this
+      evening,&rdquo; he said all at once, as the supper came to an end. He had eaten
+      next to nothing during the meal, and had sat in a sort of brown-study from
+      which Alice kindly forbore to arouse him. &ldquo;I don't know&mdash;I hardly
+      feel equal to it. They won't take it amiss&mdash;for once&mdash;if you
+      explain to them that I&mdash;I am not at all well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I do hope you're not coming down with anything!&rdquo; Alice had risen too,
+      and was gazing at him with a solicitude the tenderness of which at once
+      comforted, and in some obscure way jarred on his nerves. &ldquo;Is there
+      anything I can do&mdash;or shall I go for a doctor? We've got mustard in
+      the house, and senna&mdash;I think there's some senna left&mdash;and
+      Jamaica ginger.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron shook his head wearily at her. &ldquo;Oh, no,&mdash;no!&rdquo; he expostulated.
+      &ldquo;It isn't anything that needs drugs, or doctors either. It's just mental
+      worry and fatigue, that's all. An evening's quiet rest in the big chair,
+      and early to bed&mdash;that will fix me up all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you'll read; and that will make your head worse,&rdquo; said Alice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I won't read any more,&rdquo; he promised her, walking slowly into the
+      sitting-room, and settling himself in the big chair, the while she brought
+      out a pillow from the adjoining best bedroom, and adjusted it behind his
+      head. &ldquo;That's nice! I'll just lie quiet here, and perhaps doze a little
+      till you come back. I feel in the mood for the rest; it will do me all
+      sorts of good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He closed his eyes; and Alice, regarding his upturned face anxiously,
+      decided that already it looked more at peace than awhile ago.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I hope you'll be better when I get back,&rdquo; she said, as she began
+      preparations for the evening service. These consisted in combing stiffly
+      back the strands of light-brown hair which, during the day, had
+      exuberantly loosened themselves over her temples into something almost
+      like curls; in fastening down upon this rebellious hair a plain
+      brown-straw bonnet, guiltless of all ornament save a binding ribbon of
+      dull umber hue; and in putting on a thin dark-gray shawl and a pair of
+      equally subdued lisle-thread gloves. Thus attired, she made a mischievous
+      little grimace of dislike at her puritanical image in the looking-glass
+      over the mantel, and then turned to announce her departure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'm off,&rdquo; she said. Theron opened his eyes to take in this figure
+      of his wife dressed for prayer-meeting, and then closed them again
+      abruptly. &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he murmured, and then he heard the door shut behind
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although he had been alone all day, there seemed to be quite a unique
+      value and quality in this present solitude. He stretched out his legs on
+      the opposite chair, and looked lazily about him, with the feeling that at
+      last he had secured some leisure, and could think undisturbed to his
+      heart's content. There were nearly two hours of unbroken quiet before him;
+      and the mere fact of his having stepped aside from the routine of his duty
+      to procure it; marked it in his thoughts as a special occasion, which
+      ought in the nature of things to yield more than the ordinary harvest of
+      mental profit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron's musings were broken in upon from time to time by rumbling
+      outbursts of hymn-singing from the church next door. Surely, he said to
+      himself, there could be no other congregation in the Conference, or in all
+      Methodism, which sang so badly as these Octavians did. The noise, as it
+      came to him now and again, divided itself familiarly into a main strain of
+      hard, high, sharp, and tinny female voices, with three or four concurrent
+      and clashing branch strains of part-singing by men who did not know how.
+      How well he already knew these voices! Through two wooden walls he could
+      detect the conceited and pushing note of Brother Lovejoy, who tried always
+      to drown the rest out, and the lifeless, unmeasured weight of shrill
+      clamor which Sister Barnum hurled into every chorus, half closing her eyes
+      and sticking out her chin as she did so. They drawled their hymns too,
+      these people, till Theron thought he understood that injunction in the
+      Discipline against singing too slowly. It had puzzled him heretofore; now
+      he felt that it must have been meant in prophecy for Octavius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was impossible not to recall in contrast that other church music he had
+      heard, a month before, and the whole atmosphere of that other pastoral
+      sitting room, from which he had listened to it. The startled and crowded
+      impressions of that strange evening had been lying hidden in his mind all
+      this while, driven into a corner by the pressure of more ordinary,
+      everyday matters. They came forth now, and passed across his brain&mdash;no
+      longer confusing and distorted, but in orderly and intelligible sequence.
+      Their earlier effect had been one of frightened fascination. Now he looked
+      them over calmly as they lifted themselves, one by one, and found himself
+      not shrinking at all, or evading anything, but dwelling upon each in turn
+      as a natural and welcome part of the most important experience of his
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister had arrived, all at once, at this conclusion. He did
+      not question at all the means by which he had reached it. Nothing was
+      clearer to his mind than the conclusion itself&mdash;that his meeting,
+      with the priest and the doctor was the turning-point in his career. They
+      had lifted him bodily out of the slough of ignorance, of contact with low
+      minds and sordid, narrow things, and put him on solid ground. This book he
+      had been reading&mdash;this gentle, tender, lovable book, which had as
+      much true piety in it as any devotional book he had ever read, and yet,
+      unlike all devotional books, put its foot firmly upon everything which
+      could not be proved in human reason to be true&mdash;must be merely one of
+      a thousand which men like Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar knew by heart. The
+      very thought that he was on the way now to know them, too, made Theron
+      tremble. The prospect wooed him, and he thrilled in response, with the
+      wistful and delicate eagerness of a young lover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Somehow, the fact that the priest and the doctor were not religious men,
+      and that this book which had so impressed and stirred him was nothing more
+      than Renan's recital of how he, too, ceased to be a religious man, did not
+      take a form which Theron could look square in the face. It wore the shape,
+      instead, of a vague premise that there were a great many different kinds
+      of religions&mdash;the past and dead races had multiplied these in their
+      time literally into thousands&mdash;and that each no doubt had its central
+      support of truth somewhere for the good men who were in it, and that to
+      call one of these divine and condemn all the others was a part fit only
+      for untutored bigots. Renan had formally repudiated Catholicism, yet could
+      write in his old age with the deepest filial affection of the Mother
+      Church he had quitted. Father Forbes could talk coolly about the
+      &ldquo;Christ-myth&rdquo; without even ceasing to be a priest, and apparently a very
+      active and devoted priest. Evidently there was an intellectual world, a
+      world of culture and grace, of lofty thoughts and the inspiring communion
+      of real knowledge, where creeds were not of importance, and where men
+      asked one another, not &ldquo;Is your soul saved?&rdquo; but &ldquo;Is your mind well
+      furnished?&rdquo; Theron had the sensation of having been invited to become a
+      citizen of this world. The thought so dazzled him that his impulses were
+      dragging him forward to take the new oath of allegiance before he had had
+      time to reflect upon what it was he was abandoning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The droning of the Doxology from the church outside stirred Theron
+      suddenly out of his revery. It had grown quite dark, and he rose and lit
+      the gas. &ldquo;Blest be the Tie that Binds,&rdquo; they were singing. He paused, with
+      hand still in air, to listen. That well-worn phrase arrested his
+      attention, and gave itself a new meaning. He was bound to those people, it
+      was true, but he could never again harbor the delusion that the tie
+      between them was blessed. There was vaguely present in his mind the
+      consciousness that other ties were loosening as well. Be that as it might,
+      one thing was certain. He had passed definitely beyond pretending to
+      himself that there was anything spiritually in common between him and the
+      Methodist Church of Octavius. The necessity of his keeping up the pretence
+      with others rose on the instant like a looming shadow before his mental
+      vision. He turned away from it, and bent his brain to think of something
+      else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The noise of Alice opening the front door came as a pleasant digression. A
+      second later it became clear from the sound of voices that she had brought
+      some one back with her, and Theron hastily stretched himself out again in
+      the armchair, with his head back in the pillow, and his feet on the other
+      chair. He had come mighty near forgetting that he was an invalid, and he
+      protected himself the further now by assuming an air of lassitude verging
+      upon prostration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; there's a light burning. It's all right,&rdquo; he heard Alice say. She
+      entered the room, and Theron's head was too bad to permit him to turn it,
+      and see who her companion was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Theron dear,&rdquo; Alice began, &ldquo;I knew you'd be glad to see HER, even if you
+      were out of sorts; and I persuaded her just to run in for a minute. Let me
+      introduce you to Sister Soulsby. Sister Soulsby&mdash;my husband.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware sat upright with an energetic start, and fastened upon
+      the stranger a look which conveyed anything but the satisfaction his wife
+      had been so sure about. It was at the first blush an undisguised scowl,
+      and only some fleeting memory of that reflection about needing now to
+      dissemble, prevented him from still frowning as he rose to his feet, and
+      perfunctorily held out his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Delighted, I'm sure,&rdquo; he mumbled. Then, looking up, he discovered that
+      Sister Soulsby knew he was not delighted, and that she seemed not to mind
+      in the least.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As your good lady said, I just ran in for a moment,&rdquo; she remarked,
+      shaking his limp hand with a brisk, business-like grasp, and dropping it.
+      &ldquo;I hate bothering sick people, but as we're to be thrown together a good
+      deal this next week or so, I thought I'd like to lose no time in saying
+      'howdy.' I won't keep you up now. Your wife has been sweet enough to ask
+      me to move my trunk over here in the morning, so that you'll see enough of
+      me and to spare.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron looked falteringly into her face, as he strove for words which
+      should sufficiently mask the disgust this intelligence stirred within him.
+      A debt-raiser in the town was bad enough! A debt-raiser quartered in the
+      very parsonage!&mdash;he ground his teeth to think of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice read his hesitation aright. &ldquo;Sister Soulsby went to the hotel,&rdquo; she
+      hastily put in; &ldquo;and Loren Pierce was after her to come and stay at his
+      house, and I ventured to tell her that I thought we could make her more
+      comfortable here.&rdquo; She accompanied this by so daring a grimace and nod
+      that her husband woke up to the fact that a point in Conference politics
+      was involved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He squeezed a doubtful smile upon his features. &ldquo;We shall both do our
+      best,&rdquo; he said. It was not easy, but he forced increasing amiability into
+      his glance and tone. &ldquo;Is Brother Soulsby here, too?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The debt-raiser shook her head&mdash;again the prompt, decisive movement,
+      so like a busy man of affairs. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;He's doing supply down
+      on the Hudson this week, but he'll be here in time for the Sunday morning
+      love-feast. I always like to come on ahead, and see how the land lies.
+      Well, good-night! Your head will be all right in the morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Precisely what she meant by this assurance, Theron did not attempt to
+      guess. He received her adieu, noted the masterful manner in which she
+      kissed his wife, and watched her pass out into the hall, with the feeling
+      uppermost that this was a person who decidedly knew her way about. Much as
+      he was prepared to dislike her, and much as he detested the vulgar methods
+      her profession typified, he could not deny that she seemed a very capable
+      sort of woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This mental concession did not prevent his fixing upon Alice, when she
+      returned to the room, a glance of obvious disapproval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Theron,&rdquo; she broke forth, to anticipate his reproach, &ldquo;I did it for the
+      best. The Pierces would have got her if I hadn't cut in. I thought it
+      would help to have her on our side. And, besides, I like her. She's the
+      first sister I've seen since we've been in this hole that's had a kind
+      word for me&mdash;or&mdash;or sympathized with me! And&mdash;and&mdash;if
+      you're going to be offended&mdash;I shall cry!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There were real tears on her lashes, ready to make good the threat. &ldquo;Oh, I
+      guess I wouldn't,&rdquo; said Theron, with an approach to his old, half-playful
+      manner. &ldquo;If you like her, that's the chief thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice shook her tear-drops away. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she replied, with a wistful smile;
+      &ldquo;the chief thing is to have her like you. She's as smart as a steel trap&mdash;that
+      woman is&mdash;and if she took the notion, I believe she could help get us
+      a better place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The ensuing week went by with a buzz and whirl, circling about Theron
+      Ware's dizzy consciousness like some huge, impalpable teetotum sent
+      spinning under Sister Soulsby's resolute hands. Whenever his vagrant
+      memory recurred to it, in after months, he began by marvelling, and ended
+      with a shudder of repulsion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a week crowded with events, which seemed to him to shoot past so
+      swiftly that in effect they came all of a heap. He never essayed the task,
+      in retrospect, of arranging them in their order of sequence. They had,
+      however, a definite and interdependent chronology which it is worth the
+      while to trace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Soulsby brought her trunk round to the parsonage bright and early on
+      Friday morning, and took up her lodgement in the best bedroom, and her
+      headquarters in the house at large, with a cheerful and business-like
+      manner. She desired nothing so much, she said, as that people should not
+      put themselves out on her account, or allow her to get in their way. She
+      appeared to mean this, too, and to have very good ideas about securing its
+      realization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During both Friday and the following day, indeed, Theron saw her only at
+      the family meals. There she displayed a hearty relish for all that was set
+      before her which quite won Mrs. Ware's heart, and though she talked rather
+      more than Theron found himself expecting from a woman, he could not deny
+      that her conversation was both seemly and entertaining. She had evidently
+      been a great traveller, and referred to things she had seen in Savannah or
+      Montreal or Los Angeles in as matter-of-fact fashion as he could have
+      spoken of a visit to Tecumseh. Theron asked her many questions about these
+      and other far-off cities, and her answers were all so pat and showed so
+      keen and clear an eye that he began in spite of himself to think of her
+      with a certain admiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She in turn plied him with inquiries about the principal pew-holders and
+      members of his congregation&mdash;their means, their disposition, and the
+      measure of their devotion. She put these queries with such intelligence,
+      and seemed to assimilate his replies with such an alert understanding,
+      that the young minister was spurred to put dashes of character in his
+      descriptions, and set forth the idiosyncrasies and distinguishing earmarks
+      of his flock with what he felt afterward might have been too free a
+      tongue. But at the time her fine air of appreciation led him captive. He
+      gossiped about his parishioners as if he enjoyed it. He made a specially
+      happy thumb-nail sketch for her of one of his trustees, Erastus Winch, the
+      loud-mouthed, ostentatiously jovial, and really cold-hearted cheese-buyer.
+      She was particularly interested in hearing about this man. The personality
+      of Winch seemed to have impressed her, and she brought the talk back to
+      him more than once, and prompted Theron to the very threshold of
+      indiscretion in his confidences on the subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Save at meal-times, Sister Soulsby spent the two days out around among the
+      Methodists of Octavius. She had little or nothing to say about what she
+      thus saw and heard, but used it as the basis for still further inquiries.
+      She told more than once, however, of how she had been pressed here or
+      there to stay to dinner or supper, and how she had excused herself. &ldquo;I've
+      knocked about too much,&rdquo; she would explain to the Wares, &ldquo;not to fight shy
+      of random country cooking. When I find such a born cook as you are&mdash;well
+      I know when I'm well off.&rdquo; Alice flushed with pleased pride at this, and
+      Theron himself felt that their visitor showed great good sense. By
+      Saturday noon, the two women were calling each other by their first names.
+      Theron learned with a certain interest that Sister Soulsby's Christian
+      name was Candace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only natural that he should give even more thought to her than to
+      her quaint and unfamiliar old Ethiopian name. She was undoubtedly a very
+      smart woman. To his surprise she had never introduced in her talk any of
+      the stock religious and devotional phrases which official Methodists so
+      universally employed in mutual converse. She might have been an insurance
+      agent, or a school-teacher, visiting in a purely secular household, so
+      little parade of cant was there about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He caught himself wondering how old she was. She seemed to have been
+      pretty well over the whole American continent, and that must take years of
+      time. Perhaps, however, the exertion of so much travel would tend to age
+      one in appearance. Her eyes were still youthful&mdash;decidedly wise eyes,
+      but still juvenile. They had sparkled with almost girlish merriment at
+      some of his jokes. She turned them about a good deal when she spoke,
+      making their glances fit and illustrate the things she said. He had never
+      met any one whose eyes played so constant and prominent a part in their
+      owner's conversation. Theron had never seen a play; but he had encountered
+      the portraits of famous queens of the drama several times in illustrated
+      papers or shop windows, and it occurred to him that some of the more
+      marked contortions of Sister Soulsby's eyes&mdash;notably a trick she had
+      of rolling them swiftly round and plunging them, so to speak, into an
+      intent, yearning, one might almost say devouring, gaze at the speaker&mdash;were
+      probably employed by eminent actresses like Ristori and Fanny Davenport.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rest of Sister Soulsby was undoubtedly subordinated in interest to
+      those eyes of hers. Sometimes her face seemed to be reviving temporarily a
+      comeliness which had been constant in former days; then again it would
+      look decidedly, organically, plain. It was the worn and loose-skinned face
+      of a nervous, middle-aged woman, who had had more than her share of
+      trouble, and drank too much tea. She wore the collar of her dress rather
+      low; and Theron found himself wondering at this, because, though long and
+      expansive, her neck certainly showed more cords and cavities than
+      consorted with his vague ideal of statuesque beauty. Then he wondered at
+      himself for thinking about it, and abruptly reined up his fancy, only to
+      find that it was playing with speculations as to whether her yellowish
+      complexion was due to that tea-drinking or came to her as a legacy of
+      Southern blood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He knew that she was born in the South because she said so. From the same
+      source he learned that her father had been a wealthy planter, who was
+      ruined by the war, and sank into a premature grave under the weight of his
+      accumulated losses. The large dark rings around her eyes grew deeper still
+      in their shadows when she told about this, and her ordinarily sharp voice
+      took on a mellow cadence, with a soft, drawling accent, turning U's into
+      O's, and having no R's to speak of. Theron had imbibed somewhere in early
+      days the conviction that the South was the land of romance, of cavaliers
+      and gallants and black eyes flashing behind mantillas and outspread fans,
+      and somehow when Sister Soulsby used this intonation she suggested all
+      these things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But almost all her talk was in another key&mdash;a brisk, direct,
+      idiomatic manner of speech, with an intonation hinting at no section in
+      particular. It was merely that of the city-dweller as distinguished from
+      the rustic. She was of about Alice's height, perhaps a shade taller. It
+      did not escape the attention of the Wares that she wore clothes of a more
+      stylish cut and a livelier arrangement of hues than any Alice had ever
+      dared own, even in lax-minded Tyre. The two talked of this in their room
+      on Friday night; and Theron explained that congregations would tolerate
+      things of this sort with a stranger which would be sharply resented in the
+      case of local folk whom they controlled. It was on this occasion that
+      Alice in turn told Theron she was sure Mrs. Soulsby had false teeth&mdash;a
+      confidence which she immediately regretted as an act of treachery to her
+      sex.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Saturday afternoon, toward evening, Brother Soulsby arrived, and was
+      guided to the parsonage by his wife, who had gone to the depot to meet
+      him. They must have talked over the situation pretty thoroughly on the
+      way, for by the time the new-comer had washed his face and hands and put
+      on a clean collar, Sister Soulsby was ready to announce her plan of
+      campaign in detail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband was a man of small stature and, like herself, of uncertain
+      age. He had a gentle, if rather dry, clean-shaven face, and wore his
+      dust-colored hair long behind. His little figure was clad in black clothes
+      of a distinctively clerical fashion, and he had a white neck-cloth neatly
+      tied under his collar. The Wares noted that he looked clean and amiable
+      rather than intellectually or spiritually powerful, as he took the vacant
+      seat between theirs, and joined them in concentrating attention upon Mrs.
+      Soulsby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This lady, holding herself erect and alert on the edge of the low, big
+      easy-chair had the air of presiding over a meeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My idea is,&rdquo; she began, with an easy implication that no one else's idea
+      was needed, &ldquo;that your Quarterly Conference, when it meets on Monday, must
+      be adjourned to Tuesday. We will have the people all out tomorrow morning
+      to love-feast, and announcement can be made there, and at the morning
+      service afterward, that a series of revival meetings are to be begun that
+      same evening. Mr. Soulsby and I can take charge in the evening, and we'll
+      see to it that THAT packs the house&mdash;fills the church to overflowing
+      Monday evening. Then we'll quietly turn the meeting into a debt-raising
+      convention, before they know where they are, and we'll wipe off the best
+      part of the load. Now, don't you see,&rdquo; she turned her eyes full upon
+      Theron as she spoke, &ldquo;you want to hold your Quarterly Conference AFTER
+      this money's been raised, not before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see what you mean,&rdquo; Mr. Ware responded gravely. &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what!&rdquo; Sister Soulsby interjected, with vivacity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Theron, picking his words, &ldquo;in the first place, it rests with
+      the Presiding Elder to say whether an adjournment can be made until
+      Tuesday, not with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's all right. Leave that to me,&rdquo; said the lady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the second place,&rdquo; Theron went on, still more hesitatingly, &ldquo;there
+      seems a certain&mdash;what shall I say?&mdash;indirection in&mdash;in&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In getting them together for a revival, and springing a debt-raising on
+      them?&rdquo; Sister Soulsby put in. &ldquo;Why, man alive, that's the best part of it.
+      You ought to be getting some notion by this time what these Octavius folks
+      of yours are like. I've only been here two days, but I've got their
+      measure down to an allspice. Supposing you were to announce tomorrow that
+      the debt was to be raised Monday. How many men with bank-accounts would
+      turn up, do you think? You could put them all in your eye, sir&mdash;all
+      in your eye!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very possibly you're right,&rdquo; faltered the young minister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right? Why, of course I'm right,&rdquo; she said, with placid confidence.
+      &ldquo;You've got to take folks as you find them; and you've got to find them
+      the best way you can. One place can be worked, managed, in one way, and
+      another needs quite a different way, and both ways would be dead frosts&mdash;complete
+      failures&mdash;in a third.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Soulsby coughed softly here, and shuffled his feet for an instant
+      on the carpet. His wife resumed her remarks with slightly abated
+      animation, and at a slower pace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My experience,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;has shown me that the Apostle was right. To
+      properly serve the cause, one must be all things to all men. I have known
+      very queer things indeed turn out to be means of grace. You simply CAN'T
+      get along without some of the wisdom of the serpent. We are commanded to
+      have it, for that matter. And now, speaking of that, do you know when the
+      Presiding Elder arrives in town today, and where he is going to eat supper
+      and sleep?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron shook his head. &ldquo;All I know is he isn't likely to come here,&rdquo; he
+      said, and added sadly, &ldquo;I'm afraid he's not an admirer of mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps that's not all his fault,&rdquo; commented Sister Soulsby. &ldquo;I'll tell
+      you something. He came in on the same train as my husband, and that old
+      trustee Pierce of yours was waiting for him with his buggy, and I saw like
+      a flash what was in the wind, and the minute the train stopped I caught
+      the Presiding Elder, and invited him in your name to come right here and
+      stay; told him you and Alice were just set on his coming&mdash;wouldn't
+      take no for an answer. Of course he couldn't come&mdash;I knew well enough
+      he had promised old Pierce&mdash;but we got in our invitation anyway, and
+      it won't do you any harm. Now, that's what I call having some gumption&mdash;wisdom
+      of the serpent, and so on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sure,&rdquo; remarked Alice, &ldquo;I should have been mortified to death if he
+      had come. We lost the extension-leaf to our table in moving, and four is
+      all it'll seat decently.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby smiled winningly into the wife's honest face. &ldquo;Don't you
+      see, dear,&rdquo; she explained patiently, &ldquo;I only asked him because I knew he
+      couldn't come. A little butter spreads a long way, if it's only
+      intelligently warmed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was certainly very ingenious of you,&rdquo; Theron began almost stiffly.
+      Then he yielded to the humanities, and with a kindling smile added, &ldquo;And
+      it was as kind as kind could be. I'm afraid you're wrong about it's doing
+      me any good, but I can see how well you meant it, and I'm grateful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We COULD have sneaked in the kitchen table, perhaps, while he was out in
+      the garden, and put on the extra long tablecloth,&rdquo; interjected Alice,
+      musingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby smiled again at Sister Ware, but without any words this
+      time; and Alice on the instant rose, with the remark that she must be
+      going out to see about supper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to insist on coming out to help you,&rdquo; Mrs. Soulsby declared,
+      &ldquo;as soon as I've talked over one little matter with your husband. Oh, yes,
+      you must let me this time. I insist!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As the kitchen door closed behind Mrs. Ware, a swift and apparently
+      significant glance shot its way across from Sister Soulsby's roving,
+      eloquent eyes to the calmer and smaller gray orbs of her husband. He rose
+      to his feet, made some little explanation about being a gardener himself,
+      and desiring to inspect more closely some rhododendrons he had noticed in
+      the garden, and forthwith moved decorously out by the other door into the
+      front hall. They heard his footsteps on the gravel beneath the window
+      before Mrs. Soulsby spoke again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're right about the Presiding Elder, and you're wrong,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He
+      isn't what one might call precisely in love with you. Oh, I know the story&mdash;how
+      you got into debt at Tyre, and he stepped in and insisted on your being
+      denied Tecumseh and sent here instead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;HE was responsible for that, then, was he?&rdquo; broke in Theron, with
+      contracted brows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, don't you make any effort to find out anything at ALL?&rdquo; she asked
+      pertly enough, but with such obvious good-nature that he could not but
+      have pleasure in her speech. &ldquo;Why, of course he did it! Who else did you
+      suppose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the young minister, despondently, &ldquo;if he's as much against me
+      as all that, I might as well hang up my fiddle and go home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby gave a little involuntary groan of impatience. She bent
+      forward, and, lifting her eyes, rolled them at him in a curve of downward
+      motion which suggested to his fancy the image of two eagles in a concerted
+      pounce upon a lamb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My friend,&rdquo; she began, with a new note of impressiveness in her voice,
+      &ldquo;if you'll pardon my saying it, you haven't got the spunk of a mouse. If
+      you're going to lay down, and let everybody trample over you just as they
+      please, you're right! You MIGHT as well go home. But now here, this is
+      what I wanted to say to you: Do you just keep your hands off these next
+      few days, and leave this whole thing to me. I'll pull it into shipshape
+      for you. No&mdash;wait a minute&mdash;don't interrupt now. I have taken a
+      liking to you. You've got brains, and you've got human nature in you, and
+      heart. What you lack is SABE&mdash;common-sense. You'll get that, too, in
+      time, and meanwhile I'm not going to stand by and see you cut up and fed
+      to the dogs for want of it. I'll get you through this scrape, and put you
+      on your feet again, right-side-up-with care, because, as I said, I like
+      you. I like your wife, too, mind. She's a good, honest little soul, and
+      she worships the very ground you tread on. Of course, as long as people
+      WILL marry in their teens, the wrong people will get yoked up together.
+      But that's neither here nor there. She's a kind sweet little body, and
+      she's devoted to you, and it isn't every intellectual man that gets even
+      that much. But now it's a go, is it? You promise to keep quiet, do you,
+      and leave the whole show absolutely to me? Shake hands on it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby had risen, and stood now holding out her hand in a frank,
+      manly fashion. Theron looked at the hand, and made mental notes that there
+      were a good many veins discernible on the small wrist, and that the
+      forearm seemed to swell out more than would have been expected in a woman
+      producing such a general effect of leanness. He caught the shine of a thin
+      bracelet-band of gold under the sleeve. A delicate, significant odor just
+      hinted its presence in the air about this outstretched arm&mdash;something
+      which was not a perfume, yet deserved as gracious a name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose to his feet, and took the proffered hand with a deliberate
+      gesture, as if he had been cautiously weighing all the possible arguments
+      for and against this momentous compact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I promise,&rdquo; he said gravely, and the two palms squeezed themselves
+      together in an earnest clasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right you are,&rdquo; exclaimed the lady, once more with cheery vivacity.
+      &ldquo;Mind, when it's all over, I'm going to give you a good, serious,
+      downright talking to&mdash;a regular hoeing-over. I'm not sure I shan't
+      give you a sound shaking into the bargain. You need it. And now I'm going
+      out to help Alice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Reverend Mr. Ware remained standing after his new friend had left the
+      room, and his meditative face wore an even unusual air of abstraction. He
+      strolled aimlessly over, after a time, to the desk by the window, and
+      stood there looking out at the slight figure of Brother Soulsby, who was
+      bending over and attentively regarding some pink blossoms on a shrub
+      through what seemed to be a pocket magnifying-glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What remained uppermost in his mind was not this interesting woman's
+      confident pledge of championship in his material difficulties. He found
+      himself dwelling instead upon her remark about the incongruous results of
+      early marriages. He wondered idly if the little man in the white tie,
+      fussing out there over that rhododendron-bush, had figured in her thoughts
+      as an example of these evils. Then he reflected that they had been
+      mentioned in clear relation to talk about Alice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that he faced this question, it was as if he had been consciously
+      ignoring and putting it aside for a long time. How was it, he asked
+      himself now, that Alice, who had once seemed so bright and keen-witted,
+      who had in truth started out immeasurably his superior in swiftness of
+      apprehension and readiness in humorous quips and conceits, should have
+      grown so dull? For she was undoubtedly slow to understand things nowadays.
+      Her absurd lugging in of the extension-table problem, when the great
+      strategic point of that invitation foisted upon the Presiding Elder came
+      up, was only the latest sample of a score of these heavy-minded
+      exhibitions that recalled themselves to him. And outsiders were apparently
+      beginning to notice it. He knew by intuition what those phrases, &ldquo;good,
+      honest little soul&rdquo; and &ldquo;kind, sweet little body&rdquo; signified, when another
+      woman used them to a husband about his wife. The very employment of that
+      word &ldquo;little&rdquo; was enough, considering that there was scarcely more than a
+      hair's difference between Mrs. Soulsby and Alice, and that they were both
+      rather tall than otherwise, as the stature of women went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What she had said about the chronic misfortunes of intellectual men in
+      such matters gave added point to those meaning phrases. Nobody could deny
+      that geniuses and men of conspicuous talent had as a rule, all through
+      history, contracted unfortunate marriages. In almost every case where
+      their wives were remembered at all, it was on account of their abnormal
+      stupidity, or bad temper, or something of that sort. Take Xantippe, for
+      example, and Shakespeare's wife, and&mdash;and&mdash;well, there was
+      Byron, and Bulwer-Lytton, and ever so many others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course there was nothing to be done about it. These things happened,
+      and one could only put the best possible face on them, and live one's
+      appointed life as patiently and contentedly as might be. And Alice
+      undoubtedly merited all the praise which had been so generously bestowed
+      upon her. She was good and honest and kindly, and there could be no doubt
+      whatever as to her utter devotion to him. These were tangible, solid
+      qualities, which must always secure respect for her. It was true that she
+      no longer seemed to be very popular among people. He questioned whether
+      men, for instance, like Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar would care much
+      about her. Visions of the wifeless and academic calm in which these men
+      spent their lives&mdash;an existence consecrated to literature and
+      knowledge and familiarity with all the loftiest and noblest thoughts of
+      the past&mdash;rose and enveloped him in a cloud of depression. No such
+      lot would be his! He must labor along among ignorant and spiteful
+      narrow-minded people to the end of his days, pocketing their insults and
+      fawning upon the harsh hands of jealous nonentities who happened to be his
+      official masters, just to keep a roof over his head&mdash;or rather
+      Alice's. He must sacrifice everything to this, his ambitions, his
+      passionate desires to do real good in the world on a large scale, his
+      mental freedom, yes, even his chance of having truly elevating,
+      intellectual friendships. For it was plain enough that the men whose
+      friendship would be of genuine and stimulating profit to him would not
+      like her. Now that he thought of it, she seemed latterly to make no
+      friends at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly, as he watched in a blank sort of way Brother Soulsby take out a
+      penknife, and lop an offending twig from a rose-bush against the fence,
+      something occurred to him. There was a curious exception to that rule of
+      Alice's isolation. She had made at least one friend. Levi Gorringe seemed
+      to like her extremely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As if his mind had been a camera, Theron snapped a shutter down upon this
+      odd, unbidden idea, and turned away from the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sounds of an active, almost strenuous conversation in female voices
+      came from the kitchen. Theron opened the door noiselessly, and put in his
+      head, conscious of something furtive in his intention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must dreen every drop of water off the spinach, mind, before you put
+      it over, or else&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Sister Soulsby's sharp and penetrating tones which came to him.
+      Theron closed the door again, and surrendered himself once more to the
+      circling whirl of his thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A love-feast at nine in the morning opened the public services of a Sunday
+      still memorable in the annals of Octavius Methodism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This ceremony, which four times a year preceded the sessions of the
+      Quarterly Conference, was not necessarily an event of importance. It was
+      an occasion upon which the brethren and sisters who clung to the
+      old-fashioned, primitive ways of the itinerant circuit-riders, let
+      themselves go with emphasized independence, putting up more vehement
+      prayers than usual, and adding a special fervor of noise to their &ldquo;Amens!&rdquo;
+       and other interjections&mdash;and that was all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Theron's first love-feast in Octavius, and as the big class-room in
+      the church basement began to fill up, and he noted how the men with ultra
+      radical views and the women clad in the most ostentatious drabs and grays
+      were crowding into the front seats, he felt his spirits sinking. He had
+      literally to force himself from sentence to sentence, when the time came
+      for him to rise and open the proceedings with an exhortation. He had
+      eagerly offered this function to the Presiding Elder, the Rev. Aziel P.
+      Larrabee, who sat in severe silence on the little platform behind him, but
+      had been informed that the dignitary would lead off in giving testimony
+      later on. So Theron, feeling all the while the hostile eyes of the Elder
+      burning holes in his back, dragged himself somehow through the task. He
+      had never known any such difficulty of speech before. The relief was
+      almost overwhelming when he came to the customary part where all are
+      adjured to be as brief as possible in witnessing for the Lord, because the
+      time belongs to all the people, and the Discipline forbids the feast to
+      last more than ninety minutes. He delivered this injunction to brevity
+      with marked earnestness, and then sat down abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was some rather boisterous singing, during which the stewards,
+      beginning with the platform, passed plates of bread cut in small cubes,
+      and water in big plated pitchers and tumblers, about among the
+      congregation, threading their way between the long wooden benches
+      ordinarily occupied at this hour by the children of the Sunday-school, and
+      helping each brother and sister in turn. They held by the old custom, here
+      in Octavius, and all along the seats the sexes alternated, as they do at a
+      polite dinner-table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron impassively watched the familiar scene. The early nervousness had
+      passed away. He felt now that he was not in the least afraid of these
+      people, even with the Presiding Elder thrown in. Folks who sang with such
+      unintelligence, and who threw themselves with such undignified fervor into
+      this childish business of the bread and water, could not be formidable
+      antagonists for a man of intellect. He had never realized before what a
+      spectacle the Methodist love-feast probably presented to outsiders. What
+      must they think of it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had noticed that the Soulsbys sat together, in the centre and toward
+      the front. Next to Brother Soulsby sat Alice. He thought she looked pale
+      and preoccupied, and set it down in passing to her innate distaste for the
+      somber garments she was wearing, and for the company she perforce found
+      herself in. Another head was in the way, and for a time Theron did not
+      observe who sat beside Alice on the other side. When at last he saw that
+      it was Levi Gorringe, his instinct was to wonder what the lawyer must be
+      saying to himself about these noisy and shallow enthusiasts. A recurring
+      emotion of loyalty to the simple people among whom, after all, he had
+      lived his whole life, prompted him to feel that it wasn't wholly nice of
+      Gorringe to come and enjoy this revelation of their foolish side, as if it
+      were a circus. There was some vague memory in his mind which associated
+      Gorringe with other love-feasts, and with a cynical attitude toward them.
+      Oh, yes! he had told how he went to one just for the sake of sitting
+      beside the girl he admired&mdash;and was pursuing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stewards had completed their round, and the loud, discordant singing
+      came to an end. There ensued a little pause, during which Theron turned to
+      the Presiding Elder with a gesture of invitation to take charge of the
+      further proceedings. The Elder responded with another gesture, calling his
+      attention to something going on in front.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother and Sister Soulsby, to the considerable surprise of everybody, had
+      risen to their feet, and were standing in their places, quite motionless,
+      and with an air of professional self-assurance dimly discernible under a
+      large show of humility. They stood thus until complete silence had been
+      secured. Then the woman, lifting her head, began to sing. The words were
+      &ldquo;Rock of Ages,&rdquo; but no one present had heard the tune to which she wedded
+      them. Her voice was full and very sweet, and had in it tender cadences
+      which all her hearers found touching. She knew how to sing, and she put
+      forth the words so that each was distinctly intelligible. There came a
+      part where Brother Soulsby, lifting his head in turn, took up a tuneful
+      second to her air. Although the two did not, as one could hear by
+      listening closely, sing the same words at the same time, they produced
+      none the less most moving and delightful harmonies of sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The experience was so novel and charming that listeners ran ahead in their
+      minds to fix the number of verses there were in the hymn, and to hope that
+      none would be left out. Toward the end, when some of the intolerably
+      self-conceited local singers, fancying they had caught the tune, started
+      to join in, they were stopped by an indignant &ldquo;sh-h!&rdquo; which rose from all
+      parts of the class-room; and the Soulsbys, with a patient and pensive
+      kindliness written on their uplifted faces, gave that verse over again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What followed seemed obviously restrained and modified by the effect of
+      this unlooked-for and tranquillizing overture. The Presiding Elder was
+      known to enjoy visits to old-fashioned congregations like that of
+      Octavius, where he could indulge to the full his inner passion for
+      high-pitched passionate invocations and violent spiritual demeanor, but
+      this time he spoke temperately, almost soothingly. The most tempestuous of
+      the local witnesses for the Lord gave in their testimony in relatively
+      pacific tones, under the influence of the spell which good music had laid
+      upon the gathering. There was the deepest interest as to what the two
+      visitors would do in this way. Brother Soulsby spoke first, very briefly
+      and in well rounded and well-chosen, if conventional, phrases. His wife,
+      following him, delivered in a melodious monotone some equally hackneyed
+      remarks. The assemblage, listening in rapt attention, felt the suggestion
+      of reserved power in every sentence she uttered, and burst forth, as she
+      dropped into her seat, in a loud chorus of approving ejaculations. The
+      Soulsbys had captured Octavius with their first outer skirmish line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everything seemed to move forward now with a new zest and spontaneity.
+      Theron had picked out for the occasion the best of those sermons which he
+      had prepared in Tyre, at the time when he was justifying his ambition to
+      be accounted a pulpit orator. It was orthodox enough, but had been planned
+      as the framework for picturesque and emotional rhetoric rather than
+      doctrinal edification. He had never dreamed of trying it on Octavius
+      before, and only on the yesterday had quavered at his own daring in
+      choosing it now. Nothing but the desire to show Sister Soulsby what was in
+      him had held him to the selection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something of this same desire no doubt swayed and steadied him now in the
+      pulpit. The labored slowness of his beginning seemed to him to be due to
+      nervous timidity, until suddenly, looking down into those big eyes of
+      Sister Soulsby's, which were bent gravely upon him from where she sat
+      beside Alice in the minister's pew, he remembered that it was instead the
+      studied deliberation which art had taught him. He went on, feeling more
+      and more that the skill and histrionic power of his best days were
+      returning to him, were as marked as ever&mdash;nay, had never triumphed
+      before as they were triumphing now. The congregation watched and listened
+      with open, steadfast eyes and parted lips. For the first time in all that
+      weary quarter, their faces shone. The sustaining sparkle of their gaze
+      lifted him to a peroration unrivalled in his own recollection of himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down, and bent his head forward upon the open Bible, breathing
+      hard, but suffused with a glow of satisfaction. His ears caught the music
+      of that sighing rustle through the audience which bespeaks a profound
+      impression. He could scarcely keep the fingers of his hands, covering his
+      bowed face in a devotional posture as they were, from drumming a jubilant
+      tattoo. His pulses did this in every vein, throbbing with excited
+      exultation. The insistent whim seized him, as he still bent thus before
+      his people, to whisper to his own heart, &ldquo;At last!&mdash;The dogs!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The announcement that in the evening a series of revival meetings was to
+      be inaugurated, had been made at the love-feast, and it was repeated now
+      from the pulpit, with the added statement that for the once the
+      class-meetings usually following this morning service would be suspended.
+      Then Theron came down the steps, conscious after a fashion that the
+      Presiding Elder had laid a propitiatory hand on his shoulder and spoken
+      amiably about the sermon, and that several groups of more or less
+      important parishioners were waiting in the aisle and the vestibule to
+      shake hands and tell him how much they had enjoyed the sermon. His mind
+      perversely kept hold of the thought that all this came too late. He
+      politely smiled his way along out, and, overtaking the Soulsbys and his
+      wife near the parsonage gate, went in with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the cold, picked-up noonday meal which was the Sunday rule of the
+      house, Theron rather expected that his guests would talk about the sermon,
+      or at any rate about the events of the morning. A Sabbath chill seemed to
+      have settled upon both their tongues. They ate almost in silence, and
+      their sparse remarks touched upon topics far removed from church affairs.
+      Alice too, seemed strangely disinclined to conversation. The husband knew
+      her face and its varying moods so well that he could see she was laboring
+      under some very powerful and deep emotion. No doubt it was the sermon, the
+      oratorical swing of which still tingled in his own blood, that had so
+      affected her. If she had said so, it would have pleased him, but she said
+      nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After dinner, Brother Soulsby disappeared in his bedroom, with the remark
+      that he guessed he would lie down awhile. Sister Soulsby put on her
+      bonnet, and, explaining that she always prepared herself for an evening's
+      work by a long solitary walk, quitted the house. Alice, after she had put
+      the dinner things away, went upstairs, and stayed there. Left to himself,
+      Theron spent the afternoon in the easy-chair, and, in the intervals of
+      confused introspection, read &ldquo;Recollections of my Youth&rdquo; through again
+      from cover to cover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went through the remarkable experiences attending the opening of the
+      revival, when evening came, as one in a dream. Long before the hour for
+      the service arrived, the sexton came in to tell him that the church was
+      already nearly full, and that it was going to be impossible to present any
+      distinction in the matter of pews. When the party from the parsonage went
+      over&mdash;after another cold and mostly silent meal&mdash;it was to find
+      the interior of the church densely packed, and people being turned away
+      from the doors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron was supposed to preside over what followed, and he did sit on the
+      central chair in the pulpit, between the Presiding Elder and Brother
+      Soulsby, and on the several needful occasions did rise and perfunctorily
+      make the formal remarks required of him. The Elder preached a short, but
+      vigorously phrased sermon. The Soulsbys sang three or four times&mdash;on
+      each occasion with familiar hymnal words set to novel, concerted music&mdash;and
+      then separately exhorted the assemblage. The husband's part seemed well
+      done. If his speech lacked some of the fire of the divine girdings which
+      older Methodists recalled, it still led straight, and with kindling
+      fervency, up to a season of power. The wife took up the word as he sat
+      down. She had risen from one of the side-seats; and, speaking as she
+      walked, she moved forward till she stood within the altar-rail,
+      immediately under the pulpit, and from this place, facing the listening
+      throng, she delivered her harangue. Those who watched her words most
+      intently got the least sense of meaning from them. The phrases were all
+      familiar enough&mdash;&ldquo;Jesus a very present help,&rdquo; &ldquo;Sprinkled by the
+      Blood,&rdquo; &ldquo;Comforted by the Word,&rdquo; &ldquo;Sanctified by the Spirit,&rdquo; &ldquo;Born into
+      the Kingdom,&rdquo; and a hundred others&mdash;but it was as in the case of her
+      singing: the words were old; the music was new.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What Sister Soulsby said did not matter. The way she said it&mdash;the
+      splendid, searching sweep of her great eyes; the vibrating roll of her
+      voice, now full of tears, now scornful, now boldly, jubilantly triumphant;
+      the sympathetic swaying of her willowy figure under the stress of her
+      eloquence&mdash;was all wonderful. When she had finished, and stood,
+      flushed and panting, beneath the shadow of the pulpit, she held up a hand
+      deprecatingly as the resounding &ldquo;Amens!&rdquo; and &ldquo;Bless the Lords!&rdquo; began to
+      well up about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have heard us sing,&rdquo; she said, smiling to apologize for her shortness
+      of breath. &ldquo;Now we want to hear you sing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband had risen as she spoke, and on the instant, with a far greater
+      volume of voice than they had hitherto disclosed, the two began &ldquo;From
+      Greenland's Icy Mountains,&rdquo; in the old, familiar tune. It did not need
+      Sister Soulsby's urgent and dramatic gesture to lift people to their feet.
+      The whole assemblage sprang up, and, under the guidance of these two
+      powerful leading voices, thundered the hymn out as Octavius had never
+      heard it before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While its echoes were still alive, the woman began speaking again. &ldquo;Don't
+      sit down!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;You would stand up if the President of the United
+      States was going by, even if he was only going fishing. How much more
+      should you stand up in honor of living souls passing forward to find their
+      Saviour!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The psychological moment was upon them. Groans and cries arose, and a
+      palpable ferment stirred the throng. The exhortation to sinners to declare
+      themselves, to come to the altar, was not only on the revivalist's lips:
+      it seemed to quiver in the very air, to be borne on every inarticulate
+      exclamation in the clamor of the brethren. A young woman, with a dazed and
+      startled look in her eyes, rose in the body of the church tremblingly
+      hesitated for a moment, and then, with bowed head and blushing cheeks,
+      pressed her way out from the end of a crowded pew and down the aisle to
+      the rail. A triumphant outburst of welcoming ejaculations swelled to the
+      roof as she knelt there, and under its impetus others followed her
+      example. With interspersed snatches of song and shouted encouragements the
+      excitement reached its height only when twoscore people, mostly young,
+      were tightly clustered upon their knees about the rail, and in the space
+      opening upon the aisle. Above the confusion of penitential sobs and moans,
+      and the hysterical murmurings of members whose conviction of entire
+      sanctity kept them in their seats, could be heard the voices of the
+      Presiding Elder, the Soulsbys, and the elderly deacons of the church, who
+      moved about among the kneeling mourners, bending over them and patting
+      their shoulders, and calling out to them: &ldquo;Fasten your thoughts on Jesus!&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;Oh, the Precious Blood!&rdquo; &ldquo;Blessed be His Name!&rdquo; &ldquo;Seek Him, and you shall
+      find Him!&rdquo; &ldquo;Cling to Jesus, and Him Crucified!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Theron Ware did not, with the others, descend from the pulpit.
+      Seated where he could not see Sister Soulsby, he had failed utterly to be
+      moved by the wave of enthusiasm she had evoked. What he heard her say
+      disappointed him. He had expected from her more originality, more spice of
+      her own idiomatic, individual sort. He viewed with a cold sense of
+      aloofness the evidences of her success when they began to come forward and
+      abase themselves at the altar. The instant resolve that, come what might,
+      he would not go down there among them, sprang up ready-made in his mind.
+      He saw his two companions pass him and descend the pulpit stairs, and
+      their action only hardened his resolution. If an excuse were needed, he
+      was presiding, and the place to preside in was the pulpit. But he waived
+      in his mind the whole question of an excuse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a little, he put his hand over his face, leaning the elbow forward
+      on the reading-desk. The scene below would have thrilled him to the marrow
+      six months&mdash;yes, three months ago. He put a finger across his eyes
+      now, to half shut it out. The spectacle of these silly young &ldquo;mourners&rdquo;&mdash;kneeling
+      they knew not why, trembling at they could not tell what, pledging
+      themselves frantically to dogmas and mysteries they knew nothing of, under
+      the influence of a hubbub of outcries as meaningless in their way, and
+      inspiring in much the same way, as the racket of a fife and drum corps&mdash;the
+      spectacle saddened and humiliated him now. He was conscious of a dawning
+      sense of shame at being even tacitly responsible for such a thing. His
+      fancy conjured up the idea of Dr. Ledsmar coming in and beholding this
+      maudlin and unseemly scene, and he felt his face grow hot at the bare
+      thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking through his fingers, Theron all at once saw something which caught
+      at his breath with a sharp clutch. Alice had risen from the minister's pew&mdash;the
+      most conspicuous one in the church&mdash;and was moving down the aisle
+      toward the rail, her uplifted face chalk-like in its whiteness, and her
+      eyes wide-open, looking straight ahead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young pastor could scarcely credit his sight. He thrust aside his
+      hand, and bent forward, only to see his wife sink upon her knees among the
+      rest, and to hear this notable accession to the &ldquo;mourners&rdquo; hailed by a
+      tumult of approving shouts. Then, remembering himself, he drew back and
+      put up his hand, shutting out the strange scene altogether. To see nothing
+      at all was a relief, and under cover he closed his eyes, and bit his teeth
+      together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A fresh outburst of thanksgivings, spreading noisily through the
+      congregation, prompted him to peer through his fingers again. Levi
+      Gorringe was making his way down the aisle&mdash;was at the moment quite
+      in front. Theron found himself watching this man with the stern composure
+      of a fatalist. The clamant brethren down below were stirred to new
+      excitement by the thought that the sceptical lawyer, so long with them,
+      yet not of them, had been humbled and won by the outpourings of the
+      Spirit. Theron's perceptions were keener. He knew that Gorringe was coming
+      forward to kneel beside Alice; The knowledge left him curiously
+      undisturbed. He saw the lawyer advance, gently insinuate himself past the
+      form of some kneeling mourner who was in his way, and drop on his knees
+      close beside the bowed figure of Alice. The two touched shoulders as they
+      bent forward beneath Sister Soulsby's outstretched hands, held over them
+      as in a blessing. Theron looked fixedly at them, and professed to himself
+      that he was barely interested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little afterward, he was standing up in his place, and reading aloud a
+      list of names which one of the stewards had given him. They were the names
+      of those who had asked that evening to be taken into the church as members
+      on probation. The sounds of the recent excitement were all hushed now,
+      save as two or three enthusiasts in a corner raised their voices in abrupt
+      greeting of each name in its turn, but Theron felt somehow that this noise
+      had been transferred to the inside of his head. A continuous buzzing went
+      on there, so that the sound of his voice was far-off and unfamiliar in his
+      ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He read through the list&mdash;comprising some fifteen items&mdash;and
+      pronounced the names with great distinctness. It was necessary to take
+      pains with this, because the only name his blurred eyes seemed to see
+      anywhere on the foolscap sheet was that of Levi Gorringe. When he had
+      finished and was taking his seat, some one began speaking to him from the
+      body of the church. He saw that this was the steward, who was explaining
+      to him that the most important name of the lot&mdash;that of Brother
+      Gorringe&mdash;had not been read out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron smiled and shook his head. Then, when the Presiding Elder touched
+      him on the arm, and assured him that he had not mentioned the name in
+      question, he replied quite simply, and with another smile, &ldquo;I thought it
+      was the only name I did read out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he sat down abruptly, and let his head fall to one side. There were
+      hurried movements inside the pulpit, and people in the audience had begun
+      to stand up wonderingly, when the Presiding Elder, with uplifted hands,
+      confronted them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will omit the Doxology, and depart quietly after the benediction,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;Brother Ware seems to have been overcome by the heat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When Theron woke next morning, Alice seemed to have dressed and left the
+      room&mdash;a thing which had never happened before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This fact connected itself at once in his brain with the recollection of
+      her having made an exhibition of herself the previous evening&mdash;going
+      forward before all eyes to join the unconverted and penitent sinners, as
+      if she were some tramp or shady female, instead of an educated lady, a
+      professing member from her girlhood, and a minister's wife. It crossed his
+      mind that probably she had risen and got away noiselessly, for very shame
+      at looking him in the face, after such absurd behavior.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he remembered more, and grasped the situation. He had fainted in
+      church, and had been brought home and helped to bed. Dim memories of
+      unaccustomed faces in the bedroom, of nauseous drugs and hushed voices,
+      came to him out of the night-time. Now that he thought of it, he was a
+      sick man. Having settled this, he went off to sleep again, a feverish and
+      broken sleep, and remained in this state most of the time for the
+      following twenty-four hours. In the brief though numerous intervals of
+      waking, he found certain things clear in his mind. One was that he was
+      annoyed with Alice, but would dissemble his feelings. Another was that it
+      was much pleasanter to be ill than to be forced to attend and take part in
+      those revival meetings. These two ideas came and went in a lazy, drowsy
+      fashion, mixing themselves up with other vagrant fancies, yet always
+      remaining on top.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the evening the singing from the church next door filled his room. The
+      Soulsbys' part of it was worth keeping awake for. He turned over and
+      deliberately dozed when the congregation sang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice came up a number of times during the day to ask how he felt, and to
+      bring him broth or toast-water. On several occasions, when he heard her
+      step, the perverse inclination mastered him to shut his eyes, and pretend
+      to be asleep, so that she might tip-toe out again. She had a depressed and
+      thoughtful air, and spoke to him like one whose mind was on something
+      else. Neither of them alluded to what had happened the previous evening.
+      Toward the close of the long day, she came to ask him whether he would
+      prefer her to remain in the house, instead of attending the meeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go, by all means,&rdquo; he said almost curtly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Presiding Elder and the Sunday-school superintendent called early
+      Tuesday morning at the parsonage to make brotherly inquiries, and Theron
+      was feeling so much better that he himself suggested their coming upstairs
+      to see him. The Elder was in good spirits; he smiled approvingly, and even
+      put in a jocose word or two while the superintendent sketched for the
+      invalid in a cheerful way the leading incidents of the previous evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been an enormous crowd, even greater than that of Sunday night,
+      and everybody had been looking forward to another notable and exciting
+      season of grace. These expectations were especially heightened when Sister
+      Soulsby ascended the pulpit stairs and took charge of the proceedings. She
+      deferred to Paul's views about women preachers on Sundays, she said; but
+      on weekdays she had just as much right to snatch brands from the burning
+      as Paul, or Peter, or any other man. She went on like that, in a breezy,
+      off-hand fashion which tickled the audience immensely, and led to the
+      liveliest anticipations of what would happen when she began upon the
+      evening's harvest of souls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was something else that happened. At a signal from Sister Soulsby
+      the steward got up, and, in an unconcerned sort of way, went through the
+      throng to the rear of the church, locked the doors, and put the keys in
+      their pockets. The sister dryly explained now to the surprised
+      congregation that there was a season for all things, and that on the
+      present occasion they would suspend the glorious work of redeeming fallen
+      human nature, and take up instead the equally noble task of raising some
+      fifteen hundred dollars which the church needed in its business. The doors
+      would only be opened again when this had been accomplished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The brethren were much taken aback by this trick, and they permitted
+      themselves to exchange a good many scowling and indignant glances, the
+      while their professional visitors sang another of their delightfully novel
+      sacred duets. Its charm of harmony for once fell upon unsympathetic ears.
+      But then Sister Soulsby began another monologue, defending this way of
+      collecting money, chaffing the assemblage with bright-eyed impudence on
+      their having been trapped, and scoring, one after another, neat and jocose
+      little personal points on local characteristics, at which everybody but
+      the individual touched grinned broadly. She was so droll and cheeky, and
+      withal effective in her talk, that she quite won the crowd over. She told
+      a story about a woodchuck which fairly brought down the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man,&rdquo; she began, with a quizzical twinkle in her eye, &ldquo;told me once
+      about hunting a woodchuck with a pack of dogs, and they chased it so hard
+      that it finally escaped only by climbing a butternut-tree. 'But, my
+      friend,' I said to him, 'woodchucks can't climb trees&mdash;butternut-trees
+      or any other kind&mdash;and you know it!' All he said in reply to me was:
+      'This woodchuck had to climb a tree!' And that's the way with this
+      congregation. You think you can't raise $1,500, but you've GOT to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So it went on. She set them all laughing; and then, with a twist of the
+      eyes and a change of voice, lo, and behold, she had them nearly crying in
+      the same breath. Under the pressure of these jumbled emotions, brethren
+      began to rise up in their pews and say what they would give. The wonderful
+      woman had something smart and apt to say about each fresh contribution,
+      and used it to screw up the general interest a notch further toward
+      benevolent hysteria. With songs and jokes and impromptu exhortations and
+      prayers she kept the thing whirling, until a sort of duel of generosity
+      began between two of the most unlikely men&mdash;Erastus Winch and Levi
+      Gorringe. Everybody had been surprised when Winch gave his first $50; but
+      when he rose again, half an hour afterward, and said that, owing to the
+      high public position of some of the new members on probation, he foresaw a
+      great future for the church, and so felt moved to give another $25, there
+      was general amazement. Moved by a common instinct, all eyes were turned
+      upon Levi Gorringe, and he, without the slightest hesitation, stood up and
+      said he would give $100. There was something in his tone which must have
+      annoyed Brother Winch, for he shot up like a dart, and called out, &ldquo;Put me
+      down for fifty more;&rdquo; and that brought Gorringe to his feet with an added
+      $50, and then the two went on raising each other till the assemblage was
+      agape with admiring stupefaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This gladiatorial combat might have been going on till now, the
+      Sunday-school superintendent concluded, if Winch hadn't subsided. The
+      amount of the contributions hadn't been figured up yet, for Sister Soulsby
+      kept the list; but there had been a tremendous lot of money raised. Of
+      that there could be no doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Presiding Elder now told Theron that the Quarterly Conference had been
+      adjourned yesterday till today. He and Brother Davis were even now on
+      their way to attend the session in the church next door. The Elder added,
+      with an obvious kindly significance, that though Theron was too ill to
+      attend it, he guessed his absence would do him no harm. Then the two men
+      left the room, and Theron went to sleep again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another almost blank period ensued, this time lasting for forty-eight
+      hours. The young minister was enfolded in the coils of a fever of some
+      sort, which Brother Soulsby, who had dabbled considerably in medicine,
+      admitted that he was puzzled about. Sometimes he thought that it was
+      typhoid, and then again there were symptoms which looked suspiciously like
+      brain fever. The Methodists of Octavius counted no physician among their
+      numbers, and when, on the second day, Alice grew scared, and decided, with
+      Brother Soulsby's assent, to call in professional advice, the only
+      doctor's name she could recall was that of Ledsmar. She was conscious of
+      an instinctive dislike for the vague image of him her fancy had conjured
+      up, but the reflection that he was Theron's friend, and so probably would
+      be more moderate in his charges, decided her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Soulsby showed a most comforting tact and swiftness of
+      apprehension when Alice, in mentioning Dr. Ledsmar's name, disclosed by
+      her manner a fear that his being sent for would create talk among the
+      church people. He volunteered at once to act as messenger himself, and,
+      with no better guide than her dim hints at direction, found the doctor and
+      brought him back to the parsonage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar expressly disclaimed to Soulsby all pretence of professional
+      skill, and made him understand that he went along solely because he liked
+      Mr. Ware, and was interested in him, and in any case would probably be of
+      as much use as the wisest of strange physicians&mdash;a view which the
+      little revivalist received with comprehending nods of tacit acquiescence.
+      Ledsmar came, and was taken up to the sick-room. He sat on the bedside and
+      talked with Theron awhile, and then went downstairs again. To Alice's
+      anxious inquiries, he replied that it seemed to him merely a case of
+      over-work and over-worry, about which there was not the slightest occasion
+      for alarm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But he says the strangest things,&rdquo; the wife put in. &ldquo;He has been quite
+      delirious at times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That means only that his brain is taking a rest as well as his body,&rdquo;
+       remarked Ledsmar. &ldquo;That is Nature's way of securing an equilibrium of
+      repose&mdash;of recuperation. He will come out of it with his mind all the
+      fresher and clearer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe he knows shucks!&rdquo; was Alice's comment when she closed the
+      street door upon Dr. Ledsmar. &ldquo;Anybody could have come in and looked at a
+      sick man and said, 'Leave him alone.' You expect something more from a
+      doctor. It's his business to say what to do. And I suppose he'll charge
+      two dollars for just telling me that my husband was resting!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Brother Soulsby, &ldquo;he said he never practised, and that he would
+      come only as a friend.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it isn't my idea of a friend&mdash;not to prescribe a single
+      thing,&rdquo; protested Alice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet it seemed that no prescription was needed, after all. The next morning
+      Theron woke to find himself feeling quite restored in spirits and nerves.
+      He sat up in bed, and after an instant of weakly giddiness, recognized
+      that he was all right again. Greatly pleased, he got up, and proceeded to
+      dress himself. There were little recurring hints of faintness and vertigo,
+      while he was shaving, but he had the sense to refer these to the fact that
+      he was very, very hungry. He went downstairs, and smiled with the pleased
+      pride of a child at the surprise which his appearance at the door created.
+      Alice and the Soulsbys were at breakfast. He joined them, and ate
+      voraciously, declaring that it was worth a month's illness to have things
+      taste so good once more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You still look white as a sheet,&rdquo; said Alice, warningly. &ldquo;If I were you,
+      I'd be careful in my diet for a spell yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For answer, Theron let Sister Soulsby help him again to ham and eggs. He
+      talked exclusively to Sister Soulsby, or rather invited her by his manner
+      to talk to him, and listened and watched her with indolent content. There
+      was a sort of happy and purified languor in his physical and mental being,
+      which needed and appreciated just this&mdash;to sit next a bright and
+      attractive woman at a good breakfast, and be ministered to by her
+      sprightly conversation, by the flash of her informing and inspiring eyes,
+      and the nameless sense of support and repose which her near proximity
+      exhaled. He felt himself figuratively leaning against Sister Soulsby's
+      buoyant personality, and resting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Soulsby, like the intelligent creature he was, ate his breakfast
+      in peace; but Alice would interpose remarks from time to time. Theron was
+      conscious of a certain annoyance at this, and knew that he was showing it
+      by an exaggerated display of interest in everything Sister Soulsby said,
+      and persisted in it. There trembled in the background of his thoughts ever
+      and again the recollection of a grievance against his wife&mdash;an
+      offence which she had committed&mdash;but he put it aside as something to
+      be grappled and dealt with when he felt again like taking up the serious
+      and disagreeable things of life. For the moment, he desired only to be
+      amused by Sister Soulsby. Her casual mention of the fact that she and her
+      husband were taking their departure that very day, appealed to him as an
+      added reason for devoting his entire attention to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mustn't forget that famous talking-to you threatened me with&mdash;that
+      'regular hoeing-over,' you know,&rdquo; he reminded her, when he found himself
+      alone with her after breakfast. He smiled as he spoke, in frank enjoyment
+      of the prospect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby nodded, and aided with a roll of her eyes the effect of
+      mock-menace in her uplifted forefinger. &ldquo;Oh, never fear,&rdquo; she cried.
+      &ldquo;You'll catch it hot and strong. But that'll keep till afternoon. Tell me,
+      do you feel strong enough to go in next door and attend the trustees'
+      meeting this forenoon? It's rather important that you should be there, if
+      you can spur yourself up to it. By the way, you haven't asked what
+      happened at the Quarterly Conference yesterday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron sighed, and made a little grimace of repugnance. &ldquo;If you knew how
+      little I cared!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I did hope you'd forget all about mentioning
+      that&mdash;and everything else connected with&mdash;the next door. You
+      talk so much more interestingly about other things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here's gratitude for you!&rdquo; exclaimed Sister Soulsby, with a gay
+      simulation of despair. &ldquo;Why, man alive, do you know what I've done for
+      you? I got around on the Presiding Elder's blind side, I captured old
+      Pierce, I wound Winch right around my little finger, I worked two or three
+      of the class-leaders&mdash;all on your account. The result was you went
+      through as if you'd had your ears pinned back, and been greased all over.
+      You've got an extra hundred dollars added to your salary; do you hear? On
+      the sixth question of the order of business the Elder ruled that the
+      recommendation of the last conference's estimating committee could be
+      revised (between ourselves he was wrong, but that doesn't matter), and so
+      you're in clover. And very friendly things were said about you, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was very kind of you,&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;I am really extremely grateful to
+      you.&rdquo; He shook her by the hand to make up for what he realized to be a
+      lack of fervor in his tones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then,&rdquo; Sister Soulsby replied, &ldquo;you pull yourself together, and
+      take your place as chairman of the trustees' meeting, and see to it that,
+      whatever comes up, you side with old Pierce and Winch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, THEY'RE my friends now, are they?&rdquo; asked Theron, with a faint play of
+      irony about his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, that's your ticket this election,&rdquo; she answered briskly, &ldquo;and mind
+      you vote it straight. Don't bother about reasons now. Just take it from
+      me, as the song says, 'that things have changed since Willie died.' That's
+      all. And then come back here, and this afternoon we'll have a good
+      old-fashioned jaw.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware, walking with ostentatious feebleness, and forcing a
+      conventional smile upon his wan face, duly made his unexpected appearance
+      at the trustees' meeting in one of the smaller classrooms. He received
+      their congratulations gravely, and shook hands with all three. It required
+      an effort to do this impartially, because, upon sight of Levi Gorringe,
+      there rose up suddenly within him an emotion of fierce dislike and enmity.
+      In some enigmatic way his thoughts had kept themselves away from Gorringe
+      ever since Sunday evening. Now they concentrated with furious energy and
+      swiftness upon him. Theron seemed able in a flash of time to coordinate
+      many recollections of Gorringe&mdash;the early liking Alice had professed
+      for him, the mystery of those purchased plants in her garden, the story of
+      the girl he had lost in church, his offer to lend him money, the way in
+      which he had sat beside Alice at the love-feast and followed her to the
+      altar-rail in the evening. These raced abreast through the young
+      minister's brain, yet with each its own image, and its relation to the
+      others clearly defined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found the nerve, all the same, to take this third trustee by the hand,
+      and to thank him for his congratulations, and even to say, with a surface
+      smile of welcome, &ldquo;It is BROTHER Gorringe, now, I remember.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The work before the meeting was chiefly of a routine kind. In most places
+      this would have been transacted by the stewards; but in Octavius these
+      minor officials had degenerated into mere ceremonial abstractions, who
+      humbly ratified, or by arrangement anticipated, the will of the powerful,
+      mortgage-owning trustees. Theron sat languidly at the head of the table
+      while these common-place matters passed in their course, noting the
+      intonations of Gorringe's voice as he read from his secretary's book, and
+      finding his ear displeased by them. No issue arose upon any of these
+      trivial affairs, and the minister, feeling faint and weary in the heat,
+      wondered why Sister Soulsby had insisted on his coming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All at once he sat up straight, with an instinctive warning in his mind
+      that here was the thing. Gorringe had taken up the subject of the
+      &ldquo;debt-raising&rdquo; evening, and read out its essentials as they had been
+      embodied in a report of the stewards. The gross sum obtained, in cash and
+      promises, was $1,860. The stewards had collected of this a trifle less
+      than half, but hoped to get it all in during the ensuing quarter. There
+      were, also, the bill of Mr. and Mrs. Soulsby for $150, and the increases
+      of $100 in the pastor's salary and $25 in the apportioned contribution of
+      the charge toward the Presiding Elder's maintenance, the two latter items
+      of which the Quarterly Conference had sanctioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to hear the names of the subscribers and their amounts read out,&rdquo;
+       put in Brother Pierce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When this was done, it became apparent that much more than half of the
+      entire amount had been offered by two men. Levi Gorringe's $450 and
+      Erastus Winch's $425 left only $985 to be divided up among some seventy or
+      eighty other members of the congregation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Pierce speedily stopped the reading of these subordinate names.
+      &ldquo;They're of no concern whatever,&rdquo; he said, despite the fact that his own
+      might have been reached in time. &ldquo;Those first names are what I was getting
+      at. Have those two first amounts, the big ones, be'n paid?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One has&mdash;the other not,&rdquo; replied Gorringe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;PRE-cisely,&rdquo; remarked the senior trustee. &ldquo;And I'm goin' to move that it
+      needn't be paid, either. When Brother Winch, here, began hollerin' out
+      those extra twenty-fives and fifties, that evening, it was under a
+      complete misapprehension. He'd be'n on the Cheese Board that same Monday
+      afternoon, and he'd done what he thought was a mighty big stroke of
+      business, and he felt liberal according. I know just what that feelin' is
+      myself. If I'd be'n makin' a mint o' money, instead o' losin' all the
+      while, as I do, I'd 'a' done just the same. But the next day, lo, and
+      behold, Brother Winch found that it was all a mistake&mdash;he hadn't made
+      a single penny.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fact is, I lost by the whole transaction,&rdquo; put in Erastus Winch,
+      defiantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just so,&rdquo; Brother Pierce went on. &ldquo;He lost money. You have his own word
+      for it. Well, then, I say it would be a burning shame for us to consent to
+      touch one penny of what he offered to give, in the fullness of his heart,
+      while he was laborin' under that delusion. And I move he be not asked for
+      it. We've got quite as much as we need, without it. I put my motion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is, YOU don't put it,&rdquo; suggested Winch, correctingly. &ldquo;You move it,
+      and Brother Ware, whom we're all so glad to see able to come and preside&mdash;he'll
+      put it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a moment's silence. &ldquo;You've heard the motion,&rdquo; said Theron,
+      tentatively, and then paused for possible remarks. He was not going to
+      meddle in this thing himself, and Gorringe was the only other who might
+      have an opinion to offer. The necessities of the situation forced him to
+      glance at the lawyer inquiringly. He did so, and turned his eyes away
+      again like a shot. Gorringe was looking him squarely in the face, and the
+      look was freighted with satirical contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister spoke between clinched teeth. &ldquo;All those in favor will
+      say aye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brothers Pierce and Winch put up a simultaneous and confident &ldquo;Aye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you don't!&rdquo; interposed the lawyer, with deliberate, sneering
+      emphasis. &ldquo;I decidedly protest against Winch's voting. He's directly
+      interested, and he mustn't vote. Your chairman knows that perfectly well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I think Brother Winch ought not to vote,&rdquo; decided Theron, with great
+      calmness. He saw now what was coming, and underneath his surface composure
+      there were sharp flutterings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, then,&rdquo; said Gorringe. &ldquo;I vote no, and it's a tie. It rests
+      with the chairman now to cast the deciding vote, and say whether this
+      interesting arrangement shall go through or not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Me?&rdquo; said Theron, eying the lawyer with a cool self-control which had
+      come all at once to him. &ldquo;Me? Oh, I vote Aye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I did what you told me to do,&rdquo; Theron Ware remarked to Sister
+      Soulsby, when at last they found themselves alone in the sitting-room
+      after the midday meal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had taken not a little strategic skirmishing to secure the room to
+      themselves for the hospitable Alice, much touched by the thought of her
+      new friend's departure that very evening had gladly proposed to let all
+      the work stand over until night, and devote herself entirely to Sister
+      Soulsby. When, finally, Brother Soulsby conceived and deftly executed the
+      coup of interesting her in the budding of roses, and then leading her off
+      into the garden to see with her own eyes how it was done, Theron had a
+      sense of being left alone with a conspirator. The notion impelled him to
+      plunge at once into the heart of their mystery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did what you told me to do,&rdquo; he repeated, looking up from his low
+      easy-chair to where she sat by the desk; &ldquo;and I dare say you won't be
+      surprised when I add that I have no respect for myself for doing it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet you would go and do it right over again, eh?&rdquo; the woman said, in
+      bright, pert tones, nodding her head, and smiling at him with roguish,
+      comprehending eyes. &ldquo;Yes, that's the way we're built. We spend our lives
+      doing that sort of thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know that you would precisely grasp my meaning,&rdquo; said the young
+      minister, with a polite effort in his words to mask the untoward side of
+      the suggestion. &ldquo;It is a matter of conscience with me; and I am pained and
+      shocked at myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby drummed for an absent moment with her thin, nervous fingers
+      on the desk-top. &ldquo;I guess maybe you'd better go and lie down again,&rdquo; she
+      said gently. &ldquo;You're a sick man, still, and it's no good your worrying
+      your head just now with things of this sort. You'll see them differently
+      when you're quite yourself again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; pleaded Theron. &ldquo;Do let us have our talk out! I'm all right. My
+      mind is clear as a bell. Truly, I've really counted on this talk with
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there's something else to talk about, isn't there, besides&mdash;besides
+      your conscience?&rdquo; she asked. Her eyes bent upon him a kindly pressure as
+      she spoke, which took all possible harshness from her meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron answered the glance rather than her words. &ldquo;I know that you are my
+      friend,&rdquo; he said simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby straightened herself, and looked down upon him with a new
+      intentness. &ldquo;Well, then,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;let's thrash this thing out right
+      now, and be done with it. You say it's hurt your conscience to do just one
+      little hundredth part of what there was to be done here. Ask yourself what
+      you mean by that. Mind, I'm not quarrelling, and I'm not thinking about
+      anything except just your own state of mind. You think you soiled your
+      hands by doing what you did. That is to say, you wanted ALL the dirty work
+      done by other people. That's it, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Rev. Mr. Ware sat up, in turn, and looked doubtingly into his
+      companion's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, we were going to be frank, you know,&rdquo; she added, with a pleasant play
+      of mingled mirth and honest liking in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, picking his words, &ldquo;my point would rather be that&mdash;that
+      there ought not to have been any of what you yourself call this&mdash;this
+      'dirty work.' THAT is my feeling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now we're getting at it,&rdquo; said Sister Soulsby, briskly. &ldquo;My dear friend,
+      you might just as well say that potatoes are unclean and unfit to eat
+      because manure is put into the ground they grow in. Just look at the case.
+      Your church here was running behind every year. Your people had got into a
+      habit of putting in nickels instead of dimes, and letting you sweat for
+      the difference. That's a habit, like tobacco, or biting your fingernails,
+      or anything else. Either you were all to come to smash here, or the people
+      had to be shaken up, stood on their heads, broken of their habit. It's my
+      business&mdash;mine and Soulsby's&mdash;to do that sort of thing. We came
+      here and we did it&mdash;did it up brown, too. We not only raised all the
+      money the church needs, and to spare, but I took a personal shine to you,
+      and went out of my way to fix up things for you. It isn't only the extra
+      hundred dollars, but the whole tone of the congregation is changed toward
+      you now. You'll see that they'll be asking to have you back here, next
+      spring. And you're solid with your Presiding Elder, too. Well, now, tell
+      me straight&mdash;is that worth while, or not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've told you that I am very grateful,&rdquo; answered the minister, &ldquo;and I say
+      it again, and I shall never be tired of repeating it. But&mdash;but it was
+      the means I had in mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; rejoined the sister, patiently. &ldquo;If you saw the way a hotel
+      dinner was cooked, you wouldn't be able to stomach it. Did you ever see a
+      play? In a theatre, I mean. I supposed not. But you'll understand when I
+      say that the performance looks one way from where the audience sit, and
+      quite a different way when you are behind the scenes. THERE you see that
+      the trees and houses are cloth, and the moon is tissue paper, and the
+      flying fairy is a middle-aged woman strung up on a rope. That doesn't
+      prove that the play, out in front, isn't beautiful and affecting, and all
+      that. It only shows that everything in this world is produced by machinery&mdash;by
+      organization. The trouble is that you've been let in on the stage, behind
+      the scenes, so to speak, and you're so green&mdash;if you'll pardon me&mdash;that
+      you want to sit down and cry because the trees ARE cloth, and the moon IS
+      a lantern. And I say, don't be such a goose!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see what you mean,&rdquo; Theron said, with an answering smile. He added,
+      more gravely, &ldquo;All the same, the Winch business seems to me&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now the Winch business is my own affair,&rdquo; Sister Soulsby broke in
+      abruptly. &ldquo;I take all the responsibility for that. You need know nothing
+      about it. You simply voted as you did on the merits of the case as he
+      presented them&mdash;that's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo; Theron began, and then paused. Something had occurred to him,
+      and he knitted his brows to follow its course of expansion in his mind.
+      Suddenly he raised his head. &ldquo;Then you arranged with Winch to make those
+      bogus offers&mdash;just to lead others on?&rdquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby's large eyes beamed down upon him in reply, at first in
+      open merriment, then more soberly, till their regard was almost pensive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us talk of something else,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;All that is past and gone. It
+      has nothing to do with you, anyway. I've got some advice to give you about
+      keeping up this grip you've got on your people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister had risen to his feet while she spoke. He put his hands
+      in his pockets, and with rounded shoulders began slowly pacing the room.
+      After a turn or two he came to the desk, and leaned against it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I doubt if it's worth while going into that,&rdquo; he said, in the solemn tone
+      of one who feels that an irrevocable thing is being uttered. She waited to
+      hear more, apparently. &ldquo;I think I shall go away&mdash;give up the
+      ministry,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby's eyes revealed no such shock of consternation as he,
+      unconsciously, had looked for. They remained quite calm; and when she
+      spoke, they deepened, to fit her speech, with what he read to be a gaze of
+      affectionate melancholy&mdash;one might say pity. She shook her head
+      slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;don't let any one else hear you say that,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;My poor
+      young friend, it's no good to even think it. The real wisdom is to school
+      yourself to move along smoothly, and not fret, and get the best of what's
+      going. I've known others who felt as you do&mdash;of course there are
+      times when every young man of brains and high notions feels that way&mdash;but
+      there's no help for it. Those who tried to get out only broke themselves.
+      Those who stayed in, and made the best of it&mdash;well, one of them will
+      be a bishop in another ten years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had started walking again. &ldquo;But the moral degradation of it!&rdquo; he
+      snapped out at her over his shoulder. &ldquo;I'd rather earn the meanest living,
+      at an honest trade, and be free from it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That may all be,&rdquo; responded Sister Soulsby. &ldquo;But it isn't a question of
+      what you'd rather do. It's what you can do. How could you earn a living?
+      What trade or business do you suppose you could take up now, and get a
+      living out of? Not one, my man, not one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron stopped and stared at her. This view of his capabilities came upon
+      him with the force and effect of a blow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't discover, myself,&rdquo; he began stumblingly, &ldquo;that I'm so
+      conspicuously inferior to the men I see about me who do make livings, and
+      very good ones, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course you're not,&rdquo; she replied with easy promptness; &ldquo;you're greatly
+      the other way, or I shouldn't be taking this trouble with you. But you're
+      what you are because you're where you are. The moment you try on being
+      somewhere else, you're done for. In all this world nobody else comes to
+      such unmerciful and universal grief as the unfrocked priest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The phrase sent Theron's fancy roving. &ldquo;I know a Catholic priest,&rdquo; he said
+      irrelevantly, &ldquo;who doesn't believe an atom in&mdash;in things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very likely,&rdquo; said Sister Soulsby. &ldquo;Most of us do. But you don't hear him
+      talking about going and earning his living, I'll bet! Or if he does, he
+      takes powerful good care not to go, all the same. They've got horse-sense,
+      those priests. They're artists, too. They know how to allow for the
+      machinery behind the scenes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it's all so different,&rdquo; urged the young minister; &ldquo;the same things
+      are not expected of them. Now I sat the other night and watched those
+      people you got up around the altar-rail, groaning and shouting and crying,
+      and the others jumping up and down with excitement, and Sister Lovejoy&mdash;did
+      you see her?&mdash;coming out of her pew and regularly waltzing in the
+      aisle, with her eyes shut, like a whirling dervish&mdash;I positively
+      believe it was all that made me ill. I couldn't stand it. I can't stand it
+      now. I won't go back to it! Nothing shall make me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh-h, yes, you will,&rdquo; she rejoined soothingly. &ldquo;There's nothing else to
+      do. Just put a good face on it, and make up your mind to get through by
+      treading on as few corns as possible, and keeping your own toes well in,
+      and you'll be surprised how easy it'll all come to be. You were speaking
+      of the revival business. Now that exemplifies just what I was saying&mdash;it's
+      a part of our machinery. Now a church is like everything else,&mdash;it's
+      got to have a boss, a head, an authority of some sort, that people will
+      listen to and mind. The Catholics are different, as you say. Their church
+      is chuck-full of authority&mdash;all the way from the Pope down to the
+      priest&mdash;and accordingly they do as they're told. But the Protestants&mdash;your
+      Methodists most of all&mdash;they say 'No, we won't have any authority, we
+      won't obey any boss.' Very well, what happens? We who are responsible for
+      running the thing, and raising the money and so on&mdash;we have to put on
+      a spurt every once in a while, and work up a general state of excitement;
+      and while it's going, don't you see that THAT is the authority, the motive
+      power, whatever you like to call it, by which things are done? Other
+      denominations don't need it. We do, and that's why we've got it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the mean dishonesty of it all!&rdquo; Theron broke forth. He moved about
+      again, his bowed face drawn as with bodily suffering. &ldquo;The low-born
+      tricks, the hypocrisies! I feel as if I could never so much as look at
+      these people here again without disgust.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, now that's where you make your mistake,&rdquo; Sister Soulsby put in
+      placidly. &ldquo;These people of yours are not a whit worse than other people.
+      They've got their good streaks and their bad streaks, just like the rest
+      of us. Take them by and large, they're quite on a par with other folks the
+      whole country through.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe there's another congregation in the Conference where&mdash;where
+      this sort of thing would have been needed, or, I might say, tolerated,&rdquo;
+       insisted Theron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps you're right,&rdquo; the other assented; &ldquo;but that only shows that your
+      people here are different from the others&mdash;not that they're worse.
+      You don't seem to realize: Octavius, so far as the Methodists are
+      concerned, is twenty or thirty years behind the times. Now that has its
+      advantages and its disadvantages. The church here is tough and coarse, and
+      full of grit, like a grindstone; and it does ministers from other more
+      niminy-piminy places all sorts of good to come here once in a while and
+      rub themselves up against it. It scours the rust and mildew off from their
+      piety, and they go back singing and shouting. But of course it's had a
+      different effect with you. You're razor-steel instead of scythe-steel, and
+      the grinding's been too rough and violent for you. But you see what I
+      mean. These people here really take their primitive Methodism seriously.
+      To them the profession of entire sanctification is truly a genuine thing.
+      Well, don't you see, when people just know that they're saved, it doesn't
+      seem to them to matter so much what they do. They feel that ordinary rules
+      may well be bent and twisted in the interest of people so supernaturally
+      good as they are. That's pure human nature. It's always been like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron paused in his walk to look absently at her. &ldquo;That thought,&rdquo; he
+      said, in a vague, slow way, &ldquo;seems to be springing up in my path,
+      whichever way I turn. It oppresses me, and yet it fascinates me&mdash;this
+      idea that the dead men have known more than we know, done more than we do;
+      that there is nothing new anywhere; that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind the dead men,&rdquo; interposed Sister Soulsby. &ldquo;Just you come and
+      sit down here. I hate to have you straddling about the room when I'm
+      trying to talk to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron obeyed, and as he sank into the low seat, Sister Soulsby drew up
+      her chair, and put her hand on his shoulder. Her gaze rested upon his with
+      impressive steadiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now I want to talk seriously to you, as a friend,&rdquo; she began. &ldquo;You
+      mustn't breathe to any living soul the shadow of a hint of this nonsense
+      about leaving the ministry. I could see how you were feeling&mdash;I saw
+      the book you were reading the first time I entered this room&mdash;and
+      that made me like you; only I expected to find you mixing up more worldly
+      gumption with your Renan. Well, perhaps I like you all the better for not
+      having it&mdash;for being so delightfully fresh. At any rate, that made me
+      sail in and straighten your affairs for you. And now, for God's sake, keep
+      them straight. Just put all notions of anything else out of your head.
+      Watch your chief men and women, and be friends with them. Keep your eye
+      open for what they think you ought to do, and do it. Have your own ideas
+      as much as you like, read what you like, say 'Damn' under your breath as
+      much as you like, but don't let go of your job. I've knocked about too
+      much, and I've seen too many promising young fellows cut their own throats
+      for pure moonshine, not to have a right to say that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron could not be insensible to the friendly hand on his shoulder, or to
+      the strenuous sincerity of the voice which thus adjured him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said vaguely, smiling up into her earnest eyes, &ldquo;if we agree
+      that it IS moonshine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See here!&rdquo; she exclaimed, with renewed animation, patting his shoulder in
+      a brisk, automatic way, to point the beginnings of her confidences: &ldquo;I'll
+      tell you something. It's about myself. I've got a religion of my own, and
+      it's got just one plank in it, and that is that the time to separate the
+      sheep from the goats is on Judgment Day, and that it can't be done a
+      minute before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister took in the thought, and turned it about in his mind,
+      and smiled upon it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that brings me to what I'm going to tell you,&rdquo; Sister Soulsby
+      continued. She leaned back in her chair, and crossed her knees so that one
+      well-shaped and artistically shod foot poised itself close to Theron's
+      hand. Her eyes dwelt upon his face with an engaging candor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I began life,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;as a girl by running away from a stupid home
+      with a man that I knew was married already. After that, I supported myself
+      for a good many years&mdash;generally, at first, on the stage. I've been a
+      front-ranker in Amazon ballets, and I've been leading lady in comic opera
+      companies out West. I've told fortunes in one room of a mining-camp hotel
+      where the biggest game of faro in the Territory went on in another. I've
+      been a professional clairvoyant, and I've been a professional medium, and
+      I've been within one vote of being indicted by a grand jury, and the money
+      that bought that vote was put up by the smartest and most famous
+      train-gambler between Omaha and 'Frisco, a gentleman who died in his boots
+      and took three sheriff's deputies along with him to Kingdom-Come. Now,
+      that's MY record.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron looked earnestly at her, and said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now take Soulsby,&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;Of course I take it for granted
+      there's a good deal that he has never felt called upon to mention. He
+      hasn't what you may call a talkative temperament. But there is also a good
+      deal that I do know. He's been an actor, too, and to this day I'd back him
+      against Edwin Booth himself to recite 'Clarence's Dream.' And he's been a
+      medium, and then he was a travelling phrenologist, and for a long time he
+      was advance agent for a British Blondes show, and when I first saw him he
+      was lecturing on female diseases&mdash;and he had HIS little turn with a
+      grand jury too. In fact, he was what you may call a regular bad old
+      rooster.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again Theron suffered the pause to lapse without comment&mdash;save for an
+      amorphous sort of conversation which he felt to be going on between his
+      eyes and those of Sister Soulsby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then,&rdquo; she resumed, &ldquo;so much for us apart. Now about us together.
+      We liked each other from the start. We compared notes, and we found that
+      we had both soured on living by fakes, and that we were tired of the road,
+      and wanted to settle down and be respectable in our old age. We had a
+      little money&mdash;enough to see us through a year or two. Soulsby had
+      always hungered and longed to own a garden and raise flowers, and had
+      never been able to stay long enough in one place to see so much as a
+      bean-pod ripen. So we took a little place in a quiet country village down
+      on the Southern Tier, and he planted everything three deep all over the
+      place, and I bought a roomful of cheap good books, and we started in. We
+      took to it like ducks to water for a while, and I don't say that we
+      couldn't have stood it out, just doing nothing, to this very day; but as
+      luck would have it, during the first winter there was a revival at the
+      local Methodist church, and we went every evening&mdash;at first just to
+      kill time, and then because we found we liked the noise and excitement and
+      general racket of the thing. After it was all over each of us found that
+      the other had been mighty near going up to the rail and joining the
+      mourners. And another thing had occurred to each of us, too&mdash;that is,
+      what tremendous improvements there were possible in the way that amateur
+      revivalist worked up his business. This stuck in our crops, and we figured
+      on it all through the winter.&mdash;Well, to make a long story short, we
+      finally went into the thing ourselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me one thing,&rdquo; interposed Theron. &ldquo;I'm anxious to understand it all
+      as we go along. Were you and he at any time sincerely converted?&mdash;that
+      is, I mean, genuinely convicted of sin and conscious of&mdash;you know
+      what I mean!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, bless you, yes,&rdquo; responded Sister Soulsby. &ldquo;Not only once&mdash;dozens
+      of times&mdash;I may say every time. We couldn't do good work if we
+      weren't. But that's a matter of temperament&mdash;of emotions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely. That was what I was getting at,&rdquo; explained Theron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, hear what I was getting at,&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;You were talking
+      very loudly here about frauds and hypocrisies and so on, a few minutes
+      ago. Now I say that Soulsby and I do good, and that we're good fellows.
+      Now take him, for example. There isn't a better citizen in all Chemung
+      County than he is, or a kindlier neighbor, or a better or more charitable
+      man. I've known him to stay up a whole winter's night in a poor Irishman's
+      stinking and freezing stable, trying to save his cart-horse for him, that
+      had been seized with some sort of fit. The man's whole livelihood, and his
+      family's, was in that horse; and when it died, Soulsby bought him another,
+      and never told even ME about it. Now that I call real piety, if you like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So do I,&rdquo; put in Theron, cordially.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this question of fraud,&rdquo; pursued his companion,&mdash;&ldquo;look at it in
+      this light. You heard us sing. Well, now, I was a singer, of course, but
+      Soulsby hardly knew one note from another. I taught him to sing, and he
+      went at it patiently and diligently, like a little man. And I invented
+      that scheme of finding tunes which the crowd didn't know, and so couldn't
+      break in on and smother. I simply took Chopin&mdash;he is full of sixths,
+      you know&mdash;and I got all sorts of melodies out of his waltzes and
+      mazurkas and nocturnes and so on, and I trained Soulsby just to sing those
+      sixths so as to make the harmony, and there you are. He couldn't sing by
+      himself any more than a crow, but he's got those sixths of his down to a
+      hair. Now that's machinery, management, organization. We take these tunes,
+      written by a devil-may-care Pole who was living with George Sand openly at
+      the time, and pass 'em off on the brethren for hymns. It's a fraud, yes;
+      but it's a good fraud. So they are all good frauds. I say frankly that I'm
+      glad that the change and the chance came to help Soulsby and me to be good
+      frauds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the point is that I'm to be a good fraud, too,&rdquo; commented the young
+      minister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had risen, and he got to his feet as well. He instinctively sought for
+      her hand, and pressed it warmly, and held it in both his, with an
+      exuberance of gratitude and liking in his manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby danced her eyes at him with a saucy little shake of the
+      head. &ldquo;I'm afraid you'll never make a really GOOD fraud,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You
+      haven't got it in you. Your intentions are all right, but your execution
+      is hopelessly clumsy. I came up to your bedroom there twice while you were
+      sick, just to say 'howdy,' and you kept your eyes shut, and all the while
+      a blind horse could have told that you were wide awake.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must have thought it was my wife,&rdquo; said Theron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART3" id="link2H_PART3">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When the lingering dusk finally settled down upon this long summer
+      evening, the train bearing the Soulsbys homeward was already some score of
+      miles on its way, and the Methodists of Octavius had nearly finished their
+      weekly prayer-meeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the stirring events of the revival, it was only to be expected that
+      this routine, home-made affair should suffer from a reaction. The
+      attendance was larger than usual, perhaps, but the proceedings were
+      spiritless and tame. Neither the pastor nor his wife was present at the
+      beginning, and the class-leader upon whom control devolved made but feeble
+      headway against the spell of inertia which the hot night-air laid upon the
+      gathering. Long pauses intervened between the perfunctory praise-offerings
+      and supplications, and the hymns weariedly raised from time to time fell
+      again in languor by the wayside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice came in just as people were beginning to hope that some one would
+      start the Doxology, and bring matters to a close. Her appearance
+      apparently suggested this to the class-leader, for in a few moments the
+      meeting had been dismissed, and some of the members, on their way out,
+      were shaking hands with their minister's wife, and expressing the polite
+      hope that he was better. The worried look in her face, and the obvious
+      stains of recent tears upon her cheeks imparted an added point and fervor
+      to these inquiries, but she replied to all in tones of studied
+      tranquillity that, although not feeling well enough to attend
+      prayer-meeting, Brother Ware was steadily recovering strength, and
+      confidently expected to be in complete health by Sunday. They left her,
+      and could hardly wait to get into the vestibule to ask one another in
+      whispers what on earth she could have been crying about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile Brother Ware improved his convalescent state by pacing slowly up
+      and down under the elms on the side of the street opposite the Catholic
+      church. There were no houses here for a block and more; the sidewalk was
+      broken in many places, so that passers-by avoided it; the overhanging
+      boughs shrouded it all in obscurity; it was preeminently a place to be
+      alone in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had driven to the depot with his guests an hour before, and after a
+      period of pleasant waiting on the platform, had said good-bye to them as
+      the train moved away. Then he turned to Alice, who had also accompanied
+      them in the carriage, and was conscious of a certain annoyance at her
+      having come. That long familiar talk of the afternoon had given him the
+      feeling that he was entitled to bid farewell to Sister Soulsby&mdash;to
+      both the Soulsbys&mdash;by himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid folks will think it strange&mdash;neither of us attending the
+      prayer-meeting,&rdquo; he said, with a suggestion of reproof in his tone, as
+      they left the station-yard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If we get back in time, I'll run in for a minute,&rdquo; answered Alice, with
+      docility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;no,&rdquo; he broke in. &ldquo;I'm not equal to walking so fast. You run on
+      ahead, and explain matters, and I will come along slowly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The hack we came in is still there in the yard,&rdquo; the wife suggested. &ldquo;We
+      could drive home in that. I don't believe it would cost more than a
+      quarter&mdash;and if you're feeling badly&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I am NOT feeling badly,&rdquo; Theron replied, with frank impatience. &ldquo;Only
+      I feel&mdash;I feel that being alone with my thoughts would be good for
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, certainly&mdash;by all means!&rdquo; Alice had said, and turned sharply on
+      her heel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Being alone with these thoughts, Theron strolled aimlessly about, and did
+      not think at all. The shadows gathered, and fireflies began to disclose
+      their tiny gleams among the shrubbery in the gardens. A lamp-lighter came
+      along, and passed him, leaving in his wake a straggling double line of
+      lights, glowing radiantly against the black-green of the trees. This
+      recalled to Theron that he had heard that the town council lit the street
+      lamps by the almanac, and economized gas when moonshine was due. The idea
+      struck him as droll, and he dwelt upon it in various aspects, smiling at
+      some of its comic possibilities. Looking up in the middle of one of these
+      whimsical conceits, the sportive impulse died suddenly within him. He
+      realized that it was dark, and that the massive black bulk reared against
+      the sky on the other side of the road was the Catholic church. The other
+      fact, that he had been there walking to and fro for some time, was borne
+      in upon him more slowly. He turned, and resumed the pacing up and down
+      with a still more leisurely step, musing upon the curious way in which
+      people's minds all unconsciously follow about where instincts and
+      intuitions lead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt it was what Sister Soulsby had said about Catholics which had
+      insensibly guided his purposeless stroll in this direction. What a woman
+      that was! Somehow the purport of her talk&mdash;striking, and even
+      astonishing as he had found it&mdash;did not stand out so clearly in his
+      memory as did the image of the woman herself. She must have been extremely
+      pretty once. For that matter she still was a most attractive-looking
+      woman. It had been a genuine pleasure to have her in the house&mdash;to
+      see her intelligent responsive face at the table&mdash;to have it in one's
+      power to make drafts at will upon the fund of sympathy and appreciation,
+      of facile mirth and ready tenderness in those big eyes of hers. He liked
+      that phrase she had used about herself&mdash;&ldquo;a good fellow.&rdquo; It seemed to
+      fit her to a &ldquo;t.&rdquo; And Soulsby was a good fellow too. All at once it
+      occurred to him to wonder whether they were married or not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But really that was no affair of his, he reflected. A citizen of the
+      intellectual world should be above soiling his thoughts with mean
+      curiosities of that sort, and he drove the impertinent query down again
+      under the surface of his mind. He refused to tolerate, as well, sundry
+      vagrant imaginings which rose to cluster about and literalize the romance
+      of her youth which Sister Soulsby had so frankly outlined. He would think
+      upon nothing but her as he knew her,&mdash;the kindly, quick-witted,
+      capable and charming woman who had made such a brilliant break in the
+      monotony of life at that dull parsonage of his. The only genuine happiness
+      in life must consist in having bright, smart, attractive women like that
+      always about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lights were visible now in the upper rooms of Father Forbes' pastorate
+      across the way. Theron paused for a second to consider whether he wanted
+      to go over and call on the priest. He decided that mentally he was too
+      fagged and flat for such an undertaking. He needed another sort of
+      companionship&mdash;some restful, soothing human contact, which should
+      exact nothing from him in return, but just take charge of him, with soft,
+      wise words and pleasant plays of fancy, and jokes and&mdash;and&mdash;something
+      of the general effect created by Sister Soulsby's eyes. The thought
+      expanded itself, and he saw that he had never realized before&mdash;nay,
+      never dreamt before&mdash;what a mighty part the comradeship of talented,
+      sweet-natured and beautiful women must play in the development of genius,
+      the achievement of lofty aims, out in the great world of great men. To
+      know such women&mdash;ah, that would never fall to his hapless lot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest's lamps blinked at him through the trees. He remembered that
+      priests were supposed to be even further removed from the possibilities of
+      such contact than he was himself. His memory reverted to that horribly
+      ugly old woman whom Father Forbes had spoken of as his housekeeper. Life
+      under the same roof with such a hag must be even worse than&mdash;worse
+      than&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister did not finish the comparison, even in the privacy of
+      his inner soul. He stood instead staring over at the pastorate, in a kind
+      of stupor of arrested thought. The figure of a woman passed in view at the
+      nearest window&mdash;a tall figure with pale summer clothes of some sort,
+      and a broad summer hat&mdash;a flitting effect of diaphanous shadow
+      between him and the light which streamed from the casement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron felt a little shiver run over him, as if the delicate coolness of
+      the changing night-air had got into his blood. The window was open, and
+      his strained hearing thought it caught the sound of faint laughter. He
+      continued to gaze at the place where the vision had appeared, the while a
+      novel and strange perception unfolded itself upon his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had come there in the hope of encountering Celia Madden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that he looked this fact in the face, there was nothing remarkable
+      about it. In truth, it was simplicity itself. He was still a sick man,
+      weak in body and dejected in spirits. The thought of how unhappy and
+      unstrung he was came to him now with an insistent pathos that brought
+      tears to his eyes. He was only obeying the universal law of nature&mdash;the
+      law which prompts the pallid spindling sprout of the potato in the cellar
+      to strive feebly toward the light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From where he stood in the darkness he stretched out his hands in the
+      direction of that open window. The gesture was his confession to the
+      overhanging boughs, to the soft night-breeze, to the stars above&mdash;and
+      it bore back to him something of the confessional's vague and wistful
+      solace. He seemed already to have drawn down into his soul a taste of the
+      refreshment it craved. He sighed deeply, and the hot moisture smarted
+      again upon his eyelids, but this time not all in grief. With his tender
+      compassion for himself there mingled now a flutter of buoyant prescience,
+      of exquisite expectancy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fate walked abroad this summer night. The street door of the pastorate
+      opened, and in the flood of illumination which spread suddenly forth over
+      the steps and sidewalk, Theron saw again the tall form, with the
+      indefinitely light-hued flowing garments and the wide straw hat. He heard
+      a tuneful woman's voice call out &ldquo;Good-night, Maggie,&rdquo; and caught no
+      response save the abrupt closing of the door, which turned everything
+      black again with a bang. He listened acutely for another instant, and then
+      with long, noiseless strides made his way down his deserted side of the
+      street. He moderated his pace as he turned to cross the road at the
+      corner, and then, still masked by the trees, halted altogether, in a
+      momentary tumult of apprehension. No&mdash;yes&mdash;it was all right. The
+      girl sauntered out from the total darkness into the dim starlight of the
+      open corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, bless me, is that you, Miss Madden?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia seemed to discern readily enough, through the accents of surprise,
+      the identity of the tall, slim man who addressed her from the shadows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-evening, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; she said, with prompt affability. &ldquo;I'm so glad
+      to find you out again. We heard you were ill.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been very ill,&rdquo; responded Theron, as they shook hands and walked
+      on together. He added, with a quaver in his voice, &ldquo;I am still far from
+      strong. I really ought not to be out at all. But&mdash;but the longing for&mdash;for&mdash;well,
+      I COULDN'T stay in any longer. Even if it kills me, I shall be glad I came
+      out tonight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, we won't talk of killing,&rdquo; said Celia. &ldquo;I don't believe in illnesses
+      myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you believe in collapses of the nerves,&rdquo; put in Theron, with gentle
+      sadness, &ldquo;in moral and spiritual and mental breakdowns. I remember how I
+      was touched by the way you told me YOU suffered from them. I had to take
+      what you said then for granted. I had had no experience of it myself. But
+      now I know what it is.&rdquo; He drew a long, pathetic sigh. &ldquo;Oh, DON'T I know
+      what it is!&rdquo; he repeated gloomily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, my friend, cheer up,&rdquo; Celia purred at him, in soothing tones. He
+      felt that there was a deliciously feminine and sisterly intuition in her
+      speech, and in the helpful, nurse-like way in which she drew his arm
+      through hers. He leaned upon this support, and was glad of it in every
+      fibre of his being.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you remember? You promised&mdash;that last time I saw you&mdash;to
+      play for me,&rdquo; he reminded her. They were passing the little covered
+      postern door at the side and rear of the church as he spoke, and he made a
+      half halt to point the coincidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, there's no one to blow the organ,&rdquo; she said, divining his suggestion.
+      &ldquo;And I haven't the key&mdash;and, besides, the organ is too heavy and
+      severe for an invalid. It would overwhelm you tonight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not as you would know how to play it for me,&rdquo; urged Theron, pensively. &ldquo;I
+      feel as if good music to-night would make me well again. I am really very
+      ill and weak&mdash;and unhappy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl seemed moved by the despairing note in his voice. She invited him
+      by a sympathetic gesture to lean even more directly on her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come home with me, and I'll play Chopin to you,&rdquo; she said, in
+      compassionate friendliness. &ldquo;He is the real medicine for bruised and
+      wounded nerves. You shall have as much of him as you like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea thus unexpectedly thrown forth spread itself like some vast and
+      inexpressibly alluring vista before Theron's imagination. The spice of
+      adventure in it fascinated his mind as well, but for a shrinking moment
+      the flesh was weak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid your people would&mdash;would think it strange,&rdquo; he faltered&mdash;and
+      began also to recall that he had some people of his own who would be even
+      more amazed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense,&rdquo; said Celia, in fine, bold confidence, and with a reassuring
+      pressure on his arm. &ldquo;I allow none of my people to question what I do.
+      They never dream of such a preposterous thing. Besides, you will see none
+      of them. Mrs. Madden is at the seaside, and my father and brother have
+      their own part of the house. I shan't listen for a minute to your not
+      coming. Come, I'm your doctor. I'm to make you well again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was further conversation, and Theron more or less knew that he was
+      bearing a part in it, but his whole mind seemed concentrated, in a sort of
+      delicious terror, upon the wonderful experience to which every footstep
+      brought him nearer. His magnetized fancy pictured a great spacious parlor,
+      such as a mansion like the Maddens' would of course contain, and there
+      would be a grand piano, and lace curtains, and paintings in gold frames,
+      and a chandelier, and velvet easy-chairs, and he would sit in one of
+      these, surrounded by all the luxury of the rich, while Celia played to
+      him. There would be servants about, he presumed, and very likely they
+      would recognize him, and of course they would talk about it to Tom, Dick
+      and Harry afterward. But he said to himself defiantly that he didn't care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He withdrew his arm from hers as they came upon the well-lighted main
+      street. He passed no one who seemed to know him. Presently they came to
+      the Madden place, and Celia, without waiting for the gravelled walk,
+      struck obliquely across the lawn. Theron, who had been lagging behind with
+      a certain circumspection, stepped briskly to her side now. Their progress
+      over the soft, close-cropped turf in the dark together, with the scent of
+      lilies and perfumed shrubs heavy on the night air, and the majestic bulk
+      of the big silent house rising among the trees before them, gave him a
+      thrilling sense of the glory of individual freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel a new man already,&rdquo; he declared, as they swung along on the grass.
+      He breathed a long sigh of content, and drew nearer, so that their
+      shoulders touched now and again as they walked. In a minute more they were
+      standing on the doorstep, and Theron heard the significant jingle of a
+      bunch of keys which his companion was groping for in her elusive pocket.
+      He was conscious of trembling a little at the sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed that, unlike other people, the Maddens did not have their parlor
+      on the ground-floor, opening off the front hall. Theron stood in the
+      complete darkness of this hall, till Celia had lit one of several candles
+      which were in their hand-sticks on a sort of sideboard next the hat-rack.
+      She beckoned him with a gesture of her head, and he followed her up a
+      broad staircase, magnificent in its structural appointments of inlaid
+      woods, and carpeted with what to his feet felt like down. The tiny light
+      which his guide bore before her half revealed, as they passed in their
+      ascent, tall lengths of tapestry, and the dull glint of armor and brazen
+      discs in shadowed niches on the nearer wall. Over the stair-rail lay an
+      open space of such stately dimensions, bounded by terminal lines of
+      decoration so distant in the faint candle-flicker, that the young country
+      minister could think of no word but &ldquo;palatial&rdquo; to fit it all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the head of the flight, Celia led the way along a wide corridor to
+      where it ended. Here, stretched from side to side, and suspended from
+      broad hoops of a copper-like metal, was a thick curtain, of a uniform
+      color which Theron at first thought was green, and then decided must be
+      blue. She pushed its heavy folds aside, and unlocked another door. He
+      passed under the curtain behind her, and closed the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room into which he had made his way was not at all after the fashion
+      of any parlor he had ever seen. In the obscure light it was difficult to
+      tell what it resembled. He made out what he took to be a painter's easel,
+      standing forth independently in the centre of things. There were rows of
+      books on rude, low shelves. Against one of the two windows was a big, flat
+      writing-table&mdash;or was it a drawing-table?&mdash;littered with papers.
+      Under the other window was a carpenter's bench, with a large mound of
+      something at one end covered with a white cloth. On a table behind the
+      easel rose a tall mechanical contrivance, the chief feature of which was a
+      thick upright spiral screw. The floor was of bare wood stained brown. The
+      walls of this queer room had photographs and pictures, taken apparently
+      from illustrated papers, pinned up at random for their only ornament.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia had lighted three or four other candles on the mantel. She caught
+      the dumfounded expression with which her guest was surveying his
+      surroundings, and gave a merry little laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is my workshop,&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;I keep this for the things I do
+      badly&mdash;things I fool with. If I want to paint, or model in clay, or
+      bind books, or write, or draw, or turn on the lathe, or do some
+      carpentering, here's where I do it. All the things that make a mess which
+      has to be cleaned up&mdash;they are kept out here&mdash;because this is as
+      far as the servants are allowed to come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She unlocked still another door as she spoke&mdash;a door which was also
+      concealed behind a curtain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; she said, holding up the candle so that its reddish flare rounded
+      with warmth the creamy fulness of her chin and throat, and glowed upon her
+      hair in a flame of orange light&mdash;&ldquo;now I will show you what is my very
+      own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Theron Ware looked about him with frankly undisguised astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room in which he found himself was so dark at first that it yielded
+      little to the eye, and that little seemed altogether beyond his
+      comprehension. His gaze helplessly followed Celia and her candle about as
+      she busied herself in the work of illumination. When she had finished, and
+      pinched out the taper, there were seven lights in the apartment&mdash;lights
+      beaming softly through half-opaque alternating rectangles of blue and
+      yellow glass. They must be set in some sort of lanterns around against the
+      wall, he thought, but the shape of these he could hardly make out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gradually his sight adapted itself to this subdued light, and he began to
+      see other things. These queer lamps were placed, apparently, so as to shed
+      a special radiance upon some statues which stood in the corners of the
+      chamber, and upon some pictures which were embedded in the walls. Theron
+      noted that the statues, the marble of which lost its aggressive whiteness
+      under the tinted lights, were mostly of naked men and women; the pictures,
+      four or five in number, were all variations of a single theme&mdash;the
+      Virgin Mary and the Child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A less untutored vision than his would have caught more swiftly the scheme
+      of color and line in which these works of art bore their share. The walls
+      of the room were in part of flat upright wooden columns, terminating high
+      above in simple capitals, and they were all painted in pale amber and
+      straw and primrose hues, irregularly wavering here and there toward
+      suggestions of white. Between these pilasters were broader panels of
+      stamped leather, in gently varying shades of peacock blue. These
+      contrasted colors vaguely interwove and mingled in what he could see of
+      the shadowed ceiling far above. They were repeated in the draperies and
+      huge cushions and pillows of the low, wide divan which ran about three
+      sides of the room. Even the floor, where it revealed itself among the
+      scattered rugs, was laid in a mosaic pattern of matched woods, which, like
+      the rugs, gave back these same shifting blues and uncertain yellows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fourth side of the apartment was broken in outline at one end by the
+      door through which they had entered, and at the other by a broad, square
+      opening, hung with looped-back curtains of a thin silken stuff. Between
+      the two apertures rose against the wall what Theron took at first glance
+      to be an altar. There were pyramidal rows of tall candles here on either
+      side, each masked with a little silken hood; below, in the centre, a
+      shelf-like projection supported what seemed a massive, carved casket, and
+      in the beautiful intricacies of this, and the receding canopy of delicate
+      ornamentation which depended above it, the dominant color was white,
+      deepening away in its shadows, by tenderly minute gradations, to the tints
+      which ruled the rest of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia lighted some of the high, thick tapers in these candelabra, and
+      opened the top of the casket. Theron saw with surprise that she had
+      uncovered the keyboard of a piano. He viewed with much greater amazement
+      her next proceeding&mdash;which was to put a cigarette between her lips,
+      and, bending over one of the candles with it for an instant, turn to him
+      with a filmy, opalescent veil of smoke above her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make yourself comfortable anywhere,&rdquo; she said, with a gesture which
+      comprehended all the divans and pillows in the place. &ldquo;Will you smoke?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never tried since I was a little boy,&rdquo; said Theron, &ldquo;but I think I
+      could. If you don't mind, I should like to see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lounging at his ease on the oriental couch, Theron experimented cautiously
+      upon the unaccustomed tobacco, and looked at Celia with what he felt to be
+      the confident quiet of a man of the world. She had thrown aside her hat,
+      and in doing so had half released some of the heavy strands of hair coiled
+      at the back of her head. His glance instinctively rested upon this
+      wonderful hair of hers. There was no mistaking the sudden fascination its
+      disorder had for his eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood before him with the cigarette poised daintily between thumb and
+      finger of a shapely hand, and smiled comprehendingly down on her guest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suffered the horrors of the damned with this hair of mine when I was a
+      child,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I daresay all children have a taste for persecuting
+      red-heads; but it's a specialty with Irish children. They get hold somehow
+      of an ancient national superstition, or legend, that red hair was brought
+      into Ireland by the Danes. It's been a term of reproach with us since
+      Brian Boru's time to call a child a Dane. I used to be pursued and baited
+      with it every day of my life, until the one dream of my ambition was to
+      get old enough to be a Sister of Charity, so that I might hide my hair
+      under one of their big beastly white linen caps. I've got rather away from
+      that ideal since, I'm afraid,&rdquo; she added, with a droll downward curl of
+      her lip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your hair is very beautiful,&rdquo; said Theron, in the calm tone of a
+      connoisseur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like it myself,&rdquo; Celia admitted, and blew a little smoke-ring toward
+      him. &ldquo;I've made this whole room to match it. The colors, I mean,&rdquo; she
+      explained, in deference to his uplifted brows. &ldquo;Between us, we make up
+      what Whistler would call a symphony. That reminds me&mdash;I was going to
+      play for you. Let me finish the cigarette first.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron felt grateful for her reticence about the fact that he had laid his
+      own aside. &ldquo;I have never seen a room at all like this,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;You
+      are right; it does fit you perfectly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded her sense of his appreciation. &ldquo;It is what I like,&rdquo; she said.
+      &ldquo;It expresses ME. I will not have anything about me&mdash;or anybody
+      either&mdash;that I don't like. I suppose if an old Greek could see it, it
+      would make him sick, but it represents what I mean by being a Greek. It is
+      as near as an Irishman can get to it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember your puzzling me by saying that you were a Greek.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia laughed, and tossed the cigarette-end away. &ldquo;I'd puzzle you more,
+      I'm afraid, if I tried to explain to you what I really meant by it. I
+      divide people up into two classes, you know&mdash;Greeks and Jews. Once
+      you get hold of that principle, all other divisions and classifications,
+      such as by race or language or nationality, seem pure foolishness. It is
+      the only true division there is. It is just as true among negroes or wild
+      Indians who never heard of Greece or Jerusalem, as it is among white
+      folks. That is the beauty of it. It works everywhere, always.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Try it on me,&rdquo; urged Theron, with a twinkling eye. &ldquo;Which am I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Both,&rdquo; said the girl, with a merry nod of the head. &ldquo;But now I'll play. I
+      told you you were to hear Chopin. I prescribe him for you. He is the
+      Greekiest of the Greeks. THERE was a nation where all the people were
+      artists, where everybody was an intellectual aristocrat, where the
+      Philistine was as unknown, as extinct, as the dodo. Chopin might have
+      written his music for them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am interested in Shopang,&rdquo; put in Theron, suddenly recalling Sister
+      Soulsby's confidences as to the source of her tunes. &ldquo;He lived with&mdash;what's
+      his name&mdash;George something. We were speaking about him only this
+      afternoon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia looked down into her visitor's face at first inquiringly, then with
+      a latent grin about her lips. &ldquo;Yes&mdash;George something,&rdquo; she said, in a
+      tone which mystified him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware was sitting up, a minute afterward, in a ferment of
+      awakened consciousness that he had never heard the piano played before.
+      After a little, he noiselessly rearranged the cushions, and settled
+      himself again in a recumbent posture. It was beyond his strength to follow
+      that first impulse, and keep his mind abreast with what his ears took in.
+      He sighed and lay back, and surrendered his senses to the mere unthinking
+      charm of it all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the Fourth Prelude that was singing in the air about him&mdash;a
+      simple, plaintive strain wandering at will over a surface of steady
+      rhythmic movement underneath, always creeping upward through mysteries of
+      sweetness, always sinking again in cadences of semi-tones. With only a
+      moment's pause, there came the Seventh Waltz&mdash;a rich, bold confusion
+      which yet was not confused. Theron's ears dwelt with eager delight upon
+      the chasing medley of swift, tinkling sounds, but it left his thoughts
+      free.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From where he reclined, he turned his head to scrutinize, one by one, the
+      statues in the corners. No doubt they were beautiful&mdash;for this was a
+      department in which he was all humility&mdash;and one of them, the figure
+      of a broad-browed, stately, though thick-waisted woman, bending slightly
+      forward and with both arms broken off, was decently robed from the hips
+      downward. The others were not robed at all. Theron stared at them with the
+      erratic, rippling jangle of the waltz in his ears, and felt that he
+      possessed a new and disturbing conception of what female emancipation
+      meant in these later days. Roving along the wall, his glance rested again
+      upon the largest of the Virgin pictures&mdash;a full-length figure in
+      sweeping draperies, its radiant, aureoled head upturned in rapt adoration,
+      its feet resting on a crescent moon which shone forth in bluish silver
+      through festooned clouds of cherubs. The incongruity between the unashamed
+      statues and this serene incarnation of holy womanhood jarred upon him for
+      the instant. Then his mind went to the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without a break the waltz had slowed and expanded into a passage of what
+      might be church music, an exquisitely modulated and gently solemn chant,
+      through which a soft, lingering song roved capriciously, forcing the
+      listener to wonder where it was coming out, even while it caressed and
+      soothed to repose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked from the Madonna to Celia. Beyond the carelessly drooping braids
+      and coils of hair which blazed between the candles, he could see the
+      outline of her brow and cheek, the noble contour of her lifted chin and
+      full, modelled throat, all pink as the most delicate rose leaf is pink,
+      against the cool lights of the altar-like wall. The sight convicted him in
+      the court of his own soul as a prurient and mean-minded rustic. In the
+      presence of such a face, of such music, there ceased to be any such thing
+      as nudity, and statues no more needed clothes than did those slow, deep,
+      magnificent chords which came now, gravely accumulating their spell upon
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is all singing!&rdquo; the player called out to him over her shoulder, in a
+      minute of rest. &ldquo;That is what Chopin does&mdash;he sings!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She began, with an effect of thinking of something else, the Sixth
+      Nocturne, and Theron at first thought she was not playing anything in
+      particular, so deliberately, haltingly, did the chain of charm unwind
+      itself into sequence. Then it came closer to him than the others had done.
+      The dreamy, wistful, meditative beauty of it all at once oppressed and
+      inspired him. He saw Celia's shoulders sway under the impulse of the
+      RUBATO license&mdash;the privilege to invest each measure with the stress
+      of the whole, to loiter, to weep, to run and laugh at will&mdash;and the
+      music she made spoke to him as with a human voice. There was the wooing
+      sense of roses and moonlight, of perfumes, white skins, alluring
+      languorous eyes, and then&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know this part, of course,&rdquo; he heard her say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the instant they had stepped from the dark, scented, starlit garden,
+      where the nightingale sang, into a great cathedral. A sombre and lofty
+      anthem arose, and filled the place with the splendor of such dignified
+      pomp of harmony and such suggestions of measureless choral power and
+      authority that Theron sat abruptly up, then was drawn resistlessly to his
+      feet. He stood motionless in the strange room, feeling most of all that
+      one should kneel to hear such music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This you'll know too&mdash;the funeral march from the Second Sonata,&rdquo; she
+      was saying, before he realized that the end of the other had come. He sank
+      upon the divan again, bending forward and clasping his hands tight around
+      his knees. His heart beat furiously as he listened to the weird, mediaeval
+      processional, with its wild, clashing chords held down in the bondage of
+      an orderly sadness. There was a propelling motion in the thing&mdash;a
+      sense of being borne bodily along&mdash;which affected him like dizziness.
+      He breathed hard through the robust portions of stern, vigorous noise, and
+      rocked himself to and fro when, as rosy morn breaks upon a storm-swept
+      night, the drums are silenced for the sweet, comforting strain of solitary
+      melody. The clanging minor harmonies into which the march relapses came to
+      their abrupt end. Theron rose once more, and moved with a hesitating step
+      to the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to rest a little,&rdquo; he said, with his hand on her shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whew! so do I,&rdquo; exclaimed Celia, letting her hands fall with an
+      exaggerated gesture of weariness. &ldquo;The sonatas take it out of one! They
+      are hideously difficult, you know. They are rarely played.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know,&rdquo; remarked Theron. She seemed not to mind his hand upon her
+      shoulder, and he kept it there. &ldquo;I didn't know anything about music at
+      all. What I do know now is that&mdash;that this evening is an event in my
+      life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up at him and smiled. He read unsuspected tendernesses and
+      tolerances of friendship in the depths of her eyes, which emboldened him
+      to stir the fingers of that audacious hand in a lingering, caressing trill
+      upon her shoulder. The movement was of the faintest, but having ventured
+      it, he drew his hand abruptly away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are getting on,&rdquo; she said to him. There was an enigmatic twinkle in
+      the smile with which she continued to regard him. &ldquo;We are Hellenizing you
+      at a great rate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden thought seemed to strike her. She shifted her eyes toward vacancy
+      with a swift, abstracted glance, reflected for a moment, then let a
+      sparkling half-wink and the dimpling beginnings of an almost roguish smile
+      mark her assent to the conceit, whatever it might be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will be with you in a moment,&rdquo; he heard her say; and while the words
+      were still in his ears she had risen and passed out of sight through the
+      broad, open doorway to the right. The looped curtains fell together behind
+      her. Presently a mellow light spread over their delicately translucent
+      surface&mdash;a creamy, undulating radiance which gave the effect of
+      moving about among the myriad folds of the silk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron gazed at these curtains for a little, then straightened his
+      shoulders with a gesture of decision, and, turning on his heel, went over
+      and examined the statues in the further corners minutely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you would like some more, I will play you the Berceuse now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice came to him with a delicious shock. He wheeled round and beheld
+      her standing at the piano, with one hand resting, palm upward, on the
+      keys. She was facing him. Her tall form was robed now in some shapeless,
+      clinging drapery, lustrous and creamy and exquisitely soft, like the
+      curtains. The wonderful hair hung free and luxuriant about her neck and
+      shoulders, and glowed with an intensity of fiery color which made all the
+      other hues of the room pale and vague. A fillet of faint, sky-like blue
+      drew a gracious span through the flame of red above her temples, and from
+      this there rose the gleam of jewels. Her head inclined gently, gravely,
+      toward him&mdash;with the posture of that armless woman in marble he had
+      been studying&mdash;and her brown eyes, regarding him from the shadows,
+      emitted light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a lullaby&mdash;the only one he wrote,&rdquo; she said, as Theron,
+      pale-faced and with tightened lips, approached her. &ldquo;No&mdash;you mustn't
+      stand there,&rdquo; she added, sinking into the seat before the instrument; &ldquo;go
+      back and sit where you were.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The most perfect of lullabies, with its swaying abandonment to cooing
+      rhythm, ever and again rising in ripples to the point of insisting on
+      something, one knows not what, and then rocking, melting away once more,
+      passed, so to speak, over Theron's head. He leaned back upon the cushions,
+      and watched the white, rounded forearm which the falling folds of this
+      strange, statue-like drapery made bare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was more that appealed to his mood in the Third Ballade. It seemed
+      to him that there were words going along with it&mdash;incoherent and
+      impulsive yet very earnest words, appealing to him in strenuous argument
+      and persuasion. Each time he almost knew what they said, and strained
+      after their meaning with a passionate desire, and then there would come a
+      kind of cuckoo call, and everything would swing dancing off again into a
+      mockery of inconsequence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon the silence there fell the pure, liquid, mellifluous melody of a
+      soft-throated woman singing to her lover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is like Heine&mdash;simply a love-poem,&rdquo; said the girl, over her
+      shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron followed now with all his senses, as she carried the Ninth Nocturne
+      onward. The stormy passage, which she banged finely forth, was in truth a
+      lover's quarrel; and then the mild, placid flow of sweet harmonies into
+      which the furore sank, dying languorously away upon a silence all alive
+      with tender memories of sound&mdash;was that not also a part of love?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They sat motionless through a minute&mdash;the man on the divan, the girl
+      at the piano&mdash;and Theron listened for what he felt must be the
+      audible thumping of his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, throwing back her head, with upturned face, Celia began what she had
+      withheld for the last&mdash;the Sixteenth Mazurka. This strange foreign
+      thing she played with her eyes closed, her head tilted obliquely so that
+      Theron could see the rose-tinted, beautiful countenance, framed as if
+      asleep in the billowing luxuriance of unloosed auburn hair. He fancied her
+      beholding visions as she wrought the music&mdash;visions full of barbaric
+      color and romantic forms. As his mind swam along with the gliding, tricksy
+      phantom of a tune, it seemed as if he too could see these visions&mdash;as
+      if he gazed at them through her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It could not be helped. He lifted himself noiselessly to his feet, and
+      stole with caution toward her. He would hear the rest of this weird,
+      voluptuous fantasy standing thus, so close behind her that he could look
+      down upon her full, uplifted lace&mdash;so close that, if she moved, that
+      glowing nimbus of hair would touch him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been some curious and awkward pauses in this last piece, which
+      Theron, by some side cerebration, had put down to her not watching what
+      her fingers did. There came another of these pauses now&mdash;an odd,
+      unaccountable halt in what seemed the middle of everything. He stared
+      intently down upon her statuesque, dreaming face during the hush, and
+      caught his breath as he waited. There fell at last a few faltering
+      ascending notes, making a half-finished strain, and then again there was
+      silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia opened her eyes, and poured a direct, deep gaze into the face above
+      hers. Its pale lips were parted in suspense, and the color had faded from
+      its cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is the end,&rdquo; she said, and, with a turn of her lithe body, stood
+      swiftly up, even while the echoes of the broken melody seemed panting in
+      the air about her for completion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron put his hands to his face, and pressed them tightly against eyes
+      and brow for an instant. Then, throwing them aside with an expansive
+      downward sweep of the arms, and holding them clenched, he returned Celia's
+      glance. It was as if he had never looked into a woman's eyes before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It CAN'T be the end!&rdquo; he heard himself saying, in a low voice charged
+      with deep significance. He held her gaze in the grasp of his with
+      implacable tenacity. There was a trouble about breathing, and the mosaic
+      floor seemed to stir under his feet. He clung defiantly to the one idea of
+      not releasing her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How COULD it be the end?&rdquo; he demanded, lifting an uncertain hand to his
+      breast as he spoke, and spreading it there as if to control the tumultuous
+      fluttering of his heart. &ldquo;Things don't end that way!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sharp, blinding spasm of giddiness closed upon and shook him, while the
+      brave words were on his lips. He blinked and tottered under it, as it
+      passed, and then backed humbly to his divan and sat down, gasping a
+      little, and patting his hand on his heart. There was fright written all
+      over his whitened face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We&mdash;we forgot that I am a sick man,&rdquo; he said feebly, answering
+      Celia's look of surprised inquiry with a forced, wan smile. &ldquo;I was afraid
+      my heart had gone wrong.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She scrutinized him for a further moment, with growing reassurance in her
+      air. Then, piling up the pillows and cushions behind him for support, for
+      all the world like a big sister again, she stepped into the inner room,
+      and returned with a flagon of quaint shape and a tiny glass. She poured
+      this latter full to the brim of a thick yellowish, aromatic liquid, and
+      gave it him to drink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This Benedictine is all I happen to have,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Swallow it down. It
+      will do you good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron obeyed her. It brought tears to his eyes; but, upon reflection, it
+      was grateful and warming. He did feel better almost immediately. A great
+      wave of comfort seemed to enfold him as he settled himself back on the
+      divan. For that one flashing instant he had thought that he was dying. He
+      drew a long grateful breath of relief, and smiled his content.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia had seated herself beside him, a little away. She sat with her head
+      against the wall, and one foot curled under her, and almost faced him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare say we forced the pace a little,&rdquo; she remarked, after a pause,
+      looking down at the floor, with the puckers of a ruminating amusement
+      playing in the corners of her mouth. &ldquo;It doesn't do for a man to get to be
+      a Greek all of a sudden. He must work along up to it gradually.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He remembered the music. &ldquo;Oh, if I only knew how to tell you,&rdquo; he murmured
+      ecstatically, &ldquo;what a revelation your playing has been to me! I had never
+      imagined anything like it. I shall think of it to my dying day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to remember as well the spirit that was in the air when the music
+      ended. The details of what he had felt and said rose vaguely in his mind.
+      Pondering them, his eye roved past Celia's white-robed figure to the
+      broad, open doorway beyond. The curtains behind which she had disappeared
+      were again parted and fastened back. A dim light was burning within, out
+      of sight, and its faint illumination disclosed a room filled with white
+      marbles, white silks, white draperies of varying sorts, which shaped
+      themselves, as he looked, into the canopy and trappings of an
+      extravagantly over-sized and sumptuous bed. He looked away again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you would tell me what you really mean by that Greek idea of
+      yours,&rdquo; he said with the abruptness of confusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia did not display much enthusiasm in the tone of her answer. &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; she
+      said almost indifferently, &ldquo;lots of things. Absolute freedom from moral
+      bugbears, for one thing. The recognition that beauty is the only thing in
+      life that is worth while. The courage to kick out of one's life everything
+      that isn't worth while; and so on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; said Theron, watching the mingled delicacy and power of the bared
+      arm and the shapely grace of the hand which she had lifted to her face, &ldquo;I
+      am going to get you to teach it ALL to me.&rdquo; The memories began crowding in
+      upon him now, and the baffling note upon which the mazurka had stopped
+      short chimed like a tuning-fork in his ears. &ldquo;I want to be a Greek myself,
+      if you're one. I want to get as close to you&mdash;to your ideal, that is,
+      as I can. You open up to me a whole world that I had not even dreamed
+      existed. We swore our friendship long ago, you know: and now, after
+      tonight&mdash;you and the music have decided me. I am going to put the
+      things out of MY life that are not worthwhile. Only you must help me; you
+      must tell me how to begin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked up as he spoke, to enforce the almost tender entreaty of his
+      words. The spectacle of a yawn, only fractionally concealed behind those
+      talented fingers, chilled his soft speech, and sent a flush over his face.
+      He rose on the instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia was nothing abashed at his discovery. She laughed gayly in
+      confession of her fault, and held her hand out to let him help her
+      disentangle her foot from her draperies, and get off the divan. It seemed
+      to be her meaning that he should continue holding her hand after she was
+      also standing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You forgive me, don't you?&rdquo; she urged smilingly. &ldquo;Chopin always first
+      excites me, then sends me to sleep. You see how YOU sleep tonight!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The brown, velvety eyes rested upon him, from under their heavy lids, with
+      a languorous kindliness. Her warm, large palm clasped his in frank liking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to sleep at all,&rdquo; Mr. Ware was impelled to say. &ldquo;I want to
+      lie awake and think about&mdash;about everything all over again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled drowsily. &ldquo;And you're sure you feel strong enough to walk
+      home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he replied, with a lingering dilatory note, which deepened upon
+      reflection into a sigh. &ldquo;Oh, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He followed her and her candle down the magnificent stairway again. She
+      blew the light out in the hall, and, opening the front door, stood with
+      him for a silent moment on the threshold. Then they shook hands once more,
+      and with a whispered good-night, parted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia, returning to the blue and yellow room, lighted a cigarette and
+      helped herself to some Benedictine in the glass which Theron had used. She
+      looked meditatively at this little glass for a moment, turning it about in
+      her fingers with a smile. The smile warmed itself suddenly into a joyous
+      laugh. She tossed the glass aside, and, holding out her flowing skirts
+      with both hands, executed a swinging pirouette in front of the gravely
+      beautiful statue of the armless woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was apparent to the Rev. Theron Ware, from the very first moment of
+      waking next morning, that both he and the world had changed over night.
+      The metamorphosis, in the harsh toils of which he had been laboring
+      blindly so long, was accomplished. He stood forth, so to speak, in a new
+      skin, and looked about him, with perceptions of quite an altered kind,
+      upon what seemed in every way a fresh existence. He lacked even the
+      impulse to turn round and inspect the cocoon from which he had emerged.
+      Let the past bury the past. He had no vestige of interest in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The change was not premature. He found himself not in the least confused
+      by it, or frightened. Before he had finished shaving, he knew himself to
+      be easily and comfortably at home in his new state, and master of all its
+      requirements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed as if Alice, too, recognized that he had become another man,
+      when he went down and took his chair at the breakfast table. They had
+      exchanged no words since their parting in the depot-yard the previous
+      evening&mdash;an event now faded off into remote vagueness in Theron's
+      mind. He smiled brilliantly in answer to the furtive, half-sullen,
+      half-curious glance she stole at him, as she brought the dishes in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! potatoes warmed up in cream!&rdquo; he said, with hearty pleasure in his
+      tone. &ldquo;What a mind-reader you are, to be sure!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm glad you're feeling so much better,&rdquo; she said briefly, taking her
+      seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better?&rdquo; he returned. &ldquo;I'm a new being!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She ventured to look him over more freely, upon this assurance. He
+      perceived and catalogued, one by one, the emotions which the small brain
+      was expressing through those shallow blue eyes of hers. She was turning
+      over this, that, and the other hostile thought and childish grievance&mdash;most
+      of all she was dallying with the idea of asking him where he had been till
+      after midnight. He smiled affably in the face of this scattering fire of
+      peevish glances, and did not dream of resenting any phase of them all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going down to Thurston's this morning, and order that piano sent up
+      today,&rdquo; he announced presently, in a casual way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, Theron, can we afford it?&rdquo; the wife asked, regarding him with
+      surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, easily enough,&rdquo; he replied light-heartedly. &ldquo;You know they've
+      increased my salary.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head. &ldquo;No, I didn't. How should I? You don't realize it,&rdquo;
+       she went on, dolefully, &ldquo;but you're getting so you don't tell me the least
+      thing about your affairs nowadays.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron laughed aloud. &ldquo;You ought to be grateful&mdash;such melancholy
+      affairs as mine have been till now,&rdquo; he declared&mdash;&ldquo;that is, if it
+      weren't absurd to think such a thing.&rdquo; Then, more soberly, he explained:
+      &ldquo;No, my girl, it is you who don't realize. I am carrying big projects in
+      my mind&mdash;big, ambitious thoughts and plans upon which great things
+      depend. They no doubt make me seem preoccupied and absent-minded; but it
+      is a wife's part to understand, and make allowances, and not intrude
+      trifles which may throw everything out of gear. Don't think I'm scolding,
+      my girl. I only speak to reassure you and&mdash;and help you to
+      comprehend. Of course I know that you wouldn't willingly embarrass my&mdash;my
+      career.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course not,&rdquo; responded Alice, dubiously; &ldquo;but&mdash;but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what? Theron felt compelled by civility to say, though on the instant
+      he reproached himself for the weakness of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;I hardly know how to say it,&rdquo; she faltered, &ldquo;but it was nicer
+      in the old days, before you bothered your head about big projects, and
+      your career, as you call it, and were just a good, earnest, simple young
+      servant of the Lord. Oh, Theron!&rdquo; she broke forth suddenly, with tearful
+      zeal, &ldquo;I get sometimes lately almost scared lest you should turn out to be
+      a&mdash;a BACKSLIDER!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The husband sat upright, and hardened his countenance. But yesterday the
+      word would have had in it all sorts of inherited terrors for him. This
+      morning's dawn of a new existence revealed it as merely an empty and
+      stupid epithet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These are things not to be said,&rdquo; he admonished her, after a moment's
+      pause, and speaking with carefully measured austerity. &ldquo;Least of all are
+      they to be said to a clergyman&mdash;by his wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was on the tip of Alice's tongue to retort, &ldquo;Better by his wife than by
+      outsiders!&rdquo; but she bit her lips, and kept the gibe back. A rebuke of this
+      form and gravity was a novelty in their relations. The fear that it had
+      been merited troubled, even while it did not convince, her mind, and the
+      puzzled apprehension was to be read plainly enough on her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron, noting it, saw a good deal more behind. Really, it was amazing how
+      much wiser he had grown all at once. He had been married for years, and it
+      was only this morning that he suddenly discovered how a wife ought to be
+      handled. He continued to look sternly away into space for a little. Then
+      his brows relaxed slowly and under the visible influence of melting
+      considerations. He nodded his head, turned toward her abruptly, and broke
+      the silence with labored amiability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come&mdash;the day began so pleasantly&mdash;it was so good to feel
+      well again&mdash;let us talk about the piano instead. That is,&rdquo; he added,
+      with an obvious overture to playfulness, &ldquo;if the thought of having a piano
+      is not too distasteful to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice yielded almost effusively to his altered mood. They went together
+      into the sitting-room, to measure and decide between the two available
+      spaces which were at their disposal, and he insisted with resolute
+      magnanimity on her settling this question entirely by herself. When at
+      last he mentioned the fact that it was Friday, and he would look over some
+      sermon memoranda before he went out, Alice retired to the kitchen in
+      openly cheerful spirits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron spread some old manuscript sermons before him on his desk, and took
+      down his scribbling-book as well. But there his application flagged, and
+      he surrendered himself instead, chin on hand, to staring out at the
+      rhododendron in the yard. He recalled how he had seen Soulsby patiently
+      studying this identical bush. The notion of Soulsby, not knowing at all
+      how to sing, yet diligently learning those sixths, brought a smile to his
+      mind; and then he seemed to hear Celia calling out over her shoulder,
+      &ldquo;That's what Chopin does&mdash;he sings!&rdquo; The spirit of that wonderful
+      music came back to him, enfolded him in its wings. It seemed to raise
+      itself up&mdash;a palpable barrier between him and all that he had known
+      and felt and done before. That was his new birth&mdash;that marvellous
+      night with the piano. The conceit pleased him&mdash;not the less because
+      there flashed along with it the thought that it was a poet that had been
+      born. Yes; the former country lout, the narrow zealot, the untutored slave
+      groping about in the dark after silly superstitions, cringing at the scowl
+      of mean Pierces and Winches, was dead. There was an end of him, and good
+      riddance. In his place there had been born a Poet&mdash;he spelled the
+      word out now unabashed&mdash;a child of light, a lover of beauty and sweet
+      sounds, a recognizable brother to Renan and Chopin&mdash;and Celia!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of the soothing, tenderly grateful revery, a practical suggestion
+      suddenly took shape. He acted upon it without a moment's delay, getting
+      out his letter-pad, and writing hurriedly&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear Miss Madden,&mdash;Life will be more tolerable to me if before
+      nightfall I can know that there is a piano under my roof. Even if it
+      remains dumb, it will be some comfort to have it here and look at it, and
+      imagine how a great master might make it speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would it be too much to beg you to look in at Thurston's, say at eleven
+      this forenoon, and give me the inestimable benefit of your judgment in
+      selecting an instrument?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not trouble to answer this, for I am leaving home now, but shall call
+      at Thurston's at eleven, and wait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanking you in anticipation,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here Theron's fluency came to a sharp halt. There were adverbs enough and
+      to spare on the point of his pen, but the right one was not easy to come
+      at. &ldquo;Gratefully,&rdquo; &ldquo;faithfully,&rdquo; &ldquo;sincerely,&rdquo; &ldquo;truly&rdquo;&mdash;each in turn
+      struck a false note. He felt himself not quite any of these things. At
+      last he decided to write just the simple word &ldquo;yours,&rdquo; and then wavered
+      between satisfaction at his boldness, dread lest he had been over-bold,
+      and, worst of the lot, fear that she would not notice it one way or the
+      other&mdash;all the while he sealed and addressed the letter, put it
+      carefully in an inner pocket, and got his hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a moment's hesitation as to notifying the kitchen of his
+      departure. The interests of domestic discipline seemed to point the other
+      way. He walked softly through the hall, and let himself out by the front
+      door without a sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Down by the canal bridge he picked out an idle boy to his mind&mdash;a lad
+      whose aspect appeared to promise intelligence as a messenger, combined
+      with large impartiality in sectarian matters. He was to have ten cents on
+      his return; and he might report himself to his patron at the bookstore
+      yonder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron was grateful to the old bookseller for remaining at his desk in the
+      rear. There was a tacit compliment in the suggestion that he was not a
+      mere customer, demanding instant attention. Besides, there was no keeping
+      &ldquo;Thurston's&rdquo; out of conversations in this place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Loitering along the shelves, the young minister's eye suddenly found
+      itself arrested by a name on a cover. There were a dozen narrow volumes in
+      uniform binding, huddled together under a cardboard label of &ldquo;Eminent
+      Women Series.&rdquo; Oddly enough, one of these bore the title &ldquo;George Sand.&rdquo;
+       Theron saw there must be some mistake, as he took the book down, and
+      opened it. His glance hit by accident upon the name of Chopin. Then he
+      read attentively until almost the stroke of eleven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have to make ourselves acquainted with all sorts of queer phases of
+      life,&rdquo; he explained in self-defence to the old bookseller, then counting
+      out the money for the book from his lean purse. He smiled as he added,
+      &ldquo;There seems something almost wrong about taking advantage of the
+      clergyman's discount for a life of George Sand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; answered the other, pleasantly. &ldquo;Guess she wasn't so much
+      different from the rest of 'em&mdash;except that she didn't mind
+      appearances. We know about her. We don't know about the others.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must hurry,&rdquo; said Theron, turning on his heel. The haste with which he
+      strode out of the store, crossed the street, and made his way toward
+      Thurston's, did not prevent his thinking much upon the astonishing things
+      he had encountered in this book. Their relation to Celia forced itself
+      more and more upon his mind. He could recall the twinkle in her eye, the
+      sub-mockery in her tone, as she commented with that half-contemptuous &ldquo;Yes&mdash;George
+      something!&rdquo; upon his blundering ignorance. His mortification at having
+      thus exposed his dull rusticity was swallowed up in conjectures as to just
+      what her tolerant familiarity with such things involved. He had never
+      before met a young unmarried woman who would have confessed to him any
+      such knowledge. But then, of course, he had never known a girl who
+      resembled Celia in any other way. He recognized vaguely that he must
+      provide himself with an entire new set of standards by which to measure
+      and comprehend her. But it was for the moment more interesting to wonder
+      what her standards were. Did she object to George Sand's behavior? Or did
+      she sympathize with that sort of thing? Did those statues, and the
+      loose-flowing diaphonous toga and unbound hair, the cigarettes, the fiery
+      liqueur, the deliberately sensuous music&mdash;was he to believe that they
+      signified&mdash;?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-morning, Mr. Ware. You have managed by a miracle to hit on one of my
+      punctual days,&rdquo; said Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was standing on the doorstep, at the entrance to the musical
+      department of Thurston's. He had not noticed before the fact that the sun
+      was shining. The full glare of its strong light, enveloping her figure as
+      she stood, and drawing the dazzled eye for relief to the bower of softened
+      color, close beneath her parasol of creamy silk and lace, was what struck
+      him now first of all. It was as if Celia had brought the sun with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron shook hands with her, and found joy in the perception, that his own
+      hand trembled. He put boldly into words the thought that came to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was generous of you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to wait for me out here, where all
+      might delight in the sight of you, instead of squandering the privilege on
+      a handful of clerks inside.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Madden beamed upon him, and nodded approval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alcibiades never turned a prettier compliment,&rdquo; she remarked. They went
+      in together at this, and Theron made a note of the name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the ensuing half-hour, the young minister followed about even more
+      humbly than the clerks in Celia's commanding wake. There were a good many
+      pianos in the big show-room overhead, and Theron found himself almost awed
+      by their size and brilliancy of polish, and the thought of the tremendous
+      sum of money they represented altogether. Not so with the organist. She
+      ordered them rolled around this way or that, as if they had been so many
+      checkers on a draught-board. She threw back their covers with the scant
+      ceremony of a dispensary dentist opening paupers' mouths. She exploited
+      their several capacities with masterful hands, not deigning to seat
+      herself, but just slightly bending forward, and sweeping her fingers up
+      and down their keyboards&mdash;able, domineering fingers which pounded,
+      tinkled, meditated, assented, condemned, all in a flash, and amid what
+      affected the layman's ears as a hopelessly discordant hubbub.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron moved about in the group, nursing her parasol in his arms, and
+      watching her. The exaggerated deference which the clerks and salesmen
+      showed to her as the rich Miss Madden, seemed to him to be mixed with a
+      certain assertion of the claims of good-fellowship on the score of her
+      being a musician. There undoubtedly was a sense of freemasonry between
+      them. They alluded continually in technical terms to matters of which he
+      knew nothing, and were amused at remarks of hers which to him carried no
+      meaning whatever. It was evident that the young men liked her, and that
+      their liking pleased her. It thrilled him to think that she knew he liked
+      her, too, and to recall what abundant proofs she had given that here,
+      also, she had pleasure in the fact. He clung insistently to the memory of
+      these evidences. They helped him to resist a disagreeable tendency to feel
+      himself an intruder, an outsider, among these pianoforte experts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When it was all over, Celia waved the others aside, and talked with
+      Theron. &ldquo;I suppose you want me to tell you the truth,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;There's
+      nothing here really good. It is always much better to buy of the makers
+      direct.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do they sell on the instalment plan?&rdquo; he asked. There was a wistful
+      effect in his voice which caught her attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked away&mdash;out through the window on the street below&mdash;for
+      a moment. Then her eyes returned to his, and regarded him with a
+      comforting, friendly, half-motherly glance, recalling for all the world
+      the way Sister Soulsby had looked at him at odd times.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you want it at once&mdash;I see,&rdquo; she remarked softly. &ldquo;Well, this
+      Adelberger is the best value for the money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Ware followed her finger, and beheld with dismay that it pointed
+      toward the largest instrument in the room&mdash;a veritable leviathan
+      among pianos. The price of this had been mentioned as $600. He turned over
+      the fact that this was two-thirds his yearly salary, and found the courage
+      to shake his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be too large&mdash;much too large&mdash;for the room,&rdquo; he
+      explained. &ldquo;And, besides, it is more than I like to pay&mdash;or CAN pay,
+      for that matter.&rdquo; It was pitiful to be explaining such details, but there
+      was no help for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They picked out a smaller one, which Celia said was at least of fair
+      quality. &ldquo;Now leave all the bargaining to me,&rdquo; she adjured him. &ldquo;These
+      prices that they talk about in the piano trade are all in the air. There
+      are tremendous discounts, if one knows how to insist upon them. All you
+      have to do is to tell them to send it to your house&mdash;you wanted it
+      today, you said?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;in memory of yesterday,&rdquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She herself gave the directions, and Thurston's people, now all salesmen
+      again, bowed grateful acquiescence. Then she sailed regally across the
+      room and down the stairs, drawing Theron in her train. The hirelings made
+      salaams to him as well; it would have been impossible to interpose
+      anything so trivial and squalid as talk about terms and dates of payment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am ever so much obliged to you,&rdquo; he said fervently, in the comparative
+      solitude of the lower floor. She had paused to look at something in the
+      book-department.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I was entirely at your service; don't mention it,&rdquo; she replied,
+      reaching forth her hand in an absent way for her parasol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He held up instead the volume he had purchased. &ldquo;Guess what that is! You
+      never would guess in this wide world!&rdquo; His manner was surcharged with a
+      sense of the surreptitious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, there's no good trying, IS there?&rdquo; commented Celia, her
+      glance roving again toward the shelves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a life of George Sand,&rdquo; whispered Theron. &ldquo;I've been reading it
+      this morning&mdash;all the Chopin part&mdash;while I was waiting for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To his surprise, there was an apparently displeased contraction of her
+      brows as he made this revelation. For the instant, a dreadful fear of
+      having offended her seized upon and sickened him. But then her face
+      cleared, as by magic. She smiled, and let her eyes twinkle in laughter at
+      him, and lifted a forefinger in the most winning mockery of admonition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naughty! naughty!&rdquo; she murmured back, with a roguishly solemn wink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had no response ready for this, but mutely handed her the parasol. The
+      situation had suddenly grown too confused for words, or even sequent
+      thoughts. Uppermost across the hurly-burly of his mind there scudded the
+      singular reflection that he should never hear her play on that new piano
+      of his. Even as it flashed by out of sight, he recognized it for one of
+      the griefs of his life; and the darkness which followed seemed nothing but
+      a revolt against the idea of having a piano at all. He would countermand
+      the order. He would&mdash;but she was speaking again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had strolled toward the door, and her voice was as placidly
+      conventional as if the talk had never strayed from the subject of pianos.
+      Theron with an effort pulled himself together, and laid hold of her words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you will be going the other way,&rdquo; she was saying. &ldquo;I shall have
+      to be at the church all day. We have just got a new Mass over from Vienna,
+      and I'm head over heels in work at it. I can have Father Forbes to myself
+      today, too. That bear of a doctor has got the rheumatism, and can't come
+      out of his cave, thank Heaven!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then she was receding from view, up the sunlit, busy sidewalk, and
+      Theron, standing on the doorstep, ruefully rubbed his chin. She had said
+      he was going the other way, and, after a little pause, he made her words
+      good, though each step he took seemed all in despite of his personal
+      inclinations. Some of the passers-by bowed to him, and one or two paused
+      as if to shake hands and exchange greetings. He nodded responses
+      mechanically, but did not stop. It was as if he feared to interrupt the
+      process of lifting his reluctant feet and propelling them forward, lest
+      they should wheel and scuttle off in the opposite direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Deliberate as his progress was, the diminishing number of store-fronts
+      along the sidewalk, and the increasing proportion of picket-fences
+      enclosing domestic lawns, forced upon Theron's attention the fact that he
+      was nearing home. It was a trifle past the hour for his midday meal. He
+      was not in the least hungry; still less did he feel any desire just now to
+      sit about in that library living-room of his. Why should he go home at
+      all? There was no reason whatever&mdash;save that Alice would be expecting
+      him. Upon reflection, that hardly amounted to a reason. Wives, with their
+      limited grasp of the realities of life, were always expecting their
+      husbands to do things which it turned out not to be feasible for them to
+      do. The customary male animal spent a considerable part of his life in
+      explaining to his mate why it had been necessary to disappoint or upset
+      her little plans for his comings and goings. It was in the very nature of
+      things that it should be so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sustained by these considerations, Mr. Ware slackened his steps, then
+      halted irresolutely, and after a minute's hesitation, entered the small
+      temperance restaurant before which, as by intuition, he had paused. The
+      elderly woman who placed on the tiny table before him the tea and rolls he
+      ordered, was entirely unknown to him, he felt sure, yet none the less she
+      smiled at him, and spoke almost familiarly&mdash;&ldquo;I suppose Mrs. Ware is
+      at the seaside, and you are keeping bachelor's hall?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not quite that,&rdquo; he responded stiffly, and hurried through the meagre and
+      distasteful repast, to avoid any further conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an idea underlying her remark, however, which recurred to him
+      when he had paid his ten cents and got out on the street again. There was
+      something interesting in the thought of Alice at the seaside. Neither of
+      them had ever laid eyes on salt water, but Theron took for granted the
+      most extravagant landsman's conception of its curative and invigorating
+      powers. It was apparent to him that he was going to pay much greater
+      attention to Alice's happiness and well-being in the future than he had
+      latterly done. He had bought her, this very day, a superb new piano. He
+      was going to simply insist on her having a hired girl. And this seaside
+      notion&mdash;why, that was best of all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His fancy built up pleasant visions of her feasting her delighted eyes
+      upon the marvel of a great ocean storm, or roaming along a beach strewn
+      with wonderful marine shells, exhibiting an innocent joy in their beauty.
+      The fresh sea-breeze blew through her hair, as he saw her in mind's eye,
+      and brought the hardy flush of health back upon her rather pallid cheeks.
+      He was prepared already hardly to know her, so robust and revivified would
+      she have become, by the time he went down to the depot to meet her on her
+      return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For his imagination stopped short of seeing himself at the seaside. It
+      sketched instead pictures of whole weeks of solitary academic calm, alone
+      with his books and his thoughts. The facts that he had no books, and that
+      nobody dreamed of interfering with his thoughts, subordinated themselves
+      humbly to his mood. The prospect, as he mused fondly upon it, expanded to
+      embrace the priest's and the doctor's libraries; the thoughts which he
+      longed to be alone with involved close communion with their thoughts. It
+      could not but prove a season of immense mental stimulation and ethical
+      broadening. It would have its lofty poetic and artistic side as well; the
+      languorous melodies of Chopin stole over his revery, as he dwelt upon
+      these things, and soft azure and golden lights modelled forth the
+      exquisite outlines of tall marble forms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He opened the gate leading to Dr. Ledsmar's house. His walk had brought
+      him quite out of the town, and up, by a broad main highway which yet took
+      on all sorts of sylvan charms, to a commanding site on the hillside.
+      Below, in the valley, lay Octavius, at one end half-hidden in factory
+      smoke, at the other, where narrow bands of water gleamed upon the surface
+      of a broad plain piled symmetrically with lumber, presenting an oddly
+      incongruous suggestion of forest odors and the simplicity of the
+      wilderness. In the middle distance, on gradually rising ground, stretched
+      a wide belt of dense, artificial foliage, peeping through which tiled
+      turrets and ornamented chimneys marked the polite residences of those who,
+      though they neither stoked the furnace fires to the west, nor sawed the
+      lumber on the east, lived in purple and fine linen from the profits of
+      this toil. Nearer at hand, pastures with grazing cows on the one side of
+      the road, and the nigh, weather-stained board fence of the race-course on
+      the other, completed the jumble of primitive rusticity and urban
+      complications characterizing the whole picture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar's house, toward which Theron's impulses had been secretly
+      leading him ever since Celia's parting remark about the rheumatism, was of
+      that spacious and satisfying order of old-fashioned houses which men of
+      leisure and means built for themselves while the early traditions of a
+      sparse and contented homogeneous population were still strong in the
+      Republic. There was a hospitable look about its wide veranda, its broad,
+      low bulk, and its big, double front door, which did not fit at all with
+      the sketch of a man-hating recluse that the doctor had drawn of himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had prepared his mind for the effect of being admitted by a
+      Chinaman, and was taken somewhat aback when the door was opened by the
+      doctor himself. His reception was pleasant enough, almost cordial, but the
+      sense of awkwardness followed him into his host's inner room and rested
+      heavily upon his opening speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard, quite by accident, that you were ill,&rdquo; he said, laying aside his
+      hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's nothing at all,&rdquo; replied Ledsmar. &ldquo;Merely a stiff shoulder that I
+      wear from time to time in memory of my father. It ought to be quite gone
+      by nightfall. It was good of you to come, all the same. Sit down if you
+      can find a chair. As usual, we are littered up to our eyes here. That's it&mdash;throw
+      those things on the floor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Ware carefully deposited an armful of pamphlets on the rug at his
+      feet, and sat down. Litter was indeed the word for what he saw about him.
+      Bookcases, chairs, tables, the corners of the floor, were all buried deep
+      under disorderly strata of papers, diagrams, and opened books. One could
+      hardly walk about without treading on them. The dust which danced up into
+      the bar of sunshine streaming in from the window, as the doctor stepped
+      across to another chair, gave Theron new ideas about the value of Chinese
+      servants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must thank you, first of all, doctor,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;for your kindness in
+      coming when I was ill. 'I was sick, and ye visited me.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mustn't think of it that way,&rdquo; said Ledsmar; &ldquo;your friend came for
+      me, and of course I went; and gladly too. There was nothing that I could
+      do, or that anybody could do. Very interesting man, that friend of yours.
+      And his wife, too&mdash;both quite out of the common. I don't know when
+      I've seen two such really genuine people. I should like to have known more
+      of them. Are they still here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They went yesterday,&rdquo; Theron replied. His earlier shyness had worn off,
+      and he felt comfortably at his ease. &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;that the
+      word 'genuine' is just what would have occurred to me to describe the
+      Soulsbys. They are very interesting people, as you say&mdash;MOST
+      interesting&mdash;and there was a time, I dare say, when I should have
+      believed in their sincerity. But of course I saw them and their
+      performance from the inside&mdash;like one on the stage of a theatre, you
+      know, instead of in the audience, and&mdash;well, I understand things
+      better than I used to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor looked over his spectacles at him with a suggestion of inquiry
+      in his glance, and Theron continued: &ldquo;I had several long talks with her;
+      she told me very frankly the whole story of her life&mdash;and and it was
+      decidedly queer, I can assure you! I may say to you&mdash;you will
+      understand what I mean&mdash;that since my talk with you, and the books
+      you lent me, I see many things differently. Indeed, when I think upon it
+      sometimes my old state of mind seems quite incredible to me. I can use no
+      word for my new state short of illumination.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar continued to regard his guest with that calm, interrogatory
+      scrutiny of his. He did not seem disposed to take up the great issue of
+      illumination. &ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; he said after a little, &ldquo;no woman can come in
+      contact with a priest for any length of time WITHOUT telling him the
+      'story of her life,' as you call it. They all do it. The thing amounts to
+      a law.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister's veins responded with a pleasurable thrill to the use
+      of the word &ldquo;priest&rdquo; in obvious allusion to himself. &ldquo;Perhaps in fairness
+      I ought to explain,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that in her case it was only done in the
+      course of a long talk about myself. I might say that it was by way of
+      kindly warning to me. She saw how I had become unsettled in many&mdash;many
+      of my former views&mdash;and she was nervous lest this should lead me to&mdash;to&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To throw up the priesthood,&rdquo; the doctor interposed upon his hesitation.
+      &ldquo;Yes, I know the tribe. Why, my dear sir, your entire profession would
+      have perished from the memory of mankind, if it hadn't been for women. It
+      is a very curious subject. Lots of thinkers have dipped into it, but no
+      one has gone resolutely in with a search-light and exploited the whole
+      thing. Our boys, for instance, traverse in their younger years all the
+      stages of the childhood of the race. They have terrifying dreams of awful
+      monsters and giant animals of which they have never so much as heard in
+      their waking hours; they pass through the lust for digging caves, building
+      fires, sleeping out in the woods, hunting with bows and arrows&mdash;all
+      remote ancestral impulses; they play games with stones, marbles, and so on
+      at regular stated periods of the year which they instinctively know, just
+      as they were played in the Bronze Age, and heaven only knows how much
+      earlier. But the boy goes through all this, and leaves it behind him&mdash;so
+      completely that the grown man feels himself more a stranger among boys of
+      his own place who are thinking and doing precisely the things he thought
+      and did a few years before, than he would among Kurds or Esquimaux. But
+      the woman is totally different. She is infinitely more precocious as a
+      girl. At an age when her slow brother is still stubbing along somewhere in
+      the neolithic period, she has flown way ahead to a kind of mediaeval
+      stage, or dawn of mediaevalism, which is peculiarly her own. Having got
+      there, she stays there; she dies there. The boy passes her, as the
+      tortoise did the hare. He goes on, if he is a philosopher, and lets her
+      remain in the dark ages, where she belongs. If he happens to be a fool,
+      which is customary, he stops and hangs around in her vicinity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron smiled. &ldquo;We priests,&rdquo; he said, and paused again to enjoy the words&mdash;&ldquo;I
+      suppose I oughtn't to inquire too closely just where we belong in the
+      procession.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are considering the question impersonally,&rdquo; said the doctor. &ldquo;First of
+      all, what you regard as religion is especially calculated to attract
+      women. They remain as superstitious today, down in the marrow of their
+      bones, as they were ten thousand years ago. Even the cleverest of them are
+      secretly afraid of omens, and respect auguries. Think of the broadest
+      women you know. One of them will throw salt over her shoulder if she
+      spills it. Another drinks money from her cup by skimming the bubbles in a
+      spoon. Another forecasts her future by the arrangement of tea-grounds.
+      They make the constituency to which an institution based on mysteries,
+      miracles, and the supernatural generally, would naturally appeal.
+      Secondly, there is the personality of the priest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; assented Ware. There rose up before him, on the instant, the
+      graceful, portly figure and strong, comely face of Father Forbes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Women are not a metaphysical people. They do not easily follow
+      abstractions. They want their dogmas and religious sentiments embodied in
+      a man, just as they do their romantic fancies. Of course you Protestants,
+      with your married clergy, see less of the effects of this than celibates
+      do, but even with you there is a great deal in it. Why, the very
+      institution of celibacy itself was forced upon the early Christian Church
+      by the scandal of rich Roman ladies loading bishops and handsome priests
+      with fabulous gifts until the passion for currying favor with women of
+      wealth, and marrying them or wheedling their fortunes from them, debauched
+      the whole priesthood. You should read your Jerome.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will&mdash;certainly,&rdquo; said the listener, resolving to remember the
+      name and refer it to the old bookseller.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, whatever laws one sect or another makes, the woman's attitude
+      toward the priest survives. She desires to see him surrounded by
+      flower-pots and candles, to have him smelling of musk. She would like to
+      curl his hair, and weave garlands in it. Although she is not learned
+      enough to have ever heard of such things, she intuitively feels in his
+      presence a sort of backwash of the old pagan sensuality and lascivious
+      mysticism which enveloped the priesthood in Greek and Roman days. Ugh! It
+      makes one sick!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar rose, as he spoke, and dismissed the topic with a dry little
+      laugh. &ldquo;Come, let me show you round a bit,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;My shoulder is
+      easier walking than sitting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you never written a book yourself?&rdquo; asked Theron, getting to his
+      feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a thing on serpent-worship,&rdquo; the scientist replied&mdash;&ldquo;written
+      years ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't tell you how I should enjoy reading it,&rdquo; urged the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor laughed again. &ldquo;You'll have to learn German, then, I 'm afraid.
+      It is still in circulation in Germany, I believe, on its merits as a
+      serious book. I haven't a copy of the edition in English. THAT was all
+      exhausted by collectors who bought it for its supposed obscenity, like
+      Burton's 'Arabian Nights.' Come this way, and I will show you my
+      laboratory.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They moved out of the room, and through a passage, Ledsmar talking as he
+      led the way. &ldquo;I took up that subject, when I was at college, by a curious
+      chance. I kept a young monkey in my rooms, which had been born in
+      captivity. I brought home from a beer hall&mdash;it was in Germany&mdash;some
+      pretzels one night, and tossed one toward the monkey. He jumped toward it,
+      then screamed and ran back shuddering with fright. I couldn't understand
+      it at first. Then I saw that the curled pretzel, lying there on the floor,
+      was very like a little coiled-up snake. The monkey had never seen a snake,
+      but it was in his blood to be afraid of one. That incident changed my
+      whole life for me. Up to that evening, I had intended to be a lawyer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron did not feel sure that he had understood the point of the anecdote.
+      He looked now, without much interest, at some dark little tanks containing
+      thick water, a row of small glass cases with adders and other lesser
+      reptiles inside, and a general collection of boxes, jars, and similar
+      receptacles connected with the doctor's pursuits. Further on was a smaller
+      chamber, with a big empty furnace, and shelves bearing bottles and
+      apparatus like a drugstore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was pleasanter in the conservatory&mdash;a low, spacious structure with
+      broad pathways between the plants, and an awning over the sunny side of
+      the roof. The plants were mostly orchids, he learned. He had read of them,
+      but never seen any before. No doubt they were curious; but he discovered
+      nothing to justify the great fuss made about them. The heat grew
+      oppressive inside, and he was glad to emerge into the garden. He paused
+      under the grateful shade of a vine-clad trellis, took off his hat, and
+      looked about him with a sigh of relief. Everything seemed old-fashioned
+      and natural and delightfully free from pretence in the big, overgrown
+      field of flowers and shrubs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron recalled with some surprise Celia's indictment of the doctor as a
+      man with no poetry in his soul. &ldquo;You must be extremely fond of flowers,&rdquo;
+       he remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar shrugged his well shoulder. &ldquo;They have their points,&rdquo; he said
+      briefly. &ldquo;These are all dioecious here. Over beyond are monoecious
+      species. My work is to test the probabilities for or against Darwin's
+      theory that hermaphroditism in plants is a late by-product of these
+      earlier forms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And is his theory right?&rdquo; asked Mr. Ware, with a polite show of interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We may know in the course of three or four hundred years,&rdquo; replied
+      Ledsmar. He looked up into his guest's face with a quizzical half-smile.
+      &ldquo;That is a very brief period for observation when such a complicated
+      question as sex is involved,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;We have been studying the female
+      of our own species for some hundreds of thousands of years, and we haven't
+      arrived at the most elementary rules governing her actions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They had moved along to a bed of tall plants, the more forward of which
+      were beginning to show bloom. &ldquo;Here another task will begin next month,&rdquo;
+       the doctor observed. &ldquo;These are salvias, pentstemons, and antirrhinums, or
+      snapdragons, planted very thick for the purpose. Humble-bees bore holes
+      through their base, to save the labor of climbing in and out of the
+      flowers, and we don't quite know yet why some hive-bees discover and
+      utilize these holes at once, while others never do. It may be merely the
+      old-fogy conservatism of the individual, or there may be a law in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These seemed very paltry things for a man of such wisdom to bother his
+      head about. Theron looked, as he was bidden, at the rows of hives shining
+      in the hot sun on a bench along the wall, but offered no comment beyond a
+      casual, &ldquo;My mother was always going to keep bees, but somehow she never
+      got around to it. They say it pays very well, though.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The discovery of the reason why no bee will touch the nectar of the
+      EPIPACTIS LATIFOLIA, though it is sweet to our taste, and wasps are greedy
+      for it, WOULD pay,&rdquo; commented the doctor. &ldquo;Not like a blue rhododendron,
+      in mere money, but in recognition. Lots of men have achieved a half-column
+      in the 'Encyclopedia Britannica' on a smaller basis than that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood now at the end of the garden, before a small, dilapidated
+      summer-house. On the bench inside, facing him, Theron saw a strange
+      recumbent figure stretched at full length, apparently sound asleep, or it
+      might be dead. Looking closer, with a startled surprise, he made out the
+      shaven skull and outlandish garb of a Chinaman. He turned toward his guide
+      in the expectation of a scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor had already taken out a note-book and pencil, and was drawing
+      his watch from his pocket. He stepped into the summer-house, and, lifting
+      the Oriental's limp arm, took account of his pulse. Then, with head bowed
+      low, side-wise, he listened for the heart-action. Finally, he somewhat
+      brusquely pushed back one of the Chinaman's eyelids, and made a minute
+      inspection of what the operation disclosed. Returning to the light, he
+      inscribed some notes in his book, put it back in his pocket, and came out.
+      In answer to Theron's marvelling stare, he pointed toward a pipe of odd
+      construction lying on the floor beneath the sleeper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is one of my regular afternoon duties,&rdquo; he explained, again with the
+      whimsical half-smile. &ldquo;I am increasing his dose monthly by regular stages,
+      and the results promise to be rather remarkable. Heretofore, observations
+      have been made mostly on diseased or morbidly deteriorated subjects. This
+      fellow of mine is strong as an ox, perfectly nourished, and watched over
+      intelligently. He can assimilate opium enough to kill you and me and every
+      other vertebrate creature on the premises, without turning a hair, and he
+      hasn't got even fairly under way yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing was unpleasant, and the young minister turned away. They walked
+      together up the path toward the house. His mind was full now of the
+      hostile things which Celia had said about the doctor. He had vaguely
+      sympathized with her then, upon no special knowledge of his own. Now he
+      felt that his sentiments were vehemently in accord with hers. The doctor
+      WAS a beast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet&mdash;as they moved slowly along through the garden the thought
+      took sudden shape in his mind&mdash;it would be only justice for him to
+      get also the doctor's opinion of Celia. Even while they offended and
+      repelled him, he could not close his eyes to the fact that the doctor's
+      experiments and occupations were those of a patient and exact man of
+      science&mdash;a philosopher. And what he had said about women&mdash;there
+      was certainly a great deal of acumen and shrewd observation in that. If he
+      would only say what he really thought about Celia, and about her relations
+      with the priest! Yes, Theron recognized now there was nothing else that he
+      so much needed light upon as those puzzling ties between Celia and Father
+      Forbes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, with a simulated curiosity, about one of the flower-beds.
+      &ldquo;Speaking of women and religion&rdquo;&mdash;he began, in as casual a tone as he
+      could command&mdash;&ldquo;I notice curiously enough in my own case, that as I
+      develop in what you may call the&mdash;the other direction, my wife, who
+      formerly was not especially devote, is being strongly attracted by the
+      most unthinking and hysterical side of&mdash;of our church system.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor looked at him, nodded, and stooped to nip some buds from a
+      stalk in the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And another case,&rdquo; Theron went on&mdash;&ldquo;of course it was all so new and
+      strange to me&mdash;but the position which Miss Madden seems to occupy
+      about the Catholic Church here&mdash;I suppose you had her in mind when
+      you spoke.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ledsmar stood up. &ldquo;My mind has better things to busy itself with than mad
+      asses of that description,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;She is not worth talking about&mdash;a
+      mere bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed lewdness. If she were
+      even a type, she might be worth considering; but she is simply an abnormal
+      sport, with a little brain addled by notions that she is like Hypatia, and
+      a large impudence rendered intolerable by the fact that she has money. Her
+      father is a decent man. He ought to have her whipped.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Ware drew himself erect, as he listened to these outrageous words. It
+      would be unmanly, he felt, to allow such comments upon an absent friend to
+      pass unrebuked. Yet there was the courtesy due to a host to be considered.
+      His mind, fluttering between these two extremes, alighted abruptly upon a
+      compromise. He would speak so as to show his disapproval, yet not so as to
+      prevent his finding out what he wanted to know. The desire to hear Ledsmar
+      talk about Celia and the priest seemed now to have possessed him for a
+      long time, to have dictated his unpremeditated visit out here, to have
+      been growing in intensity all the while he pretended to be interested in
+      orchids and bees and the drugged Chinaman. It tugged passionately at his
+      self-control as he spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot in the least assent to your characterization of the lady,&rdquo; he
+      began with rhetorical dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bless me!&rdquo; interposed the doctor, with deceptive cheerfulness, &ldquo;that is
+      not required of you at all. It is a strictly personal opinion, offered
+      merely as a contribution to the general sum of hypotheses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; Theron went on, feeling his way, &ldquo;of course, I gathered that
+      evening that you had prejudices in the matter; but these are rather apart
+      from the point I had in view. We were speaking, you will remember, of the
+      traditional attitude of women toward priests&mdash;wanting to curl their
+      hair and put flowers in it, you know, and that suggested to me some
+      individual illustrations, and it occurred to me to wonder just what were
+      the relations between Miss Madden and&mdash;and Father Forbes. She said
+      this morning, for instance&mdash;I happened to meet her, quite by accident&mdash;that
+      she was going to the church to practise a new piece, and that she could
+      have Father Forbes to herself all day. Now that would be quite an
+      impossible remark in our&mdash;that is, in any Protestant circles&mdash;and
+      purely as a matter of comparison, I was curious to ask you just how much
+      there was in it. I ask you, because going there so much you have had
+      exceptional opportunities for&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sharp exclamation from his companion interrupted the clergyman's
+      hesitating monologue. It began like a high-pitched, violent word, but
+      dwindled suddenly into a groan of pain. The doctor's face, too, which had
+      on the flash of Theron's turning seemed given over to unmixed anger, took
+      on an expression of bodily suffering instead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My shoulder has grown all at once excessively painful,&rdquo; he said hastily.
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid I must ask you to excuse me, Mr. Ware.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Carrying the afflicted side with ostentatious caution, he led the way
+      without ado round the house to the front gate on the road. He had put his
+      left hand under his coat to press it against his aching shoulder, and his
+      right hung palpably helpless. This rendered it impossible for him to shake
+      hands with his guest in parting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're sure there's nothing I can do,&rdquo; said Theron, lingering on the
+      outer side of the gate. &ldquo;I used to rub my father's shoulders and back; I'd
+      gladly&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, not for worlds!&rdquo; groaned the doctor. His anguish was so impressive
+      that Theron, as he walked down the road, quite missed the fact that there
+      had been no invitation to come again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar stood for a minute or two, his gaze meditatively following the
+      retreating figure. Then he went in, opening the front door with his right
+      hand, and carrying himself once more as if there were no such thing as
+      rheumatism in the world. He wandered on through the hall into the
+      laboratory, and stopped in front of the row of little tanks full of water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some deliberation was involved in whatever his purpose might be, for he
+      looked from one tank to another with a pondering, dilatory gaze. At last
+      he plunged his hand into the opaque fluid and drew forth a long, slim,
+      yellowish-green lizard, with a coiling, sinuous tail and a pointed, evil
+      head. The reptile squirmed and doubled itself backward around his wrist,
+      darting out and in with dizzy swiftness its tiny forked tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor held the thing up to the light, and, scrutinizing it through
+      his spectacles, nodded his head in sedate approval. A grim smile curled in
+      his beard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you are the type,&rdquo; he murmured to it, with evident enjoyment in the
+      conceit. &ldquo;Your name isn't Johnny any more. It's the Rev. Theron Ware.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The annual camp-meeting of the combined Methodist districts of Octavius
+      and Thessaly was held this year in the second half of September, a little
+      later than usual. Of the nine days devoted to this curious survival of
+      primitive Wesleyanism, the fifth fell upon a Saturday. On the noon of that
+      day the Rev. Theron Ware escaped for some hours from the burden of work
+      and incessant observation which he shared with twenty other preachers, and
+      walked alone in the woods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The scene upon which he turned his back was one worth looking at. A
+      spacious, irregularly defined clearing in the forest lay level as a
+      tennis-court, under the soft haze of autumn sunlight. In the centre was a
+      large, roughly constructed frame building, untouched by paint, but stained
+      and weather-beaten with time. Behind it were some lines of horse-sheds,
+      and still further on in that direction, where the trees began, the eye
+      caught fragmentary glimpses of low roofs and the fronts of tiny cottages,
+      withdrawn from full view among the saplings and underbrush. At the other
+      side of the clearing, fully fourscore tents were pitched, some gray and
+      mended, others dazzlingly white in their newness. The more remote of these
+      tents fell into an orderly arrangement of semi-circular form, facing that
+      part of the engirdling woods where the trees were largest, and their
+      canopy of overhanging foliage was lifted highest from the ground. Inside
+      this half-ring of tents were many rounded rows of benches, which followed
+      in narrowing lines the idea of an amphitheatre cut in two. In the centre,
+      just under the edge of the roof of boughs, rose a wooden pagoda, in form
+      not unlike an open-air stand for musicians. In front of this, and leading
+      from it on the level of its floor, there projected a platform, railed
+      round with aggressively rustic woodwork. The nearest benches came close
+      about this platform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the hour when Theron started away, there were few enough signs of life
+      about this encampment. The four or five hundred people who were in
+      constant residence were eating their dinners in the big boarding-house, or
+      the cottages or the tents. It was not the time of day for strangers. Even
+      when services were in progress by daylight, the regular attendants did not
+      make much of a show, huddled in a gray-black mass at the front of the
+      auditorium, by comparison with the great green and blue expanses of nature
+      about them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The real spectacle was in the evening when, as the shadows gathered, big
+      clusters of kerosene torches, hung on the trees facing the audience were
+      lighted. The falling darkness magnified the glow of the lights, and the
+      size and importance of what they illumined. The preacher, bending forward
+      over the rails of the platform, and fastening his eyes upon the abashed
+      faces of those on the &ldquo;anxious seat&rdquo; beneath him, borrowed an effect of
+      druidical mystery from the wall of blackness about him, from the
+      flickering reflections on the branches far above, from the cool night air
+      which stirred across the clearing. The change was in the blood of those
+      who saw and heard him, too. The decorum and half-heartedness of their
+      devotions by day deepened under the glare of the torches into a fervent
+      enthusiasm, even before the services began. And if there was in the rustic
+      pulpit a man whose prayers or exhortations could stir their pulses, they
+      sang and groaned and bellowed out their praises with an almost barbarous
+      license, such as befitted the wilderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the evening not all were worshippers. For a dozen miles round on
+      the country-side, young farm-workers and their girls regarded the
+      camp-meeting as perhaps the chief event of the year&mdash;no more to be
+      missed than the country fair or the circus, and offering, from many points
+      of view, more opportunities for genuine enjoyment than either. Their
+      behavior when they came was pretty bad&mdash;not the less so because all
+      the rules established by the Presiding Elders for the regulation of
+      strangers took it for granted that they would act as viciously as they
+      knew how. These sight-seers sometimes ventured to occupy the back benches
+      where the light was dim. More often they stood outside, in the circular
+      space between the tents and the benches, and mingled cat-calls, drovers'
+      yelps, and all sorts of mocking cries and noises with the &ldquo;Amens&rdquo; of the
+      earnest congregation. Their rough horse-play on the fringe of the
+      sanctified gathering was grievous enough; everybody knew that much worse
+      things went on further out in the surrounding darkness. Indeed, popular
+      report gave to these external phases of the camp-meeting an even more evil
+      fame than attached to the later moonlight husking-bees, or the least
+      reputable of the midwinter dances at Dave Randall's low halfway house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cynics said that the Methodists found consolation for this scandal in the
+      large income they derived from their unruly visitors' gate-money. This was
+      unfair. No doubt the money played its part, but there was something else
+      far more important. The pious dwellers in the camp, intent upon reviving
+      in their poor modern way the character and environment of the heroic early
+      days, felt the need of just this hostile and scoffing mob about them to
+      bring out the spirit they sought. Theirs was pre-eminently a fighting
+      religion, which languished in peaceful fair weather, but flamed high in
+      the storm. The throng of loafers and light-minded worldlings of both
+      sexes, with their jeering interruptions and lewd levity of conduct,
+      brought upon the scene a kind of visible personal devil, with whom the
+      chosen could do battle face to face. The daylight services became more and
+      more perfunctory, as the sojourn in the woods ran its course, and interest
+      concentrated itself upon the night meetings, for the reason that THEN came
+      the fierce wrestle with a Beelzebub of flesh and blood. And it was not so
+      one-sided a contest, either!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No evening passed without its victories for the pulpit. Careless or
+      mischievous young people who were pushed into the foremost ranks of the
+      mockers, and stood grinning and grimacing under the lights, would of a
+      sudden feel a spell clamped upon them. They would hear a strange,
+      quavering note in the preacher's voice, catch the sense of a piercing,
+      soul-commanding gleam in his eye&mdash;not at all to be resisted. These
+      occult forces would take control of them, drag them forward as in a dream
+      to the benches under the pulpit, and abase them there like worms in the
+      dust. And then the preacher would descend, and the elders advance, and the
+      torch-fires would sway and dip before the wind of the mighty roar that
+      went up in triumph from the brethren.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These combats with Satan at close quarters, if they made the week-day
+      evenings exciting, reacted with an effect of crushing dulness upon the
+      Sunday services. The rule was to admit no strangers to the grounds from
+      Saturday night to Monday morning. Every year attempts were made to rescind
+      or modify this rule, and this season at least three-fourths of the laymen
+      in attendance had signed a petition in favor of opening the gates. The two
+      Presiding Elders, supported by a dozen of the older preachers, resisted
+      the change, and they had the backing of the more bigoted section of the
+      congregation from Octavius. The controversy reached a point where Theron's
+      Presiding Elder threatened to quit the grounds, and the leaders of the
+      open-Sunday movement spoke freely of the ridiculous figure which its
+      cranks and fanatics made poor Methodism cut in the eyes of modern go-ahead
+      American civilization. Then Theron Ware saw his opportunity, and preached
+      an impromptu sermon upon the sanctity of the Sabbath, which ended all
+      discussion. Sometimes its arguments seemed to be on one side, sometimes on
+      the other, but always they were clothed with so serene a beauty of
+      imagery, and moved in such a lofty and rarefied atmosphere of spiritual
+      exaltation, that it was impossible to link them to so sordid a thing as
+      this question of gate-money. When he had finished, nobody wanted the gates
+      opened. The two factions found that the difference between them had melted
+      out of existence. They sat entranced by the charm of the sermon; then,
+      glancing around at the empty benches, glaringly numerous in the afternoon
+      sunlight, they whispered regrets that ten thousand people had not been
+      there to hear that marvellous discourse. Theron's conquest was of
+      exceptional dimensions. The majority, whose project he had defeated, were
+      strangers who appreciated and admired his effort most. The little minority
+      of his own flock, though less susceptible to the influence of graceful
+      diction and delicately balanced rhetoric, were proud of the distinction he
+      had reflected upon them, and delighted with him for having won their
+      fight. The Presiding Elders wrung his hand with a significant grip. The
+      extremists of his own charge beamed friendship upon him for the first
+      time. He was the veritable hero of the week.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prestige of this achievement made it the easier for Theron to get away
+      by himself next day, and walk in the woods. A man of such power had a
+      right to solitude. Those who noted his departure from the camp remembered
+      with pleasure that he was to preach again on the morrow. He was going to
+      commune with God in the depths of the forest, that the Message next day
+      might be clearer and more luminous still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron strolled for a little, with an air of aimlessness, until he was
+      well outside the more or less frequented neighborhood of the camp. Then he
+      looked at the sun and the lay of the land with that informing scrutiny of
+      which the farm-bred boy never loses the trick, turned, and strode at a
+      rattling pace down the hillside. He knew nothing personally of this piece
+      of woodland&mdash;a spur of the great Adirondack wilderness thrust
+      southward into the region of homesteads and dairies and hop-fields&mdash;but
+      he had prepared himself by a study of the map, and he knew where he wanted
+      to go. Very Soon he hit upon the path he had counted upon finding, and at
+      this he quickened his gait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three months of the new life had wrought changes in Theron. He bore
+      himself more erectly, for one thing; his shoulders were thrown back, and
+      seemed thicker. The alteration was even more obvious in his face. The
+      effect of lank, wistful, sallow juvenility had vanished. It was the
+      countenance of a mature, well-fed, and confident man, firmer and more
+      rounded in its outlines, and with a glow of health on its whole surface.
+      Under the chin were the suggestions of fulness which bespeak an easy mind.
+      His clothes were new; the frock-coat fitted him, and the thin,
+      dark-colored autumn overcoat, with its silk lining exposed at the breast,
+      gave a masculine bulk and shape to his figure. He wore a shining tall hat,
+      and, in haste though he was, took pains not to knock it against
+      low-hanging branches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All had gone well&mdash;more than well&mdash;with him. The second
+      Quarterly Conference had passed without a ripple. Both the attendance and
+      the collections at his church were larger than ever before, and the tone
+      of the congregation toward him was altered distinctly for the better. As
+      for himself, he viewed with astonished delight the progress he had made in
+      his own estimation. He had taken Sister Soulsby's advice, and the results
+      were already wonderful. He had put aside, once and for all, the thousand
+      foolish trifles and childish perplexities which formerly had racked his
+      brain, and worried him out of sleep and strength. He borrowed all sorts of
+      books boldly now from the Octavius public library, and could swim with a
+      calm mastery and enjoyment upon the deep waters into which Draper and
+      Lecky and Laing and the rest had hurled him. He dallied pleasurably, a
+      little languorously, with a dozen aspects of the case against revealed
+      religion, ranging from the mild heterodoxy of Andover's qualms to the rude
+      Ingersoll's rollicking negation of God himself, as a woman of coquetry
+      might play with as many would-be lovers. They amused him; they were all
+      before him to choose; and he was free to postpone indefinitely the act of
+      selection. There was a sense of the luxurious in this position which
+      softened bodily as well as mental fibres. He ceased to grow indignant at
+      things below or outside his standards, and he bought a small book which
+      treated of the care of the hand and finger nails.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice had accepted with deference his explanation that shapely hands
+      played so important a part in pulpit oratory. For that matter, she now
+      accepted whatever he said or did with admirable docility. It was months
+      since he could remember her venturing upon a critical attitude toward him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had not wished to leave home, for the seaside or any other resort,
+      during the summer, but had worked outside in her garden more than usual.
+      This was inexpensive, and it seemed to do her as much good as a holiday
+      could have done. Her new devotional zeal was now quite an odd thing; it
+      had not slackened at all from the revival pitch. At the outset she had
+      tried several times to talk with her husband upon this subject. He had
+      discouraged conversation about her soul and its welfare, at first
+      obliquely, then, under compulsion, with some directness. His thoughts were
+      absorbed, he said, by the contemplation of vast, abstract schemes of
+      creation and the government of the universe, and it only diverted and
+      embarrassed his mind to try to fasten it upon the details of personal
+      salvation. Thereafter the topic was not broached between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She bestowed a good deal of attention, too, upon her piano. The knack of a
+      girlish nimbleness of touch had returned to her after a few weeks, and she
+      made music which Theron supposed was very good&mdash;for her. It pleased
+      him, at all events, when he sat and listened to it; but he had a far
+      greater pleasure, as he listened, in dwelling upon the memories of the
+      yellow and blue room which the sounds always brought up. Although three
+      months had passed, Thurston's had never asked for the first payment on the
+      piano, or even sent in a bill. This impressed him as being peculiarly
+      graceful behavior on his part, and he recognized its delicacy by not going
+      near Thurston's at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An hour's sharp walk, occasionally broken by short cuts across open
+      pastures, but for the most part on forest paths, brought Theron to the
+      brow of a small knoll, free from underbrush, and covered sparsely with
+      beech-trees. The ground was soft with moss and the powdered remains of
+      last year's foliage; the leaves above him were showing the first yellow
+      stains of autumn. A sweet smell of ripening nuts was thick upon the air,
+      and busy rustlings and chirpings through the stillness told how the
+      chipmunks and squirrels were attending to their harvest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had no ears for these noises of the woodland. He had halted, and
+      was searching through the little vistas offered between the stout gray
+      trunks of the beeches for some sign of a more sophisticated sort. Yes!
+      there were certainly voices to be heard, down in the hollow. And now,
+      beyond all possibility of mistake, there came up to him the low, rhythmic
+      throb of music. It was the merest faint murmur of music, made up almost
+      wholly of groaning bass notes, but it was enough. He moved down the slope,
+      swiftly at first, then with increasing caution. The sounds grew louder as
+      he advanced, until he could hear the harmony of the other strings in its
+      place beside the uproar of the big fiddles, and distinguish from both the
+      measured noise of many feet moving as one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reached a place from which, himself unobserved, he could overlook much
+      of what he had come to see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bottom of the glade below him lay out in the full sunshine, as flat
+      and as velvety in its fresh greenness as a garden lawn. Its open expanse
+      was big enough to accommodate several distinct crowds, and here the crowds
+      were&mdash;one massed about an enclosure in which young men were playing
+      at football, another gathered further off in a horse-shoe curve at the end
+      of a baseball diamond, and a third thronging at a point where the shade of
+      overhanging woods began, focussed upon a centre of interest which Theron
+      could not make out. Closer at hand, where a shallow stream rippled along
+      over its black-slate bed, some little boys, with legs bared to the thighs,
+      were paddling about, under the charge of two men clad in long black gowns.
+      There were others of these frocked monitors scattered here and there upon
+      the scene&mdash;pallid, close-shaven, monkish figures, who none the less
+      wore modern hats, and superintended with knowledge the games of the
+      period. Theron remembered that these were the Christian Brothers, the
+      semi-monastic teachers of the Catholic school.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this was the picnic of the Catholics of Octavius. He gazed in mingled
+      amazement and exhilaration upon the spectacle. There seemed to be
+      literally thousands of people on the open fields before him, and
+      apparently there were still other thousands in the fringes of the woods
+      round about. The noises which arose from this multitude&mdash;the shouts
+      of the lads in the water, the playful squeals of the girls in the swings,
+      the fused uproar of the more distant crowds, and above all the diligent,
+      ordered strains of the dance-music proceeding from some invisible distance
+      in the greenwood&mdash;charmed his ears with their suggestion of universal
+      merriment. He drew a long breath&mdash;half pleasure, half wistful regret&mdash;as
+      he remembered that other gathering in the forest which he had left behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At any rate, it should be well behind him today, whatever the morrow might
+      bring! Evidently he was on the wrong side of the circle for the
+      headquarters of the festivities. He turned and walked to the right through
+      the beeches, making a detour, under cover, of the crowds at play. At last
+      he rounded the long oval of the clearing, and found himself at the very
+      edge of that largest throng of all, which had been too far away for
+      comprehension at the beginning. There was no mystery now. A rough, narrow
+      shed, fully fifty feet in length, imposed itself in an arbitrary line
+      across the face of this crowd, dividing it into two compact halves. Inside
+      this shed, protected all round by a waist-high barrier of boards, on top
+      of which ran a flat, table-like covering, were twenty men in their
+      shirt-sleeves, toiling ceaselessly to keep abreast of the crowd's thirst
+      for beer. The actions of these bartenders greatly impressed Theron. They
+      moved like so many machines, using one hand, apparently, to take money and
+      give change, and with the other incessantly sweeping off rows of empty
+      glasses, and tossing forward in their place fresh, foaming glasses five at
+      a time. Hundreds of arms and hands were continually stretched out, on both
+      sides of the shed, toward this streaming bar, and through the babel of
+      eager cries rose without pause the racket of mallets tapping new kegs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had never seen any considerable number of his fellow-citizens
+      engaged in drinking lager beer before. His surprise at the facility of
+      those behind the bar began to yield, upon observation, to a profound
+      amazement at the thirst of those before it. The same people seemed to be
+      always in front, emptying the glasses faster than the busy men inside
+      could replenish them, and clamoring tirelessly for more. Newcomers had to
+      force their way to the bar by violent efforts, and once there they stayed
+      until pushed bodily aside. There were actually women to be seen here and
+      there in the throng, elbowing and shoving like the rest for a place at the
+      front. Some of the more gallant young men fought their way outward, from
+      time to time, carrying for safety above their heads glasses of beer which
+      they gave to young and pretty girls standing on the fringe of the crowd,
+      among the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everywhere a remarkable good-humor prevailed. Once a sharp fight broke
+      out, just at the end of the bar nearest Theron, and one young man was
+      knocked down. A rush of the onlookers confused everything before the
+      minister's eyes for a minute, and then he saw the aggrieved combatant up
+      on his legs again, consenting under the kindly pressure of the crowd to
+      shake hands with his antagonist, and join him in more beer. The incident
+      caught his fancy. There was something very pleasingly human, he thought,
+      in this primitive readiness to resort to fisticuffs, and this frank and
+      genial reconciliation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps there was something contagious in this wholesale display of
+      thirst, for the Rev. Mr. Ware became conscious of a notion that he should
+      like to try a glass of beer. He recalled having heard that lager was
+      really a most harmless beverage. Of course it was out of the question that
+      he should show himself at the bar. Perhaps some one would bring him out a
+      glass, as if he were a pretty girl. He looked about for a possible
+      messenger. Turning, he found himself face to face with two smiling people,
+      into whose eyes he stared for an instant in dumfounded blankness. Then his
+      countenance flashed with joy, and he held out both hands in greeting. It
+      was Father Forbes and Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We stole down upon you unawares,&rdquo; said the priest, in his cheeriest
+      manner. He wore a brown straw hat, and loose clothes hardly at all
+      clerical in form, and had Miss Madden's arm drawn lightly within his own.
+      &ldquo;We could barely believe our eyes&mdash;that it could be you whom we saw,
+      here among the sinners!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am in love with your sinners,&rdquo; responded Theron, as he shook hands with
+      Celia, and trusted himself to look fully into her eyes. &ldquo;I've had five
+      days of the saints, over in another part of the woods, and they've bored
+      the head off me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At the command of Father Forbes, a lad who was loitering near them went
+      down through the throng to the bar, and returned with three glasses of
+      beer. It pleased the Rev. Mr. Ware that the priest should have taken it
+      for granted that he would do as the others did. He knocked his glass
+      against theirs in compliance with a custom strange to him, but which they
+      seemed to understand very well. The beer itself was not so agreeable to
+      the taste as he had expected, but it was cold and refreshing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the boy had returned with the glasses, the three stood for a moment
+      in silence, meditatively watching the curious scene spread below them.
+      Beyond the bar, Theron could catch now through the trees regularly
+      recurring glimpses of four or five swings in motion. These were nearest
+      him, and clearest to the vision as well, at the instant when they reached
+      their highest forward point. The seats were filled with girls, some of
+      them quite grown young women, and their curving upward sweep through the
+      air was disclosing at its climax a remarkable profusion of white skirts
+      and black stockings. The sight struck him as indecorous in the extreme,
+      and he turned his eyes away. They met Celia's; and there was something
+      latent in their brown depths which prompted him, after a brief dalliance
+      of interchanging glances, to look again at the swings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That old maid Curran is really too ridiculous, with those white stockings
+      of hers,&rdquo; remarked Celia; &ldquo;some friend ought to tell her to dye them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or pad them,&rdquo; suggested Father Forbes, with a gay little chuckle. &ldquo;I
+      daresay the question of swings and ladies' stockings hardly arises with
+      you, over at the camp-meeting, Mr. Ware?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron laughed aloud at the conceit. &ldquo;I should say not!&rdquo; he replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm just dying to see a camp-meeting!&rdquo; said Celia. &ldquo;You hear such racy
+      accounts of what goes on at them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't go, I beg of you!&rdquo; urged Theron, with doleful emphasis. &ldquo;Don't
+      let's even talk about them. I should like to feel this afternoon as if
+      there was no such thing within a thousand miles of me as a camp-meeting.
+      Do you know, all this interests me enormously. It is a revelation to me to
+      see these thousands of good, decent, ordinary people, just frankly
+      enjoying themselves like human beings. I suppose that in this whole huge
+      crowd there isn't a single person who will mention the subject of his soul
+      to any other person all day long.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think the assumption was a safe one,&rdquo; said the priest,
+      smilingly, &ldquo;unless,&rdquo; he added on afterthought, &ldquo;it be by way of a genial
+      profanity. There used to be some old Clare men who said 'Hell to my soul!'
+      when they missed at quoits, but I haven't heard it for a long time. I
+      daresay they're all dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall never forget that death-bed&mdash;where I saw you first,&rdquo;
+       remarked Theron, musingly. &ldquo;I date from that experience a whole new life.
+      I have been greatly struck lately, in reading our 'Northern Christian
+      Advocate' to see in the obituary notices of prominent Methodists how over
+      and over again it is recorded that they got religion in their youth
+      through being frightened by some illness of their own, or some epidemic
+      about them. The cholera year of 1832 seems to have made Methodists hand
+      over fist. Even to this day our most successful revivalists, those who
+      work conversions wholesale wherever they go, do it more by frightful
+      pictures of hell-fire surrounding the sinner's death-bed than anything
+      else. You could hear the same thing at our camp-meeting tonight, if you
+      were there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There isn't so much difference as you think,&rdquo; said Father Forbes,
+      dispassionately. &ldquo;Your people keep examining their souls, just as children
+      keep pulling up the bulbs they have planted to see are there any roots
+      yet. Our people are more satisfied to leave their souls alone, once they
+      have been planted, so to speak, by baptism. But fear of hell governs them
+      both, pretty much alike. As I remember saying to you once before, there is
+      really nothing new under the sun. Even the saying isn't new. Though there
+      seem to have been the most tremendous changes in races and civilizations
+      and religions, stretching over many thousands of years, yet nothing is in
+      fact altered very much. Where religions are concerned, the human race are
+      still very like savages in a dangerous wood in the dark, telling one
+      another ghost stories around a camp-fire. They have always been like
+      that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What nonsense!&rdquo; cried Celia. &ldquo;I have no patience with such gloomy
+      rubbish. The Greeks had a religion full of beauty and happiness and
+      light-heartedness, and they weren't frightened of death at all. They made
+      the image of death a beautiful boy, with a torch turned down. Their
+      greatest philosophers openly preached and practised the doctrine of
+      suicide when one was tired of life. Our own early Church was full of these
+      broad and beautiful Greek ideas. You know that yourself! And it was only
+      when your miserable Jeromes and Augustines and Cyrils brought in the
+      abominable meannesses and cruelties of the Jewish Old Testament, and
+      stamped out the sane and lovely Greek elements in the Church, that
+      Christians became the poor, whining, cowardly egotists they are, troubling
+      about their little tin-pot souls, and scaring themselves in their churches
+      by skulls and crossbones.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Celia,&rdquo; interposed the priest, patting her shoulder gently, &ldquo;we
+      will have no Greek debate today. Mr. Ware has been permitted to taboo
+      camp-meetings, and I claim the privilege to cry off on Greeks. Look at
+      those fellows down there, trampling over one another to get more beer.
+      What have they to do with Athens, or Athens with them? I take it, Mr.
+      Ware,&rdquo; he went on, with a grave face but a twinkling eye, &ldquo;that what we
+      are observing here in front of us is symbolical of a great ethical and
+      theological revolution, which in time will modify and control the destiny
+      of the entire American people. You see those young Irishmen there,
+      struggling like pigs at a trough to get their fill of German beer. That
+      signifies a conquest of Teuton over Kelt more important and far-reaching
+      in its results than the landing of Hengist and Horsa. The Kelt has come to
+      grief heretofore&mdash;or at least been forced to play second fiddle to
+      other races&mdash;because he lacked the right sort of a drink. He has in
+      his blood an excess of impulsive, imaginative, even fantastic qualities.
+      It is much easier for him to make a fool of himself, to begin with, than
+      it is for people of slower wits and more sluggish temperaments. When you
+      add whiskey to that, or that essence of melancholia which in Ireland they
+      call 'porther,' you get the Kelt at his very weakest and worst. These
+      young men down there are changing all that. They have discovered lager.
+      Already many of them can outdrink the Germans at their own beverage. The
+      lager-drinking Irishman in a few generations will be a new type of
+      humanity&mdash;the Kelt at his best. He will dominate America. He will be
+      THE American. And his church&mdash;with the Italian element thrown clean
+      out of it, and its Pope living, say, in Baltimore or Georgetown&mdash;will
+      be the Church of America.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us have some more lager at once,&rdquo; put in Celia. &ldquo;This revolution
+      can't be hurried forward too rapidly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron could not feel sure how much of the priest's discourse was in jest,
+      how much in earnest. &ldquo;It seems to me,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that as things are going,
+      it doesn't look much as if the America of the future will trouble itself
+      about any kind of a church. The march of science must very soon produce a
+      universal scepticism. It is in the nature of human progress. What all
+      intelligent men recognize today, the masses must surely come to see in
+      time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes laughed outright this time. &ldquo;My dear Mr. Ware,&rdquo; he said, as
+      they touched glasses again, and sipped the fresh beer that had been
+      brought them, &ldquo;of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless and
+      empty as this idea that humanity progresses. The savage's natural
+      impression is that the world he sees about him was made for him, and that
+      the rest of the universe is subordinated to him and his world, and that
+      all the spirits and demons and gods occupy themselves exclusively with him
+      and his affairs. That idea was the basis of every pagan religion, and it
+      is the basis of the Christian religion, simply because it is the
+      foundation of human nature. That foundation is just as firm and unshaken
+      today as it was in the Stone Age. It will always remain, and upon it will
+      always be built some kind of a religious superstructure. 'Intelligent
+      men,' as you call them, really have very little influence, even when they
+      all pull one way. The people as a whole soon get tired of them. They give
+      too much trouble. The most powerful forces in human nature are
+      self-protection and inertia. The middle-aged man has found out that the
+      chief wisdom in life is to bend to the pressures about him, to shut up and
+      do as others do. Even when he thinks he has rid his own mind of
+      superstitions, he sees that he will best enjoy a peaceful life by leaving
+      other peoples' superstitions alone. That is always the ultimate view of
+      the crowd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don't see,&rdquo; observed Theron, &ldquo;granting that all this is true, how
+      you think the Catholic Church will come out on top. I could understand it
+      of Unitarianism, or Universalism, or the Episcopal Church, where nobody
+      seems to have to believe particularly in anything except the beauty of its
+      burial service, but I should think the very rigidity of the Catholic creed
+      would make it impossible. There everything is hard and fast; nothing is
+      elastic; there is no room for compromise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Church is always compromising,&rdquo; explained the priest, &ldquo;only it does
+      it so slowly that no one man lives long enough to quite catch it at the
+      trick. No; the great secret of the Catholic Church is that it doesn't
+      debate with sceptics. No matter what points you make against it, it is
+      never betrayed into answering back. It simply says these things are sacred
+      mysteries, which you are quite free to accept and be saved, or reject and
+      be damned. There is something intelligible and fine about an attitude like
+      that. When people have grown tired of their absurd and fruitless wrangling
+      over texts and creeds which, humanly speaking, are all barbaric nonsense,
+      they will come back to repose pleasantly under the Catholic roof, in that
+      restful house where things are taken for granted. There the manners are
+      charming, the service excellent, the decoration and upholstery most
+      acceptable to the eye, and the music&rdquo;&mdash;he made a little mock bow here
+      to Celia&mdash;&ldquo;the music at least is divine. There you have nothing to do
+      but be agreeable, and avoid scandal, and observe the convenances. You are
+      no more expected to express doubts about the Immaculate Conception than
+      you are to ask the lady whom you take down to dinner how old she is. Now
+      that is, as I have said, an intelligent and rational church for people to
+      have. As the Irish civilize themselves&mdash;you observe them diligently
+      engaged in the process down below there&mdash;and the social roughness of
+      their church becomes softened and ameliorated, Americans will inevitably
+      be attracted toward it. In the end, it will embrace them all, and be
+      modified by them, and in turn influence their development, till you will
+      have a new nation and a new national church, each representative of the
+      other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And all this is to be done by lager beer!&rdquo; Theron ventured to comment,
+      jokingly. He was conscious of a novel perspiration around the bridge of
+      his nose, which was obviously another effect of the drink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest passed the pleasantry by. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said seriously; &ldquo;what you
+      must see is that there must always be a church. If one did not exist, it
+      would be necessary to invent it. It is needed, first and foremost, as a
+      police force. It is needed, secondly, so to speak, as a fire insurance. It
+      provides the most even temperature and pure atmosphere for the growth of
+      young children. It furnishes the best obtainable social machinery for
+      marrying off one's daughters, getting to know the right people, patching
+      up quarrels, and so on. The priesthood earn their salaries as the agents
+      for these valuable social arrangements. Their theology is thrown in as a
+      sort of intellectual diversion, like the ritual of a benevolent
+      organization. There are some who get excited about this part of it, just
+      as one hears of Free-Masons who believe that the sun rises and sets to
+      exemplify their ceremonies. Others take their duties more quietly, and,
+      understanding just what it all amounts to, make the best of it, like you
+      and me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron assented to the philosophy and the compliment by a grave bow. &ldquo;Yes,
+      that is the idea&mdash;to make the best of it,&rdquo; he said, and fastened his
+      regard boldly this time upon the swings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were both ordained by our bishops,&rdquo; continued the priest, &ldquo;at an age
+      when those worthy old gentlemen would not have trusted our combined wisdom
+      to buy a horse for them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I was married,&rdquo; broke in Theron, with an eagerness almost vehement,
+      &ldquo;when I had only just been ordained! At the worst, YOU had only the Church
+      fastened upon your back, before you were old enough to know what you
+      wanted. It is easy enough to make the best of THAT, but it is different
+      with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A marked silence followed this outburst. The Rev. Mr. Ware had never
+      spoken of his marriage to either of these friends before; and something in
+      their manner seemed to suggest that they did not find the subject
+      inviting, now that it had been broached. He himself was filled with a
+      desire to say more about it. He had never clearly realized before what a
+      genuine grievance it was. The moisture at the top of his nose merged
+      itself into tears in the corners of his eyes, as the cruel enormity of the
+      sacrifice he had made in his youth rose before him. His whole life had
+      been fettered and darkened by it. He turned his gaze from the swings
+      toward Celia, to claim the sympathy he knew she would feel for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Celia was otherwise engaged. A young man had come up to her&mdash;a
+      tall and extremely thin young man, soberly dressed, and with a long,
+      gaunt, hollow-eyed face, the skin of which seemed at once florid and pale.
+      He had sandy hair and the rough hands of a workman; but he was speaking to
+      Miss Madden in the confidential tones of an equal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can do nothing at all with him,&rdquo; this newcomer said to her. &ldquo;He'll not
+      be said by me. Perhaps he'd listen to you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's likely I'll go down there!&rdquo; said Celia. &ldquo;He may do what he likes for
+      all me! Take my advice, Michael, and just go your way, and leave him to
+      himself. There was a time when I would have taken out my eyes for him, but
+      it was love wasted and thrown away. After the warnings he's had, if he
+      WILL bring trouble on himself, let's make it no affair of ours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had found himself exchanging glances of inquiry with this young
+      man. &ldquo;Mr. Ware,&rdquo; said Celia, here, &ldquo;let me introduce you to my brother
+      Michael&mdash;my full brother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Ware remembered him now, and began, in response to the other's formal
+      bow, to say something about their having met in the dark, inside the
+      church. But Celia held up her hand. &ldquo;I'm afraid, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; she said
+      hurriedly, &ldquo;that you are in for a glimpse of the family skeleton. I will
+      apologize for the infliction in advance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Wonderingly, Theron followed her look, and saw another young man who had
+      come up the path from the crowd below, and was close upon them. The
+      minister recognized in him a figure which had seemed to be the centre of
+      almost every group about the bar that he had studied in detail. He was a
+      small, dapper, elegantly attired youth, with dark hair, and the handsome,
+      regularly carved face of an actor. He advanced with a smiling countenance
+      and unsteady step&mdash;his silk hat thrust back upon his head, his
+      frock-coat and vest unbuttoned, and his neckwear disarranged&mdash;and
+      saluted the company with amiability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw you up here, Father Forbes,&rdquo; he said, with a thickened and erratic
+      utterance. &ldquo;Whyn't you come down and join us? I'm setting 'em up for
+      everybody. You got to take care of the boys, you know. I'll blow in the
+      last cent I've got in the world for the boys, every time, and they know
+      it. They're solider for me than they ever were for anybody. That's how it
+      is. If you stand by the boys, the boys'll stand by you. I'm going to the
+      Assembly for this district, and they ain't nobody can stop me. The boys
+      are just red hot for me. Wish you'd come down, Father Forbes, and address
+      a few words to the meeting&mdash;just mention that I'm a candidate, and
+      say I'm bound to win, hands down. That'll make you solid with the boys,
+      and we'll be all good fellows together. Come on down!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest affably disengaged his arm from the clutch which the speaker
+      had laid upon it, and shook his head in gentle deprecation. &ldquo;No, no; you
+      must excuse me, Theodore,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;We mustn't meddle in politics, you
+      know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Politics be damned!&rdquo; urged Theodore, grabbing the priest's other arm, and
+      tugging at it stoutly to pull him down the path. &ldquo;I say, boys&rdquo; he shouted
+      to those below, &ldquo;here's Father Forbes, and he's going to come down and
+      address the meeting. Come on, Father! Come down, and have a drink with the
+      boys!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Celia who sharply pulled his hand away from the priest's arm this
+      time. &ldquo;Go away with you!&rdquo; she snapped in low, angry tones at the intruder.
+      &ldquo;You should be ashamed of yourself! If you can't keep sober yourself, you
+      can at least keep your hands off the priest. I should think you'd have
+      more decency, when you're in such a state as this, than to come where I
+      am. If you've no respect for yourself, you might have that much respect
+      for me! And before strangers, too!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I mustn't come where YOU are, eh?&rdquo; remarked the peccant Theodore,
+      straightening himself with an elaborate effort. &ldquo;You've bought these
+      woods, have you? I've got a hundred friends here, all the same, for every
+      one you'll ever have in your life, Red-head, and don't you forget it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go and spend your money with them, then, and don't come insulting decent
+      people,&rdquo; said Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before strangers, too!&rdquo; the young man called out, with beery sarcasm.
+      &ldquo;Oh, we'll take care of the strangers all right.&rdquo; He had not seemed to be
+      aware of Theron's presence, much less his identity, before; but he turned
+      to him now with a knowing grin. &ldquo;I'm running for the Assembly, Mr. Ware,&rdquo;
+       he said, speaking loudly and with deliberate effort to avoid the drunken
+      elisions and comminglings to which his speech tended, &ldquo;and I want you to
+      fix up the Methodists solid for me. I'm going to drive over to the
+      camp-meeting tonight, me and some of the boys in a barouche, and I'll put
+      a twenty-dollar bill on their plate. Here it is now, if you want to see
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As the young man began fumbling in a vest-pocket, Theron gathered his wits
+      together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd better not go this evening,&rdquo; he said, as convincingly as he knew
+      how; &ldquo;because the gates will be closed very early, and the
+      Saturday-evening services are of a particularly special nature, quite
+      reserved for those living on the grounds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rats!&rdquo; said Theodore, raising his head, and abandoning the search for the
+      bill. &ldquo;Why don't you speak out like a man, and say you think I'm too
+      drunk?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think that is a question which need arise between us, Mr.
+      Madden,&rdquo; murmured Theron, confusedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, don't you make any mistake! A hell of a lot of questions arise
+      between us, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; cried Theodore, with a sudden accession of vigor in
+      tone and mien. &ldquo;And one of 'em is&mdash;go away from me, Michael!&mdash;one
+      of 'em is, I say, why don't you leave our girls alone? They've got their
+      own priests to make fools of themselves over, without any sneak of a
+      Protestant parson coming meddling round them. You're a married man into
+      the bargain; and you've got in your house this minute a piano that my
+      sister bought and paid for. Oh, I've seen the entry in Thurston's books!
+      You have the cheek to talk to me about being drunk&mdash;why&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These remarks were never concluded, for Father Forbes here clapped a hand
+      abruptly over the offending mouth, and flung his free arm in a tight grip
+      around the young man's waist. &ldquo;Come with me, Michael!&rdquo; he said, and the
+      two men led the reluctant and resisting Theodore at a sharp pace off into
+      the woods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron and Celia stood and watched them disappear among the undergrowth.
+      &ldquo;It's the dirty Foley blood that's in him,&rdquo; he heard her say, as if
+      between clenched teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl's big brown eyes, when Theron looked into them again, were still
+      fixed upon the screen of foliage, and dilated like those of a Medusa mask.
+      The blood had gone away, and left the fair face and neck as white, it
+      seemed to him, as marble. Even her lips, fiercely bitten together,
+      appeared colorless. The picture of consuming and powerless rage which she
+      presented, and the shuddering tremor which ran over her form, as visible
+      as the quivering track of a gust of wind across a pond, awed and
+      frightened him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tenderness toward her helpless state came too, and uppermost. He drew her
+      arm into his, and turned their backs upon the picnic scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us walk a little up the path into the woods,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and get away
+      from all this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The further away the better,&rdquo; she answered bitterly, and he felt the
+      shiver run through her again as she spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The methodical waltz-music from that unseen dancing platform rose again
+      above all other sounds. They moved up the woodland path, their steps
+      insensibly falling into the rhythm of its strains, and vanished from sight
+      among the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Theron and Celia walked in silence for some minutes, until the noises of
+      the throng they had left behind were lost. The path they followed had
+      grown indefinite among the grass and creepers of the forest carpet; now it
+      seemed to end altogether in a little copse of young birches, the
+      delicately graceful stems of which were clustered about a parent stump,
+      long since decayed and overgrown with lichens and layers of thick moss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the two paused, the girl suddenly sank upon her knees, then threw
+      herself face forward upon the soft green bark which had formed itself
+      above the roots of the ancient mother-tree. Her companion looked down in
+      pained amazement at what he saw. Her body shook with the violence of
+      recurring sobs, or rather gasps of wrath and grief Her hands, with
+      stiffened, claw-like fingers, dug into the moss and tangle of tiny vines,
+      and tore them by the roots. The half-stifled sounds of weeping that arose
+      from where her face grovelled in the leaves were terrible to his ears. He
+      knew not what to say or do, but gazed in resourceless suspense at the
+      strange figure she made. It seemed a cruelly long time that she lay there,
+      almost at his feet, struggling fiercely with the fury that was in her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All at once the paroxysms passed away, the sounds of wild weeping ceased.
+      Celia sat up, and with her handkerchief wiped the tears and leafy
+      fragments from her face. She rearranged her hat and the braids of her hair
+      with swift, instinctive touches, brushed the woodland debris from her
+      front, and sprang to her feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm all right now,&rdquo; she said briskly. There was palpable effort in her
+      light tone, and in the stormy sort of smile which she forced upon her
+      blotched and perturbed countenance, but they were only too welcome to
+      Theron's anxious mood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank God!&rdquo; he blurted out, all radiant with relief. &ldquo;I feared you were
+      going to have a fit&mdash;or something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia laughed, a little artificially at first, then with a genuine
+      surrender to the comic side of his visible fright. The mirth came back
+      into the brown depths of her eyes again, and her face cleared itself of
+      tear-stains and the marks of agitation. &ldquo;I AM a nice quiet party for a
+      Methodist minister to go walking in the woods with, am I not?&rdquo; she cried,
+      shaking her skirts and smiling at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not a Methodist minister&mdash;please!&rdquo; answered Theron&mdash;&ldquo;at
+      least not today&mdash;and here&mdash;with you! I am just a man&mdash;nothing
+      more&mdash;a man who has escaped from lifelong imprisonment, and feels for
+      the first time what it is to be free!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, my friend,&rdquo; Celia said, shaking her head slowly, &ldquo;I'm afraid you
+      deceive yourself. You are not by any means free. You are only looking out
+      of the window of your prison, as you call it. The doors are locked, just
+      the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will smash them!&rdquo; he declared, with confidence. &ldquo;Or for that matter, I
+      HAVE smashed them&mdash;battered them to pieces. You don't realize what
+      progress I have made, what changes there have been in me since that night,
+      you remember that wonderful night! I am quite another being, I assure you!
+      And really it dates from way beyond that&mdash;why, from the very first
+      evening, when I came to you in the church. The window in Father Forbes'
+      room was open, and I stood by it listening to the music next door, and I
+      could just faintly see on the dark window across the alley-way a
+      stained-glass picture of a woman. I suppose it was the Virgin Mary. She
+      had hair like yours, and your face, too; and that is why I went into the
+      church and found you. Yes, that is why.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia regarded him with gravity. &ldquo;You will get yourself into great
+      trouble, my friend,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's where you're wrong,&rdquo; put in Theron. &ldquo;Not that I'd mind any trouble
+      in this wide world, so long as you called me 'my friend,' but I'm not
+      going to get into any at all. I know a trick worth two of that. I've
+      learned to be a showman. I can preach now far better than I used to, and I
+      can get through my work in half the time, and keep on the right side of my
+      people, and get along with perfect smoothness. I was too green before. I
+      took the thing seriously, and I let every mean-fisted curmudgeon and crazy
+      fanatic worry me, and keep me on pins and needles. I don't do that any
+      more. I've taken a new measure of life. I see now what life is really
+      worth, and I'm going to have my share of it. Why should I deliberately
+      deny myself all possible happiness for the rest of my days, simply because
+      I made a fool of myself when I was in my teens? Other men are not
+      eternally punished like that, for what they did as boys, and I won't
+      submit to it either. I will be as free to enjoy myself as&mdash;as Father
+      Forbes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia smiled softly, and shook her head again. &ldquo;Poor man, to call HIM
+      free!&rdquo; she said: &ldquo;why, he is bound hand and foot. You don't in the least
+      realize how he is hedged about, the work he has to do, the thousand
+      suspicious eyes that watch his every movement, eager to bring the Bishop
+      down upon him. And then think of his sacrifice&mdash;the great sacrifice
+      of all&mdash;to never know what love means, to forswear his manhood, to
+      live a forlorn, celibate life&mdash;you have no idea how sadly that
+      appeals to a woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us sit down here for a little,&rdquo; said Theron; &ldquo;we seem at the end of
+      the path.&rdquo; She seated herself on the root-based mound, and he reclined at
+      her side, with an arm carelessly extended behind her on the moss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can see what you mean,&rdquo; he went on, after a pause. &ldquo;But to me, do you
+      know, there is an enormous fascination in celibacy. You forget that I know
+      the reverse of the medal. I know how the mind can be cramped, the nerves
+      harassed, the ambitions spoiled and rotted, the whole existence darkened
+      and belittled, by&mdash;by the other thing. I have never talked to you
+      before about my marriage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think we'd better talk about it now,&rdquo; observed Celia. &ldquo;There must
+      be many more amusing topics.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He missed the spirit of her remark. &ldquo;You are right,&rdquo; he said slowly. &ldquo;It
+      is too sad a thing to talk about. But there! it is my load, and I bear it,
+      and there's nothing more to be said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron drew a heavy sigh, and let his fingers toy abstractedly with a
+      ribbon on the outer edge of Celia's penumbra of apparel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We mustn't snivel, and we mustn't sulk. When I get into a
+      rage it makes me ill, and I storm my way through it and tear things, but
+      it doesn't last long, and I come out of it feeling all the better. I don't
+      know that I've ever seen your wife. I suppose she hasn't got red hair?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think it's a kind of light brown,&rdquo; answered Theron, with an effect of
+      exerting his memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems that you only take notice of hair in stained-glass windows,&rdquo; was
+      Celia's comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh-h!&rdquo; he murmured reproachfully, &ldquo;as if&mdash;as if&mdash;but I won't
+      say what I was going to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's not fair!&rdquo; she said. The little touch of whimsical mockery which
+      she gave to the serious declaration was delicious to him. &ldquo;You have me at
+      such a disadvantage! Here am I rattling out whatever comes into my head,
+      exposing all my lightest emotions, and laying bare my very heart in
+      candor, and you meditate, you turn things over cautiously in your mind,
+      like a second Machiavelli. I grow afraid of you; you are so subtle and
+      mysterious in your reserves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron gave a tug at the ribbon, to show the joy he had in her delicate
+      chaff. &ldquo;No, it is you who are secretive,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You never told me
+      about&mdash;about the piano.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The word was out! A minute before it had seemed incredible to him that he
+      should ever have the courage to utter it&mdash;but here it was. He laid
+      firm hold upon the ribbon, which it appeared hung from her waist, and drew
+      himself a trifle nearer to her. &ldquo;I could never have consented to take it,
+      I'm afraid,&rdquo; he went on in a low voice, &ldquo;if I had known. And even as it
+      is, I fear it won't be possible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you afraid of?&rdquo; asked Celia. &ldquo;Why shouldn't you take it? People
+      in your profession never do get anything unless it's given to them, do
+      they? I've always understood it was like that. I've often read of donation
+      parties&mdash;that's what they're called, isn't it?&mdash;where everybody
+      is supposed to bring some gift to the minister. Very well, then, I've
+      simply had a donation party of my own, that's all. Unless you mean that my
+      being a Catholic makes a difference. I had supposed you were quite free
+      from that kind of prejudice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I am! Believe me, I am!&rdquo; urged Theron. &ldquo;When I'm with you, it seems
+      impossible to realize that there are people so narrow and contracted in
+      their natures as to take account of such things. It is another atmosphere
+      that I breathe near you. How could you imagine that such a thought&mdash;about
+      our difference of creed&mdash;would enter my head? In fact,&rdquo; he concluded
+      with a nervous half-laugh, &ldquo;there isn't any such difference. Whatever your
+      religion is, it's mine too. You remember&mdash;you adopted me as a Greek.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did I?&rdquo; she rejoined. &ldquo;Well, if that's the case, it leaves you without a
+      leg to stand on. I challenge you to find any instance where a Greek made
+      any difficulties about accepting a piano from a friend. But seriously&mdash;while
+      we are talking about it&mdash;you introduced the subject: I didn't&mdash;I
+      might as well explain to you that I had no such intention, when I picked
+      the instrument out. It was later, when I was talking to Thurston's people
+      about the price, that the whim seized me. Now it is the one fixed rule of
+      my life to obey my whims. Whatever occurs to me as a possibly pleasant
+      thing to do, straight like a hash, I go and do it. It is the only way that
+      a person with means, with plenty of money, can preserve any freshness of
+      character. If they stop to think what it would be prudent to do, they get
+      crusted over immediately. That is the curse of rich people&mdash;they
+      teach themselves to distrust and restrain every impulse toward unusual
+      actions. They get to feel that it is more necessary for them to be
+      cautious and conventional than it is for others. I would rather work at a
+      wash-tub than occupy that attitude toward my bank account. I fight against
+      any sign of it that I detect rising in my mind. The instant a wish occurs
+      to me, I rush to gratify it. That is my theory of life. That accounts for
+      the piano; and I don't see that you've anything to say about it at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed very convincing, this theory of life. Somehow, the thought of
+      Miss Madden's riches had never before assumed prominence in Theron's mind.
+      Of course her father was very wealthy, but it had not occurred to him that
+      the daughter's emancipation might run to the length of a personal fortune.
+      He knew so little of rich people and their ways!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted his head, and looked up at Celia with an awakened humility and
+      awe in his glance. The glamour of a separate banking-account shone upon
+      her. Where the soft woodland light played in among the strands of her
+      disordered hair, he saw the veritable gleam of gold. A mysterious new
+      suggestion of power blended itself with the beauty of her face, was
+      exhaled in the faint perfume of her garments. He maintained a timorous
+      hold upon the ribbon, wondering at his hardihood in touching it, or being
+      near her at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What surprises me,&rdquo; he heard himself saying, &ldquo;is that you are contented
+      to stay in Octavius. I should think that you would travel&mdash;go abroad&mdash;see
+      the beautiful things of the world, surround yourself with the luxuries of
+      big cities&mdash;and that sort of thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia regarded the forest prospect straight in front of her with a pensive
+      gaze. &ldquo;Sometime&mdash;no doubt I will sometime,&rdquo; she said abstractedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One reads so much nowadays,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;of American heiresses going to
+      Europe and marrying dukes and noblemen. I suppose you will do that too.
+      Princes would fight one another for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The least touch of a smile softened for an instant the impassivity of her
+      countenance. Then she stared harder than ever at the vague, leafy
+      distance. &ldquo;That is the old-fashioned idea,&rdquo; she said, in a musing tone,
+      &ldquo;that women must belong to somebody, as if they were curios, or statues,
+      or race-horses. You don't understand, my friend, that I have a different
+      view. I am myself, and I belong to myself, exactly as much as any man. The
+      notion that any other human being could conceivably obtain the slightest
+      property rights in me is as preposterous, as ridiculous, as&mdash;what
+      shall I say?&mdash;as the notion of your being taken out with a chain on
+      your neck and sold by auction as a slave, down on the canal bridge. I
+      should be ashamed to be alive for another day, if any other thought were
+      possible to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is not the generally accepted view, I should think,&rdquo; faltered
+      Theron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No more is it the accepted view that young married Methodist ministers
+      should sit out alone in the woods with red-headed Irish girls. No, my
+      friend, let us find what the generally accepted views are, and as fast as
+      we find them set our heels on them. There is no other way to live like
+      real human beings. What on earth is it to me that other women crawl about
+      on all-fours, and fawn like dogs on any hand that will buckle a collar
+      onto them, and toss them the leavings of the table? I am not related to
+      them. I have nothing to do with them. They cannot make any rules for me.
+      If pride and dignity and independence are dead in them, why, so much the
+      worse for them! It is no affair of mine. Certainly it is no reason why I
+      should get down and grovel also. No; I at least stand erect on my legs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Ware sat up, and stared confusedly, with round eyes and parted lips,
+      at his companion. Instinctively his brain dragged forth to the surface
+      those epithets which the doctor had hurled in bitter contempt at her&mdash;&ldquo;mad
+      ass, a mere bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed lewdness.&rdquo; The
+      words rose in their order on his memory, hard and sharp-edged, like
+      arrow-heads. But to sit there, quite at her side; to breathe the same air,
+      and behold the calm loveliness of her profile; to touch the ribbon of her
+      dress&mdash;and all the while to hold these poisoned darts of abuse
+      levelled in thought at her breast&mdash;it was monstrous. He could have
+      killed the doctor at that moment. With an effort, he drove the foul things
+      from his mind&mdash;scattered them back into the darkness. He felt that he
+      had grown pale, and wondered if she had heard the groan that seemed to
+      have been forced from him in the struggle. Or was the groan imaginary?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia continued to sit unmoved, composedly looking upon vacancy. Theron's
+      eyes searched her face in vain for any sign of consciousness that she had
+      astounded and bewildered him. She did not seem to be thinking of him at
+      all. The proud calm of her thoughtful countenance suggested instead
+      occupation with lofty and remote abstractions and noble ideals.
+      Contemplating her, he suddenly perceived that what she had been saying was
+      great, wonderful, magnificent. An involuntary thrill ran through his veins
+      at recollection of her words. His fancy likened it to the sensation he
+      used to feel as a youth, when the Fourth of July reader bawled forth that
+      opening clause: &ldquo;When, in the course of human events, it becomes
+      necessary,&rdquo; etc. It was nothing less than another Declaration of
+      Independence he had been listening to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sank again recumbent at her side, and stretched the arm behind her,
+      nearer than before. &ldquo;Apparently, then, you will never marry.&rdquo; His voice
+      trembled a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Most certainly not!&rdquo; said Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You spoke so feelingly a little while ago,&rdquo; he ventured along, with
+      hesitation, &ldquo;about how sadly the notion of a priest's sacrificing himself&mdash;never
+      knowing what love meant&mdash;appealed to a woman. I should think that the
+      idea of sacrificing herself would seem to her even sadder still.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't remember that we mentioned THAT,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;How do you mean&mdash;sacrificing
+      herself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron gathered some of the outlying folds of her dress in his hand, and
+      boldly patted and caressed them. &ldquo;You, so beautiful and so free, with such
+      fine talents and abilities,&rdquo; he murmured; &ldquo;you, who could have the whole
+      world at your feet&mdash;are you, too, never going to know what love
+      means? Do you call that no sacrifice? To me it is the most terrible that
+      my imagination can conceive.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia laughed&mdash;a gentle, amused little laugh, in which Theron's ears
+      traced elements of tenderness. &ldquo;You must regulate that imagination of
+      yours,&rdquo; she said playfully. &ldquo;It conceives the thing that is not. Pray,
+      when&rdquo;&mdash;and here, turning her head, she bent down upon his face a gaze
+      of arch mock-seriousness&mdash;&ldquo;pray, when did I describe myself in these
+      terms? When did I say that I should never know what love meant?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For answer Theron laid his head down upon his arm, and closed his eyes,
+      and held his face against the draperies encircling her. &ldquo;I cannot think!&rdquo;
+       he groaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing that came uppermost in his mind, as it swayed and rocked in the
+      tempest of emotion, was the strange reminiscence of early childhood in it
+      all. It was like being a little boy again, nestling in an innocent,
+      unthinking transport of affection against his mother's skirts. The tears
+      he felt scalding his eyes were the spontaneous, unashamed tears of a
+      child; the tremulous and exquisite joy which spread, wave-like, over him,
+      at once reposeful and yearning, was full of infantile purity and
+      sweetness. He had not comprehended at all before what wellsprings of
+      spiritual beauty, what limpid depths of idealism, his nature contained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were speaking of our respective religions,&rdquo; he heard Celia say, as
+      imperturbably as if there had been no digression worth mentioning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he assented, and moved his head so that he looked up at her back
+      hair, and the leaves high above, mottled against the sky. The wish to lie
+      there, where now he could just catch the rose-leaf line of her under-chin
+      as well, was very strong upon him. &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo; he repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot talk to you like that,&rdquo; she said; and he sat up again
+      shamefacedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;I think we were speaking of religions&mdash;some time ago,&rdquo; he
+      faltered, to relieve the situation. The dreadful thought that she might be
+      annoyed began to oppress him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you said whatever my religion was, it was yours too. That entitles
+      you at least to be told what the religion is. Now, I am a Catholic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron, much mystified, nodded his head. Could it be possible&mdash;was
+      there coming a deliberate suggestion that he should become a convert? &ldquo;Yes&mdash;I
+      know,&rdquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I should explain that I am only a Catholic in the sense that its
+      symbolism is pleasant to me. You remember what Schopenhauer said&mdash;you
+      cannot have the water by itself: you must also have the jug that it is in.
+      Very well; the Catholic religion is my jug. I put into it the things I
+      like. They were all there long ago, thousands of years ago. The Jews threw
+      them out; we will put them back again. We will restore art and poetry and
+      the love of beauty, and the gentle, spiritual, soulful life. The Greeks
+      had it; and Christianity would have had it too, if it hadn't been for
+      those brutes they call the Fathers. They loved ugliness and dirt and the
+      thought of hell-fire. They hated women. In all the earlier stages of the
+      Church, women were very prominent in it. Jesus himself appreciated women,
+      and delighted to have them about him, and talk with them and listen to
+      them. That was the very essence of the Greek spirit; and it breathed into
+      Christianity at its birth a sweetness and a grace which twenty generations
+      of cranks and savages like Paul and Jerome and Tertullian weren't able to
+      extinguish. But the very man, Cyril, who killed Hypatia, and thus began
+      the dark ages, unwittingly did another thing which makes one almost
+      forgive him. To please the Egyptians, he secured the Church's acceptance
+      of the adoration of the Virgin. It is that idea which has kept the Greek
+      spirit alive, and grown and grown, till at last it will rule the world. It
+      was only epileptic Jews who could imagine a religion without sex in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember the pictures of the Virgin in your room,&rdquo; said Theron, feeling
+      more himself again. &ldquo;I wondered if they quite went with the statues.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The remark won a smile from Celia's lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They get along together better than you suppose,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;Besides,
+      they are not all pictures of Mary. One of them, standing on the moon, is
+      of Isis with the infant Horus in her arms. Another might as well be
+      Mahamie, bearing the miraculously born Buddha, or Olympias with her child
+      Alexander, or even Perictione holding her babe Plato&mdash;all these were
+      similar cases, you know. Almost every religion had its Immaculate
+      Conception. What does it all come to, except to show us that man turns
+      naturally toward the worship of the maternal idea? That is the deepest of
+      all our instincts&mdash;love of woman, who is at once daughter and wife
+      and mother. It is that that makes the world go round.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brave thoughts shaped themselves in Theron's mind, and shone forth in a
+      confident yet wistful smile on his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a pity you cannot change estates with me for one minute,&rdquo; he said,
+      in steady, low tone. &ldquo;Then you would realize the tremendous truth of what
+      you have been saying. It is only your intellect that has reached out and
+      grasped the idea. If you were in my place, you would discover that your
+      heart was bursting with it as well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia turned and looked at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I myself,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;would not have known, half an hour ago, what you
+      meant by the worship of the maternal idea. I am much older than you. I am
+      a strong, mature man. But when I lay down there, and shut my eyes&mdash;because
+      the charm and marvel of this whole experience had for the moment overcome
+      me&mdash;the strangest sensation seized upon me. It was absolutely as if I
+      were a boy again, a good, pure-minded, fond little child, and you were the
+      mother that I idolized.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia had not taken her eyes from his face. &ldquo;I find myself liking you
+      better at this moment,&rdquo; she said, with gravity, &ldquo;than I have ever liked
+      you before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, as by a sudden impulse, she sprang to her feet. &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; she cried,
+      her voice and manner all vivacity once more, &ldquo;we have been here long
+      enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon the instant, as Theron was more laboriously getting up, it became
+      apparent to them both that perhaps they had been there too long.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A boy with a gun under his arm, and two gray squirrels tied by the tails
+      slung across his shoulder, stood at the entrance to the glade, some dozen
+      paces away, regarding them with undisguised interest. Upon the discovery
+      that he was in turn observed, he resumed his interrupted progress through
+      the woods, whistling softly as he went, and vanished among the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heavens above!&rdquo; groaned Theron, shudderingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Know him?&rdquo; he went on, in answer to the glance of inquiry on his
+      companion's face. &ldquo;I should think I did! He spades my&mdash;my wife's
+      garden for her. He used to bring our milk. He works in the law office of
+      one of my trustees&mdash;the one who isn't friendly to me, but is very
+      friendly indeed with my&mdash;with Mrs. Ware. Oh, what shall I do? It may
+      easily mean my ruin!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia looked at him attentively. The color had gone out of his face, and
+      with it the effect of earnestness and mental elevation which, a minute
+      before, had caught her fancy. &ldquo;Somehow, I fear that I do not like you
+      quite so much just now, my friend,&rdquo; she remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In God's name, don't say that!&rdquo; urged Theron. He raised his voice in
+      agitated entreaty. &ldquo;You don't know what these people are&mdash;how they
+      would leap at the barest hint of a scandal about me. In my position I am a
+      thousand times more defenceless than any woman. Just a single whisper, and
+      I am done for!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me point out to you, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; said Celia, slowly, &ldquo;that to be seen
+      sitting and talking with me, whatever doubts it may raise as to a
+      gentleman's intellectual condition, need not necessarily blast his social
+      reputation beyond all hope whatever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron stared at her, as if he had not grasped her meaning. Then he winced
+      visibly under it, and put out his hands to implore her. &ldquo;Forgive me!
+      Forgive me!&rdquo; he pleaded. &ldquo;I was beside myself for the moment with the
+      fright of the thing. Oh, say you do forgive me, Celia!&rdquo; He made haste to
+      support this daring use of her name. &ldquo;I have been so happy today&mdash;so
+      deeply, so vastly happy&mdash;like the little child I spoke of&mdash;and
+      that is so new in my lonely life&mdash;that&mdash;the suddenness of the
+      thing&mdash;it just for the instant unstrung me. Don't be too hard on me
+      for it! And I had hoped, too&mdash;I had had such genuine heartfelt
+      pleasure in the thought&mdash;that, an hour or two ago, when you were
+      unhappy, perhaps it had been some sort of consolation to you that I was
+      with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia was looking away. When he took her hand she did not withdraw it, but
+      turned and nodded in musing general assent to what he had said. &ldquo;Yes, we
+      have both been unstrung, as you call it, today,&rdquo; she said, decidedly out
+      of pitch. &ldquo;Let each forgive the other, and say no more about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took his arm, and they retraced their steps along the path, again in
+      silence. The labored noise of the orchestra, as it were, returned to meet
+      them. They halted at an intersecting footpath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I go back to my slavery&mdash;my double bondage,&rdquo; said Theron, letting
+      his voice sink to a sigh. &ldquo;But even if I am put on the rack for it, I
+      shall have had one day of glory.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you may kiss me, in memory of that one day&mdash;or of a few
+      minutes in that day,&rdquo; said Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their lips brushed each other in a swift, almost perfunctory caress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron went his way at a hurried pace, the sobered tones of her &ldquo;good-bye&rdquo;
+       beating upon his brain with every measure of the droning waltz-music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART4" id="link2H_PART4">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The memory of the kiss abode with Theron. Like Aaron's rod, it swallowed
+      up one by one all competing thoughts and recollections, and made his brain
+      its slave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even as he strode back through the woods to the camp-meeting, it was the
+      kiss that kept his feet in motion, and guided their automatic course. All
+      along the watches of the restless night, it was the kiss that bore him
+      sweet company, and wandered with him from one broken dream of bliss to
+      another. Next day, it was the kiss that made of life for him a sort of
+      sunlit wonderland. He preached his sermon in the morning, and took his
+      appointed part in the other services of afternoon and evening, apparently
+      to everybody's satisfaction: to him it was all a vision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the beautiful full moon rose, this Sunday evening, and glorified the
+      clearing and the forest with its mellow harvest radiance, he could have
+      groaned with the burden of his joy. He went out alone into the light, and
+      bared his head to it, and stood motionless for a long time. In all his
+      life, he had never been impelled as powerfully toward earnest and soulful
+      thanksgiving. The impulse to kneel, there in the pure, tender moonlight,
+      and lift up offerings of praise to God, kept uppermost in his mind. Some
+      formless resignation restrained him from the act itself, but the spirit of
+      it hallowed his mood. He gazed up at the broad luminous face of the
+      satellite. &ldquo;You are our God,&rdquo; he murmured. &ldquo;Hers and mine! You are the
+      most beautiful of heavenly creatures, as she is of the angels on earth. I
+      am speechless with reverence for you both.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not until the camp-meeting broke up, four days later, and Theron
+      with the rest returned to town, that the material aspects of what had
+      happened, and might be expected to happen, forced themselves upon his
+      mind. The kiss was a child of the forest. So long as Theron remained in
+      the camp, the image of the kiss, which was enshrined in his heart and
+      ministered to by all his thoughts, continued enveloped in a haze of sylvan
+      mystery, like a dryad. Suggestions of its beauty and holiness came to him
+      in the odors of the woodland, at the sight of wild flowers and
+      water-lilies. When he walked alone in unfamiliar parts of the forest, he
+      carried about with him the half-conscious idea of somewhere coming upon a
+      strange, hidden pool which mortal eye had not seen before&mdash;a deep,
+      sequestered mere of spring-fed waters, walled in by rich, tangled growths
+      of verdure, and bearing upon its virgin bosom only the shadows of the
+      primeval wilderness, and the light of the eternal skies. His fancy dwelt
+      upon some such nook as the enchanted home of the fairy that possessed his
+      soul. The place, though he never found it, became real to him. As he
+      pictured it, there rose sometimes from among the lily-pads, stirring the
+      translucent depths and fluttering over the water's surface drops like
+      gems, the wonderful form of a woman, with pale leaves wreathed in her
+      luxuriant red hair, and a skin which gave forth light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the homecoming to Octavius, his dreams began to take more account of
+      realities. In a day or two he was wide awake, and thinking hard. The kiss
+      was as much as ever the ceaseless companion of his hours, but it no longer
+      insisted upon shrouding itself in vines and woodland creepers, or
+      outlining itself in phosphorescent vagueness against mystic backgrounds of
+      nymph-haunted glades. It advanced out into the noonday, and assumed
+      tangible dimensions and substance. He saw that it was related to the facts
+      of his daily life, and had, in turn, altered his own relations to all
+      these facts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What ought he to do? What COULD he do? Apparently, nothing but wait. He
+      waited for a week&mdash;then for another week. The conclusion that the
+      initiative had been left to him began to take shape in his mind. From this
+      it seemed but a step to the passionate resolve to act at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning the situation over and over in his anxious thoughts, two things
+      stood out in special prominence. One was that Celia loved him. The other
+      was that the boy in Gorringe's law office, and possibly Gorringe, and
+      heaven only knew how many others besides, had reasons for suspecting this
+      to be true.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And what about Celia? Side by side with the moving rapture of thinking
+      about her as a woman, there rose the substantial satisfaction of
+      contemplating her as Miss Madden. She had kissed him, and she was very
+      rich. The things gradually linked themselves before his eyes. He tried a
+      thousand varying guesses at what she proposed to do, and each time reined
+      up his imagination by the reminder that she was confessedly a creature of
+      whims, who proposed to do nothing, but was capable of all things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as to the boy. If he had blabbed what he saw, it was incredible that
+      somebody should not take the subject up, and impart a scandalous twist to
+      it, and send it rolling like a snowball to gather up exaggeration and foul
+      innuendo till it was big enough to overwhelm him. What would happen to him
+      if a formal charge were preferred against him? He looked it up in the
+      Discipline. Of course, if his accusers magnified their mean suspicions and
+      calumnious imaginings to the point of formulating a charge, it would be
+      one of immorality. They could prove nothing; there was nothing to prove.
+      At the worst, it was an indiscretion, which would involve his being
+      admonished by his Presiding Elder. Or if these narrow bigots confused
+      slanders with proofs, and showed that they intended to convict him, then
+      it would be open to him to withdraw from the ministry, in advance of his
+      condemnation. His relation to the church would be the same as if he had
+      been expelled, but to the outer world it would be different. And supposing
+      he did withdraw from the ministry?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes; this was the important point. What if he did abandon this mistaken
+      profession of his? On its mental side the relief would be prodigious,
+      unthinkable. But on the practical side, the bread-and-butter side? For
+      some days Theron paused with a shudder when he reached this question. The
+      thought of the plunge into unknown material responsibilities gave him a
+      sinking heart. He tried to imagine himself lecturing, canvassing for books
+      or insurance policies, writing for newspapers&mdash;and remained
+      frightened. But suddenly one day it occurred to him that these qualms and
+      forebodings were sheer folly. Was not Celia rich? Would she not with
+      lightning swiftness draw forth that check-book, like the flashing sword of
+      a champion from its scabbard, and run to his relief? Why, of course. It
+      was absurd not to have thought of that before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He recalled her momentary anger with him, that afternoon in the woods,
+      when he had cried out that discovery would mean ruin to him. He saw
+      clearly enough now that she had been grieved at his want of faith in her
+      protection. In his flurry of fright, he had lost sight of the fact that,
+      if exposure and trouble came to him, she would naturally feel that she had
+      been the cause of his martyrdom. It was plain enough now. If he got into
+      hot water, it would be solely on account of his having been seen with her.
+      He had walked into the woods with her&mdash;&ldquo;the further the better&rdquo; had
+      been her own words&mdash;out of pure kindliness, and the desire to lead
+      her away from the scene of her brother's and her own humiliation. But why
+      amplify arguments? Her own warm heart would tell her, on the instant, how
+      he had been sacrificed for her sake, and would bring her, eager and
+      devoted, to his succor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was all right, then. Slowly, from this point, suggestions expanded
+      themselves. The future could be, if he willed it, one long serene triumph
+      of love, and lofty intellectual companionship, and existence softened and
+      enriched at every point by all that wealth could command, and the most
+      exquisite tastes suggest. Should he will it! Ah! the question answered
+      itself. But he could not enter upon this beckoning heaven of a future
+      until he had freed himself. When Celia said to him, &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; he must not be
+      in the position to reply, &ldquo;I should like to, but unfortunately I am tied
+      by the leg.&rdquo; He should have to leave Octavius, leave the ministry, leave
+      everything. He could not begin too soon to face these contingencies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very likely Celia had not thought it out as far as this. With her, it was
+      a mere vague &ldquo;sometime I may.&rdquo; But the harder masculine sense, Theron
+      felt, existed for the very purpose of correcting and giving point to these
+      loose feminine notions of time and space. It was for him to clear away the
+      obstacles, and map the plans out with definite decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One warm afternoon, as he lolled in his easy-chair under the open window
+      of his study, musing upon the ever-shifting phases of this vast,
+      complicated, urgent problem, some chance words from the sidewalk in front
+      came to his ears, and, coming, remained to clarify his thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two ladies whose voices were strange to him had stopped&mdash;as so many
+      people almost daily stopped&mdash;to admire the garden of the parsonage.
+      One of them expressed her pleasure in general terms. Said the other&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My husband declares those dahlias alone couldn't be matched for thirty
+      dollars, and that some of those gladiolus must have cost three or four
+      dollars apiece. I know we've spent simply oceans of money on our garden,
+      and it doesn't begin to compare with this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems like a sinful waste to me,&rdquo; said her companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No-o,&rdquo; the other hesitated. &ldquo;No, I don't think quite that&mdash;if you
+      can afford it just as well as not. But it does seem to me that I'd rather
+      live in a little better house, and not spend it ALL on flowers. Just LOOK
+      at that cactus!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The voices died away. Theron sat up, with a look of arrested thought upon
+      his face, then sprang to his feet and moved hurriedly through the parlor
+      to an open front window. Peering out with caution he saw that the two
+      women receding from view were fashionably dressed and evidently came from
+      homes of means. He stared after them in a blank way until they turned a
+      corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went into the hall then, put on his frock-coat and hat, and stepped out
+      into the garden. He was conscious of having rather avoided it heretofore&mdash;not
+      altogether without reasons of his own, lying unexamined somewhere in the
+      recesses of his mind. Now he walked slowly about, and examined the flowers
+      with great attentiveness. The season was advancing, and he saw that many
+      plants had gone out of bloom. But what a magnificent plenitude of blossoms
+      still remained!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thirty dollars' worth of dahlias&mdash;that was what the stranger had
+      said. Theron hardly brought himself to credit the statement; but all the
+      same it was apparent to even his uninformed eye that these huge,
+      imbricated, flowering masses, with their extraordinary half-colors, must
+      be unusual. He remembered that the boy in Gorringe's office had spoken of
+      just one lot of plants costing thirty-one dollars and sixty cents, and
+      there had been two other lots as well. The figures remained surprisingly
+      distinct in his memory. It was no good deceiving himself any longer: of
+      course these were the plants that Gorringe had spent his money upon, here
+      all about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he surveyed them with a sour regard, a cool breeze stirred across the
+      garden. The tall, over-laden flower-spikes of gladioli bent and nodded at
+      him; the hollyhocks and flaming alvias, the clustered blossoms on the
+      standard roses, the delicately painted lilies on their stilt-like stems,
+      fluttered in the wind, and seemed all bowing satirically to him. &ldquo;Yes,
+      Levi Gorringe paid for us!&rdquo; He almost heard their mocking declaration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out in the back-yard, where a longer day of sunshine dwelt, there were
+      many other flowers, and notably a bed of geraniums which literally made
+      the eye ache. Standing at this rear corner of the house, he caught the
+      droning sound of Alice's voice, humming a hymn to herself as she went
+      about her kitchen work. He saw her through the open window. She was
+      sweeping, and had a sort of cap on her head which did not add to the
+      graces of her appearance. He looked at her with a hard glance, recalling
+      as a fresh grievance the ten days of intolerable boredom he had spent
+      cooped up in a ridiculous little tent with her, at the camp-meeting. She
+      must have realized at the time how odious the enforced companionship was
+      to him. Yes, beyond doubt she did. It came back to him now that they had
+      spoken but rarely to each other. She had not even praised his sermon upon
+      the Sabbath-question, which every one else had been in raptures over. For
+      that matter she no longer praised anything he did, and took obvious pains
+      to preserve toward him a distant demeanor. So much the better, he felt
+      himself thinking. If she chose to behave in that offish and unwifely
+      fashion, she could blame no one but herself for its results.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had seen him, and came now to the window, watering-pot and broom in
+      hand. She put her head out, to breathe a breath of dustless air, and began
+      as if she would smile on him. Then her face chilled and stiffened, as she
+      caught his look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall you be home for supper?&rdquo; she asked, in her iciest tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not thought of going out before. The question, and the manner of
+      it, gave immediate urgency to the idea of going somewhere. &ldquo;I may or I may
+      not,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;It is quite impossible for me to say.&rdquo; He turned on his
+      heel with this, and walked briskly out of the yard and down the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the most natural thing that presently he should be strolling past
+      the Madden house, and letting a covert glance stray over its front and the
+      grounds about it, as he loitered along. Every day since his return from
+      the woods he had given the fates this chance of bringing Celia to meet
+      him, without avail. He had hung about in the vicinity of the Catholic
+      church on several evenings as well, but to no purpose. The organ inside
+      was dumb, and he could detect no signs of Celia's presence on the curtains
+      of the pastorate next door. This day, too, there was no one visible at the
+      home of the Maddens, and he walked on, a little sadly. It was weary work
+      waiting for the signal that never came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there were compensations. His mind reverted doggedly to the flowers in
+      his garden, and to Alice's behavior toward him. They insisted upon
+      connecting themselves in his thoughts. Why should Levi Gorringe, a
+      money-lender, and therefore the last man in the world to incur reckless
+      expenditure, go and buy perhaps a hundred dollars, worth of flowers for
+      his wife's garden? It was time&mdash;high time&mdash;to face this
+      question. And his experiencing religion afterward, just when Alice did,
+      and marching down to the rail to kneel beside her&mdash;that was a thing
+      to be thought of, too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meditation, it is true, hardly threw fresh light upon the matter. It was
+      incredible, of course, that there should be anything wrong. To even shape
+      a thought of Alice in connection with gallantry would be wholly
+      impossible. Nor could it be said that Gorringe, in his new capacity as a
+      professing church-member, had disclosed any sign of ulterior motives, or
+      of insincerity. Yet there the facts were. While Theron pondered them,
+      their mystery, if they involved a mystery, baffled him altogether. But
+      when he had finished, he found himself all the same convinced that neither
+      Alice nor Gorringe would be free to blame him for anything he might do. He
+      had grounds for complaint against them. If he did not himself know just
+      what these grounds were, it was certain enough that THEY knew. Very well,
+      then, let them take the responsibility for what happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was indeed awkward that at the moment, as Theron chanced to emerge
+      temporarily from his brown-study, his eyes fell full upon the spare,
+      well-knit form of Levi Gorringe himself, standing only a few feet away, in
+      the staircase entrance to his law office. His lean face, browned by the
+      summer's exposure, had a more Arabian aspect than ever. His hands were in
+      his pockets, and he held an unlighted cigar between his teeth. He looked
+      the Rev. Mr. Ware over calmly, and nodded recognition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had halted instinctively. On the instant he would have given a
+      great deal not to have stopped at all. It was stupid of him to have
+      paused, but it would not do now to go on without words of some sort. He
+      moved over to the door-way, and made a half-hearted pretence of looking at
+      the photographs in one of the show-cases at its side. As Mr. Gorringe did
+      not take his hands from his pockets, there was no occasion for any formal
+      greeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had no idea that they took such good pictures in Octavius,&rdquo; Theron
+      remarked after a minute's silence, still bending in examination of the
+      photographs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They ought to; they charge New York prices,&rdquo; observed the lawyer,
+      sententiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron found in the words confirmation of his feeling that Gorringe was
+      not naturally a lavish or extravagant man. Rather was he a careful and
+      calculating man, who spent money only for a purpose. Though the minister
+      continued gazing at the stiff presentments of local beauties and swains,
+      his eyes seemed to see salmon-hued hollyhocks and spotted lilies instead.
+      Suddenly a resolve came to him. He stood erect, and faced his trustee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Speaking of the price of things,&rdquo; he said, with an effort of arrogance in
+      his measured tone, &ldquo;I have never had an opportunity before of mentioning
+      the subject of the flowers you have so kindly furnished for my&mdash;for
+      MY garden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why mention it now?&rdquo; queried Gorringe, with nonchalance. He turned his
+      cigar about with a movement of his lips, and worked it into the corner of
+      his mouth. He did not find it necessary to look at Theron at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because&mdash;&rdquo; began Mr. Ware, and then hesitated&mdash;&ldquo;because&mdash;well,
+      it raises a question of my being under obligation, which I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no, sir,&rdquo; said the lawyer; &ldquo;put that out of your mind. You are no
+      more under obligation to me than I am to you. Oh, no, make yourself easy
+      about that. Neither of us owes the other anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not even good-will&mdash;I take that to be your meaning,&rdquo; retorted
+      Theron, with some heat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The words are yours, sir,&rdquo; responded Gorringe, coolly. &ldquo;I do not object
+      to them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As you like,&rdquo; put in the other. &ldquo;If it be so, why, then all the more
+      reason why I should, under the circumstances&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Under what circumstances?&rdquo; interposed the lawyer. &ldquo;Let us be clear about
+      this thing as we go along. To what circumstances do you refer?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had turned his eyes now, and looked Theron in the face. A slight
+      protrusion of his lower jaw had given the cigar an upward tilt under the
+      black mustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The circumstances are that you have brought or sent to my garden a great
+      many very expensive flower-plants and bushes and so on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you object? I had not supposed that clergymen in general&mdash;and
+      you in particular&mdash;were so sensitive. Have donation parties, then,
+      gone out of date?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand your sneer well enough,&rdquo; retorted Theron, &ldquo;but that can
+      pass. The main point is, that you did me the honor to send these plants&mdash;or
+      to smuggle them in&mdash;but never once deigned to hint to me that you had
+      done so. No one told me. Except by mere accident, I should not have known
+      to this day where they came from.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gorringe twisted the cigar at another angle, with lines of grim
+      amusement about the corner of his mouth. &ldquo;I should have thought,&rdquo; he said
+      with dry deliberation, &ldquo;that possibly this fact might have raised in your
+      mind the conceivable hypothesis that the plants might not be intended for
+      you at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is precisely it, sir,&rdquo; said Theron. There were people passing, and
+      he was forced to keep his voice down. It would have been a relief, he
+      felt, to shout. &ldquo;That is it&mdash;they were not intended for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, what are you talking about?&rdquo; The lawyer's speech had become
+      abrupt almost to incivility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think my remarks have been perfectly clear,&rdquo; said the minister, with
+      dignity. It was a new experience to be addressed in that fashion. It
+      occurred to him to add, &ldquo;Please remember that I am not in the witness-box,
+      to be bullied or insulted by a professional.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gorringe studied Theron's face attentively with a cold, searching
+      scrutiny. &ldquo;You may thank your stars you're not!&rdquo; he said, with
+      significance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What on earth could he mean? The words and the menacing tone greatly
+      impressed Theron. Indeed, upon reflection, he found that they frightened
+      him. The disposition to adopt a high tone with the lawyer was melting
+      away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not see,&rdquo; he began, and then deliberately allowed his voice to take
+      on an injured and plaintive inflection&mdash;&ldquo;I do not see why you should
+      adopt this tone toward me&mdash;Brother Gorringe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lawyer scowled, and bit sharply into the cigar, but said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I have unconsciously offended you in any way,&rdquo; Theron went on, &ldquo;I beg
+      you to tell me how. I liked you from the beginning of my pastorate here,
+      and the thought that latterly we seemed to be drifting apart has given me
+      much pain. But now it is still more distressing to find you actually
+      disposed to quarrel with me. Surely, Brother Gorringe, between a pastor
+      and a probationer who&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; Gorringe broke in; &ldquo;quarrel isn't the word for it. There isn't any
+      quarrel, Mr. Ware.&rdquo; He stepped down from the door-stone to the sidewalk as
+      he spoke, and stood face to face with Theron. Working-men with
+      dinner-pails, and factory girls, were passing close to them, and he
+      lowered his voice to a sharp, incisive half-whisper as he added, &ldquo;It
+      wouldn't be worth any grown man's while to quarrel with so poor a creature
+      as you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron stood confounded, with an empty stare of bewilderment on his face.
+      It rose in his mind that the right thing to feel was rage, righteous
+      indignation, fury; but for the life of him, he could not muster any manly
+      anger. The character of the insult stupefied him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not know that I have anything to say to you in reply,&rdquo; he remarked,
+      after what seemed to him a silence of minutes. His lips framed the words
+      automatically, but they expressed well enough the blank vacancy of his
+      mind. The suggestion that anybody deemed him a &ldquo;poor creature&rdquo; grew more
+      astounding, incomprehensible, as it swelled in his brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I suppose not,&rdquo; snapped Gorringe. &ldquo;You're not the sort to stand up to
+      men; your form is to go round the corner and take it out of somebody
+      weaker than yourself&mdash;a defenceless woman, for instance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;ho!&rdquo; said Theron. The exclamation had uttered itself. The sound
+      of it seemed to clarify his muddled thoughts; and as they ranged
+      themselves in order, he began to understand. &ldquo;Oh&mdash;ho!&rdquo; he said again,
+      and nodded his head in token of comprehension.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lawyer, chewing his cigar with increased activity, glared at him.
+      &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; he demanded peremptorily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mean?&rdquo; said the minister. &ldquo;Oh, nothing that I feel called upon to explain
+      to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was passing strange, but his self-possession had all at once returned
+      to him. As it became more apparent that the lawyer was losing his temper,
+      Theron found the courage to turn up the corners of his lips in show of a
+      bitter little smile of confidence. He looked into the other's dusky face,
+      and flaunted this smile at it in contemptuous defiance. &ldquo;It is not a
+      subject that I can discuss with propriety&mdash;at this stage,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damn you! Are you talking about those flowers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I am not talking about anything in particular,&rdquo; returned Theron, &ldquo;not
+      even the curious choice of language which my latest probationer seems to
+      prefer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go and strike my name off the list!&rdquo; said Gorringe, with rising passion.
+      &ldquo;I was a fool to ever have it there. To think of being a probationer of
+      yours&mdash;my God!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That will be a pity&mdash;from one point of view,&rdquo; remarked Theron, still
+      with the ironical smile on his lips. &ldquo;You seemed to enter upon the new
+      life with such deliberation and fixity of purpose, too! I can imagine the
+      regrets your withdrawal will cause, in certain quarters. I only hope that
+      it will not discourage those who accompanied you to the altar, and shared
+      your enthusiasm at the time.&rdquo; He had spoken throughout with studied
+      slowness and an insolent nicety of utterance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had better go away!&rdquo; broke forth Gorringe. &ldquo;If you don't, I shall
+      forget myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the first time?&rdquo; asked Theron. Then, warned by the flash in the
+      lawyer's eye, he turned on his heel and sauntered, with a painstaking
+      assumption of a mind quite at ease, up the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gorringe's own face twitched and his veins tingled as he looked after him.
+      He spat the shapeless cigar out of his mouth into the gutter, and, drawing
+      forth another from his pocket, clenched it between his teeth, his gaze
+      following the tall form of the Methodist minister till it was merged in
+      the crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'm damned!&rdquo; he said aloud to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The photographer had come down to take in his showcases for the night. He
+      looked up from his task at the exclamation, and grinned inquiringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've just been talking to a man,&rdquo; said the lawyer, &ldquo;who's so much meaner
+      than any other man I ever heard of that it takes my breath away. He's got
+      a wife that's as pure and good as gold, and he knows it, and she worships
+      the ground he walks on, and he knows that too. And yet the scoundrel is
+      around trying to sniff out some shadow of a pretext for misusing her worse
+      than he's already done. Yes, sir; he'd be actually tickled to death if he
+      could nose up some hint of a scandal about her&mdash;something that he
+      could pretend to believe, and work for his own advantage to levy
+      blackmail, or get rid of her, or whatever suited his book. I didn't think
+      there was such an out-and-out cur on this whole footstool. I almost wish,
+      by God, I'd thrown him into the canal!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you lawyers must run against some pretty snide specimens,&rdquo; remarked
+      the photographer, lifting one of the cases from its sockets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0026" id="link2HCH0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Theron spent half an hour in aimless strolling about the streets. From
+      earliest boyhood his mind had always worked most clearly when he walked
+      alone. Every mental process which had left a mark upon his memory and his
+      career&mdash;the daydreams of future academic greatness and fame which had
+      fashioned themselves in his brain as a farm lad; the meditations,
+      raptures, and high resolves of his student period at the seminary; the
+      more notable sermons and powerful discourse by which he had revealed the
+      genius that was in him to astonished and delighted assemblages&mdash;all
+      were associated in his retrospective thoughts with solitary rambles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a very direct and vivid consciousness now that it was good to be on
+      his legs, and alone. He had never in his life been more sensible of the
+      charm of his own companionship. The encounter with Gorringe seemed to have
+      cleared all the clouds out of his brain, and restored lightness to his
+      heart. After such an object lesson, the impossibility of his continuing to
+      sacrifice himself to a notion of duty to these low-minded and
+      coarse-natured villagers was beyond all argument. There could no longer be
+      any doubt about his moral right to turn his back upon them, to wash his
+      hands of the miserable combination of hypocrisy and hysterics which they
+      called their spiritual life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the question of Gorringe and Alice, that too stood precisely where he
+      wanted it. Even in his own thoughts, he preferred to pursue it no further.
+      Between them somewhere an offence of concealment, it might be of
+      conspiracy, had been committed against him. It was no business of his to
+      say more, or to think more. He rested his case simply on the fact, which
+      could not be denied, and which he was not in the least interested to have
+      explained, one way or the other. The recollection of Gorringe's obvious
+      disturbance of mind was especially pleasant to him. He himself had been
+      magnanimous almost to the point of weakness. He had gone out of his way to
+      call the man &ldquo;brother,&rdquo; and to give him an opportunity of behaving like a
+      gentleman; but his kindly forbearance had been wasted. Gorringe was not
+      the man to understand generous feelings, much less rise to their level. He
+      had merely shown that he would be vicious if he knew how. It was more
+      important and satisfactory to recall that he had also shown a complete
+      comprehension of the injured husband's grievance. The fact that he had
+      recognized it was enough&mdash;was, in fact, everything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the background of his thoughts Theron had carried along a notion of
+      going and dining with Father Forbes when the time for the evening meal
+      should arrive. The idea in itself attracted him, as a fitting capstone to
+      his resolve not to go home to supper. It gave just the right kind of
+      character to his domestic revolt. But when at last he stood on the
+      doorstep of the pastorate, waiting for an answer to the tinkle of the
+      electric bell he had heard ring inside, his mind contained only the single
+      thought that now he should hear something about Celia. Perhaps he might
+      even find her there; but he put that suggestion aside as slightly
+      unpleasant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hag-faced housekeeper led him, as before, into the dining-room. It was
+      still daylight, and he saw on the glance that the priest was alone at the
+      table, with a book beside him to read from as he ate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes rose and came forward, greeting his visitor with profuse
+      urbanity and smiles. If there was a perfunctory note in the invitation to
+      sit down and share the meal, Theron did not catch it. He frankly displayed
+      his pleasure as he laid aside his hat, and took the chair opposite his
+      host.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is really only a few months since I was here, in this room, before,&rdquo;
+       he remarked, as the priest closed his book and tossed it to one side, and
+      the housekeeper came in to lay another place. &ldquo;Yet it might have been
+      years, many long years, so tremendous is the difference that the lapse of
+      time has wrought in me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid we have nothing to tempt you very much, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; remarked
+      Father Forbes, with a gesture of his plump white hand which embraced the
+      dishes in the centre of the table. &ldquo;May I send you a bit of this boiled
+      mutton? I have very homely tastes when I am by myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was saying,&rdquo; Theron observed, after some moments had passed in silence,
+      &ldquo;that I date such a tremendous revolution in my thoughts, my beliefs, my
+      whole mind and character, from my first meeting with you, my first coming
+      here. I don't know how to describe to you the enormous change that has
+      come over me; and I owe it all to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can only hope, then, that it is entirely of a satisfactory nature,&rdquo;
+       said the priest, politely smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it is so splendidly satisfactory!&rdquo; said Theron, with fervor. &ldquo;I look
+      back at myself now with wonder and pity. It seems incredible that, such a
+      little while ago, I should have been such an ignorant and unimaginative
+      clod of earth, content with such petty ambitions and actually proud of my
+      limitations.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you have larger ambitions now?&rdquo; asked the other. &ldquo;Pray let me help
+      you to some potatoes. I am afraid that ambitions only get in our way and
+      trip us up. We clergymen are like street-car horses. The more steadily we
+      jog along between the rails, the better it is for us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I don't intend to remain in the ministry,&rdquo; declared Theron. The
+      statement seemed to him a little bald, now that he had made it; and as his
+      companion lifted his brows in surprise, he added stumblingly: &ldquo;That is, as
+      I feel now, it seems to me impossible that I should remain much longer.
+      With you, of course, it is different. You have a thousand things to
+      interest and pleasantly occupy you in your work and its ceremonies, so
+      that mere belief or non-belief in the dogma hardly matters. But in our
+      church dogma is everything. If you take that away, or cease to have its
+      support, the rest is intolerable, hideous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes cut another slice of mutton for himself. &ldquo;It is a pretty
+      serious business to make such a change at your time of life. I take it for
+      granted you will think it all over very carefully before you commit
+      yourself.&rdquo; He said this with an almost indifferent air, which rather
+      chilled his listener's enthusiasm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo;, Theron made answer; &ldquo;I shall do nothing rash. But I have a
+      good many plans for the future.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes did not ask what these were, and a brief further period of
+      silence fell upon the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope everything went off smoothly at the picnic,&rdquo; Theron ventured, at
+      last. &ldquo;I have not seen any of you since then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest shook his head and sighed. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It is a bad
+      business. I have had a great deal of unhappiness out of it this past
+      fortnight. That young man who was rude to you&mdash;of course it was mere
+      drunken, irresponsible nonsense on his part&mdash;has got himself into a
+      serious scrape, I'm afraid. It is being kept quite within the family, and
+      we hope to manage so that it will remain there, but it has terribly upset
+      his father and his sister. But that, after all, is not so hard to bear as
+      the other affliction that has come upon the Maddens. You remember Michael,
+      the other brother? He seems to have taken cold that evening, or perhaps
+      over-exerted himself. He has been seized with quick consumption. He will
+      hardly last till snow flies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I am GRIEVED to hear that!&rdquo; Theron spoke with tremulous earnestness.
+      It seemed to him as if Michael were in some way related to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very hard upon them all,&rdquo; the priest went on. &ldquo;Michael is as sweet
+      and holy a character as it is possible for any one to think of. He is the
+      apple of his father's eye. They were inseparable, those two. Do you know
+      the father, Mr. Madden?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron shook his head. &ldquo;I think I have seen him,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;A small man,
+      with gray whiskers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A peasant,&rdquo; said Father Forbes, &ldquo;but with a heart of gold. Poor man! he
+      has had little enough out of his riches. Ah, the West Coast people, what
+      tragedies I have seen among them over here! They have rudimentary lung
+      organizations, like a frog's, to fit the mild, wet soft air they live in.
+      The sharp air here kills them off like flies in a frost. Whole families
+      go. I should think there are a dozen of old Jeremiah's children in the
+      cemetery. If Michael could have passed his twenty-eighth year, there would
+      have been hope for him, at least till his thirty-fifth. These pulmonary
+      things seem to go by sevens, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know,&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;It is very strange&mdash;and very sad.&rdquo; His
+      startled mind was busy, all at once, with conjectures as to Celia's age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sister&mdash;Miss Madden&mdash;seems extremely strong,&rdquo; he remarked
+      tentatively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Celia may escape the general doom,&rdquo; said the priest. His guest noted that
+      he clenched his shapely white hand on the table as he spoke, and that his
+      gentle, carefully modulated voice had a gritty hardness in its tone. &ldquo;THAT
+      would be too dreadful to think of,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron shuddered in silence, and strove to shut his mind against the
+      thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has taken Michael's illness so deeply to heart,&rdquo; the priest
+      proceeded, &ldquo;and devoted herself to him so untiringly that I get a little
+      nervous about her. I have been urging her to go away and get a change of
+      air and scene, if only for a few days. She does not sleep well, and that
+      is always a bad thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I remember her telling me once that sometimes she had sleepless
+      spells,&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;She said that then she banged on her piano at all
+      hours, or dragged the cushions about from room to room, like a wild woman.
+      A very interesting young lady, don't you find her so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes let a wan smile play on his lips. &ldquo;What, our Celia?&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;Interesting! Why, Mr. Ware, there is no one like her in the world.
+      She is as unique as&mdash;what shall I say?&mdash;as the Irish are among
+      races. Her father and mother were both born in mud-cabins, and she&mdash;she
+      might be the daughter of a hundred kings, except that they seem mostly
+      rather under-witted than otherwise. She always impresses me as a sort of
+      atavistic idealization of the old Kelt at his finest and best. There in
+      Ireland you got a strange mixture of elementary early peoples, walled off
+      from the outer world by the four seas, and free to work out their own
+      racial amalgam on their own lines. They brought with them at the outset a
+      great inheritance of Eastern mysticism. Others lost it, but the Irish, all
+      alone on their island, kept it alive and brooded on it, and rooted their
+      whole spiritual side in it. Their religion is full of it; their blood is
+      full of it; our Celia is fuller of it than anybody else. The Ireland of
+      two thousand years ago is incarnated in her. They are the merriest people
+      and the saddest, the most turbulent and the most docile, the most talented
+      and the most unproductive, the most practical and the most visionary, the
+      most devout and the most pagan. These impossible contradictions war
+      ceaselessly in their blood. When I look at Celia, I seem to see in my
+      mind's eye the fair young-ancestral mother of them all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron gazed at the speaker with open admiration. &ldquo;I love to hear you
+      talk,&rdquo; he said simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An unbidden memory flitted upward in his mind. Those were the very words
+      that Alice had so often on her lips in their old courtship days. How
+      curious it was! He looked at the priest, and had a quaint sensation of
+      feeling as a romantic woman must feel in the presence of a specially
+      impressive masculine personality. It was indeed strange that this
+      soft-voiced, portly creature in a gown, with his white, fat hands and his
+      feline suavity of manner, should produce such a commanding and unique
+      effect of virility. No doubt this was a part of the great sex mystery
+      which historically surrounded the figure of the celibate priest as with an
+      atmosphere. Women had always been prostrating themselves before it.
+      Theron, watching his companion's full, pallid face in the lamp-light,
+      tried to fancy himself in the priest's place, looking down upon these
+      worshipping female forms. He wondered what the celibate's attitude really
+      was. The enigma fascinated him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes, after his rhetorical outburst, had been eating. He pushed
+      aside his cheese-plate. &ldquo;I grow enthusiastic on the subject of my race
+      sometimes,&rdquo; he remarked, with the suggestion of an apology. &ldquo;But I make up
+      for it other times&mdash;most of the time&mdash;by scolding them. If it
+      were not such a noble thing to be an Irishman, it would be ridiculous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said Theron, deprecatingly, &ldquo;who would not be enthusiastic in
+      talking of Miss Madden? What you said about her was perfect. As you spoke,
+      I was thinking how proud and thankful we ought to be for the privilege of
+      knowing her&mdash;we who do know her well&mdash;although of course your
+      friendship with her is vastly more intimate than mine&mdash;than mine
+      could ever hope to be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest offered no comment, and Theron went on: &ldquo;I hardly know how to
+      describe the remarkable impression she makes upon me. I can't imagine to
+      myself any other young woman so brilliant or broad in her views, or so
+      courageous. Of course, her being so rich makes it easier for her to do
+      just what she wants to do, but her bravery is astonishing all the same. We
+      had a long and very sympathetic talk in the woods, that day of the picnic,
+      after we left you. I don't know whether she spoke to you about it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes made a movement of the head and eyes which seemed to
+      negative the suggestion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her talk,&rdquo; continued Theron, &ldquo;gave me quite new ideas of the range and
+      capacity of the female mind. I wonder that everybody in Octavius isn't
+      full of praise and admiration for her talents and exceptional character.
+      In such a small town as this, you would think she would be the centre of
+      attention&mdash;the pride of the place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think she has as much praise as is good for her,&rdquo; remarked the priest,
+      quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And here's a thing that puzzles me,&rdquo; pursued Mr. Ware. &ldquo;I was immensely
+      surprised to find that Dr. Ledsmar doesn't even think she is smart&mdash;or
+      at least he professes the utmost intellectual contempt for her, and says
+      he dislikes her into the bargain. But of course she dislikes him, too, so
+      that's only natural. But I can't understand his denying her great
+      ability.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest smiled in a dubious way. &ldquo;Don't borrow unnecessary alarm about
+      that, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; he said, with studied smoothness of modulated tones.
+      &ldquo;These two good friends of mine have much enjoyment out of the idea that
+      they are fighting for the mastery over my poor unstable character. It has
+      grown to be a habit with them, and a hobby as well, and they pursue it
+      with tireless zest. There are not many intellectual diversions open to us
+      here, and they make the most of this one. It amuses them, and it is not
+      without its charms for me, in my capacity as an interested observer. It is
+      a part of the game that they should pretend to themselves that they detest
+      each other. In reality I fancy that they like each other very much. At any
+      rate, there is nothing to be disturbed about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His mellifluous tones had somehow the effect of suggesting to Theron that
+      he was an outsider and would better mind his own business. Ah, if this
+      purring pussy-cat of a priest only knew how little of an outsider he
+      really was! The thought gave him an easy self-control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;our warm mutual friendship makes the observation of
+      these little individual vagaries merely a part of a delightful whole. I
+      should not dream of discussing Miss Madden's confidences to me, or the
+      doctor's either, outside our own little group.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes reached behind him and took from a chair his black
+      three-cornered cap with the tassel. &ldquo;Unfortunately I have a sick call
+      waiting me,&rdquo; he said, gathering up his gown and slowly rising.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I saw the man sitting in the hall,&rdquo; remarked Theron, getting to his
+      feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would ask you to go upstairs and wait,&rdquo; the priest went on, &ldquo;but my
+      return, unhappily, is quite uncertain. Another evening I may be more
+      fortunate. I am leaving town tomorrow for some days, but when I get back&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The polite sentence did not complete itself. Father Forbes had come out
+      into the hall, giving a cool nod to the working-man, who rose from the
+      bench as they passed, and shook hands with his guest on the doorstep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the door had closed upon Mr. Ware, the priest turned to the man. &ldquo;You
+      have come about those frames,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If you will come upstairs, I will
+      show you the prints, and you can give me a notion of what can be done with
+      them. I rather fancy the idea of a triptych in carved old English, if you
+      can manage it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After the workman had gone away, Father Forbes put on slippers and an old
+      loose soutane, lighted a cigar, and, pushing an easy-chair over to the
+      reading lamp, sat down with a book. Then something occurred to him, and he
+      touched the house-bell at his elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Maggie,&rdquo; he said gently, when the housekeeper appeared at the door, &ldquo;I
+      will have the coffee and FINE CHAMPAGNE up here, if it is no trouble. And&mdash;oh,
+      Maggie&mdash;I was compelled this evening to turn the blameless visit of
+      the framemaker into a venial sin, and that involves a needless wear and
+      tear of conscience. I think that&mdash;hereafter&mdash;you understand?&mdash;I
+      am not invariably at home when the Rev. Mr. Ware does me the honor to
+      call.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0027" id="link2HCH0027">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That night brought the first frost of the season worth counting. In the
+      morning, when Theron came downstairs, his casual glance through the window
+      caught a desolate picture of blackened dahlia stalks and shrivelled
+      blooms. The gayety and color of the garden were gone, and in their place
+      was shabby and dishevelled ruin. He flung the sash up and leaned out. The
+      nipping autumn air was good to breathe. He looked about him, surveying the
+      havoc the frost had wrought among the flowers, and smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At breakfast he smiled again&mdash;a mirthless and calculated smile. &ldquo;I
+      see that Brother Gorringe's flowers have come to grief over night,&rdquo; he
+      remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice looked at him before she spoke, and saw on his face a confirmation
+      of the hostile hint in his voice. She nodded in a constrained way, and
+      said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or rather, I should say,&rdquo; Theron went on, with deliberate words, &ldquo;the
+      late Brother Gorringe's flowers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you mean&mdash;LATE&rdquo; asked his wife, swiftly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, calm yourself!&rdquo; replied the husband. &ldquo;He is not dead. He has only
+      intimated to me his desire to sever his connection. I may add that he did
+      so in a highly offensive manner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very sorry,&rdquo; said Alice, in a low tone, and with her eyes on her
+      plate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I took it for granted you would be grieved at his backsliding,&rdquo; remarked
+      Theron, making his phrases as pointed as he could. &ldquo;He was such a
+      promising probationer, and you took such a keen interest in his spiritual
+      awakening. But the frost has nipped his zeal&mdash;along with the hundred
+      or more dollars' worth of flowers by which he testified his faith. I find
+      something interesting in their having been blasted simultaneously.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice dropped all pretence of interest in her breakfast. With a flushed
+      face and lips tightly compressed, she made a movement as if to rise from
+      her chair. Then, changing her mind, she sat bolt upright and faced her
+      husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think we had better have this out right now,&rdquo; she said, in a voice
+      which Theron hardly recognized. &ldquo;You have been hinting round the subject
+      long enough&mdash;too long. There are some things nobody is obliged to put
+      up with, and this is one of them. You will oblige me by saying out in so
+      many words what it is you are driving at.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The outburst astounded Theron. He laid down his knife and fork, and gazed
+      at his wife in frank surprise. She had so accustomed him, of late, to a
+      demeanor almost abject in its depressed docility that he had quite
+      forgotten the Alice of the old days, when she had spirit and courage
+      enough for two, and a notable tongue of her own. The flash in her eyes and
+      the lines of resolution about her mouth and chin for a moment daunted him.
+      Then he observed by a flutter of the frill at her wrist that she was
+      trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure I have nothing to 'say out in so many words,' as you put it,&rdquo;
+       he replied, forcing his voice into cool, impassive tones. &ldquo;I merely
+      commented upon a coincidence, that was all. If, for any reason under the
+      sun, the subject chances to be unpleasant to you, I have no earthly desire
+      to pursue it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I insist upon having it pursued!&rdquo; returned Alice. &ldquo;I've had just all
+      I can stand of your insinuations and innuendoes, and it's high time we had
+      some plain talk. Ever since the revival, you have been dropping sly,
+      underhand hints about Mr. Gorringe and&mdash;and me. Now I ask you what
+      you mean by it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, there was a shake in her voice, and he could see how her bosom heaved
+      in a tremor of nervousness. It was easy for him to be very calm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is you who introduce these astonishing suggestions, not I,&rdquo; he replied
+      coldly. &ldquo;It is you who couple your name with his&mdash;somewhat to my
+      surprise, I admit&mdash;but let me suggest that we drop the subject. You
+      are excited just now, and you might say things that you would prefer to
+      leave unsaid. It would surely be better for all concerned to say no more
+      about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice, staring across the table at him with knitted brows, emitted a sharp
+      little snort of indignation. &ldquo;Well, I never! Theron, I wouldn't have
+      thought it of you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are so many things you wouldn't have thought, on such a variety of
+      subjects,&rdquo; he observed, with a show of resuming his breakfast. &ldquo;But why
+      continue? We are only angering each other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind that,&rdquo; she replied, with more control over her speech. &ldquo;I
+      guess things have come to a pass where a little anger won't do any harm. I
+      have a right to insist on knowing what you mean by your insinuations.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron sighed. &ldquo;Why will you keep harping on the thing?&rdquo; he asked wearily.
+      &ldquo;I have displayed no curiosity. I don't ask for any explanations. I think
+      I mentioned that the man had behaved insultingly to me&mdash;but that
+      doesn't matter. I don't bring it up as a grievance. I am very well able to
+      take care of myself. I have no wish to recur to the incident in any way. So
+      far as I am concerned, the topic is dismissed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen to me!&rdquo; broke in Alice, with eager gravity. She hesitated, as he
+      looked up with a nod of attention, and reflected as well as she was able
+      among her thoughts for a minute or two. &ldquo;This is what I want to say to
+      you. Ever since we came to this hateful Octavius, you and I have been
+      drifting apart&mdash;or no, that doesn't express it&mdash;simply rushing
+      away from each other. It only began last spring, and now the space between
+      us is so wide that we are worse than complete strangers. For strangers at
+      least don't hate each other, and I've had a good many occasions lately to
+      see that you positively do hate me&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What grotesque absurdity&rdquo; interposed Theron, impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it isn't absurdity; it's gospel truth,&rdquo; retorted Alice. &ldquo;And&mdash;don't
+      interrupt me&mdash;there have been times, too, when I have had to ask
+      myself if I wasn't getting almost to hate you in return. I tell you this
+      frankly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you are undoubtedly frank,&rdquo; commented the husband, toying with his
+      teaspoon. &ldquo;A hypercritical person might consider, almost too frank.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice scanned his face closely while he spoke, and held her breath as if
+      in expectant suspense. Her countenance clouded once more. &ldquo;You don't
+      realize, Theron,&rdquo; she said gravely; &ldquo;your voice when you speak to me, your
+      look, your manner, they have all changed. You are like another man&mdash;some
+      man who never loved me, and doesn't even know me, much less like me. I
+      want to know what the end of it is to be. Up to the time of your sickness
+      last summer, until after the Soulsbys went away, I didn't let myself get
+      downright discouraged. It seemed too monstrous for belief that you should
+      go away out of my life like that. It didn't seem possible that God could
+      allow such a thing. It came to me that I had been lax in my Christian
+      life, especially in my position as a minister's wife, and that this was my
+      punishment. I went to the altar, to intercede with Him, and to try to
+      loose my burden at His feet. But nothing has come of it. I got no help
+      from you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really, Alice,&rdquo; broke in Theron, &ldquo;I explained over and over again to you
+      how preoccupied I was&mdash;with the book&mdash;and affairs generally.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I got no assistance from Heaven either,&rdquo; she went on, declining the
+      diversion he offered. &ldquo;I don't want to talk impiously, but if there is a
+      God, he has forgotten me, his poor heart-broken hand-maiden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are talking impiously, Alice,&rdquo; observed her husband. &ldquo;And you are
+      doing me cruel injustice, into the bargain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I only wish I were!&rdquo; she replied; &ldquo;I only wish to God I were!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, accept my complete assurance that you ARE&mdash;that your
+      whole conception of me, and of what you are pleased to describe as my
+      change toward you, is an entire and utter mistake. Of course, the married
+      state is no more exempt from the universal law of growth, development,
+      alteration, than any other human institution. On its spiritual side, of
+      course, viewed either as a sacrament, or as&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't let us go into that,&rdquo; interposed Alice, abruptly. &ldquo;In fact, there
+      is no good in talking any more at all. It is as if we didn't speak the
+      same language. You don't understand what I say; it makes no impression
+      upon your mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite to the contrary,&rdquo; he assured her; &ldquo;I have been deeply interested
+      and concerned in all you have said. I think you are laboring under a great
+      delusion, and I have tried my best to convince you of it; but I have never
+      heard you speak more intelligibly or, I might say, effectively.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A little gleam of softness stole over Alice's face. &ldquo;If you only gave me a
+      little more credit for intelligence,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;you would find that I am
+      not such a blockhead as you think I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come!&rdquo; he said, with a smiling show of impatience. &ldquo;You really
+      mustn't impute things to me wholesale, like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was glad to answer the smile in kind. &ldquo;No; but truly,&rdquo; she pleaded,
+      &ldquo;you don't realize it, but you have grown into a way of treating me as if
+      I had absolutely no mind at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have a very admirable mind,&rdquo; he responded, and took up his teaspoon
+      again. She reached for his cup, and poured out hot coffee for him. An
+      almost cheerful spirit had suddenly descended upon the breakfast table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now let me say the thing I have been aching to say for months,&rdquo; she
+      began in less burdened voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted his brows. &ldquo;Haven't things been discussed pretty fully already?&rdquo;
+       he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doubtful, harassed expression clouded upon her face at his words, and
+      she paused. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said resolutely, after an instant's reflection; &ldquo;it
+      is my duty to discuss this, too. It is a misunderstanding all round. You
+      remember that I told you Mr. Gorringe had given me some plants, which he
+      got from some garden or other?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you really wish to go on with the subject&mdash;yes I have a
+      recollection of that particular falsehood of his.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He did it with the kindest and friendliest motives in the world!&rdquo;
+       protested Alice. &ldquo;He saw how down-in-the-mouth and moping I was here,
+      among these strangers&mdash;and I really was getting quite peaked and
+      run-down&mdash;and he said I stayed indoors too much and it would do me
+      all sorts of good to work in the garden, and he would send me some plants.
+      The next I knew, here they were, with a book about mixing soils and
+      planting, and so on. When I saw him next, and thanked him, I suppose I
+      showed some apprehension about his having laid out money on them, and he,
+      just to ease my mind, invented the story about his getting them for
+      nothing. When I found out the truth&mdash;I got it out of that boy, Harvey
+      Semple&mdash;he admitted it quite frankly&mdash;said he was wrong to
+      deceive me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This was in the fine first fervor of his term of probation, I suppose,&rdquo;
+       put in Theron. He made no effort to dissemble the sneer in his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; answered Alice, with a touch of acerbity, &ldquo;I have told you now,
+      and it is off my mind. There never would have been the slightest
+      concealment about it, if you hadn't begun by keeping me at arm's length,
+      and making it next door to impossible to speak to you at all, and if&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if he hadn't lied.&rdquo; Theron, as he finished her sentence for her, rose
+      from the table. Dallying for a brief moment by his chair, there seemed the
+      magnetic premonition in the air of some further and kindlier word. Then he
+      turned and walked sedately into the next room, and closed the door behind
+      him. The talk was finished; and Alice, left alone, passed the knuckle of
+      her thumb over one swimming eye and then the other, and bit her lips and
+      swallowed down the sob that rose in her throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0028" id="link2HCH0028">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was early afternoon when Theron walked out of his yard, bestowing no
+      glance upon the withered and tarnished show of the garden, and started
+      with a definite step down the street. The tendency to ruminative
+      loitering, which those who saw him abroad always associated with his tall,
+      spare figure, was not suggested today. He moved forward like a man with a
+      purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the forenoon in the seclusion of the sitting-room, with a book opened
+      before him, he had been thinking hard. It was not the talk with Alice that
+      occupied his thoughts. That rose in his mind from time to time, only as a
+      disagreeable blur, and he refused to dwell upon it. It was nothing to him,
+      he said to himself, what Gorringe's motives in lying had been. As for
+      Alice, he hardened his heart against her. Just now it was her mood to try
+      and make up to him. But it had been something different yesterday, and who
+      could say what it would be tomorrow? He really had passed the limit of
+      patience with her shifting emotional vagaries, now lurching in this
+      direction, now in that. She had had her chance to maintain a hold upon his
+      interest and imagination, and had let it slip. These were the accidents of
+      life, the inevitable harsh happenings in the great tragedy of Nature. They
+      could not be helped, and there was nothing more to be said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had bestowed much more attention upon what the priest had said the
+      previous evening. He passed in review all the glowing tributes Father
+      Forbes had paid to Celia. They warmed his senses as he recalled them, but
+      they also, in a curious, indefinite way, caused him uneasiness. There had
+      been a personal fervor about them which was something more than priestly.
+      He remembered how the priest had turned pale and faltered when the
+      question whether Celia would escape the general doom of her family came
+      up. It was not a merely pastoral agitation that, he felt sure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A hundred obscure hints, doubts, stray little suspicions, crowded upward
+      together in his thoughts. It became apparent to him now that from the
+      outset he had been conscious of something queer&mdash;yes, from that very
+      first day when he saw the priest and Celia together, and noted their
+      glance of recognition inside the house of death. He realized now, upon
+      reflection, that the tone of other people, his own parishioners and his
+      casual acquaintances in Octavius alike, had always had a certain note of
+      reservation in it when it touched upon Miss Madden. Her running in and out
+      of the pastorate at all hours, the way the priest patted her on the
+      shoulder before others, the obvious dislike the priest's ugly old
+      housekeeper bore her, the astonishing freedom of their talk with each
+      other&mdash;these dark memories loomed forth out of a mass of sinister
+      conjecture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He could bear the uncertainty no longer. Was it indeed not entirely his
+      own fault that it had existed thus long? No man with the spirit of a mouse
+      would have shilly-shallied in this preposterous fashion, week after week,
+      with the fever of a beautiful woman's kiss in his blood, and the woman
+      herself living only round the corner. The whole world had been as good as
+      offered to him&mdash;a bewildering world of wealth and beauty and
+      spiritual exaltation and love&mdash;and he, like a weak fool, had waited
+      for it to be brought to him on a salver, as it were, and actually forced
+      upon his acceptance! &ldquo;That is my failing,&rdquo; he reflected; &ldquo;these miserable
+      ecclesiastical bandages of mine have dwarfed my manly side. The meanest of
+      Thurston's clerks would have shown a more adventurous spirit and a bolder
+      nerve. If I do not act at once, with courage and resolution, everything
+      will be lost. Already she must think me unworthy of the honor it was in
+      her sweet will to bestow.&rdquo; Then he remembered that she was now always at
+      home. &ldquo;Not another hour of foolish indecision!&rdquo; he whispered to himself.
+      &ldquo;I will put my destiny to the test. I will see her today!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A middle-aged, plain-faced servant answered his ring at the door-bell of
+      the Madden mansion. She was palpably Irish, and looked at him with a
+      saddened preoccupation in her gray eyes, holding the door only a little
+      ajar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had got out one of his cards. &ldquo;I wish to make inquiry about young
+      Mr. Madden&mdash;Mr. Michael Madden,&rdquo; he said, holding the card forth
+      tentatively. &ldquo;I have only just heard of his illness, and it has been a
+      great grief to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is no better,&rdquo; answered the woman, briefly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am the Rev. Mr. Ware,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;and you may say that, if he is well
+      enough, I should be glad to see him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The servant peered out at him with a suddenly altered expression, then
+      shook her head. &ldquo;I don't think he would be wishing to see YOU,&rdquo; she
+      replied. It was evident from her tone that she suspected the visitor's
+      intentions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron smiled in spite of himself. &ldquo;I have not come as a clergyman,&rdquo; he
+      explained, &ldquo;but as a friend of the family. If you will tell Miss Madden
+      that I am here, it will do just as well. Yes, we won't bother him. If you
+      will kindly hand my card to his sister.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the domestic turned at this and went in, Theron felt like throwing
+      his hat in the air, there where he stood. The woman's churlish sectarian
+      prejudices had played ideally into his hands. In no other imaginable way
+      could he have asked for Celia so naturally. He wondered a little that a
+      servant at such a grand house as this should leave callers standing on the
+      doorstep. Still more he wondered what he should say to the lady of his
+      dream when he came into her presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you please to walk this way?&rdquo; The woman had returned. She closed the
+      door noiselessly behind him, and led the way, not up the sumptuous
+      staircase, as Theron had expected, but along through the broad hall, past
+      several large doors, to a small curtained archway at the end. She pushed
+      aside this curtain, and Theron found himself in a sort of conservatory,
+      full of the hot, vague light of sunshine falling through ground-glass. The
+      air was moist and close, and heavy with the smell of verdure and wet
+      earth. A tall bank of palms, with ferns sprawling at their base, reared
+      itself directly in front of him. The floor was of mosaic, and he saw now
+      that there were rugs upon it, and that there were chairs and sofas, and
+      other signs of habitation. It was, indeed, only half a greenhouse, for the
+      lower part of it was in rosewood panels, with floral paintings on them,
+      like a room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moving to one side of the barrier of palms, he discovered, to his great
+      surprise, the figure of Michael, sitting propped up with pillows in a huge
+      easy-chair. The sick man was looking at him with big, gravely intent eyes.
+      His face did not show as much change as Theron had in fancy pictured. It
+      had seemed almost as bony and cadaverous on the day of the picnic. The
+      hands spread out on the chair-arms were very white and thin, though, and
+      the gaze in the blue eyes had a spectral quality which disturbed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Michael raised his right hand, and Theron, stepping forward, took it
+      limply in his for an instant. Then he laid it down again. The touch of
+      people about to die had always been repugnant to him. He could feel on his
+      own warm palm the very damp of the grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I only heard from Father Forbes last evening of your&mdash;your
+      ill-health,&rdquo; he said, somewhat hesitatingly. He seated himself on a bench
+      beneath the palms, facing the invalid, but still holding his hat. &ldquo;I hope
+      very sincerely that you will soon be all right again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My sister is lying down in her room,&rdquo; answered Michael. He had not once
+      taken his sombre and embarrassing gaze from the other's face. The voice in
+      which he uttered this uncalled-for remark was thin in fibre, cold and
+      impassive. It fell upon Theron's ears with a suggestion of hidden meaning.
+      He looked uneasily into Michael's eyes, and then away again. They seemed
+      to be looking straight through him, and there was no shirking the
+      sensation that they saw and comprehended things with an unnatural
+      prescience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope she is feeling better,&rdquo; Theron found himself saying. &ldquo;Father
+      Forbes mentioned that she was a little under the weather. I dined with him
+      last night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad that you came,&rdquo; said Michael, after a little pause. His
+      earnest, unblinking eyes seemed to supplement his tongue with speech of
+      their own. &ldquo;I do be thinking a great deal about you. I have matters to
+      speak of to you, now that you are here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron bowed his head gently, in token of grateful attention. He tried the
+      experiment of looking away from Michael, but his glance went back again
+      irresistibly, and fastened itself upon the sick man's gaze, and clung
+      there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am next door to a dead man,&rdquo; he went on, paying no heed to the other's
+      deprecatory gesture. &ldquo;It is not years or months with me, but weeks. Then I
+      go away to stand up for judgment on my sins, and if it is His merciful
+      will, I shall see God. So I say my good-byes now, and so you will let me
+      speak plainly, and not think ill of what I say. You are much changed, Mr.
+      Ware, since you came to Octavius, and it is not a change for the good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron lifted his brows in unaffected surprise, and put inquiry into his
+      glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know if Protestants will be saved, in God's good time, or not,&rdquo;
+       continued Michael. &ldquo;I find there are different opinions among the clergy
+      about that, and of course it is not for me, only a plain mechanic, to be
+      sure where learned and pious scholars are in doubt. But I am sure about
+      one thing. Those Protestants, and others too, mind you, who profess and
+      preach good deeds, and themselves do bad deeds&mdash;they will never be
+      saved. They will have no chance at all to escape hell-fire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think we are all agreed upon that, Mr. Madden,&rdquo; said Theron, with
+      surface suavity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I say to you, Mr. Ware, you are yourself in a bad path. Take the
+      warning of a dying man, sir, and turn from it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The impulse to smile tugged at Theron's facial muscles. This was really
+      too droll. He looked up at the ceiling, the while he forced his
+      countenance into a polite composure, then turned again to Michael, with
+      some conciliatory commonplace ready for utterance. But he said nothing,
+      and all suggestion of levity left his mind, under the searching inspection
+      bent upon him by the young man's hollow eyes. What did Michael suspect?
+      What did he know? What was he hinting at, in this strange talk of his?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw you often on the street when first you came here,&rdquo; continued
+      Michael. &ldquo;I knew the man who was here before you&mdash;that is, by sight&mdash;and
+      he was not a good man. But your face, when you came, pleased me. I liked
+      to look at you. I was tormented just then, do you see, that so many
+      decent, kindly people, old school-mates and friends and neighbors of mine&mdash;and,
+      for that matter, others all over the country must lose their souls because
+      they were Protestants. At my boyhood and young manhood, that thought took
+      the joy out of me. Sometimes I usen't to sleep a whole night long, for
+      thinking that some lad I had been playing with, perhaps in his own house,
+      that very day, would be taken when he died, and his mother too, when she
+      died, and thrown into the flames of hell for all eternity. It made me so
+      unhappy that finally I wouldn't go to any Protestant boy's house, and have
+      his mother be nice to me, and give me cake and apples&mdash;and me
+      thinking all the while that they were bound to be damned, no matter how
+      good they were to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The primitive humanity of this touched Theron, and he nodded approbation
+      with a tender smile in his eyes, forgetting for the moment that a personal
+      application of the monologue had been hinted at.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But then later, as I grew up,&rdquo; the sick man went on, &ldquo;I learned that it
+      was not altogether certain. Some of the authorities, I found, maintained
+      that it was doubtful, and some said openly that there must be salvation
+      possible for good people who lived in ignorance of the truth through no
+      fault of their own. Then I had hope one day, and no hope the next, and as
+      I did my work I thought it over, and in the evenings my father and I
+      talked it over, and we settled nothing of it at all. Of course, how could
+      we?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you ever discuss the question with your sister?&rdquo; it occurred suddenly
+      to Theron to interpose. He was conscious of some daring in doing so, and
+      he fancied that Michael's drawn face clouded a little at his words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My sister is no theologian,&rdquo; he answered briefly. &ldquo;Women have no call to
+      meddle with such matters. But I was saying&mdash;it was in the middle of
+      these doubtings of mine that you came here to Octavius, and I noticed you
+      on the streets, and once in the evening&mdash;I made no secret of it to my
+      people&mdash;I sat in the back of your church and heard you preach. As I
+      say, I liked you. It was your face, and what I thought it showed of the
+      man underneath it, that helped settle my mind more than anything else. I
+      said to myself: 'Here is a young man, only about my own age, and he has
+      education and talents, and he does not seek to make money for himself, or
+      a great name, but he is content to live humbly on the salary of a
+      book-keeper, and devote all his time to prayer and the meditation of his
+      religion, and preaching, and visiting the sick and the poor, and
+      comforting them. His very face is a pleasure and a help for those in
+      suffering and trouble to look at. The very sight of it makes one believe
+      in pure thoughts and merciful deeds. I will not credit it that God intends
+      damning such a man as that, or any like him!'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron bowed, with a slow, hesitating gravity of manner, and deep, not
+      wholly complacent, attention on his face. Evidently all this was by way of
+      preparation for something unpleasant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was only last spring,&rdquo; said Michael. His tired voice sank for a
+      sentence or two into a meditative half-whisper. &ldquo;And it was MY last spring
+      of all. I shall not be growing weak any more, or drawing hard breaths,
+      when the first warm weather comes. It will be one season to me hereafter,
+      always the same.&rdquo; He lifted his voice with perceptible effort. &ldquo;I am
+      talking too much. The rest I can say in a word. Only half a year has gone
+      by, and you have another face on you entirely. I had noticed the small
+      changes before, one by one. I saw the great change, all of a sudden, the
+      day of the picnic. I see it a hundred times more now, as you sit there. If
+      it seemed to me like the face of a saint before, it is more like the face
+      of a bar-keeper now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was quite too much. Theron rose, flushed to the temples, and scowled
+      down at the helpless man in the chair. He swallowed the sharp words which
+      came uppermost, and bit and moistened his lips as he forced himself to
+      remember that this was a dying man, and Celia's brother, to whom she was
+      devoted, and whom he himself felt he wanted to be very fond of. He got the
+      shadow of a smile on to his countenance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I fear you HAVE tired yourself unduly,&rdquo; he said, in as non-contentious a
+      tone as he could manage. He even contrived a little deprecatory laugh. &ldquo;I
+      am afraid your real quarrel is with the air of Octavius. It agrees with me
+      so wonderfully&mdash;I am getting as fat as a seal. But I do hope I am not
+      paying for it by such a wholesale deterioration inside. If my own opinion
+      could be of any value, I should assure you that I feel myself an
+      infinitely better and broader and stronger man than I was when I came
+      here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Michael shook his head dogmatically. &ldquo;That is the greatest pity of all,&rdquo;
+       he said, with renewed earnestness. &ldquo;You are entirely deceived about
+      yourself. You do not at all realize how you have altered your direction,
+      or where you are going. It was a great misfortune for you, sir, that you
+      did not keep among your own people. That poor half-brother of mine, though
+      the drink was in him when he said that same to you, never spoke a truer
+      word. Keep among your own people, Mr. Ware! When you go among others&mdash;you
+      know what I mean&mdash;you have no proper understanding of what their
+      sayings and doings really mean. You do not realize that they are held up
+      by the power of the true Church, as a little child learning to walk is
+      held up with a belt by its nurse. They can say and do things, and no harm
+      at all come to them, which would mean destruction to you, because they
+      have help, and you are walking alone. And so be said by me, Mr. Ware! Go
+      back to the way you were brought up in, and leave alone the people whose
+      ways are different from yours. You are a married man, and you are the
+      preacher of a religion, such as it is. There can be nothing better for you
+      than to go and strive to be a good husband, and to set a good example to
+      the people of your Church, who look up to you&mdash;and mix yourself up no
+      more with outside people and outside notions that only do you mischief.
+      And that is what I wanted to say to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron took up his hat. &ldquo;I take in all kindness what you have felt it your
+      duty to say to me, Mr. Madden,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I am not sure that I have
+      altogether followed you, but I am very sure you mean it well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean well by you,&rdquo; replied Michael, wearily moving his head on the
+      pillow, and speaking in an undertone of languor and pain, &ldquo;and I mean well
+      by others, that are nearer to me, and that I have a right to care more
+      about. When a man lies by the site of his open grave, he does not be
+      meaning ill to any human soul.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;thanks&mdash;quite so!&rdquo; faltered Theron. He dallied for an
+      instant with the temptation to seek some further explanation, but the
+      sight of Michael's half-closed eyes and worn-out expression decided him
+      against it. It did not seem to be expected, either, that he should shake
+      hands, and with a few perfunctory words of hope for the invalid's
+      recovery, which fell with a jarring note of falsehood upon his own ears,
+      he turned and left the room. As he did so, Michael touched a bell on the
+      table beside him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron drew a long breath in the hall, as the curtain fell behind him. It
+      was an immense relief to escape from the oppressive humidity and heat of
+      the flower-room, and from that ridiculous bore of a Michael as well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The middle-aged, grave-faced servant, warned by the bell, stood waiting to
+      conduct him to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry to have missed Miss Madden,&rdquo; he said to her. &ldquo;She must be
+      quite worn out. Perhaps later in the day&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will not be seeing anybody today,&rdquo; returned the woman. &ldquo;She is going
+      to New York this evening, and she is taking some rest against the
+      journey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will she be away long?&rdquo; he asked mechanically. The servant's answer, &ldquo;I
+      have no idea,&rdquo; hardly penetrated his consciousness at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved down the steps, and along the gravel to the street, in a maze of
+      mental confusion. When he reached the sidewalk, under the familiar elms,
+      he paused, and made a definite effort to pull his thoughts together, and
+      take stock of what had happened, of what was going to happen; but the
+      thing baffled him. It was as if some drug had stupefied his faculties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to walk, and gradually saw that what he was thinking about was
+      the fact of Celia's departure for New York that evening. He stared at this
+      fact, at first in its nakedness, then clothed with reassuring suggestions
+      that this was no doubt a trip she very often made. There was a blind sense
+      of comfort in this idea, and he rested himself upon it. Yes, of course,
+      she travelled a great deal. New York must be as familiar to her as
+      Octavius was to him. Her going there now was quite a matter of course&mdash;the
+      most natural thing in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then there burst suddenly uppermost in his mind the other fact&mdash;that
+      Father Forbes was also going to New York that evening. The two things
+      spindled upward, side by side, yet separately, in his mental vision; then
+      they twisted and twined themselves together. He followed their
+      convolutions miserably, walking as if his eyes were shut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In slow fashion matters defined and arranged themselves before him. The
+      process of tracing their sequence was all torture, but there was no
+      possibility, no notion, of shirking any detail of the pain. The priest had
+      spoken of his efforts to persuade Celia to go away for a few days, for
+      rest and change of air and scene. He must have known only too well that
+      she was going, but of that he had been careful to drop no hint. The
+      possibility of accident was too slight to be worth considering. People on
+      such intimate terms as Celia and the priest&mdash;people with such
+      facilities for seeing each other whenever they desired&mdash;did not find
+      themselves on the same train of cars, with the same long journey in view,
+      by mere chance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron walked until dusk began to close in upon the autumn day. It grew
+      colder, as he turned his face homeward. He wondered if it would freeze
+      again over-night, and then remembered the shrivelled flowers in his wife's
+      garden. For a moment they shaped themselves in a picture before his mind's
+      eye; he saw their blackened foliage, their sicklied, drooping stalks, and
+      wilted blooms, and as he looked, they restored themselves to the vigor and
+      grace and richness of color of summer-time, as vividly as if they had been
+      painted on a canvas. Or no, the picture he stared at was not on canvas,
+      but on the glossy, varnished panel of a luxurious sleeping-car. He shook
+      his head angrily and blinked his eyes again and again, to prevent their
+      seeing, seated together in the open window above this panel, the two
+      people he knew were there, gloved and habited for the night's journey,
+      waiting for the train to start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very much to my surprise,&rdquo; he found himself saying to Alice, watching her
+      nervously as she laid the supper-table, &ldquo;I find I must go to Albany
+      tonight. That is, it isn't absolutely necessary, for that matter, but I
+      think it may easily turn out to be greatly to my advantage to go.
+      Something has arisen&mdash;I can't speak about it as yet&mdash;but the
+      sooner I see the Bishop about it the better. Things like that occur in a
+      man's life, where boldly striking out a line of action, and following it
+      up without an instant's delay, may make all the difference in the world to
+      him. Tomorrow it might be too late; and, besides, I can be home the sooner
+      again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice's face showed surprise, but no trace of suspicion. She spoke with
+      studied amiability during the meal, and deferred with such unexpected tact
+      to his implied desire not to be questioned as to the mysterious motives of
+      the journey, that his mood instinctively softened and warmed toward her,
+      as they finished supper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled a little. &ldquo;I do hope I shan't have to go on tomorrow to New
+      York; but these Bishops of ours are such gad-abouts one never knows where
+      to catch them. As like as not Sanderson may be down in New York, on
+      Book-Concern business or something; and if he is, I shall have to chase
+      him up. But, after all, perhaps the trip will do me good&mdash;the change
+      of air and scene, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sure I hope so,&rdquo; said Alice, honestly enough. &ldquo;If you do go on to New
+      York, I suppose you'll go by the river-boat. Everybody talks so much of
+      that beautiful sail down the Hudson.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's an idea!&rdquo; exclaimed Theron, welcoming it with enthusiasm. &ldquo;It
+      hadn't occurred to me. If I do have to go, and it is as lovely as they
+      make out, the next time I promise I won't go without you, my girl. I HAVE
+      been rather out of sorts lately,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;When I come back, I
+      daresay I shall be feeling better, more like my old self. Then I'm going
+      to try, Alice, to be nicer to you than I have been of late. I'm afraid
+      there was only too much truth in what you said this morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind what I said this morning&mdash;or any other time,&rdquo; broke in
+      Alice, softly. &ldquo;Don't ever remember it again, Theron, if only&mdash;only&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose as she spoke, moved round the table to where she sat, and, bending
+      over her, stopped the faltering sentence with a kiss. When was it, he
+      wondered, that he had last kissed her? It seemed years, ages, ago.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An hour later, with hat and overcoat on, and his valise in his hand, he
+      stood on the doorstep of the parsonage, and kissed her once more before he
+      turned and descended into the darkness. He felt like whistling as his feet
+      sounded firmly on the plank sidewalk beyond the gate. It seemed as if he
+      had never been in such capital good spirits before in his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0029" id="link2HCH0029">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The train was at a standstill somewhere, and the dull, ashen beginnings of
+      daylight had made a first feeble start toward effacing the lamps in the
+      car-roof, when the new day opened for Theron. A man who had just come in
+      stopped at the seat upon which he had been stretched through the night,
+      and, tapping him brusquely on the knee, said, &ldquo;I'm afraid I must trouble
+      you, sir.&rdquo; After a moment of sleep-burdened confusion, he sat up, and the
+      man took the other half of the seat and opened a newspaper, still damp
+      from the press. It was morning, then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron rubbed a clear space upon the clouded window with his thumb, and
+      looked out. There was nothing to be seen but a broad stretch of tracks,
+      and beyond this the shadowed outlines of wagons and machinery in a yard,
+      with a background of factory buildings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The atmosphere in the car was vile beyond belief. He thought of opening
+      the window, but feared that the peremptory-looking man with the paper, who
+      had wakened him and made him sit up, might object. They were the only
+      people in the car who were sitting up. Backwards and forwards, on either
+      side of the narrow aisle, the dim light disclosed recumbent forms, curled
+      uncomfortably into corners, or sprawling at difficult angles which
+      involved the least interference with one another. Here and there an
+      upturned face gave a livid patch of surface for the mingled play of the
+      gray dawn and the yellow lamp-light. A ceaseless noise of snoring was in
+      the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up and walked to the tank of ice-water at the end of the aisle, and
+      took a drink from the most inaccessible portion of the common tin-cup's
+      rim. The happy idea of going out on the platform struck him, and he acted
+      upon it. The morning air was deliciously cool and fresh by contrast, and
+      he filled his lungs with it again and again. Standing here, he could
+      discern beyond the buildings to the right the faint purplish outlines of
+      great rounded hills. Some workmen, one of them bearing a torch, were
+      crouching along under the side of the train, pounding upon the resonant
+      wheels with small hammers. He recalled having heard the same sound in the
+      watches of the night, during a prolonged halt. Some one had said it was
+      Albany. He smiled in spite of himself at the thought that Bishop Sanderson
+      would never know about the visit he had missed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swinging himself to the ground, he bent sidewise and looked forward down
+      the long train. There were five, six, perhaps more, sleeping-cars on in
+      front. Which one of them, he wondered&mdash;and then there came the sharp
+      &ldquo;All aboard!&rdquo; from the other side, and he bundled up the steps again, and
+      entered the car as the train slowly resumed its progress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was wide-awake now, and quite at his ease. He took his seat, and
+      diverted himself by winking gravely at a little child facing him on the
+      next seat but one. There were four other children in the family party,
+      encamped about the tired and still sleeping mother whose back was turned
+      to Theron. He recalled now having noticed this poor woman last night, in
+      the first stage of his journey&mdash;how she fed her brood from one of the
+      numerous baskets piled under their feet, and brought water in a tin dish
+      of her own from the tank to use in washing their faces with a rag, and
+      loosened their clothes to dispose them for the night's sleep. The face of
+      the woman, her manner and slatternly aspect, and the general effect of her
+      belongings, bespoke squalid ignorance and poverty. Watching her, Theron
+      had felt curiously interested in the performance. In one sense, it was
+      scarcely more human than the spectacle of a cat licking her kittens, or a
+      cow giving suck to her calf. Yet, in another, was there anything more
+      human?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The child who had wakened before the rest regarded him with placidity,
+      declining to be amused by his winkings, but exhibiting no other emotion.
+      She had been playing by herself with a couple of buttons tied on a string,
+      and after giving a civil amount of attention to Theron's grimaces, she
+      turned again to the superior attractions of this toy. Her self-possession,
+      her capacity for self-entertainment, the care she took not to arouse the
+      others, all impressed him very much. He felt in his pocket for a small
+      coin, and, reaching forward, offered it to her. She took it calmly,
+      bestowed a tranquil gaze upon him for a moment, and went back to the
+      buttons. Her indifference produced an unpleasant sensation upon him
+      somehow, and he rubbed the steaming window clear again, and stared out of
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wide river lay before him, flanked by a precipitous wall of cliffs
+      which he knew instantly must be the Palisades. There was an advertisement
+      painted on them which he tried in vain to read. He was surprised to find
+      they interested him so slightly. He had heard all his life of the Hudson,
+      and especially of it just at this point. The reality seemed to him almost
+      commonplace. His failure to be thrilled depressed him for the moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose those ARE the Palisades?&rdquo; he asked his neighbor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man glanced up from his paper, nodded, and made as if to resume his
+      reading. But his eye had caught something in the prospect through the
+      window which arrested his attention. &ldquo;By George!&rdquo; he exclaimed, and lifted
+      himself to get a clearer view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; asked Theron, peering forth as well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing; only Barclay Wendover's yacht is still there. There's been a
+      hitch of some sort. They were to have left yesterday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that it&mdash;that long black thing?&rdquo; queried Theron. &ldquo;That can't be a
+      yacht, can it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you think it is?&rdquo; answered the other. They were looking at a
+      slim, narrow hull, lying at anchor, silent and motionless on the drab
+      expanse of water. &ldquo;If that ain't a yacht, they haven't begun building any
+      yet. They're taking her over to the Mediterranean for a cruise, you know&mdash;around
+      India and Japan for the winter, and home by the South Sea islands. Friend
+      o' mine's in the party. Wouldn't mind the trip myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But do you mean to say,&rdquo; asked Theron, &ldquo;that that little shell of a thing
+      can sail across the ocean? Why, how many people would she hold?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man laughed. &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;there's room for two sets of quadrilles
+      in the chief saloon, if the rest keep their legs well up on the sofas. But
+      there's only ten or a dozen in the party this time. More than that rather
+      get in one another's way, especially with so many ladies on board.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron asked no more questions, but bent his head to see the last of this
+      wonderful craft. The sight of it, and what he had heard about it, suddenly
+      gave point and focus to his thoughts. He knew at last what it was that had
+      lurked, formless and undesignated, these many days in the background of
+      his dreams. The picture rose in his mind now of Celia as the mistress of a
+      yacht. He could see her reclining in a low easy-chair upon the polished
+      deck, with the big white sails billowing behind her, and the sun shining
+      upon the deep blue waves, and glistening through the splash of spray in
+      the air, and weaving a halo of glowing gold about her fair head. Ah, how
+      the tender visions crowded now upon him! Eternal summer basked round this
+      enchanted yacht of his fancy&mdash;summer sought now in Scottish firths or
+      Norwegian fiords, now in quaint old Southern harbors, ablaze with the hues
+      of strange costumes and half-tropical flowers and fruits, now in far-away
+      Oriental bays and lagoons, or among the coral reefs and palm-trees of the
+      luxurious Pacific. He dwelt upon these new imaginings with the fervent
+      longing of an inland-born boy. Every vague yearning he had ever felt
+      toward salt-water stirred again in his blood at the thought of the sea&mdash;with
+      Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why not? She had never visited any foreign land. &ldquo;Sometime,&rdquo; she had said,
+      &ldquo;sometime, no doubt I will.&rdquo; He could hear again the wistful, musing tone
+      of her voice. The thought had fascinations for her, it was clear. How
+      irresistibly would it not appeal to her, presented with the added charm of
+      a roving, vagrant independence on the high seas, free to speed in her
+      snow-winged chariot wherever she willed over the deep, loitering in this
+      place, or up-helm-and-away to another, with no more care or weight of
+      responsibility than the gulls tossing through the air in her wake!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron felt, rather than phrased to himself, that there would not be &ldquo;ten
+      or a dozen in the party&rdquo; on that yacht. Without defining anything in his
+      mind, he breathed in fancy the same bold ocean breeze which filled the
+      sails, and toyed with Celia's hair; he looked with her as she sat by the
+      rail, and saw the same waves racing past, the same vast dome of cloud and
+      ether that were mirrored in her brown eyes, and there was no one else
+      anywhere near them. Even the men in sailors' clothes, who would be pulling
+      at ropes, or climbing up tarred ladders, kept themselves considerately
+      outside the picture. Only Celia sat there, and at her feet, gazing up
+      again into her face as in the forest, the man whose whole being had been
+      consecrated to her service, her worship, by the kiss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've passed it now. I was trying to point out the Jumel house to you&mdash;where
+      Aaron Burr lived, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron roused himself from his day-dream, and nodded with a confused smile
+      at his neighbor. &ldquo;Thanks,&rdquo; he faltered; &ldquo;I didn't hear you. The train
+      makes such a noise, and I must have been dozing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked about him. The night aspect, as of a tramps' lodging-house, had
+      quite disappeared from the car. Everybody was sitting up; and the more
+      impatient were beginning to collect their bundles and hand-bags from the
+      racks and floor. An expressman came through, jangling a huge bunch of
+      brass checks on leathern thongs over his arm, and held parley with
+      passengers along the aisle. Outside, citified streets, with stores and
+      factories, were alternating in the moving panorama with open fields; and,
+      even as he looked, these vacant spaces ceased altogether, and successive
+      regular lines of pavement, between two tall rows of houses all alike,
+      began to stretch out, wheel to the right, and swing off out of view, for
+      all the world like the avenues of hop-poles he remembered as a boy. Then
+      was a long tunnel, its darkness broken at stated intervals by brief bursts
+      of daylight from overhead, and out of this all at once the train drew up
+      its full length in some vast, vaguely lighted enclosure, and stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, this is New York,&rdquo; said the man, folding up his paper, and springing
+      to his feet. The narrow aisle was filled with many others who had been
+      prompter still; and Theron stood, bag in hand, waiting till this energetic
+      throng should have pushed itself bodily past him forth from the car. Then
+      he himself made his way out, drifting with a sense of helplessness in
+      their resolute wake. There rose in his mind the sudden conviction that he
+      would be too late. All the passengers in the forward sleepers would be
+      gone before he could get there. Yet even this terror gave him no new power
+      to get ahead of anybody else in the tightly packed throng.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once on the broad platform, the others started off briskly; they all
+      seemed to know just where they wanted to go, and to feel that no instant
+      of time was to be lost in getting there. Theron himself caught some of
+      this urgent spirit, and hurled himself along in the throng with reckless
+      haste, knocking his bag against peoples' legs, but never pausing for
+      apology or comment until he found himself abreast of the locomotive at the
+      head of the train. He drew aside from the main current here, and began
+      searching the platform, far and near, for those he had travelled so far to
+      find.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The platform emptied itself. Theron lingered on in puzzled hesitation, and
+      looked about him. In the whole immense station, with its acres of tracks
+      and footways, and its incessantly shifting processions of people, there
+      was visible nobody else who seemed also in doubt, or who appeared capable
+      of sympathizing with indecision in any form. Another train came in, some
+      way over to the right, and before it had fairly stopped, swarms of eager
+      men began boiling out of each end of each car, literally precipitating
+      themselves over one another, it seemed to Theron, in their excited dash
+      down the steps. As they caught their footing below, they started racing
+      pell-mell down the platform to its end; there he saw them, looking more
+      than ever like clustered bees in the distance, struggling vehemently in a
+      dense mass up a staircase in the remote corner of the building.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are those folks running for? Is there a fire?&rdquo; he asked an
+      amiable-faced young mulatto, in the uniform of the sleeping-car service,
+      who passed him with some light hand-bags.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; they's Harlem people, I guess&mdash;jes' catchin' the Elevated&mdash;that's
+      all, sir,&rdquo; he answered obligingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the moment some passengers emerged slowly from one of the
+      sleeping-cars, and came loitering toward him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, are there people still in these cars?&rdquo; he asked eagerly. &ldquo;Haven't
+      they all gone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some has; some ain't,&rdquo; the porter replied. &ldquo;They most generally take
+      their time about it. They ain't no hurry, so long's they get out 'fore
+      we're drawn round to the drill-yard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was still hope, then. Theron took up his bag and walked forward,
+      intent upon finding some place from which he could watch unobserved the
+      belated stragglers issuing from the sleeping-cars. He started back all at
+      once, confronted by a semi-circle of violent men with whips and badges,
+      who stunned his hearing by a sudden vociferous outburst of shouts and
+      yells. They made furious gestures at him with their whips and fists, to
+      enforce the incoherent babel of their voices; and in these gestures, as in
+      their faces and cries, there seemed a great deal of menace and very little
+      invitation. There was a big policeman sauntering near by, and Theron got
+      the idea that it was his presence alone which protected him from open
+      violence at the hands of these savage hackmen. He tightened his clutch on
+      his valise, and, turning his back on them and their uproar, tried to brave
+      it out and stand where he was. But the policeman came lounging slowly
+      toward him, with such authority in his swaying gait, and such urban
+      omniscience written all over his broad, sandy face, that he lost heart,
+      and beat an abrupt retreat off to the right, where there were a number of
+      doorways, near which other people had ventured to put down baggage on the
+      floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, somewhat screened from observation, he stood for a long time,
+      watching at odd moments the ceaselessly varying phases of the strange
+      scene about him, but always keeping an eye on the train he had himself
+      arrived in. It was slow and dispiriting work. A dozen times his heart
+      failed him, and he said to himself mournfully that he had had his journey
+      for nothing. Then some new figure would appear, alighting from the steps
+      of a sleeper, and hope revived in his breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, when over half an hour of expectancy had been marked off by the
+      big clock overhead, his suspense came to an end. He saw Father Forbes'
+      erect and substantial form, standing on the car platform nearest of all,
+      balancing himself with his white hands on the rails, waiting for
+      something. Then after a little he came down, followed by a black porter,
+      whose arms were burdened by numerous bags and parcels. The two stood a
+      minute or so more in hesitation at the side of the steps. Then Celia
+      descended, and the three advanced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The importance of not being discovered was uppermost in Theron's mind, now
+      that he saw them actually coming toward him. He had avoided this the
+      previous evening, in the Octavius depot, with some skill, he flattered
+      himself. It gave him a pleasurable sense of being a man of affairs, almost
+      a detective, to be confronted by the necessity now of baffling observation
+      once again. He was still rather without plans for keeping them in view,
+      once they left the station. He had supposed that he would be able to hear
+      what hotel they directed their driver to take them to, and, failing that,
+      he had fostered a notion, based upon a story he had read when a boy, of
+      throwing himself into another carriage, and bidding his driver to pursue
+      them in hot haste, and on his life not fail to track them down. These
+      devices seemed somewhat empty, now that the urgent moment was at hand; and
+      as he drew back behind some other loiterers, out of view, he sharply
+      racked his wits for some way of coping with this most pressing problem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It turned out, however, that there was no difficulty at all. Father Forbes
+      and Celia seemed to have no use for the hackmen, but moved straight
+      forward toward the street, through the doorway next to that in which
+      Theron cowered. He stole round, and followed them at a safe distance,
+      making Celia's hat, and the portmanteau perched on the shoulder of the
+      porter behind her, his guides. To his surprise, they still kept on their
+      course when they had reached the sidewalk, and went over the pavement
+      across an open square which spread itself directly in front of the
+      station. Hanging as far behind as he dared, he saw them pass to the other
+      sidewalk diagonally opposite, proceed for a block or so along this, and
+      then separate at a corner. Celia and the negro lad went down a side
+      street, and entered the door of a vast, tall red-brick building which
+      occupied the whole block. The priest, turning on his heel, came back again
+      and went boldly up the broad steps of the front entrance to this same
+      structure, which Theron now discovered to be the Murray Hill Hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fortune had indeed favored him. He not only knew where they were, but he
+      had been himself a witness to the furtive way in which they entered the
+      house by different doors. Nothing in his own limited experience of hotels
+      helped him to comprehend the notion of a separate entrance for ladies and
+      their luggage. He did not feel quite sure about the significance of what
+      he had observed, in his own mind. But it was apparent to him that there
+      was something underhanded about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After lingering awhile on the steps of the hotel, and satisfying himself
+      by peeps through the glass doors that the coast was clear, he ventured
+      inside. The great corridor contained many people, coming, going, or
+      standing about, but none of them paid any attention to him. At last he
+      made up his mind, and beckoned a colored boy to him from a group gathered
+      in the shadows of the big central staircase. Explaining that he did not at
+      that moment wish a room, but desired to leave his bag, the boy took him to
+      a cloak-room, and got him a check for the thing. With this in his pocket
+      he felt himself more at his ease, and turned to walk away. Then suddenly
+      he wheeled, and, bending his body over the counter of the cloak-room,
+      astonished the attendant inside by the eagerness with which he scrutinized
+      the piled rows of portmanteaus, trunks, overcoats, and bundles in the
+      little enclosure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it you want? Here's your bag, if you're looking for that,&rdquo; this
+      man said to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thanks; it's nothing,&rdquo; replied Theron, straightening himself again.
+      He had had a narrow escape. Father Forbes and Celia, walking side by side,
+      had come down the small passage in which he stood, and had passed him so
+      closely that he had felt her dress brush against him. Fortunately he had
+      seen them in time, and by throwing himself half into the cloak-room, had
+      rendered recognition impossible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked now in the direction they had taken, till he came to the polite
+      colored man at an open door on the left, who was bowing people into the
+      breakfast room. Standing in the doorway, he looked about him till his eye
+      lighted upon his two friends, seated at a small table by a distant window,
+      with a black waiter, card in hand, bending over in consultation with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Returning to the corridor, he made bold now to march up to the desk and
+      examine the register. The priest's name was not there. He found only the
+      brief entry, &ldquo;Miss Madden, Octavius,&rdquo; written, not by her, but by Father
+      Forbes. On the line were two numbers in pencil, with an &ldquo;and&rdquo; between
+      them. An indirect question to one of the clerks helped him to an
+      explanation of this. When there were two numbers, it meant that the guest
+      in question had a parlor as well as a bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here he drew a long, satisfied breath, and turned away. The first half of
+      his quest stood completed&mdash;and that much more fully and easily than
+      he had dared to hope. He could not but feel a certain new respect for
+      himself as a man of resource and energy. He had demonstrated that people
+      could not fool with him with impunity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It remained to decide what he would do with his discovery, now that it had
+      been so satisfactorily made. As yet, he had given this hardly a thought.
+      Even now, it did not thrust itself forward as a thing demanding instant
+      attention. It was much more important, first of all, to get a good
+      breakfast. He had learned that there was another and less formal
+      eating-place, downstairs in the basement by the bar, with an entrance from
+      the street. He walked down by the inner stairway instead, feeling himself
+      already at home in the big hotel. He ordered an ample breakfast, and came
+      out while it was being served to wash and have his boots blacked, and he
+      gave the man a quarter of a dollar. His pockets were filled with silver
+      quarters, half-dollars, and dollars almost to a burdensome point, and in
+      his valise was a bag full of smaller change, including many rolls of
+      copper cents which Alice always counted and packed up on Mondays. In the
+      hurry of leaving he had brought with him the church collections for the
+      past two weeks. It occurred to him that he must keep a strict account of
+      his expenditure. Meanwhile he gave ten cents to another man in a
+      silk-sleeved cardigan jacket, who had merely stood by and looked at him
+      while his boots were being polished. There was a sense of metropolitan
+      affluence in the very atmosphere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little table in the adjoining room, on which Theron found his meal in
+      waiting for him, seemed a vision of delicate napery and refined
+      appointments in his eyes. He was wolfishly hungry, and the dishes he
+      looked upon gave him back assurances by sight and smell that he was very
+      happy as well. The servant in attendance had an extremely white apron and
+      a kindly black face. He bowed when Theron looked at him, with the air of a
+      lifelong admirer and humble friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you'll have claret with your breakfast, sir?&rdquo; he remarked, as
+      if it were a matter of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, certainly,&rdquo; answered Theron, stretching his legs contentedly under
+      the table, and tucking the corner of his napkin in his neckband.&mdash;&ldquo;Certainly,
+      my good man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0030" id="link2HCH0030">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At ten o'clock Theron, loitering near the bookstall in the corridor, saw
+      Father Forbes come downstairs, pass out through the big front doors, get
+      into a carriage, and drive away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This relieved him of a certain sense of responsibility, and he retired to
+      a corner sofa and sat down. The detective side of him being off duty, so
+      to speak, there was leisure at last for reflection upon the other aspects
+      of his mission. Yes; it was high time for him to consider what he should
+      do next.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was easier to recognize this fact, however, than to act upon it. His
+      mind was full of tricksy devices for eluding this task of serious thought
+      which he sought to impose upon it. It seemed so much pleasanter not to
+      think at all&mdash;but just to drift. He found himself watching with envy
+      the men who, as they came out from their breakfast, walked over to the
+      bookstall, and bought cigars from the row of boxes nestling there among
+      the newspaper piles. They had such evident delight in the work of
+      selection; they took off the ends of the cigars so carefully, and lighted
+      them with such meditative attention,&mdash;he could see that he was
+      wofully handicapped by not knowing how to smoke. He had had the most
+      wonderful breakfast of his life, but even in the consciousness of
+      comfortable repletion which pervaded his being, there was an obstinate
+      sense of something lacking. No doubt a good cigar was the thing needed to
+      round out the perfection of such a breakfast. He half rose once, fired by
+      a sudden resolution to go over and get one. But of course that was
+      nonsense; it would only make him sick. He sat down, and determinedly set
+      himself to thinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effort finally brought fruit&mdash;and of a kind which gave him a very
+      unhappy quarter of an hour. The lover part of him was uppermost now,
+      insistently exposing all its raw surfaces to the stings and scalds of
+      jealousy. Up to this moment, his brain had always evaded the direct
+      question of how he and the priest relatively stood in Celia's estimation.
+      It forced itself remorselessly upon him now; and his thoughts, so far from
+      shirking the subject, seemed to rise up to meet it. It was extremely
+      unpleasant, all this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then a calmer view asserted itself. Why go out of his way to invent
+      anguish for himself? The relations between Celia and the priest, whatever
+      they might be, were certainly of old standing. They had begun before his
+      time. His own romance was a more recent affair, and must take its place,
+      of course, subject to existing conditions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was all right for him to come to New York, and satisfy his legitimate
+      curiosity as to the exact character and scope of these conditions. But it
+      was foolish to pretend to be amazed or dismayed at the discovery of their
+      existence. They were a part of the situation which he, with his eyes wide
+      open, had accepted. It was his function to triumph over them, to supplant
+      them, to rear the edifice of his own victorious passion upon their ruins.
+      It was to this that Celia's kiss had invited him. It was for this that he
+      had come to New York. To let his purpose be hampered or thwarted now by
+      childish doubts and jealousies would be ridiculous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose, and holding himself very erect, walked with measured deliberation
+      across the corridor and up the broad staircase. There was an elevator near
+      at hand, he had noticed, but he preferred the stairs. One or two of the
+      colored boys clustered about the foot of the stairs looked at him, and he
+      had a moment of dreadful apprehension lest they should stop his progress.
+      Nothing was said, and he went on. The numbers on the first floor were not
+      what he wanted, and after some wandering about he ascended to the next,
+      and then to the third. Every now and then he encountered attendants, but
+      intuitively he bore himself with an air of knowing what he was about which
+      protected him from inquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally he came upon the hall-way he sought. Passing along, he found the
+      doors bearing the numbers he had memorized so well. They were quite close
+      together, and there was nothing to help him guess which belonged to the
+      parlor. He hesitated, gazing wistfully from one to the other. In the
+      instant of indecision, even while his alert ear caught the sound of feet
+      coming along toward the passage in which he stood, a thought came to
+      quicken his resolve. It became apparent to him that his discovery gave him
+      a certain new measure of freedom with Celia, a sort of right to take
+      things more for granted than heretofore. He chose a door at random, and
+      rapped distinctly on the panel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The voice he knew for Celia's. The single word, however, recalled the
+      usage of Father Forbes, which he had noted more than once at the
+      pastorate, when Maggie had knocked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He straightened his shoulders, took his hat off, and pushed open the door.
+      It WAS the parlor&mdash;a room of sofas, pianos, big easy-chairs, and
+      luxurious bric-a-brac. A tall woman was walking up and down in it, with
+      bowed head. Her back was at the moment toward him; and he looked at her,
+      saying to himself that this was the lady of his dreams, the enchantress of
+      the kiss, the woman who loved him&mdash;but somehow it did not seem to his
+      senses to be Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned, and moved a step or two in his direction before she
+      mechanically lifted her eyes and saw who was standing in her doorway. She
+      stopped short, and regarded him. Her face was in the shadow, and he could
+      make out nothing of its expression, save that there was a general effect
+      of gravity about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot receive you,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You must go away. You have no business
+      to come like this without sending up your card.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron smiled at her. The notion of taking in earnest her inhospitable
+      words did not at all occur to him. He could see now that her face had
+      vexed and saddened lines upon it, and the sharpness of her tone remained
+      in his ears. But he smiled again gently, to reassure her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought to have sent up my name, I know,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I couldn't bear
+      to wait. I just saw your name on the register and&mdash;you WILL forgive
+      me, won't you?&mdash;I ran to you at once. I know you won't have the heart
+      to send me away!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood where she had halted, her arms behind her, looking him fixedly
+      in the face. He had made a movement to advance, and offer his hand in
+      greeting, but her posture checked the impulse. His courage began to falter
+      under her inspection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Must I really go down again?&rdquo; he pleaded. &ldquo;It's a crushing penalty to
+      suffer for such little indiscretion. I was so excited to find you were
+      here&mdash;I never stopped to think. Don't send me away; please don't!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia raised her head. &ldquo;Well, shut the door, then,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;since you
+      are so anxious to stay. You would have done much better, though, very much
+      better indeed, to have taken the hint and gone away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you shake hands with me, Celia?&rdquo; he asked softly, as he came near
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit there, please!&rdquo; she made answer, indicating a chair in the middle of
+      the room. He obeyed her, but to his surprise, instead of seating herself
+      as well, she began walking up and down the length of the floor again.
+      After a turn or two she stopped in front of him, and looked him full in
+      the eye. The light from the windows was on her countenance now, and its
+      revelations vaguely troubled him. It was a Celia he had never seen before
+      who confronted him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am much occupied by other matters,&rdquo; she said, speaking with cold
+      impassivity, &ldquo;but still I find myself curious to know just what limits you
+      set to your dishonesty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron stared up at her. His lips quivered, but no speech came to them. If
+      this was all merely fond playfulness, it was being carried to a
+      heart-aching point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw you hiding about in the depot at home last evening,&rdquo; she went on.
+      &ldquo;You come up here, pretending to have discovered me by accident, but I saw
+      you following me from the Grand Central this morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I did both these things,&rdquo; said Theron, boldly. A fine bravery
+      tingled in his veins all at once. He looked into her face and found the
+      spirit to disregard its frowning aspect. &ldquo;Yes, I did them,&rdquo; he repeated
+      defiantly. &ldquo;That is not the hundredth part, or the thousandth part, of
+      what I would do for your sake. I have got way beyond caring for any
+      consequences. Position, reputation, the good opinion of fools&mdash;what
+      are they? Life itself&mdash;what does it amount to? Nothing at all&mdash;with
+      you in the balance!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;but I am not in the balance,&rdquo; observed Celia, quietly. &ldquo;That is
+      where you have made your mistake.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron laid aside his hat. Women were curious creatures, he reflected.
+      Some were susceptible to one line of treatment, some to another. His own
+      reading of Celia had always been that she liked opposition, of a smart,
+      rattling, almost cheeky, sort. One got on best with her by saying bright
+      things. He searched his brain now for some clever quip that would strike
+      sparks from the adamantine mood which for the moment it was her whim to
+      assume. To cover the process, he smiled a little. Then her beauty, as she
+      stood before him, her queenly form clad in a more stiffly fashionable
+      dress than he had seen her wearing before, appealed afresh and
+      overwhelmingly to him. He rose to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you forgotten our talk in the woods?&rdquo; he murmured with a wooing
+      note. &ldquo;Have you forgotten the kiss?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head calmly. &ldquo;I have forgotten nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why play with me so cruelly now?&rdquo; he went on, in a voice of tender
+      deprecation. &ldquo;I know you don't mean it, but all the same it bruises my
+      heart a little. I build myself so wholly upon you, I have made existence
+      itself depend so completely upon your smile, upon a soft glance in your
+      eyes, that when they are not there, why, I suffer, I don't know how to
+      live at all. So be kinder to me, Celia!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was kinder, as you call it, when you came in,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;I told you
+      to go away. That was pure kindness&mdash;more kindness than you deserved.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron looked at his hat, where it stood on the carpet by his feet. He
+      felt tears coming into his eyes. &ldquo;You tell me that you remember,&rdquo; he said,
+      in depressed tones, &ldquo;and yet you treat me like this! Perhaps I am wrong.
+      No doubt it is my own fault. I suppose I ought not to have come down here
+      at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia nodded her head in assent to this view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I swear that I was helpless in the matter,&rdquo; he burst forth. &ldquo;I HAD to
+      come! It would have been literally impossible for me to have stayed at
+      home, knowing that you were here, and knowing also that&mdash;that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on!&rdquo; said Celia, thrusting forth her under-lip a trifle, and hardening
+      still further the gleam in her eye, as he stumbled over his sentence and
+      left it unfinished. &ldquo;What was the other thing that you were 'knowing'?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Knowing&mdash;&rdquo; he took up the word hesitatingly&mdash;&ldquo;knowing that life
+      would be insupportable to me if I could not be near you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She curled her lip at him. &ldquo;You skated over the thin spot very well,&rdquo; she
+      commented. &ldquo;It was on the tip of your tongue to mention the fact that
+      Father Forbes came with me. Oh, I can read you through and through, Mr.
+      Ware.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a misty way Theron felt things slipping from his grasp. The rising
+      moisture blurred his eyes as their gaze clung to Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then if you do read me,&rdquo; he protested, &ldquo;you must know how utterly my
+      heart and brain are filled with you. No other man in all the world can
+      yield himself so absolutely to the woman he worships as I can. You have
+      taken possession of me so wholly, I am not in the least master of myself
+      any more. I don't know what I say or what I do. I am not worthy of you, I
+      know. No man alive could be that. But no one else will idolize and
+      reverence you as I do. Believe me when I say that, Celia! And how can you
+      blame me, in your heart, for following you? 'Whither thou goest, I will
+      go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people,
+      and thy God my God; where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be
+      buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee
+      and me!'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia shrugged her shoulders, and moved a few steps away from him.
+      Something like despair seized upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely,&rdquo; he urged with passion, &ldquo;surely I have a right to remind you of
+      the kiss!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned. &ldquo;The kiss,&rdquo; she said meditatively. &ldquo;Yes, you have a right to
+      remind me of it. Oh, yes, an undoubted right. You have another right too&mdash;the
+      right to have the kiss explained to you. It was of the good-bye order. It
+      signified that we weren't to meet again, and that just for one little
+      moment I permitted myself to be sorry for you. That was all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held himself erect under the incredible words, and gazed blankly at
+      her. The magnitude of what he confronted bewildered him; his mind was
+      incapable of taking it in. &ldquo;You mean&mdash;&rdquo; he started to say, and then
+      stopped, helplessly staring into her face, with a dropped jaw. It was too
+      much to try to think what she meant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little side-thought sprouted in the confusion of his brain. It grew
+      until it spread a bitter smile over his pale face. &ldquo;I know so little about
+      kisses,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I am such a greenhorn at that sort of thing. You should
+      have had pity on my inexperience, and told me just what brand of kiss it
+      was I was getting. Probably I ought to have been able to distinguish, but
+      you see I was brought up in the country&mdash;on a farm. They don't have
+      kisses in assorted varieties there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She bowed her head slightly. &ldquo;Yes, you are entitled to say that,&rdquo; she
+      assented. &ldquo;I was to blame, and it is quite fair that you should tell me
+      so. You spoke of your inexperience, your innocence. That was why I kissed
+      you in saying good-bye. It was in memory of that innocence of yours, to
+      which you yourself had been busy saying good-bye ever since I first saw
+      you. The idea seemed to me to mean something at the moment. I see now that
+      it was too subtle. I do not usually err on that side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron kept his hold upon her gaze, as if it afforded him bodily support.
+      He felt that he ought to stoop and take up his hat, but he dared not look
+      away from her. &ldquo;Do you not err now, on the side of cruelty?&rdquo; he asked her
+      piteously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed for the instant as if she were wavering, and he swiftly thrust
+      forth other pleas. &ldquo;I admit that I did wrong to follow you to New York. I
+      see that now. But it was an offence committed in entire good faith. Think
+      of it, Celia! I have never seen you since that day&mdash;that day in the
+      woods. I have waited&mdash;and waited&mdash;with no sign from you, no
+      chance of seeing you at all. Think what that meant to me! Everything in
+      the world had been altered for me, torn up by the roots. I was a new
+      being, plunged into a new existence. The kiss had done that. But until I saw
+      you again, I could not tell whether this vast change in me and my life was
+      for good or for bad&mdash;whether the kiss had come to me as a blessing or
+      a curse. The suspense was killing me, Celia! That is why, when I learned
+      that you were coming here, I threw everything to the winds and followed
+      you. You blame me for it, and I bow my head and accept the blame. But are
+      you justified in punishing me so terribly&mdash;in going on after I have
+      confessed my error, and cutting my heart into little strips, putting me to
+      death by torture?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down,&rdquo; said Celia, with a softened weariness in her voice. She seated
+      herself in front of him as he sank into his chair again. &ldquo;I don't want to
+      give you unnecessary pain, but you have insisted on forcing yourself into
+      a position where there isn't anything else but pain. I warned you to go
+      away, but you wouldn't. No matter how gently I may try to explain things
+      to you, you are bound to get nothing but suffering out of the explanation.
+      Now shall I still go on?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He inclined his head in token of assent, and did not lift it again, but
+      raised toward her a disconsolate gaze from a pallid, drooping face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is all in a single word, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; she proceeded, in low tones. &ldquo;I
+      speak for others as well as myself, mind you&mdash;we find that you are a
+      bore.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron's stiffened countenance remained immovable. He continued to stare
+      unblinkingly up into her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were disposed to like you very much when we first knew you,&rdquo; Celia
+      went on. &ldquo;You impressed us as an innocent, simple, genuine young
+      character, full of mother's milk. It was like the smell of early spring in
+      the country to come in contact with you. Your honesty of nature, your
+      sincerity in that absurd religion of yours, your general NAIVETE of mental
+      and spiritual get-up, all pleased us a great deal. We thought you were
+      going to be a real acquisition.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just a moment&mdash;whom do you mean by 'we'?&rdquo; He asked the question
+      calmly enough, but in a voice with an effect of distance in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It may not be necessary to enter into that,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;Let me go on.
+      But then it became apparent, little by little, that we had misjudged you.
+      We liked you, as I have said, because you were unsophisticated and
+      delightfully fresh and natural. Somehow we took it for granted you would
+      stay so. But that is just what you didn't do&mdash;just what you hadn't
+      the sense to try to do. Instead, we found you inflating yourself with all
+      sorts of egotisms and vanities. We found you presuming upon the
+      friendships which had been mistakenly extended to you. Do you want
+      instances? You went to Dr. Ledsmar's house that very day after I had been
+      with you to get a piano at Thurston's, and tried to inveigle him into
+      talking scandal about me. You came to me with tales about him. You went to
+      Father Forbes, and sought to get him to gossip about us both. Neither of
+      those men will ever ask you inside his house again. But that is only one
+      part of it. Your whole mind became an unpleasant thing to contemplate. You
+      thought it would amuse and impress us to hear you ridiculing and reviling
+      the people of your church, whose money supports you, and making a mock of
+      the things they believe in, and which you for your life wouldn't dare let
+      them know you didn't believe in. You talked to us slightingly about your
+      wife. What were you thinking of, not to comprehend that that would disgust
+      us? You showed me once&mdash;do you remember?&mdash;a life of George Sand
+      that you had just bought,&mdash;bought because you had just discovered
+      that she had an unclean side to her life. You chuckled as you spoke to me
+      about it, and you were for all the world like a little nasty boy, giggling
+      over something dirty that older people had learned not to notice. These
+      are merely random incidents. They are just samples, picked hap-hazard, of
+      the things in you which have been opening our eyes, little by little, to
+      our mistake. I can understand that all the while you really fancied that
+      you were expanding, growing, in all directions. What you took to be
+      improvement was degeneration. When you thought that you were impressing us
+      most by your smart sayings and doings, you were reminding us most of the
+      fable about the donkey trying to play lap-dog. And it wasn't even an
+      honest, straightforward donkey at that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She uttered these last words sorrowfully, her hands clasped in her lap,
+      and her eyes sinking to the floor. A silence ensued. Then Theron reached a
+      groping hand out for his hat, and, rising, walked with a lifeless,
+      automatic step to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had it half open, when the impossibility of leaving in this way towered
+      suddenly in his path and overwhelmed him. He slammed the door to, and
+      turned as if he had been whirled round by some mighty wind. He came toward
+      her, with something almost menacing in the vigor of his movements, and in
+      the wild look upon his white, set face. Halting before her, he covered the
+      tailor-clad figure, the coiled red hair, the upturned face with its
+      simulated calm, the big brown eyes, the rings upon the clasped fingers,
+      with a sweeping, comprehensive glare of passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is what you have done to me, then!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice was unrecognizable in his own ears&mdash;hoarse and broken, but
+      with a fright-compelling something in it which stimulated his rage. The
+      horrible notion of killing her, there where she sat, spread over the chaos
+      of his mind with an effect of unearthly light&mdash;red and abnormally
+      evil. It was like that first devilish radiance ushering in Creation, of
+      which the first-fruit was Cain. Why should he not kill her? In all ages,
+      women had been slain for less. Yes&mdash;and men had been hanged.
+      Something rose and stuck in his dry throat; and as he swallowed it down,
+      the sinister flare of murderous fascination died suddenly away into
+      darkness. The world was all black again&mdash;plunged in the Egyptian
+      night which lay upon the face of the deep while the earth was yet without
+      form and void. He was alone on it&mdash;alone among awful, planetary
+      solitudes which crushed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sight of Celia, sitting motionless only a pace in front of him, was
+      plain enough to his eyes. It was an illusion. She was really a star, many
+      millions of miles away. These things were hard to understand; but they
+      were true, none the less. People seemed to be about him, but in fact he
+      was alone. He recalled that even the little child in the car, playing with
+      those two buttons on a string, would have nothing to do with him. Take his
+      money, yes; take all he would give her&mdash;but not smile at him, not
+      come within reach of him! Men closed the doors of their houses against
+      him. The universe held him at arm's length as a nuisance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was standing with one knee upon a sofa. Unconsciously he had moved
+      round to the side of Celia; and as he caught the effect of her face now in
+      profile, memory-pictures began at once building themselves in his brain&mdash;pictures
+      of her standing in the darkened room of the cottage of death, declaiming
+      the CONFITEOR; of her seated at the piano, under the pure, mellowed
+      candle-light; of her leaning her chin on her hands, and gazing
+      meditatively at the leafy background of the woods they were in; of her
+      lying back, indolently content, in the deck-chair on the yacht of his
+      fancy&mdash;that yacht which a few hours before had seemed so brilliantly
+      and bewitchingly real to him, and now&mdash;now&mdash;!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sank in a heap upon the couch, and, burying his face among its
+      cushions, wept and groaned aloud. His collapse was absolute. He sobbed
+      with the abandonment of one who, in the veritable presence of death, lets
+      go all sense of relation to life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently some one was touching him on the shoulder&mdash;an incisive,
+      pointed touch&mdash;and he checked himself, and lifted his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will have to get up, and present some sort of an appearance, and go
+      away at once,&rdquo; Celia said to him in low, rapid tones. &ldquo;Some gentlemen are
+      at the door, whom I have been waiting for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he stupidly sat up and tried to collect his faculties, Celia had opened
+      the door and admitted two visitors. The foremost was Father Forbes; and
+      he, with some whispered, smiling words, presented to her his companion, a
+      tall, robust, florid man of middle-age, with a frock-coat and a gray
+      mustache, sharply waxed. The three spoke for a moment together. Then the
+      priest's wandering eye suddenly lighted upon the figure on the sofa. He
+      stared, knitted his brows, and then lifted them in inquiry as he turned to
+      Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor man!&rdquo; she said readily, in tones loud enough to reach Theron. &ldquo;It is
+      our neighbor, Father, the Rev. Mr. Ware. He hit upon my name in the
+      register quite unexpectedly, and I had him come up. He is in sore distress&mdash;a
+      great and sudden bereavement. He is going now. Won't you speak to him in
+      the hall&mdash;a few words, Father? It would please him. He is terribly
+      depressed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The words had drawn Theron to his feet, as by some mechanical process. He
+      took up his hat and moved dumbly to the door. It seemed to him that Celia
+      intended offering to shake hands; but he went past her with only some
+      confused exchange of glances and a murmured word or two. The tall
+      stranger, who drew aside to let him pass, had acted as if he expected to
+      be introduced. Theron, emerging into the hall, leaned against the wall and
+      looked dreamily at the priest, who had stepped out with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very sorry to learn that you are in trouble, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; Father
+      Forbes said, gently enough, but in hurried tones. &ldquo;Miss Madden is also in
+      trouble. I mentioned to you that her brother had got into a serious
+      scrape. I have brought my old friend, General Brady, to consult with her
+      about the matter. He knows all the parties concerned, and he can set
+      things right if anybody can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a mistake about me&mdash;I 'm not in any trouble at all,&rdquo; said
+      Theron. &ldquo;I just dropped in to make a friendly call.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest glanced sharply at him, noting with a swift, informed scrutiny
+      how he sprawled against the wall, and what vacuity his eyes and loosened
+      lips expressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you have a talent for the inopportune amounting to positive genius,&rdquo;
+       said Father Forbes, with a stormy smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me this, Father Forbes,&rdquo; the other demanded, with impulsive
+      suddenness, &ldquo;is it true that you don't want me in your house again? Is
+      that the truth or not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The truth is always relative, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; replied the priest, turning
+      away, and closing the door of the parlor behind him with a decisive sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Left alone, Theron started to make his way downstairs. He found his legs
+      wavering under him and making zigzag movements of their own in a
+      bewildering fashion. He referred this at first, in an outburst of fresh
+      despair, to the effects of his great grief. Then, as he held tight to the
+      banister and governed his descent step by step, it occurred to him that it
+      must be the wine he had had for breakfast. Upon examination, he was not so
+      unhappy, after all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0031" id="link2HCH0031">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXXI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At the second peal of the door-bell, Brother Soulsby sat up in bed. It was
+      still pitch-dark, and the memory of the first ringing fluttered musically
+      in his awakening consciousness as a part of some dream he had been having.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who the deuce can that be?&rdquo; he mused aloud, in querulous resentment at
+      the interruption.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put your head out of the window, and ask,&rdquo; suggested his wife, drowsily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bell-pull scraped violently in its socket, and a third outburst of
+      shrill reverberations clamored through the silent house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whatever you do, I'd do it before he yanked the whole thing to pieces,&rdquo;
+       added the wife, with more decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Soulsby was wide awake now. He sprang to the floor, and, groping
+      about in the obscurity, began drawing on some of his clothes. He rapped on
+      the window during the process, to show that the house was astir, and a
+      minute afterward made his way out of the room and down the stairs, the
+      boards creaking under his stockinged feet as he went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nearly a quarter of an hour passed before he returned. Sister Soulsby,
+      lying in sleepy quiescence, heard vague sounds of voices at the front
+      door, and did not feel interested enough to lift her head and listen. A
+      noise of footsteps on the sidewalk followed, first receding from the door,
+      then turning toward it, this second time marking the presence of more than
+      one person. There seemed in this the implication of a guest, and she shook
+      off the dozing impulses which enveloped her faculties, and waited to hear
+      more. There came up, after further muttering of male voices, the
+      undeniable chink of coins striking against one another. Then more
+      footsteps, the resonant slam of a carriage door out in the street, the
+      grinding of wheels turning on the frosty road, and the racket of a vehicle
+      and horses going off at a smart pace into the night. Somebody had come,
+      then. She yawned at the thought, but remained well awake, tracing idly in
+      her mind, as various slight sounds rose from the lower floor, the
+      different things Soulsby was probably doing. Their spare room was down
+      there, directly underneath, but curiously enough no one seemed to enter
+      it. The faint murmur of conversation which from time to time reached her
+      came from the parlor instead. At last she heard her husband's soft tread
+      coming up the staircase, and still there had been no hint of employing the
+      guest-chamber. What could he be about? she wondered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Soulsby came in, bearing a small lamp in his hand, the reddish
+      light of which, flaring upward, revealed an unlooked-for display of
+      amusement on his thin, beardless face. He advanced to the bedside, shading
+      the glare from her blinking eyes with his palm, and grinned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A thousand guesses, old lady,&rdquo; he said, with a dry chuckle, &ldquo;and you
+      wouldn't have a ghost of a chance. You might guess till Hades froze over
+      seven feet thick, and still you wouldn't hit it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat up in turn. &ldquo;Good gracious, man,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;you don't mean&mdash;&rdquo;
+       Here the cheerful gleam in his small eyes reassured her, and she sighed
+      relief, then smiled confusedly. &ldquo;I half thought, just for the minute,&rdquo; she
+      explained, &ldquo;it might be some bounder who'd come East to try and blackmail
+      me. But no, who is it&mdash;and what on earth have you done with him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Soulsby cackled in merriment. &ldquo;It's Brother Ware of Octavius, out
+      on a little bat, all by himself. He says he's been on the loose only two
+      days; but it looks more like a fortnight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;OUR Brother Ware?&rdquo; she regarded him with open-eyed surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, yes, I suppose he's OUR Brother Ware&mdash;some,&rdquo; returned Soulsby,
+      genially. &ldquo;He seems to think so, anyway.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But tell me about it!&rdquo; she urged eagerly. &ldquo;What's the matter with him?
+      How does he explain it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, he explains it pretty badly, if you ask me,&rdquo; said Soulsby, with a
+      droll, joking eye and a mock-serious voice. He seated himself on the side
+      of the bed, facing her, and still considerately shielding her from the
+      light of the lamp he held. &ldquo;But don't think I suggested any explanations.
+      I've been a mother myself. He's merely filled himself up to the neck with
+      rum, in the simple, ordinary, good old-fashioned way. That's all. What is
+      there to explain about that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked meditatively at him for a time, shaking her head. &ldquo;No,
+      Soulsby,&rdquo; she said gravely, at last. &ldquo;This isn't any laughing matter. You
+      may be sure something bad has happened, to set him off like that. I'm
+      going to get up and dress right now. What time is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now don't you do anything of the sort,&rdquo; he urged persuasively. &ldquo;It isn't
+      five o'clock; it'll be dark for nearly an hour yet. Just you turn over,
+      and have another nap. He's all right. I put him on the sofa, with the
+      buffalo robe round him. You'll find him there, safe and sound, when it's
+      time for white folks to get up. You know how it breaks you up all day, not
+      to get your full sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't care if it makes me look as old as the everlasting hills,&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;Can't you understand, Soulsby? The thing worries me&mdash;gets on
+      my nerves. I couldn't close an eye, if I tried. I took a great fancy to
+      that young man. I told you so at the time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Soulsby nodded, and turned down the wick of his lamp a trifle. &ldquo;Yes, I
+      know you did,&rdquo; he remarked in placidly non-contentious tones. &ldquo;I can't say
+      I saw much in him myself, but I daresay you're right.&rdquo; There followed a
+      moment's silence, during which he experimented in turning the wick up
+      again. &ldquo;But, anyway,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;there isn't anything you can do. He'll
+      sleep it off, and the longer he's left alone the better. It isn't as if we
+      had a hired girl, who'd come down and find him there, and give the whole
+      thing away. He's fixed up there perfectly comfortable; and when he's had
+      his sleep out, and wakes up on his own account, he'll be feeling a heap
+      better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The argument might have carried conviction, but on the instant the sound
+      of footsteps came to them from the room below. The subdued noise rose
+      regularly, as of one pacing to and fro.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Soulsby, YOU come back to bed, and get YOUR sleep out. I'm going
+      downstairs. It's no good talking; I'm going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Soulsby offered no further opposition, either by talk or demeanor,
+      but returned contentedly to bed, pulling the comforter over his ears, and
+      falling into the slow, measured respiration of tranquil slumber before his
+      wife was ready to leave the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dim, cold gray of twilight was sifting furtively through the lace
+      curtains of the front windows when Mrs. Soulsby, lamp in hand, entered the
+      parlor. She confronted a figure she would have hardly recognized. The man
+      seemed to have been submerged in a bath of disgrace. From the crown of his
+      head to the soles of his feet, everything about him was altered,
+      distorted, smeared with an intangible effect of shame. In the vague gloom
+      of the middle distance, between lamp and window, she noticed that his
+      shoulders were crouched, like those of some shambling tramp. The frowsy
+      shadows of a stubble beard lay on his jaw and throat. His clothes were
+      crumpled and hung awry; his boots were stained with mud. The silk hat on
+      the piano told its battered story with dumb eloquence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lifting the lamp, she moved forward a step, and threw its light upon his
+      face. A little groan sounded involuntarily upon her lips. Out of a mask of
+      unpleasant features, swollen with drink and weighted by the physical
+      craving for rest and sleep, there stared at her two bloodshot eyes,
+      shining with the wild light of hysteria. The effect of dishevelled hair,
+      relaxed muscles, and rough, half-bearded lower face lent to these eyes, as
+      she caught their first glance, an unnatural glare. The lamp shook in her
+      hand for an instant. Then, ashamed of herself, she held out her other hand
+      fearlessly to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me all about it, Theron,&rdquo; she said calmly, and with a soothing,
+      motherly intonation in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not take the hand she offered, but suddenly, with a wailing moan,
+      cast himself on his knees at her feet. He was so tall a man that the
+      movement could have no grace. He abased his head awkwardly, to bury it
+      among the folds of the skirts at her ankles. She stood still for a moment,
+      looking down upon him. Then, blowing out the light, she reached over and
+      set the smoking lamp on the piano near by. The daylight made things
+      distinguishable in a wan, uncertain way, throughout the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have come out of hell, for the sake of hearing some human being speak
+      to me like that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The thick utterance proceeded in a muffled fashion from where his face
+      grovelled against her dress. Its despairing accents appealed to her, but
+      even more was she touched by the ungainly figure he made, sprawling on the
+      carpet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, since you are out, stay out,&rdquo; she answered, as reassuringly as she
+      could. &ldquo;But get up and take a seat here beside me, like a sensible man,
+      and tell me all about it. Come! I insist!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In obedience to her tone, and the sharp tug at his shoulder with which she
+      emphasized it, he got slowly to his feet, and listlessly seated himself on
+      the sofa to which she pointed. He hung his head, and began catching his
+      breath with a periodical gasp, half hiccough, half sob.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First of all,&rdquo; she said, in her brisk, matter-of-fact manner, &ldquo;don't you
+      want to lie down there again, and have me tuck you up snug with the
+      buffalo robe, and go to sleep? That would be the best thing you could do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head disconsolately, from side to side. &ldquo;I can't!&rdquo; he
+      groaned, with a swifter recurrence of the sob-like convulsions. &ldquo;I'm dying
+      for sleep, but I'm too&mdash;too frightened!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, I'll sit beside you till you drop off,&rdquo; she said, with masterful
+      decision. He suffered himself to be pushed into recumbency on the couch,
+      and put his head with docility on the pillow she brought from the spare
+      room. When she had spread the fur over him, and pushed her chair close to
+      the sofa, she stood by it for a little, looking down in meditation at his
+      demoralized face. Under the painful surface-blur of wretchedness and
+      fatigued debauchery, she traced reflectively the lineaments of the younger
+      and cleanlier countenance she had seen a few months before. Nothing
+      essential had been taken away. There was only this pestiferous overlaying
+      of shame and cowardice to be removed. The face underneath was still all
+      right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a soft, maternal touch, she smoothed the hair from his forehead into
+      order. Then she seated herself, and, when he got his hand out from under
+      the robe and thrust it forth timidly, she took it in hers and held it in a
+      warm, sympathetic grasp. He closed his eyes at this, and gradually the
+      paroxysmal catch in his breathing lapsed. The daylight strengthened, until
+      at last tiny flecks of sunshine twinkled in the meshes of the further
+      curtains at the window. She fancied him asleep, and gently sought to
+      disengage her hand, but his fingers clutched at it with vehemence, and his
+      eyes were wide open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't sleep at all,&rdquo; he murmured. &ldquo;I want to talk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There 's nothing in the world to hinder you,&rdquo; she commented smilingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you the solemn truth,&rdquo; he said, lifting his voice in dogged
+      assertion: &ldquo;the best sermon I ever preached in my life, I preached only
+      three weeks ago, at the camp-meeting. It was admitted by everybody to be
+      far and away my finest effort! They will tell you the same!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's quite likely,&rdquo; assented Sister Soulsby. &ldquo;I quite believe it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then how can anybody say that I've degenerated, that I've become a fool?&rdquo;
+       he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't heard anybody hint at such a thing,&rdquo; she answered quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, of course, YOU haven't heard them!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;I heard them, though!&rdquo;
+       Then, forcing himself to a sitting posture, against the restraint of her
+      hand, he flung back the covering. &ldquo;I'm burning hot already! Yes, those
+      were the identical words: I haven't improved; I've degenerated. People
+      hate me; they won't have me in their houses. They say I'm a nuisance and a
+      bore. I'm like a little nasty boy. That's what they say. Even a young man
+      who was dying&mdash;lying right on the edge of his open grave&mdash;told
+      me solemnly that I reminded him of a saint once, but I was only fit for a
+      barkeeper now. They say I really don't know anything at all. And I'm not
+      only a fool, they say, I'm a dishonest fool into the bargain!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But who says such twaddle as that?&rdquo; she returned consolingly. The
+      violence of his emotion disturbed her. &ldquo;You mustn't imagine such things.
+      You are among friends here. Other people are your friends, too. They have
+      the very highest opinion of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't a friend on earth but you!&rdquo; he declared solemnly. His eyes
+      glowed fiercely, and his voice sank into a grave intensity of tone. &ldquo;I was
+      going to kill myself. I went on to the big bridge to throw myself off, and
+      a policeman saw me trying to climb over the railing, and he grabbed me and
+      marched me away. Then he threw me out at the entrance, and said he would
+      club my head off if I came there again. And then I went and stood and let
+      the cable-cars pass close by me, and twenty times I thought I had the
+      nerve to throw myself under the next one, and then I waited for the next&mdash;and
+      I was afraid! And then I was in a crowd somewhere, and the warning came to
+      me that I was going to die. The fool needn't go kill himself: God would
+      take care of that. It was my heart, you know. I've had that terrible
+      fluttering once before. It seized me this time, and I fell down in the
+      crowd, and some people walked over me, but some one else helped me up, and
+      let me sit down in a big lighted hallway, the entrance to some theatre,
+      and some one brought me some brandy, but somebody else said I was drunk,
+      and they took it away again, and put me out. They could see I was a fool,
+      that I hadn't a friend on earth. And when I went out, there was a big
+      picture of a woman in tights, and the word 'Amazons' overhead&mdash;and
+      then I remembered you. I knew you were my friend&mdash;the only one I have
+      on earth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very flattering&mdash;to be remembered like that,&rdquo; said Sister
+      Soulsby, gently. The disposition to laugh was smothered by a pained
+      perception of the suffering he was undergoing. His face had grown drawn
+      and haggard under the burden of his memories as he rambled on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I came straight to you,&rdquo; he began again. &ldquo;I had just money enough left
+      to pay my fare. The rest is in my valise at the hotel&mdash;the Murray
+      Hill Hotel. It belongs to the church. I stole it from the church. When I
+      am dead they can get it back again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby forced a smile to her lips. &ldquo;What nonsense you talk&mdash;about
+      dying!&rdquo; she exclaimed. &ldquo;Why, man alive, you'll sleep this all off like a
+      top, if you'll only lie down and give yourself a chance. Come, now, you
+      must do as you're told.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a resolute hand, she made him lie down again, and once more covered
+      him with the fur. He submitted, and did not even offer to put out his arm
+      this time, but looked in piteous dumbness at her for a long time. While
+      she sat thus in silence, the sound of Brother Soulsby moving about
+      upstairs became audible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron heard it, and the importance of hurrying on some further disclosure
+      seemed to suggest itself. &ldquo;I can see you think I'm just drunk,&rdquo; he said,
+      in low, sombre tones. &ldquo;Of course that's what HE thought. The hackman
+      thought so, and so did the conductor, and everybody. But I hoped you would
+      know better. I was sure you would see that it was something worse than
+      that. See here, I'll tell you. Then you'll understand. I've been drinking
+      for two days and one whole night, on my feet all the while, wandering
+      alone in that big strange New York, going through places where they
+      murdered men for ten cents, mixing myself up with the worst people in low
+      bar-rooms and dance-houses, and they saw I had money in my pocket, too,
+      and yet nobody touched me, or offered to lay a finger on me. Do you know
+      why? They understood that I wanted to get drunk, and couldn't. The Indians
+      won't harm an idiot, or lunatic, you know. Well, it was the same with
+      these vilest of the vile. They saw that I was a fool whom God had taken
+      hold of, to break his heart first, and then to craze his brain, and then
+      to fling him on a dunghill to die like a dog. They believe in God, those
+      people. They're the only ones who do, it seems to me. And they wouldn't
+      interfere when they saw what He was doing to me. But I tell you I wasn't
+      drunk. I haven't been drunk. I'm only heart-broken, and crushed out of
+      shape and life&mdash;that's all. And I've crawled here just to have a
+      friend by me when&mdash;when I come to the end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're not talking very sensibly, or very bravely either, Theron Ware,&rdquo;
+       remarked his companion. &ldquo;It's cowardly to give way to notions like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I 'm not afraid to die; don't think that,&rdquo; he remonstrated wearily.
+      &ldquo;If there is a Judgment, it has hit me as hard as it can already. There
+      can't be any hell worse than that I've gone through. Here I am talking
+      about hell,&rdquo; he continued, with a pained contraction of the muscles about
+      his mouth&mdash;a stillborn, malformed smile&mdash;&ldquo;as if I believed in
+      one! I've got way through all my beliefs, you know. I tell you that
+      frankly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's none of my business,&rdquo; she reassured him. &ldquo;I'm not your Bishop, or
+      your confessor. I'm just your friend, your pal, that's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here!&rdquo; he broke in, with some animation and a new intensity of
+      glance and voice. &ldquo;If I was going to live, I'd have some funny things to
+      tell. Six months ago I was a good man. I not only seemed to be good, to
+      others and to myself, but I was good. I had a soul; I had a conscience. I
+      was going along doing my duty, and I was happy in it. We were poor, Alice
+      and I, and people behaved rather hard toward us, and sometimes we were a
+      little down in the mouth about it; but that was all. We really were happy;
+      and I&mdash;I really was a good man. Here's the kind of joke God plays!
+      You see me here six months after. Look at me! I haven't got an honest hair
+      in my head. I'm a bad man through and through, that's what I am. I look
+      all around at myself, and there isn't an atom left anywhere of the good
+      man I used to be. And, mind you, I never lifted a finger to prevent the
+      change. I didn't resist once; I didn't make any fight. I just walked
+      deliberately down-hill, with my eyes wide open. I told myself all the
+      while that I was climbing uphill instead, but I knew in my heart that it
+      was a lie. Everything about me was a lie. I wouldn't be telling the truth,
+      even now, if&mdash;if I hadn't come to the end of my rope. Now, how do you
+      explain that? How can it be explained? Was I really rotten to the core all
+      the time, years ago, when I seemed to everybody, myself and the rest, to
+      be good and straight and sincere? Was it all a sham, or does God take a
+      good man and turn him into an out-and-out bad one, in just a few months&mdash;in
+      the time that it takes an ear of corn to form and ripen and go off with
+      the mildew? Or isn't there any God at all&mdash;but only men who live and
+      die like animals? And that would explain my case, wouldn't it? I got
+      bitten and went vicious and crazy, and they've had to chase me out and
+      hunt me to my death like a mad dog! Yes, that makes it all very simple. It
+      isn't worth while to discuss me at all as if I had a soul, is it? I'm just
+      one more mongrel cur that's gone mad, and must be put out of the way.
+      That's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See here,&rdquo; said Sister Soulsby, alertly, &ldquo;I half believe that a good
+      cuffing is what you really stand in need of. Now you stop all this
+      nonsense, and lie quiet and keep still! Do you hear me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The jocose sternness which she assumed, in words and manner, seemed to
+      soothe him. He almost smiled up at her in a melancholy way, and sighed
+      profoundly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've told you MY religion before,&rdquo; she went on with gentleness. &ldquo;The
+      sheep and the goats are to be separated on Judgment Day, but not a minute
+      sooner. In other words, as long as human life lasts, good, bad, and
+      indifferent are all braided up together in every man's nature, and every
+      woman's too. You weren't altogether good a year ago, any more than you're
+      altogether bad now. You were some of both then; you're some of both now.
+      If you've been making an extra sort of fool of yourself lately, why, now
+      that you recognize it, the only thing to do is to slow steam, pull up, and
+      back engine in the other direction. In that way you'll find things will
+      even themselves up. It's a see-saw with all of us, Theron Ware&mdash;sometimes
+      up; sometimes down. But nobody is rotten clear to the core.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He closed his eyes, and lay in silence for a time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is what day of the week?&rdquo; he asked, at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Friday, the nineteenth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wednesday&mdash;that would be the seventeenth. That was the day ordained
+      for my slaughter. On that morning, I was the happiest man in the world. No
+      king could have been so proud and confident as I was. A wonderful romance
+      had come to me. The most beautiful young woman in the world, the most
+      talented too, was waiting for me. An express train was carrying me to her,
+      and it couldn't go fast enough to keep up with my eagerness. She was very
+      rich, and she loved me, and we were to live in eternal summer, wherever we
+      liked, on a big, beautiful yacht. No one else had such a life before him
+      as that. It seemed almost too good for me, but I thought I had grown and
+      developed so much that perhaps I would be worthy of it. Oh, how happy I
+      was! I tell you this because&mdash;because YOU are not like the others.
+      You will understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I understand,&rdquo; she said patiently. &ldquo;Well&mdash;you were being so
+      happy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was in the morning&mdash;Wednesday the seventeenth&mdash;early in
+      the morning. There was a little girl in the car, playing with some
+      buttons, and when I tried to make friends with her, she looked at me, and
+      she saw, right at a glance, that I was a fool. 'Out of the mouths of babes
+      and sucklings,' you know. She was the first to find it out. It began like
+      that, early in the morning. But then after that everybody knew it. They
+      had only to look at me and they said: 'Why, this is a fool&mdash;like a
+      little nasty boy; we won't let him into our houses; we find him a bore.'
+      That is what they said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did SHE say it?&rdquo; Sister Soulsby permitted herself to ask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For answer Theron bit his lips, and drew his chin under the fur, and
+      pushed his scowling face into the pillow. The spasmodic, sob-like gasps
+      began to shake him again. She laid a compassionate hand upon his hot brow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is why I made my way here to you,&rdquo; he groaned piteously. &ldquo;I knew you
+      would sympathize; I could tell it all to you. And it was so awful, to die
+      there alone in the strange city&mdash;I couldn't do it&mdash;with nobody
+      near me who liked me, or thought well of me. Alice would hate me. There
+      was no one but you. I wanted to be with you&mdash;at the last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His quavering voice broke off in a gust of weeping, and his face frankly
+      surrendered itself to the distortions of a crying child's countenance,
+      wide-mouthed and tragically grotesque in its abandonment of control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby, as her husband's boots were heard descending the stairs,
+      rose, and drew the robe up to half cover his agonized visage. She patted
+      the sufferer softly on the head, and then went to the stair-door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think he'll go to sleep now,&rdquo; she said, lifting her voice to the
+      new-comer, and with a backward nod toward the couch. &ldquo;Come out into the
+      kitchen while I get breakfast, or into the sitting-room, or somewhere, so
+      as not to disturb him. He's promised me to lie perfectly quiet, and try to
+      sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When they had passed together out of the room, she turned. &ldquo;Soulsby,&rdquo; she
+      said with half-playful asperity, &ldquo;I'm disappointed in you. For a man who's
+      knocked about as much as you have, I must say you've picked up an
+      astonishingly small outfit of gumption. That poor creature in there is no
+      more drunk than I am. He's been drinking&mdash;yes, drinking like a fish;
+      but it wasn't able to make him drunk. He's past being drunk; he's
+      grief-crazy. It's a case of 'woman.' Some girl has made a fool of him, and
+      decoyed him up in a balloon, and let him drop. He's been hurt bad, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have all been hurt in our day and generation,&rdquo; responded Brother
+      Soulsby, genially. &ldquo;Don't you worry; he'll sleep that off too. It takes
+      longer than drink, and it doesn't begin to be so pleasant, but it can be
+      slept off. Take my word for it, he'll be a different man by noon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When noon came, however, Brother Soulsby was on his way to summon one of
+      the village doctors. Toward nightfall, he went out again to telegraph for
+      Alice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0032" id="link2HCH0032">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXXII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Spring fell early upon the pleasant southern slopes of the Susquehanna
+      country. The snow went off as by magic. The trees budded and leaved before
+      their time. The birds came and set up their chorus in the elms, while
+      winter seemed still a thing of yesterday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice, clad gravely in black, stood again upon a kitchen-stoop, and looked
+      across an intervening space of back-yards and fences to where the tall
+      boughs, fresh in their new verdure, were silhouetted against the pure blue
+      sky. The prospect recalled to her irresistibly another sunlit morning, a
+      year ago, when she had stood in the doorway of her own kitchen, and
+      surveyed a scene not unlike this; it might have been with the same
+      carolling robins, the same trees, the same azure segment of the tranquil,
+      speckless dome. Then she was looking out upon surroundings novel and
+      strange to her, among which she must make herself at home as best she
+      could. But at least the ground was secure under her feet; at least she had
+      a home, and a word from her lips could summon her husband out, to stand
+      beside her with his arm about her, and share her buoyant, hopeful joy in
+      the promises of spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To think that that was only one little year ago&mdash;the mere revolution
+      of four brief seasons! And now&mdash;!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby, wiping her hands on her apron, came briskly out upon the
+      stoop. Some cheerful commonplace was on her tongue, but a glance at
+      Alice's wistful face kept it back. She passed an arm around her waist
+      instead, and stood in silence, looking at the elms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It brings back memories to me&mdash;all this,&rdquo; said Alice, nodding her
+      head, and not seeking to dissemble the tears which sprang to her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The men will be down in a minute, dear,&rdquo; the other reminded her. &ldquo;They'd
+      nearly finished packing before I put the biscuits in the oven. We mustn't
+      wear long faces before folks, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I know,&rdquo; murmured Alice. Then, with a sudden impulse, she turned to
+      her companion. &ldquo;Candace,&rdquo; she said fervently, &ldquo;we're alone here for the
+      moment; I must tell you that if I don't talk gratitude to you, it's simply
+      and solely because I don't know where to begin, or what to say. I'm just
+      dumfounded at your goodness. It takes my speech away. I only know this,
+      Candace: God will be very good to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tut! tut!&rdquo; replied Sister Soulsby, &ldquo;that's all right, you dear thing. I
+      know just how you feel. Don't dream of being under obligation to explain
+      it to me, or to thank us at all. We've had all sorts of comfort out of the
+      thing&mdash;Soulsby and I. We used to get downright lonesome, here all by
+      ourselves, and we've simply had a winter of pleasant company instead, that
+      s all. Besides, there's solid satisfaction in knowing that at last, for
+      once in our lives we've had a chance to be of some real use to somebody
+      who truly needed it. You can't imagine how stuck up that makes us in our
+      own conceit. We feel as if we were George Peabody and Lady Burdett-Coutts,
+      and several other philanthropists thrown in. No, seriously, don't think of
+      it again. We're glad to have been able to do it all; and if you only go
+      ahead now, and prosper and be happy, why, that will be the only reward we
+      want.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope we shall do well,&rdquo; said Alice. &ldquo;Only tell me this, Candace. You do
+      think I was right, don't you, in insisting on Theron's leaving the
+      ministry altogether? He seems convinced enough now that it was the right
+      thing to do; but I grow nervous sometimes lest he should find it harder
+      than he thought to get along in business, and regret the change&mdash;and
+      blame me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you may rest easy in your mind about that,&rdquo; the other responded.
+      &ldquo;Whatever else he does, he will never want to come within gunshot of a
+      pulpit again. It came too near murdering him for that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice looked at her doubtfully. &ldquo;Something came near murdering him, I
+      know. But it doesn't seem to me that I would say it was the ministry. And
+      I guess you know pretty well yourself what it was. Of course, I've never
+      asked any questions, and I've hushed up everybody at Octavius who tried to
+      quiz me about it&mdash;his disappearance and my packing up and leaving,
+      and all that&mdash;and I've never discussed the question with you&mdash;but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, and there's no good going into it now,&rdquo; put in Sister Soulsby, with
+      amiable decisiveness. &ldquo;It's all past and gone. In fact, I hardly remember
+      much about it now myself. He simply got into deep water, poor soul, and
+      we've floated him out again, safe and sound. That's all. But all the same,
+      I was right in what I said. He was a mistake in the ministry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if you'd known him in previous years,&rdquo; urged Alice, plaintively,
+      &ldquo;before we were sent to that awful Octavius. He was the very ideal of all
+      a young minister should be. People used to simply worship him, he was such
+      a perfect preacher, and so pure-minded and friendly with everybody, and
+      threw himself into his work so. It was all that miserable, contemptible
+      Octavius that did the mischief.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby slowly shook her head. &ldquo;If there hadn't been a screw loose
+      somewhere,&rdquo; she said gently, &ldquo;Octavius wouldn't have hurt him. No, take my
+      word for it, he never was the right man for the place. He seemed to be, no
+      doubt, but he wasn't. When pressure was put on him, it found out his weak
+      spot like a shot, and pushed on it, and&mdash;well, it came near smashing
+      him, that's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And do you think he'll always be a&mdash;a back-slider,&rdquo; mourned Alice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For mercy's sake, don't ever try to have him pretend to be anything
+      else!&rdquo; exclaimed the other. &ldquo;The last state of that man would be worse
+      than the first. You must make up your mind to that. And you mustn't show
+      that you're nervous about it. You mustn't get nervous! You mustn't be
+      afraid of things. Just you keep a stiff upper lip, and say you WILL get
+      along, you WILL be happy. That's your only chance, Alice. He isn't going
+      to be an angel of light, or a saint, or anything of that sort, and it's no
+      good expecting it. But he'll be just an average kind of man&mdash;a little
+      sore about some things, a little wiser than he was about some others. You
+      can get along perfectly with him, if you only keep your courage up, and
+      don't show the white feather.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I know; but I've had it pretty well taken out of me,&rdquo; commented
+      Alice. &ldquo;It used to come easy to me to be cheerful and resolute and all
+      that; but it's different now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby stole a swift glance at the unsuspecting face of her
+      companion which was not all admiration, but her voice remained patiently
+      affectionate. &ldquo;Oh, that'll all come back to you, right enough. You'll have
+      your hands full, you know, finding a house, and unpacking all your old
+      furniture, and buying new things, and getting your home settled. It'll
+      keep you so busy you won't have time to feel strange or lonesome, one bit.
+      You'll see how it'll tone you up. In a year's time you won't know yourself
+      in the looking-glass.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, my health is good enough,&rdquo; said Alice; &ldquo;but I can't help thinking,
+      suppose Theron should be taken sick again, away out there among strangers.
+      You know he's never appeared to me to have quite got his strength back.
+      These long illnesses, you know, they always leave a mark on a man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense! He's strong as an ox,&rdquo; insisted Sister Soulsby. &ldquo;You mark my
+      word, he'll thrive in Seattle like a green bay-tree.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seattle!&rdquo; echoed Alice, meditatively. &ldquo;It sounds like the other end of
+      the world, doesn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The noise of feet in the house broke upon the colloquy, and the women went
+      indoors, to join the breakfast party. During the meal, it was Brother
+      Soulsby who bore the burden of the conversation. He was full of the future
+      of Seattle and the magnificent impending development of that Pacific
+      section. He had been out there, years ago, when it was next door to
+      uninhabited. He had visited the district twice since, and the changes
+      discoverable each new time were more wonderful than anything Aladdin's
+      lamp ever wrought. He had secured for Theron, through some of his friends
+      in Portland, the superintendency of a land and real estate company, which
+      had its headquarters in Seattle, but ambitiously linked its affairs with
+      the future of all Washington Territory. In an hour's time the hack would
+      come to take the Wares and their baggage to the depot, the first stage in
+      their long journey across the continent to their new home. Brother Soulsby
+      amiably filled the interval with reminiscences of the Oregon of twenty
+      years back, with instructive dissertations upon the soil, climate, and
+      seasons of Puget Sound and the Columbia valley, and, above all, with
+      helpful characterizations of the social life which had begun to take form
+      in this remotest West. He had nothing but confidence, to all appearances,
+      in the success of his young friend, now embarking on this new career. He
+      seemed so sanguine about it that the whole atmosphere of the breakfast
+      room lightened up, and the parting meal, surrounded by so many temptations
+      to distraught broodings and silences as it was, became almost jovial in
+      its spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, it was time to look for the carriage. The trunks and hand-bags
+      were ready in the hall, and Sister Soulsby was tying up a package of
+      sandwiches for Alice to keep by her in the train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron, with hat in hand, and overcoat on arm, loitered restlessly into
+      the kitchen, and watched this proceeding for a moment. Then he sauntered
+      out upon the stoop, and, lifting his head and drawing as long a breath as
+      he could, looked over at the elms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps the face was older and graver; it was hard to tell. The long
+      winter's illness, with its recurring crises and sustained confinement, had
+      bleached his skin and reduced his figure to gauntness, but there was none
+      the less an air of restored and secure good health about him. Only in the
+      eyes themselves, as they rested briefly upon the prospect, did a
+      substantial change suggest itself. They did not dwell fondly upon the
+      picture of the lofty, spreading boughs, with their waves of sap-green
+      leafage stirring against the blue. They did not soften and glow this time,
+      at the thought of how wholly one felt sure of God's goodness in these
+      wonderful new mornings of spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They looked instead straight through the fairest and most moving spectacle
+      in nature's processional, and saw afar off, in conjectural vision, a
+      formless sort of place which was Seattle. They surveyed its impalpable
+      outlines, its undefined dimensions, with a certain cool glitter of
+      hard-and-fast resolve. There rose before his fancy, out of the chaos of
+      these shapeless imaginings, some faces of men, then more behind them, then
+      a great concourse of uplifted countenances, crowded close together as far
+      as the eye could reach. They were attentive faces all, rapt, eager,
+      credulous to a degree. Their eyes were admiringly bent upon a common
+      object of excited interest. They were looking at HIM; they strained their
+      ears to miss no cadence of his voice. Involuntarily he straightened
+      himself, stretched forth his hand with the pale, thin fingers gracefully
+      disposed, and passed it slowly before him from side to side, in a
+      comprehensive, stately gesture. The audience rose at him, as he dropped
+      his hand, and filled his day-dream with a mighty roar of applause, in
+      volume like an ocean tempest, yet pitched for his hearing alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled, shook himself with a little delighted tremor, and turned on the
+      stoop to the open door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What Soulsby said about politics out there interested me enormously,&rdquo; he
+      remarked to the two women. &ldquo;I shouldn't be surprised if I found myself
+      doing something in that line. I can speak, you know, if I can't do
+      anything else. Talk is what tells, these days. Who knows? I may turn up in
+      Washington a full-blown senator before I'm forty. Stranger things have
+      happened than that, out West!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll come down and visit you then, Soulsby and I,&rdquo; said Sister Soulsby,
+      cheerfully. &ldquo;You shall take us to the White House, Alice, and introduce
+      us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it isn't likely I would come East,&rdquo; said Alice, pensively. &ldquo;Most
+      probably I'd be left to amuse myself in Seattle. But there&mdash;I think
+      that's the carriage driving up to the door.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 133 ***</div>
+  </body>
+</html>
+
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+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
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+The Damnation of Theron Ware, by Harold Frederic
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+May, 1994  [Etext #133]
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+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Damnation of Theron Ware
+
+by Harold Frederic
+
+
+PART I
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+No such throng had ever before been seen in the building
+during all its eight years of existence.  People were
+wedged together most uncomfortably upon the seats;
+they stood packed in the aisles and overflowed the galleries;
+at the back, in the shadows underneath these galleries,
+they formed broad, dense masses about the doors,
+through which it would be hopeless to attempt a passage.
+
+The light, given out from numerous tin-lined circles
+of flaring gas-jets arranged on the ceiling,
+fell full upon a thousand uplifted faces--some framed
+in bonnets or juvenile curls, others bearded or crowned
+with shining baldness--but all alike under the spell
+of a dominant emotion which held features in abstracted
+suspense and focussed every eye upon a common objective point.
+
+The excitement of expectancy reigned upon each row
+of countenances, was visible in every attitude--
+nay, seemed a part of the close, overheated atmosphere itself.
+
+An observer, looking over these compact lines of faces
+and noting the uniform concentration of eagerness
+they exhibited, might have guessed that they were watching
+for either the jury's verdict in some peculiarly absorbing
+criminal trial, or the announcement of the lucky numbers
+in a great lottery.  These two expressions seemed
+to alternate, and even to mingle vaguely, upon the
+upturned lineaments of the waiting throng--the hope
+of some unnamed stroke of fortune and the dread of some adverse decree.
+
+But a glance forward at the object of this universal
+gaze would have sufficed to shatter both hypotheses. 
+Here was neither a court of justice nor a tombola. 
+It was instead the closing session of the annual
+Nedahma Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,
+and the Bishop was about to read out the list
+of ministerial appointments for the coming year. 
+This list was evidently written in a hand strange to him,
+and the slow, near-sighted old gentleman, having at last
+sufficiently rubbed the glasses of his spectacles, and then
+adjusted them over his nose with annoying deliberation,
+was now silently rehearsing his task to himself--
+the while the clergymen round about ground their teeth
+and restlessly shuffled their feet in impatience.
+
+Upon a closer inspection of the assemblage, there were a
+great many of these clergymen.  A dozen or more dignified,
+and for the most part elderly, brethren sat grouped
+about the Bishop in the pulpit.  As many others,
+not quite so staid in mien, and indeed with here and there
+almost a suggestion of frivolity in their postures,
+were seated on the steps leading down from this platform. 
+A score of their fellows sat facing the audience, on chairs
+tightly wedged into the space railed off round the pulpit;
+and then came five or six rows of pews, stretching across
+the whole breadth of the church, and almost solidly filled
+with preachers of the Word.
+
+There were very old men among these--bent and decrepit
+veterans who had known Lorenzo Dow, and had been ordained
+by elders who remembered Francis Asbury and even Whitefield. 
+They sat now in front places, leaning forward with trembling
+and misshapen hands behind their hairy ears, waiting to
+hear their names read out on the superannuated list,
+it might be for the last time.
+
+The sight of these venerable Fathers in Israel was good
+to the eyes, conjuring up, as it did, pictures of a time
+when a plain and homely people had been served by a fervent
+and devoted clergy--by preachers who lacked in learning
+and polish, no doubt, but who gave their lives without dream
+of earthly reward to poverty and to the danger and wearing toil
+of itinerant missions through the rude frontier settlements. 
+These pictures had for their primitive accessories log-huts,
+rough household implements, coarse clothes, and patched
+old saddles which told of weary years of journeying;
+but to even the least sympathetic vision there shone
+upon them the glorified light of the Cross and Crown. 
+Reverend survivors of the heroic times, their very
+presence there--sitting meekly at the altar-rail to hear
+again the published record of their uselessness and of their
+dependence upon church charity--was in the nature of a benediction.
+
+The large majority of those surrounding these patriarchs
+were middle-aged men, generally of a robust type,
+with burly shoulders, and bushing beards framing shaven
+upper lips, and who looked for the most part like honest
+and prosperous farmers attired in their Sunday clothes. 
+As exceptions to this rule, there were scattered stray
+specimens of a more urban class, worthies with neatly
+trimmed whiskers, white neckcloths, and even indications
+of hair-oil--all eloquent of citified charges; and now and
+again the eye singled out a striking and scholarly face,
+at once strong and simple, and instinctively referred it
+to the faculty of one of the several theological seminaries
+belonging to the Conference.
+
+The effect of these faces as a whole was toward goodness,
+candor, and imperturbable self-complacency rather than
+learning or mental astuteness; and curiously enough it wore
+its pleasantest aspect on the countenances of the older men. 
+The impress of zeal and moral worth seemed to diminish
+by regular gradations as one passed to younger faces;
+and among the very beginners, who had been ordained only within
+the past day or two, this decline was peculiarly marked. 
+It was almost a relief to note the relative smallness
+of their number, so plainly was it to be seen that they
+were not the men their forbears had been.
+
+And if those aged, worn-out preachers facing the pulpit
+had gazed instead backward over the congregation,
+it may be that here too their old eyes would have detected
+a difference--what at least they would have deemed a decline.
+
+But nothing was further from the minds of the members of the
+First M. E. Church of Tecumseh than the suggestion that they
+were not an improvement on those who had gone before them. 
+They were undoubtedly the smartest and most important
+congregation within the limits of the Nedahma Conference,
+and this new church edifice of theirs represented alike
+a scale of outlay and a standard of progressive taste
+in devotional architecture unique in the Methodism of that
+whole section of the State.  They had a right to be proud
+of themselves, too.  They belonged to the substantial
+order of the community, with perhaps not so many very rich
+men as the Presbyterians had, but on the other hand
+with far fewer extremely poor folk than the Baptists
+were encumbered with.  The pews in the first four rows
+of their church rented for one hundred dollars apiece--
+quite up to the Presbyterian highwater mark--and they
+now had almost abolished free pews altogether.  The oyster
+suppers given by their Ladies' Aid Society in the basement
+of the church during the winter had established rank
+among the fashionable events in Tecumseh's social calendar.
+
+A comprehensive and satisfied perception of these advantages
+was uppermost in the minds of this local audience,
+as they waited for the Bishop to begin his reading. 
+They had entertained this Bishop and his Presiding Elders,
+and the rank and file of common preachers, in a style
+which could not have been remotely approached by any
+other congregation in the Conference.  Where else,
+one would like to know, could the Bishop have been domiciled
+in a Methodist house where he might have a sitting-room
+all to himself, with his bedroom leading out of it? 
+Every clergyman present had been provided for in a
+private residence--even down to the Licensed Exhorters,
+who were not really ministers at all when you came to think
+of it, and who might well thank their stars that the
+Conference had assembled among such open-handed people. 
+There existed a dim feeling that these Licensed Exhorters--
+an uncouth crew, with country store-keepers and lumbermen
+and even a horse-doctor among their number--had taken
+rather too much for granted, and were not exhibiting quite
+the proper degree of gratitude over their reception.
+
+But a more important issue hung now imminent in the balance--
+was Tecumseh to be fairly and honorably rewarded for her
+hospitality by being given the pastor of her choice?
+
+All were agreed--at least among those who paid pew-rents--
+upon the great importance of a change in the pulpit
+of the First M. E. Church.  A change in persons must
+of course take place, for their present pastor had
+exhausted the three-year maximum of the itinerant system,
+but there was needed much more than that.  For a handsome
+and expensive church building like this, and with such
+a modern and go-ahead congregation, it was simply a vital
+necessity to secure an attractive and fashionable preacher. 
+They had held their own against the Presbyterians
+these past few years only by the most strenuous efforts,
+and under the depressing disadvantage of a minister
+who preached dreary out-of-date sermons, and who lacked
+even the most rudimentary sense of social distinctions. 
+The Presbyterians had captured the new cashier of the
+Adams County Bank, who had always gone to the Methodist
+Church in the town he came from, but now was lost
+solely because of this tiresome old fossil of theirs;
+and there were numerous other instances of the same sort,
+scarcely less grievous.  That this state of things must
+be altered was clear.
+
+The unusually large local attendance upon the sessions
+of the Conference had given some of the more guileless
+of visiting brethren a high notion of Tecumseh's piety;
+and perhaps even the most sophisticated stranger never
+quite realized how strictly it was to be explained by the
+anxiety to pick out a suitable champion for the fierce
+Presbyterian competition.  Big gatherings assembled evening
+after evening to hear the sermons of those selected to preach,
+and the church had been almost impossibly crowded at each of
+the three Sunday services.  Opinions had naturally differed
+a good deal during the earlier stages of this scrutiny,
+but after last night's sermon there could be but one feeling. 
+The man for Tecumseh was the Reverend Theron Ware.
+
+The choice was an admirable one, from points of view much
+more exalted than those of the local congregation.
+
+You could see Mr. Ware sitting there at the end of the
+row inside the altar-rail--the tall, slender young
+man with the broad white brow, thoughtful eyes,
+and features moulded into that regularity of strength
+which used to characterize the American Senatorial type
+in those far-away days of clean-shaven faces and moderate
+incomes before the War.  The bright-faced, comely,
+and vivacious young woman in the second side pew was
+his wife--and Tecumseh noted with approbation that she
+knew how to dress.  There were really no two better or
+worthier people in the building than this young couple,
+who sat waiting along with the rest to hear their fate. 
+But unhappily they had come to know of the effort being
+made to bring them to Tecumseh; and their simple pride
+in the triumph of the husband's fine sermon had become
+swallowed up in a terribly anxious conflict of hope
+and fear.  Neither of them could maintain a satisfactory
+show of composure as the decisive moment approached. 
+The vision of translation from poverty and obscurity
+to such a splendid post as this--truly it was too dazzling
+for tranquil nerves.
+
+The tedious Bishop had at last begun to call his roll
+of names, and the good people of Tecumseh mentally
+ticked them off, one by one, as the list expanded. 
+They felt that it was like this Bishop--an unimportant
+and commonplace figure in Methodism, not to be mentioned
+in the same breath with Simpson and Janes and Kingsley--
+that he should begin with the backwoods counties,
+and thrust all these remote and pitifully rustic stations
+ahead of their own metropolitan charge.  To these they
+listened but listlessly--indifferent alike to the joy
+and to the dismay which he was scattering among the divines
+before him.
+
+The announcements were being doled out with stumbling hesitation. 
+After each one a little half-rustling movement through
+the crowded rows of clergymen passed mute judgment upon
+the cruel blow this brother had received, the reward justly
+given to this other, the favoritism by which a third
+had profited.  The Presiding Elders, whose work all this was,
+stared with gloomy and impersonal abstraction down upon
+the rows of blackcoated humanity spread before them. 
+The ministers returned this fixed and perfunctory gaze
+with pale, set faces, only feebly masking the emotions
+which each new name stirred somewhere among them. 
+The Bishop droned on laboriously, mispronouncing words
+and repeating himself as if he were reading a catalogue
+of unfamiliar seeds.
+
+"First church of Tecumseh--Brother Abram G. Tisdale!"
+
+There was no doubt about it!  These were actually the
+words that had been uttered.  After all this outlay,
+all this lavish hospitality, all this sacrifice of time
+and patience in sitting through those sermons, to draw
+from the grab-bag nothing better than--a Tisdale!
+
+A hum of outraged astonishment--half groan, half wrathful
+snort bounded along from pew to pew throughout the body
+of the church.  An echo of it reached the Bishop, and so
+confused him that he haltingly repeated the obnoxious line. 
+Every local eye turned as by intuition to where the
+calamitous Tisdale sat, and fastened malignantly upon him.
+
+Could anything be worse?  This Brother Tisdale was past fifty--
+a spindling, rickety, gaunt old man, with a long horse-like
+head and vacantly solemn face, who kept one or the
+other of his hands continually fumbling his bony jaw. 
+He had been withdrawn from routine service for a number
+of years, doing a little insurance canvassing on his
+own account, and also travelling for the Book Concern. 
+Now that he wished to return to parochial work, the richest
+prize in the whole list, Tecumseh, was given to him--
+to him who had never been asked to preach at a Conference,
+and whose archaic nasal singing of "Greenland's Icy
+Mountains " had made even the Licensed Exhorters grin! 
+It was too intolerably dreadful to think of!
+
+An embittered whisper to the effect that Tisdale was
+the Bishop's cousin ran round from pew to pew.  This did
+not happen to be true, but indignant Tecumseh gave it
+entire credit.  The throngs about the doors dwindled as
+by magic, and the aisles cleared.  Local interest was dead;
+and even some of the pewholders rose and made their way out. 
+One of these murmured audibly to his neighbors as he
+departed that HIS pew could be had now for sixty dollars.
+
+So it happened that when, a little later on,
+the appointment of Theron Ware to Octavius was read out,
+none of the people of Tecumseh either noted or cared. 
+They had been deeply interested in him so long as it seemed
+likely that he was to come to them--before their clearly
+expressed desire for him had been so monstrously ignored. 
+But now what became of him was no earthly concern of theirs.
+
+After the Doxology had been sung and the Conference
+formally declared ended, the Wares would fain have escaped
+from the flood of handshakings and boisterous farewells
+which spread over the front part of the church.  But the
+clergymen were unusually insistent upon demonstrations of
+cordiality among themselves--the more, perhaps, because it
+was evident that the friendliness of their local hosts
+had suddenly evaporated--and, of all men in the world,
+the present incumbent of the Octavius pulpit now bore
+down upon them with noisy effusiveness, and defied evasion.
+
+"Brother Ware--we have never been interduced--but let
+me clasp your hand!  And--Sister Ware, I presume--
+yours too!"
+
+He was a portly man, who held his head back so that his
+face seemed all jowl and mouth and sandy chin-whisker.
+He smiled broadly upon them with half-closed eyes,
+and shook hands again.
+
+"I said to 'em," he went on with loud pretence of heartiness,
+"the minute I heerd your name called out for our
+dear Octavius, "I must go over an' interduce myself." 
+It will be a heavy cross to part with those dear people,
+Brother Ware, but if anything could wean me to the notion,
+so to speak, it would be the knowledge that you are to take
+up my labors in their midst.  Perhaps--ah--perhaps they
+ARE jest a trifle close in money matters, but they come
+out strong on revivals.  They'll need a good deal o'
+stirrin' up about parsonage expenses, but, oh! such
+seasons of grace as we've experienced there together!" 
+He shook his head, and closed his eyes altogether,
+as if transported by his memories.
+
+Brother Ware smiled faintly in decorous response,
+and bowed in silence; but his wife resented the unctuous
+beaming of content on the other's wide countenance,
+and could not restrain her tongue.
+
+"You seem to bear up tolerably well under this heavy cross,
+as you call it," she said sharply.
+
+"The will o' the Lord, Sister Ware--the will o' the Lord!"
+he responded, disposed for the instant to put on his
+pompous manner with her, and then deciding to smile again
+as he moved off.  The circumstance that he was to get
+an additional three hundred dollars yearly in his new
+place was not mentioned between them.
+
+By a mutual impulse the young couple, when they had at last
+gained the cool open air, crossed the street to the side
+where over-hanging trees shaded the infrequent lamps,
+and they might be comparatively alone.  The wife had
+taken her husband's arm, and pressed closely upon it
+as they walked.  For a time no word passed, but finally
+he said, in a grave voice,--
+
+"It is hard upon you, poor girl."
+
+Then she stopped short, buried her face against his shoulder,
+and fell to sobbing.
+
+He strove with gentle, whispered remonstrance to win
+her from this mood, and after a few moments she lifted
+her head and they resumed their walk, she wiping her eyes
+as they went.
+
+"I couldn't keep it in a minute longer!" she said,
+catching her breath between phrases.  "Oh, WHY do they
+behave so badly to us, Theron?"
+
+He smiled down momentarily upon her as they moved along,
+and patted her hand.
+
+"Somebody must have the poor places, Alice," he said consolingly. 
+"I am a young man yet, remember.  We must take our turn,
+and be patient.  For 'we know that all things work together for good.'"
+
+"And your sermon was so head-and-shoulders above all
+the others!" she went on breathlessly.  "Everybody said so! 
+And Mrs. Parshall heard it so DIRECT that you were to
+be sent here, and I know she told everybody how much I
+was lotting on it--I wish we could go right off tonight
+without going to her house--I shall be ashamed to look
+her in the face--and of course she knows we're poked
+off to that miserable Octavius.--Why, Theron, they tell
+me it's a worse place even than we've got now!"
+
+"Oh, not at all," he put in reassuringly.  "It has
+grown to be a large town--oh, quite twice the size
+of Tyre.  It's a great Irish place, I've heard. 
+Our own church seems to be a good deal run down there. 
+We must build it up again; and the salary is better--
+a little."
+
+But he too was depressed, and they walked on toward their
+temporary lodging in a silence full of mutual grief. 
+It was not until they had come within sight of this goal
+that he prefaced by a little sigh of resignation these
+further words,--
+
+"Come--let us make the best of it, my girl!  After all,
+we are in the hands of the Lord."
+
+"Oh, don't, Theron!" she said hastily.  "Don't talk to me
+about the Lord tonight; I can't bear it!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+"Theron!  Come out here!  This is the funniest thing we
+have heard yet!"
+
+Mrs. Ware stood on the platform of her new kitchen stoop. 
+The bright flood of May-morning sunshine completely enveloped
+her girlish form, clad in a simple, fresh-starched calico gown,
+and shone in golden patches upon her light-brown hair. 
+She had a smile on her face, as she looked down at the milk
+boy standing on the bottom step--a smile of a doubtful sort,
+stormily mirthful.
+
+"Come out a minute, Theron!" she called again;
+and in obedience to the summons the tall lank figure
+of her husband appeared in the open doorway behind her. 
+A long loose, open dressing-gown dangled to his knees,
+and his sallow, clean-shaven, thoughtful face wore a morning
+undress expression of youthful good-nature. He leaned
+against the door-sill, crossed his large carpet slippers,
+and looked up into the sky, drawing a long satisfied breath.
+
+"What a beautiful morning!" he exclaimed.  "The elms
+over there are full of robins.  We must get up earlier
+these mornings, and take some walks."
+
+His wife indicated the boy with the milk-pail on his arm,
+by a wave of her hand.
+
+"Guess what he tells me!" she said.  "It wasn't a mistake
+at all, our getting no milk yesterday or the Sunday before. 
+It seems that that's the custom here, at least so far
+as the parsonage is concerned."
+
+"What's the matter, boy?" asked the young minister,
+drawling his words a little, and putting a sense of placid
+irony into them.  "Don't the cows give milk on Sunday, then?"
+
+The boy was not going to be chaffed.  "Oh, I'll bring you
+milk fast enough on Sundays, if you give me the word,"
+he said with nonchalance.  "Only it won't last long."
+
+"How do you mean--'won't last long'?", asked Mrs. Ware, briskly.
+
+The boy liked her--both for herself, and for the doughnuts
+fried with her own hands, which she gave him on his
+morning round.  He dropped his half-defiant tone.
+
+"The thing of it's this," he explained.  "Every new
+minister starts in saying we can deliver to this house
+on Sundays, an' then gives us notice to stop before
+the month's out.  It's the trustees that does it."
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware uncrossed his feet and moved out on
+to the stoop beside his wife.  "What's that you say?"
+he interjected.  "Don't THEY take milk on Sundays?"
+
+"Nope!" answered the boy.
+
+The young couple looked each other in the face
+for a puzzled moment, then broke into a laugh.
+
+"Well, we'll try it, anyway," said the preacher. 
+"You can go on bringing it Sundays till--till--"
+
+"Till you cave in an' tell me to stop," put in the boy. 
+"All right!" and he was off on the instant, the dipper
+jangling loud incredulity in his pail as he went.
+
+The Wares exchanged another glance as he disappeared
+round the corner of the house, and another mutual laugh
+seemed imminent.  Then the wife's face clouded over,
+and she thrust her under-lip a trifle forward out of its
+place in the straight and gently firm profile.
+
+"It's just what Wendell Phillips said," she declared. 
+"'The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has
+to mind his own business.'"
+
+The young minister stroked his chin thoughtfully, and let
+his gaze wander over the backyard in silence.  The garden
+parts had not been spaded up, but lay, a useless stretch
+of muddy earth, broken only by last year's cabbage-stumps
+and the general litter of dead roots and vegetation. 
+The door of the tenantless chicken-coop hung wide open. 
+Before it was a great heap of ashes and cinders, soaked into
+grimy hardness by the recent spring rains, and nearer still
+an ancient chopping-block, round which were scattered old
+weather-beaten hardwood knots which had defied the axe,
+parts of broken barrels and packing-boxes, and a nameless
+debris of tin cans, clam-shells, and general rubbish. 
+It was pleasanter to lift the eyes, and look across
+the neighbors' fences to the green, waving tops of the elms
+on the street beyond.  How lofty and beautiful they were
+in the morning sunlight, and with what matchless charm
+came the song of the robins, freshly installed in their
+haunts among the new pale-green leaves!  Above them,
+in the fresh, scented air, glowed the great blue dome,
+radiant with light and the purification of spring.
+
+Theron lifted his thin, long-fingered hand, and passed it
+in a slow arch of movement to comprehend this glorious
+upper picture.
+
+"What matter anyone's ideas of hell," he said, in soft,
+grave tones, "when we have that to look at, and listen to,
+and fill our lungs with?  It seems to me that we never FEEL
+quite so sure of God's goodness at other times as we do
+in these wonderful new mornings of spring."
+
+The wife followed his gesture, and her eyes rested for
+a brief moment, with pleased interest, upon the trees
+and the sky.  Then they reverted, with a harsher scrutiny,
+to the immediate foreground.
+
+"Those Van Sizers ought to be downright ashamed of themselves,"
+she said, "to leave everything in such a muss as this. 
+You MUST see about getting a man to clean up the yard,
+Theron.  It's no use your thinking of doing it yourself. 
+In the first place, it wouldn't look quite the thing,
+and, second, you'd never get at it in all your born days. 
+Or if a man would cost too much, we might get a boy. 
+I daresay Harvey would come around, after he'd finished
+with his milk-route in the forenoon.  We could give him
+his dinner, you know, and I'd bake him some cookies. 
+He's got the greatest sweet-tooth you ever heard of. 
+And then perhaps if we gave him a quarter, or say half a dollar,
+he'd be quite satisfied.  I'll speak to him in the morning. 
+We can save a dollar or so that way."
+
+"I suppose every little does help," commented Mr. Ware,
+with a doleful lack of conviction.  Then his face brightened. 
+"I tell you what let's do!" he exclaimed.  "Get on your
+street dress, and we'll take a long walk, way out into
+the country.  You've never seen the basin, where they
+float the log-rafts in, or the big sawmills.  The hills
+beyond give you almost mountain effects, they are so steep;
+and they say there's a sulphur spring among the slate
+on the hill-side, somewhere, with trees all about it;
+and we could take some sandwiches with us--"
+
+"You forget," put in Mrs. Ware,--"those trustees are
+coming at eleven."
+
+"So they are!" assented the young minister, with something
+like a sigh.  He cast another reluctant, lingering glance
+at the sunlit elm boughs, and, turning, went indoors.
+
+He loitered for an aimless minute in the kitchen,
+where his wife, her sleeves rolled to the elbow,
+now resumed the interrupted washing of the breakfast dishes--
+perhaps with vague visions of that ever-receding time
+to come when they might have a hired girl to do such work. 
+Then he wandered off into the room beyond, which served
+them alike as living-room and study, and let his eye run
+along the two rows of books that constituted his library. 
+He saw nothing which he wanted to read.  Finally he did
+take down "Paley's Evidences," and seated himself in the
+big armchair--that costly and oversized anomaly among
+his humble house-hold gods; but the book lay unopened on
+his knee, and his eyelids half closed themselves in sign
+of revery.
+
+This was his third charge--this Octavius which they
+both knew they were going to dislike so much.
+
+The first had been in the pleasant dairy and hop country
+many miles to the south, on another watershed and among
+a different kind of people.  Perhaps, in truth, the grinding
+labor, the poverty of ideas, the systematic selfishness
+of later rural experience, had not been lacking there;
+but they played no part in the memories which now he
+passed in tender review.  He recalled instead the warm
+sunshine on the fertile expanse of fields; the sleek,
+well-fed herds of "milkers" coming lowing down the road
+under the maples; the prosperous and hospitable farmhouses,
+with their orchards in blossom and their spacious red barns;
+the bountiful boiled dinners which cheery housewives
+served up with their own skilled hands.  Of course,
+he admitted to himself, it would not be the same if he
+were to go back there again.  He was conscious of having
+moved along--was it, after all, an advance?--to a point
+where it was unpleasant to sit at table with the unfragrant
+hired man, and still worse to encounter the bucolic
+confusion between the functions of knives and forks. 
+But in those happy days--young, zealous, himself farm-bred--
+these trifles had been invisible to him, and life there
+among those kindly husbandmen had seemed, by contrast
+with the gaunt surroundings and gloomy rule of the
+theological seminary, luxuriously abundant and free.
+
+It was there too that the crowning blessedness of
+his youth--nay, should he not say of all his days?--
+had come to him.  There he had first seen Alice Hastings,--
+the bright-eyed, frank-faced, serenely self-reliant girl,
+who now, less than four years thereafter, could be heard
+washing the dishes out in the parsonage kitchen.
+
+How wonderful she had seemed to him then!  How beautiful
+and all-beneficent the miracle still appeared! 
+Though herself the daughter of a farmer, her presence
+on a visit within the borders of his remote country
+charge had seemed to make everything, there a hundred
+times more countrified than it had ever been before. 
+She was fresh from the refinements of a town seminary: 
+she read books; it was known that she could play upon
+the piano.  Her clothes, her manners, her way of speaking,
+the readiness of her thoughts and sprightly tongue--
+not least, perhaps, the imposing current understanding
+as to her father's wealth--placed her on a glorified
+pinnacle far away from the girls of the neighborhood. 
+These honest and good-hearted creatures indeed called
+ceaseless attention to her superiority by their deference
+and open-mouthed admiration, and treated it as the most
+natural thing in the world that their young minister should be
+visibly "taken" with her.
+
+Theron Ware, in truth, left this first pastorate of his
+the following spring, in a transfiguring halo of romance. 
+His new appointment was to Tyre--a somewhat distant
+village of traditional local pride and substance--and he
+was to be married only a day or so before entering upon
+his pastoral duties there.  The good people among whom he
+had begun his ministry took kindly credit to themselves
+that he had met his bride while she was "visiting round"
+their countryside.  In part by jocose inquiries addressed
+to the expectant groom, in part by the confidences of the
+postmaster at the corners concerning the bulk and frequency
+of the correspondence passing between Theron and the now
+remote Alice--they had followed the progress of the courtship
+through the autumn and winter with friendly zest. 
+When he returned from the Conference, to say good-bye
+and confess the happiness that awaited him, they gave
+him a "donation"--quite as if he were a married pastor
+with a home of his own, instead of a shy young bachelor,
+who received his guests and their contributions in the
+house where he boarded.
+
+He went away with tears of mingled regret and proud joy
+in his eyes, thinking a good deal upon their predictions
+of a distinguished career before him, feeling infinitely
+strengthened and upborne by the hearty fervor of their
+God-speed, and taking with him nearly two wagon-loads
+of vegetables, apples, canned preserves, assorted furniture,
+glass dishes, cheeses, pieced bedquilts, honey, feathers,
+and kitchen utensils.
+
+Of the three years' term in Tyre, it was pleasantest
+to dwell upon the beginning.
+
+The young couple--after being married out at Alice's home
+in an adjoining county, under the depressing conditions
+of a hopelessly bedridden mother, and a father and brothers
+whose perceptions were obviously closed to the advantages
+of a matrimonial connection with Methodism--came straight to
+the house which their new congregation rented as a parsonage. 
+The impulse of reaction from the rather grim cheerlessness
+of their wedding lent fresh gayety to their lighthearted,
+whimsical start at housekeeping.  They had never laughed
+so much in all their lives as they did now in these
+first months--over their weird ignorance of domestic details;
+with its mishaps, mistakes, and entertaining discoveries;
+over the comical super-abundances and shortcomings
+of their "donation" outfit; over the thousand and one
+quaint experiences of their novel relation to each other,
+to the congregation, and to the world of Tyre at large.
+
+Theron, indeed, might be said never to have laughed before. 
+Up to that time no friendly student of his character,
+cataloguing his admirable qualities, would have thought
+of including among them a sense of humor, much less a bent
+toward levity.  Neither his early strenuous battle to get
+away from the farm and achieve such education as should
+serve to open to him the gates of professional life,
+nor the later wave of religious enthusiasm which caught
+him up as he stood on the border-land of manhood,
+and swept him off into a veritable new world of views
+and aspirations, had been a likely school of merriment. 
+People had prized him for his innocent candor and
+guileless mind, for his good heart, his pious zeal,
+his modesty about gifts notably above the average,
+but it had occurred to none to suspect in him a latent
+funny side.
+
+But who could be solemn where Alice was?--Alice in a
+quandary over the complications of her cooking stove;
+Alice boiling her potatoes all day, and her eggs for half
+an hour; Alice ordering twenty pounds of steak and half
+a pound of sugar, and striving to extract a breakfast
+beverage from the unground coffee-bean? Clearly not
+so tenderly fond and sympathetic a husband as Theron. 
+He began by laughing because she laughed, and grew
+by swift stages to comprehend, then frankly to share,
+her amusement.  From this it seemed only a step to the
+development of a humor of his own, doubling, as it were,
+their sportive resources.  He found himself discovering
+a new droll aspect in men and things; his phraseology took
+on a dryly playful form, fittingly to present conceits
+which danced up, unabashed, quite into the presence
+of lofty and majestic truths.  He got from this nothing
+but satisfaction; it obviously involved increased claims
+to popularity among his parishioners, and consequently
+magnified powers of usefulness, and it made life so much more
+a joy and a thing to be thankful for.  Often, in the midst
+of the exchange of merry quip and whimsical suggestion,
+bright blossoms on that tree of strength and knowledge
+which he felt expanding now with a mighty outward pushing
+in all directions, he would lapse into deep gravity,
+and ponder with a swelling heart the vast unspeakable marvel
+of his blessedness, in being thus enriched and humanized
+by daily communion with the most worshipful of womankind.
+
+This happy and good young couple took the affections of
+Tyre by storm.  The Methodist Church there had at no time
+held its head very high among the denominations, and for
+some years back had been in a deplorably sinking state,
+owing first to the secession of the Free Methodists
+and then to the incumbency of a pastor who scandalized
+the community by marrying a black man to a white woman. 
+But the Wares changed all this.  Within a month the report
+of Theron's charm and force in the pulpit was crowding
+the church building to its utmost capacity--and that,
+too, with some of Tyre's best people.  Equally winning
+was the atmosphere of jollity and juvenile high spirits
+which pervaded the parsonage under these new conditions,
+and which Theron and Alice seemed to diffuse wherever
+they went.
+
+Thus swimmingly their first year sped, amid universal acclaim. 
+Mrs. Ware had a recognized social place, quite outside
+the restricted limits of Methodism, and shone in it with
+an unflagging brilliancy altogether beyond the traditions
+of Tyre.  Delightful as she was in other people's houses,
+she was still more naively fascinating in her own quaint
+and somewhat harum-scarum domicile; and the drab,
+two-storied, tin-roofed little parsonage might well have
+rattled its clapboards to see if it was not in dreamland--
+so gay was the company, so light were the hearts,
+which it sheltered in these new days.  As for Theron,
+the period was one of incredible fructification and output. 
+He scarcely recognized for his own the mind which now was
+reaching out on all sides with the arms of an octopus,
+exploring unsuspected mines of thought, bringing in
+rich treasures of deduction, assimilating, building,
+propounding as if by some force quite independent of him. 
+He could not look without blinking timidity at the radiance
+of the path stretched out before him, leading upward
+to dazzling heights of greatness.
+
+At the end of this first year the Wares suddenly discovered
+that they were eight hundred dollars in debt.
+
+The second year was spent in arriving, by slow stages and
+with a cruel wealth of pathetic detail, at a realization
+of what being eight hundred dollars in debt meant.
+
+It was not in their elastic and buoyant natures to grasp
+the full significance of the thing at once, or easily. 
+Their position in the social structure, too, was all
+against clear-sightedness in material matters. 
+A general, for example, uniformed and in the saddle,
+advancing through the streets with his staff in the proud
+wake of his division's massed walls of bayonets, cannot be
+imagined as quailing at the glance thrown at him by his
+tailor on the sidewalk.  Similarly, a man invested with
+sacerdotal authority, who baptizes, marries, and buries,
+who delivers judgments from the pulpit which may not be
+questioned in his hearing, and who receives from all his
+fellow-men a special deference of manner and speech,
+is in the nature of things prone to see the grocer's
+book and the butcher's bill through the little end
+of the telescope.
+
+The Wares at the outset had thought it right to trade
+as exclusively as possible with members of their own
+church society.  This loyalty became a principal element
+of martyrdom.  Theron had his creditors seated in serried
+rows before him, Sunday after Sunday.  Alice had her
+critics consolidated among those whom it was her chief duty
+to visit and profess friendship for.  These situations
+now began, by regular gradations, to unfold their terrors. 
+At the first intimation of discontent, the Wares made
+what seemed to them a sweeping reduction in expenditure. 
+When they heard that Brother Potter had spoken of them
+as "poor pay," they dismissed their hired girl. 
+A little later, Theron brought himself to drop a laboriously
+casual suggestion as to a possible increase of salary,
+and saw with sinking spirits the faces of the stewards
+freeze with dumb disapprobation.  Then Alice paid a visit
+to her parents, only to find her brothers doggedly
+hostile to the notion of her being helped, and her father
+so much under their influence that the paltry sum he
+dared offer barely covered the expenses of her journey. 
+With another turn of the screw, they sold the piano she
+had brought with her from home, and cut themselves down
+to the bare necessities of life, neither receiving company
+nor going out.  They never laughed now, and even smiles
+grew rare.
+
+By this time Theron's sermons, preached under that stony
+glare of people to whom he owed money, had degenerated
+to a pitiful level of commonplace.  As a consequence,
+the attendance became once more confined to the insufficient
+membership of the church, and the trustees complained
+of grievously diminished receipts.  When the Wares,
+grown desperate, ventured upon the experiment of trading
+outside the bounds of the congregation, the trustees
+complained again, this time peremptorily.
+
+Thus the second year dragged itself miserably to an end. 
+Nor was relief possible, because the Presiding Elder knew
+something of the circumstances, and felt it his duty
+to send Theron back for a third year, to pay his debts,
+and drain the cup of disciplinary medicine to its dregs.
+
+The worst has been told.  Beginning in utter blackness,
+this third year, in the second month, brought a change as welcome
+as it was unlooked for.  An elderly and important citizen
+of Tyre, by name Abram Beekman, whom Theron knew slightly,
+and had on occasions seen sitting in one of the back
+pews near the door, called one morning at the parsonage,
+and electrified its inhabitants by expressing a desire
+to wipe off all their old scores for them, and give them
+a fresh start in life.  As he put the suggestion, they could
+find no excuse for rejecting it.  He had watched them,
+and heard a good deal about them, and took a fatherly sort
+of interest in them.  He did not deprecate their regarding
+the aid he proffered them in the nature of a loan,
+but they were to make themselves perfectly easy about it,
+and never return it at all unless they could spare it
+sometime with entire convenience, and felt that they wanted
+to do so.  As this amazing windfall finally took shape,
+it enabled the Wares to live respectably through the year,
+and to leave Tyre with something over one hundred dollars
+in hand.
+
+It enabled them, too, to revive in a chastened form their
+old dream of ultimate success and distinction for Theron. 
+He had demonstrated clearly enough to himself, during that
+brief season of unrestrained effulgence, that he had within
+him the making of a great pulpit orator.  He set to work now,
+with resolute purpose, to puzzle out and master all the
+principles which underlie this art, and all the tricks
+that adorn its superstructure.  He studied it, fastened his
+thoughts upon it, talked daily with Alice about it. 
+In the pulpit, addressing those people who had so darkened
+his life and crushed the first happiness out of his home,
+he withheld himself from any oratorical display which
+could afford them gratification.  He put aside, as well;
+the thought of attracting once more the non-Methodists
+of Tyre, whose early enthusiasm had spread such pitfalls
+for his unwary feet.  He practised effects now by piecemeal,
+with an alert ear, and calculation in every tone. 
+An ambition, at once embittered and tearfully solicitous,
+possessed him.
+
+He reflected now, this morning, with a certain incredulous
+interest, upon that unworthy epoch in his life history,
+which seemed so far behind him, and yet had come to a close
+only a few weeks ago.  The opportunity had been given him,
+there at the Tecumseh Conference, to reveal his quality. 
+He had risen to its full limit of possibilities,
+and preached a great sermon in a manner which he at least
+knew was unapproachable.  He had made his most powerful
+bid for the prize place, had trebly deserved success--
+and had been banished instead to Octavius!
+
+The curious thing was that he did not resent his failure. 
+Alice had taken it hard, but he himself was conscious of a
+sense of spiritual gain.  The influence of the Conference,
+with its songs and seasons of prayer and high pressure
+of emotional excitement, was still strong upon him. 
+It seemed years and years since the religious side of him
+had been so stirred into motion.  He felt, as he lay
+back in the chair, and folded his hands over the book
+on his knee, that he had indeed come forth from the fire
+purified and strengthened.  The ministry to souls diseased
+beckoned him with a new and urgent significance.  He smiled
+to remember that Mr. Beekman, speaking in his shrewd and
+pointed way, had asked him whether, looking it all over,
+he didn't think it would be better for him to study law,
+with a view to sliding out of the ministry when a good
+chance offered.  It amazed him now to recall that he had
+taken this hint seriously, and even gone to the length
+of finding out what books law-students began upon.
+
+Thank God! all that was past and gone now.  The Call sounded,
+resonant and imperative, in his ears, and there was no
+impulse of his heart, no fibre of his being, which did
+not stir in devout response.  He closed his eyes, to be
+the more wholly alone with the Spirit, that moved him.
+
+The jangling of a bell in the hallway broke sharply upon
+his meditations, and on the instant his wife thrust
+in her head from the kitchen.
+
+"You'll have to go to the door, Theron!" she warned him,
+in a loud, swift whisper.  "I'm not fit to be seen. 
+It is the trustees."
+
+"All right," he said, and rose slowly from sprawling
+recumbency to his feet.  "I'll go."
+
+"And don't forget," she added strenuously; "I believe
+in Levi Gorringe!  I've seen him go past here with his rod
+and fish-basket twice in eight days, and that's a good sign. 
+He's got a soft side somewhere.  And just keep a stiff
+upper lip about the gas, and don't you let them jew you
+down a solitary cent on that sidewalk."
+
+"All right," said Theron, again, and moved reluctantly
+toward the hall door.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+When the three trustees had been shown in by the Rev. Mr. Ware,
+and had taken seats, an awkward little pause ensued. 
+The young minister looked doubtingly from one face
+to another, the while they glanced with inquiring interest
+about the room, noting the pictures and appraising
+the furniture in their minds.
+
+The obvious leader of the party, Loren Pierce, a rich
+quarryman, was an old man of medium size and mean attire,
+with a square, beardless face as hard and impassive
+in expression as one of his blocks of limestone. 
+The irregular, thin-lipped mouth, slightly sunken,
+and shut with vice-like firmness, the short snub nose,
+and the little eyes squinting from half-closed lids
+beneath slightly marked brows, seemed scarcely to attain
+to the dignity of features, but evaded attention instead,
+as if feeling that they were only there at all from
+plain necessity, and ought not to be taken into account. 
+Mr. Pierce's face did not know how to smile--what was the use
+of smiles?--but its whole surface radiated secretiveness. 
+Portrayed on canvas by a master brush, with a ruff
+or a red robe for masquerade, generations of imaginative
+amateurs would have seen in it vast reaching plots,
+the skeletons of a dozen dynastic cupboards, the guarded
+mysteries of half a century's international diplomacy. 
+The amateurs would have been wrong again.  There was
+nothing behind Mr. Pierce's juiceless countenance more
+weighty than a general determination to exact seven per
+cent for his money, and some specific notions about
+capturing certain brickyards which were interfering with
+his quarry-sales. But Octavius watched him shamble along
+its sidewalks quite as the Vienna of dead and forgotten
+yesterday might have watched Metternich.
+
+Erastus Winch was of a breezier sort--a florid, stout,
+and sandy man, who spent most of his life driving over
+evil country roads in a buggy, securing orders for dairy
+furniture and certain allied lines of farm utensils. 
+This practice had given him a loud voice and a deceptively
+hearty manner, to which the other avocation of cheese-buyer,
+which he pursued at the Board of Trade meetings every
+Monday afternoon, had added a considerable command of
+persuasive yet non-committal language.  To look at him,
+still more to hear him, one would have sworn he was a
+good fellow, a trifle rough and noisy, perhaps, but all
+right at bottom.  But the County Clerk of Dearborn County
+could have told you of agriculturists who knew Erastus
+from long and unhappy experience, and who held him to be
+even a tighter man than Loren Pierce in the matter of a mortgage.
+
+The third trustee, Levi Gorringe, set one wondering at the
+very first glance what on earth he was doing in that company. 
+Those who had known him longest had the least notion;
+but it may be added that no one knew him well. 
+He was a lawyer, and had lived in Octavius for upwards
+of ten years; that is to say, since early manhood. 
+He had an office on the main street, just under the
+principal photograph gallery.  Doubtless he was sometimes
+in this office; but his fellow-townsmen saw him more often
+in the street doorway, with the stairs behind him, and the
+flaring show-cases of the photographer on either side,
+standing with his hands in his pockets and an unlighted
+cigar in his mouth, looking at nothing in particular. 
+About every other day he went off after breakfast
+into the country roundabout, sometimes with a rod,
+sometimes with a gun, but always alone.  He was a bachelor,
+and slept in a room at the back of his office, cooking some
+of his meals himself, getting others at a restaurant
+close by.  Though he had little visible practice,
+he was understood to be well-to-do and even more,
+and people tacitly inferred that he "shaved notes." 
+The Methodists of Octavius looked upon him as a queer fish,
+and through nearly a dozen years had never quite outgrown
+their hebdomadal tendency to surprise at seeing him enter
+their church.  He had never, it is true, professed religion,
+but they had elected him as a trustee now for a number
+of terms, all the same--partly because he was their
+only lawyer, partly because he, like both his colleagues,
+held a mortgage on the church edifice and lot. 
+In person, Mr. Gorringe was a slender man, with a skin
+of a clear, uniform citron tint, black waving hair,
+and dark gray eyes, and a thin, high-featured face. 
+He wore a mustache and pointed chin-tuft; and, though he
+was of New England parentage and had never been further
+south than Ocean Grove, he presented a general effect
+of old Mississippian traditions and tastes startlingly at
+variance with the standards of Dearborn County Methodism. 
+Nothing could convince some of the elder sisters that he was
+not a drinking man.
+
+The three visitors had completed their survey of the room now;
+and Loren Pierce emitted a dry, harsh little cough, as a
+signal that business was about to begin.  At this sound,
+Winch drew up his feet, and Gorringe untied a parcel
+of account-books and papers that he held on his knee. 
+Theron felt that his countenance must be exhibiting to the
+assembled brethren an unfortunate sense of helplessness
+in their hands.  He tried to look more resolute,
+and forced his lips into a smile.
+
+"Brother Gorringe allus acts as Seckertary,"
+said Erastus Winch, beaming broadly upon the minister,
+as if the mere mention of the fact promoted jollity. 
+"That's it, Brother Gorringe,--take your seat at Brother
+Ware's desk.  Mind the Dominie's pen don't play tricks
+on you, an' start off writin' out sermons instid of figgers." 
+The humorist turned to Theron as the lawyer walked over
+to the desk at the window.  "I allus have to caution him
+about that," he remarked with great joviality.  "An' do YOU
+look out afterwards, Brother Ware, or else you'll catch
+that pen o' yours scribblin' lawyer's lingo in place o'
+the Word."
+
+Theron felt bound to exhibit a grin in acknowledgment
+of this pleasantry.  The lawyer's change of position had
+involved some shifting of the others' chairs, and the young
+minister found himself directly confronted by Brother
+Pierce's hard and colorless old visage.  Its little eyes
+were watching him, as through a mask, and under their
+influence the smile of politeness fled from his lips. 
+The lawyer on his right, the cheese-buyer to the left,
+seemed to recede into distance as he for the moment returned
+the gaze of the quarryman.  He waited now for him to speak,
+as if the others were of no importance.
+
+"We are a plain sort o' folks up in these parts,"
+said Brother Pierce, after a slight further pause. 
+His voice was as dry and rasping as his cough, and its
+intonations were those of authority.  "We walk here,"
+he went on, eying the minister with a sour regard,
+"in a meek an' humble spirit, in the straight an'
+narrow way which leadeth unto life.  We ain't gone traipsin'
+after strange gods, like some people that call themselves
+Methodists in other places.  We stick by the Discipline an'
+the ways of our fathers in Israel.  No new-fangled notions
+can go down here.  Your wife'd better take them flowers
+out of her bunnit afore next Sunday."
+
+Silence possessed the room for a few moments,
+the while Theron, pale-faced and with brows knit,
+studied the pattern of the ingrain carpet.  Then he lifted
+his head, and nodded it in assent.  "Yes," he said;
+"we will do nothing by which our 'brother stumbleth,
+or is offended, or is made weak.'"
+
+Brother Pierce's parchment face showed no sign of surprise
+or pleasure at this easy submission.  "Another thing: 
+We don't want no book-learnin' or dictionary words in
+our pulpit," he went on coldly.  "Some folks may stomach
+'em; we won't. Them two sermons o' yours, p'r'aps they'd
+do down in some city place; but they're like your wife's
+bunnit here, they're too flowery to suit us.  What we
+want to hear is the plain, old-fashioned Word of God,
+without any palaver or 'hems and ha's." They tell me
+there's some parts where hell's treated as played-out--
+where our ministers don't like to talk much about it
+because people don't want to hear about it.  Such preachers
+ought to be put out.  They ain't Methodists at all. 
+What we want here, sir, is straight-out, flat-footed hell--
+the burnin' lake o' fire an' brim-stone. Pour it into
+'em, hot an' strong.  We can't have too much of it. 
+Work in them awful deathbeds of Voltaire an' Tom Paine,
+with the Devil right there in the room, reachin' for 'em, an'
+they yellin' for fright; that's what fills the anxious seat an'
+brings in souls hand over fist."
+
+Theron's tongue dallied for an instant with the temptation
+to comment upon these old-wife fables, which were so dear
+to the rural religious heart when he and I were boys. 
+But it seemed wiser to only nod again, and let his mentor
+go on.
+
+"We ain't had no trouble with the Free Methodists here,"
+continued Brother Pierce, "jest because we kept to the
+old paths, an' seek for salvation in the good old way. 
+Everybody can shout "Amen!" as loud and as long as
+the Spirit moves him, with us.  Some one was sayin'
+you thought we ought to have a choir and an organ. 
+No, sirree!  No such tom-foolery for us!  You'll only stir
+up feelin' agin yourself by hintin' at such things. 
+And then, too, our folks don't take no stock in all
+that pack o' nonsense about science, such as tellin'
+the age of the earth by crackin' up stones.  I've b'en
+in the quarry line all my life, an' I know it's all humbug! 
+Why, they say some folks are goin' round now preachin'
+that our grandfathers were all monkeys.  That comes
+from departin' from the ways of our forefathers, an puttin'
+in organs an' choirs, an' deckin' our women-folks out
+with gewgaws, an' apin' the fashions of the worldly. 
+I shouldn't wonder if them kind did have some monkey blood
+in 'em.  You'll find we're a different sort here."
+
+The young minister preserved silence for a little, until it
+became apparent that the old trustee had had his say out. 
+Even then he raised his head slowly, and at last made
+answer in a hesitating and irresolute way
+
+"You have been very frank," he said.  "I am obliged to you. 
+A clergyman coming to a new charge cannot be better served
+than by having laid before him a clear statement of the
+views and--and spiritual tendencies--of his new flock,
+quite at the outset.  I feel it to be of especial value
+in this case, because I am young in years and in my ministry,
+and am conscious of a great weakness of the flesh. 
+I can see how daily contact with a people so attached
+to the old, simple, primitive Methodism of Wesley
+and Asbury may be a source of much strength to me. 
+I may take it," he added upon second thought, with an
+inquiring glance at Mr. Winch, "that Brother Pierce's
+description of our charge, and its tastes and needs,
+meets with your approval?"
+
+Erastus Winch nodded his head and smiled expansively. 
+"Whatever Brother Pierce says, goes!" he declared. 
+The lawyer, sitting behind at the desk by the window,
+said nothing.
+
+"The place is jest overrun with Irish," Brother Pierce
+began again.  "They've got two Catholic churches here
+now to our one, and they do jest as they blamed please
+at the Charter elections.  It'd be a good idee to pitch
+into Catholics in general whenever you can.  You could
+make a hit that way.  I say the State ought to make 'em
+pay taxes on their church property.  They've no right
+to be exempted, because they ain't Christians at all. 
+They're idolaters, that's what they are!  I know 'em! 
+I've had 'em in my quarries for years, an' they ain't got
+no idee of decency or fair dealin'. Every time the price
+of stone went up, every man of 'em would jine to screw
+more wages out o' me.  Why, they used to keep account o'
+the amount o' business I done, an' figger up my profits, an'
+have the face to come an' talk to me about 'em, as if
+that had anything to do with wages.  It's my belief their
+priests put 'em up to it.  People don't begin to reelize--
+that church of idolatry 'll be the ruin o' this country,
+if it ain't checked in time.  Jest you go at 'em hammer
+'n' tongs!  I've got Eyetalians in the quarries now. 
+They're sensible fellows:  they know when they're well off--
+a dollar a day, an' they're satisfied, an' everything goes
+smooth."
+
+"But they're Catholics, the same as the Irish," suddenly
+interjected the lawyer, from his place by the window. 
+Theron pricked up his ears at the sound of his voice. 
+There was an anti-Pierce note in it, so to speak, which it
+did him good to hear.  The consciousness of sympathy
+began on the instant to inspire him with courage.
+
+"I know some people SAY they are," Brother Pierce
+guardedly retorted "but I've summered an' wintered both
+kinds, an' I hold to it they're different.  I grant ye,
+the Eyetalians ARE some given to jabbin' knives into
+each other, but they never git up strikes, an' they don't
+grumble about wages.  Why, look at the way they live--
+jest some weeds an' yarbs dug up on the roadside, an'
+stewed in a kettle with a piece o' fat the size o'
+your finger, an' a loaf o' bread, an' they're happy as a king. 
+There's some sense in THAT; but the Irish, they've got
+to have meat an' potatoes an' butter jest as if--as if--"
+
+"As if they'd b'en used to 'em at home," put in Mr. Winch,
+to help his colleague out.
+
+The lawyer ostentatiously drew up his chair to the desk,
+and began turning over the leaves of his biggest book. 
+"It's getting on toward noon, gentlemen," he said, in an
+impatient voice.
+
+The business meeting which followed was for a considerable
+time confined to hearing extracts from the books and papers
+read in a swift and formal fashion by Mr. Gorringe. 
+If this was intended to inform the new pastor of the exact
+financial situation in Octavius, it lamentably failed
+of its purpose.  Theron had little knowledge of figures;
+and though he tried hard to listen, and to assume an air
+of comprehension, he did not understand much of what he heard. 
+In a general way he gathered that the church property was
+put down at $12,000, on which there was a debt of $4,800.
+The annual expenses were $2,250, of which the principal
+items were $800 for his salary, $170 for the rent
+of the parsonage, and $319 for interest on the debt. 
+It seemed that last year the receipts had fallen just under
+$2,000, and they now confronted the necessity of making
+good this deficit during the coming year, as well as
+increasing the regular revenues.  Without much discussion,
+it was agreed that they should endeavor to secure the
+services of a celebrated "debt-raiser," early in the autumn,
+and utilize him in the closing days of a revival.
+
+Theron knew this "debt-raiser," and had seen him at work--
+a burly, bustling, vulgar man who took possession
+of the pulpit as if it were an auctioneer's block,
+and pursued the task of exciting liberality in the bosoms
+of the congregation by alternating prayer, anecdote, song,
+and cheap buffoonery in a manner truly sickening. 
+Would it not be preferable, he feebly suggested,
+to raise the money by a festival, or fair, or some
+other form of entertainment which the ladies could manage?
+
+Brother Pierce shook his head with contemptuous emphasis. 
+"Our women-folks ain't that kind," he said.  "They did try
+to hold a sociable once, but nobody came, and we didn't
+raise more 'n three or four dollars.  It ain't their line. 
+They lack the worldly arts.  As the Discipline commands,
+they avoid the evil of putting on gold and costly apparel,
+and taking such diversions as cannot be used in the name of
+the Lord Jesus."
+
+"Well--of course--if you prefer the 'debt-raiser'--"
+Theron began, and took the itemized account from Gorringe's
+knee as an excuse for not finishing the hateful sentence.
+
+He looked down the foolscap sheet, line by line,
+with no special sense of what it signified, until his
+eye caught upon this little section of the report,
+bracketed by itself in the Secretary's neat hand:
+
+INTEREST CHARGE.
+
+First mortgage (1873) .. $1,000 ... (E. Winch)    @7.. $ 70
+Second mortgage (1776)..  1,700 ... (L. Gorringe) @6..  102
+Third mortgage (1878)...  2,100 ... (L. Pierce)   @7..  147
+                        -------                       -----
+                         $4,800                        $319
+
+It was no news to him that the three mortgages on
+the church property were held by the three trustees. 
+But as he looked once more, another feature of the thing
+struck him as curious.
+
+"I notice that the rates of interest vary," he remarked
+without thinking, and then wished the words unsaid,
+for the two trustees in view moved uneasily on their seats.
+
+"Oh, that's nothing," exclaimed Erastus Winch, with a
+boisterous display of jollity.  "It's only Brother
+Gorringe's pleasant little way of making a contribution
+to our funds.  You will notice that, at the date
+of all these mortgages, the State rate of interest was
+seven per cent.  Since then it's b'en lowered to six. 
+Well, when that happened, you see, Brother Gorringe,
+not being a professin' member, and so not bound by our rules,
+he could just as well as not let his interest down a cent. 
+But Brother Pierce an' me, we talked it over, an' we made
+up our minds we were tied hand an' foot by our contract. 
+You know how strong the Discipline lays it down that
+we must be bound to the letter of our agreements. 
+That bein' so, we seen it in the light of duty not to change
+what we'd set our hands to.  That's how it is, Brother Ware."
+
+"I understand," said Theron, with an effort at polite
+calmness of tone.  "And--is there anything else?"
+
+"There's this," broke in Brother Pierce:  "we're commanded
+to be law-abiding people, an' seven per cent WAS the law an'
+would be now if them ragamuffins in the Legislation--"
+
+"Surely we needn't go further into that," interrupted
+the minister, conscious of a growing stiffness
+in his moral spine.  "Have we any other business before us?"
+
+Brother Pierce's little eyes snapped, and the wrinkles
+in his forehead deepened angrily.  "Business?" he demanded. 
+"Yes, plenty of it.  We've got to reduce expenses. 
+We're nigh onto $300 behind-hand this minute.  Besides your
+house-rent, you get $800 free an' clear--that is $15.38
+every week, an' only you an' your wife to keep out of it. 
+Why, when I was your age, young man, and after that too,
+I was glad to get $4 a week."
+
+"I don't think my salary is under discussion, Mr. Pierce--"
+
+"BROTHER Pierce!" suggested Winch, in a half-shuckling undertone.
+
+"Brother Pierce, then!" echoed Theron, impatiently. 
+"The Quarterly Conference and the Estimating Committee
+deal with that.  The trustees have no more to do with it
+than the man in the moon."
+
+"Come, come, Brother Ware," put in Erastus Winch,
+"we mustn't have no hard feelin's. Brotherly love is
+what we're all lookin' after.  Brother Pierce's meanin'
+wasn't agin your drawin' your full salary, every cent
+of it, only--only there are certain little things connected
+with the parsonage here that we feel you ought to bear. 
+F'r instance, there's the new sidewalk we had to lay
+in front of the house here only a month ago.  Of course,
+if the treasury was flush we wouldn't say a word about it. 
+An' then there's the gas bill here.  Seein' as you get
+your rent for nothin', it don't seem much to ask that you
+should see to lightin' the place yourself."
+
+"No, I don't think that either is a proper charge upon me,"
+interposed Theron.  "I decline to pay them."
+
+"We can have the gas shut off," remarked Brother Pierce, coldly.
+
+"As soon as you like," responded the minister, sitting erect
+and tapping the carpet nervously with his foot.  Only you
+must understand that I will take the whole matter to the
+Quarterly Conference in July.  I already see a good many
+other interesting questions about the financial management
+of this church which might be appropriately discussed there."
+
+"Oh, come, Brother Ware!" broke in Trustee Winch, with a
+somewhat agitated assumption of good-feeling. "Surely
+these are matters we ought to settle amongst ourselves. 
+We never yet asked outsiders to meddle with our business here. 
+It's our motto, Brother Ware.  I say, if you've got a motto,
+stand by it."
+
+"Well, my motto," said Theron, "is to be behaved decently
+to by those with whom I have to deal; and I also propose
+to stand by it."
+
+Brother Pierce rose gingerly to his feet, with the
+hesitation of an old man not sure about his knees. 
+When he had straightened himself, he put on his hat,
+and eyed the minister sternly from beneath its brim.
+
+"The Lord gives us crosses grievous to our natur',"
+he said, "an' we're told to bear 'em cheerfully as long
+as they're on our backs; but there ain't nothin' said agin
+our unloadin' 'em in the ditch the minute we git the chance. 
+I guess you won't last here more 'n a twelvemonth."
+
+He pulled his soft and discolored old hat down over his
+brows with a significantly hostile nod, and, turning,
+stumped toward the hall-door without offering to shake hands.
+
+The other trustees had risen likewise, in tacit recognition
+that the meeting was over.  Winch clasped the minister's
+hand in his own broad, hard palm, and squeezed it in an
+exuberant grip.  "Don't mind his little ways, Brother Ware,"
+he urged in a loud, unctuous whisper, with a grinning
+backward nod:  "he's a trifle skittish sometimes when you
+don't give him free rein; but he's all wool an' a yard
+wide when it comes to right-down hard-pan religion. 
+My love to Sister Ware;" and he followed the senior
+trustee into the hall.
+
+Mr. Gorringe had been tying up his books and papers. 
+He came now with the bulky parcel under his arm, and his hat
+and stick in the other hand.  He could give little but his
+thumb to Theron to shake.  His face wore a grave expression,
+and not a line relaxed as, catching the minister's look,
+he slowly covered his left eye in a deliberate wink.
+
+
+
+"Well?--and how did it go off?" asked Alice, from where
+she knelt by the oven door, a few minutes later.
+
+For answer, Theron threw himself wearily into the big
+old farm rocking-chair on the other side of the stove,
+and shook his head with a lengthened sigh.
+
+"If it wasn't for that man Gorringe of yours,"
+he said dejectedly, "I think I should feel like going off--
+and learning a trade."
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+
+On the following Sunday, young Mrs. Ware sat alone in the
+preacher's pew through the morning service, and everybody
+noted that the roses had been taken from her bonnet. 
+In the evening she was absent, and after the doxology
+and benediction several people, under the pretence of
+solicitude for her health, tried to pump her husband as to
+the reason.  He answered their inquiries civilly enough,
+but with brevity:  she had stayed at home because she
+did not feel like coming out--this and nothing more.
+
+The congregation dispersed under a gossip-laden cloud
+of consciousness that there must be something queer
+about Sister Ware.  There was a tolerably general
+agreement, however, that the two sermons of the day
+had been excellent.  Not even Loren Pierce's railing
+commentary on the pastor's introduction of an outlandish
+word like "epitome"--clearly forbidden by the Discipline's
+injunction to plain language understood of the people--
+availed to sap the satisfaction of the majority.
+
+Theron himself comprehended that he had pleased the bulk
+of his auditors; the knowledge left him curiously hot
+and cold.  On the one hand, there was joy in the apparent
+prospect that the congregation would back him up in a
+stand against the trustees, if worst came to worst. 
+But, on the other hand, the bonnet episode entered his soul. 
+It had been a source of bitter humiliation to him to see
+his wife sitting there beneath the pulpit, shorn by despotic
+order of the adornments natural to her pretty head. 
+But he had even greater pain in contemplating the effect
+it had produced on Alice herself.  She had said not
+a word on the subject, but her every glance and gesture
+seemed to him eloquent of deep feeling about it. 
+He made sure that she blamed him for having defended
+his own gas and sidewalk rights with successful vigor,
+but permitted the sacrifice of her poor little inoffensive
+roses without a protest.  In this view of the matter,
+indeed, he blamed himself.  Was it too late to make the
+error good?  He ventured a hint on this Sunday evening,
+when he returned to the parsonage and found her reading
+an old weekly newspaper by the light of the kitchen lamp,
+to the effect that he fancied there would be no great
+danger in putting those roses back into her bonnet. 
+Without lifting her eyes from the paper, she answered
+that she had no earthly desire to wear roses in her bonnet,
+and went on with her reading.
+
+At breakfast the next morning Theron found himself
+in command of an unusual fund of humorous good spirits,
+and was at pains to make the most of it, passing whimsical
+comments on subjects which the opening day suggested,
+recalling quaint and comical memories of the past,
+and striving his best to force Alice into a laugh. 
+Formerly her merry temper had always ignited at the merest
+spark of gayety.  Now she gave his jokes only a dutiful
+half-smile, and uttered scarcely a word in response
+to his running fire of talk.  When the meal was finished,
+she went silently to work to clear away the dishes.
+
+Theron turned over in his mind the project of offering
+to help her, as he had done so often in those dear
+old days when they laughingly began life together. 
+Something decided this project in the negative for him,
+and after lingering moments he put on his hat and went out
+for a walk.
+
+Not even the most doleful and trying hour of his bitter
+experience in Tyre had depressed him like this. 
+Looking back upon these past troubles, he persuaded himself
+that he had borne them all with a light and cheerful heart,
+simply because Alice had been one with him in every
+thought and emotion.  How perfect, how ideally complete,
+their sympathy had always been!  With what absolute
+unity of mind and soul they had trod that difficult
+path together!  And now--henceforth--was it to be different? 
+The mere suggestion of such a thing chilled his veins. 
+He said aloud to himself as he walked that life would
+be an intolerable curse if Alice were to cease sharing it
+with him in every conceivable phase.
+
+He had made his way out of town, and tramped along the
+country hill-road for a considerable distance, before a
+merciful light began to lessen the shadows in the picture
+of gloom with which his mind tortured itself.  All at once
+he stopped short, lifted his head, and looked about him. 
+The broad valley lay warm and tranquil in the May sunshine
+at his feet.  In the thicket up the side-hill above him
+a gray squirrel was chattering shrilly, and the birds sang
+in a tireless choral confusion.  Theron smiled, and drew
+a long breath.  The gay clamor of the woodland songsters,
+the placid radiance of the landscape, were suddenly
+taken in and made a part of his new mood.  He listened,
+smiled once more, and then started in a leisurely way
+back toward Octavius.
+
+How could he have been so ridiculous as to fancy that Alice--
+his Alice--had been changed into someone else?  He marvelled
+now at his own perverse folly.  She was overworked--
+tired out--that was all.  The task of moving in, of setting
+the new household to rights, had been too much for her. 
+She must have a rest.  They must get in a hired girl.
+
+Once this decision about a servant fixed itself in the young
+minister's mind, it drove out the last vestage of discomfort. 
+He strode along now in great content, revolving idly
+a dozen different plans for gilding and beautifying this
+new life of leisure into which his sanguine thoughts
+projected Alice.  One of these particularly pleased him,
+and waxed in definiteness as he turned it over and over. 
+He would get another piano for her, in place of that which had
+been sacrificed in Tyre.  That beneficient modern invention,
+the instalment plan, made this quite feasible--so easy,
+in fact, that it almost seemed as if he should find his
+wife playing on the new instrument when he got home. 
+He would stop in at the music store and see about it that
+very day.
+
+Of course, now that these important resolutions had been taken,
+it would be a good thing if he could do something to bring
+in some extra money.  This was by no means a new notion. 
+He had mused over the possibility in a formless way ever
+since that memorable discovery of indebtedness in Tyre,
+and had long ago recognized the hopelessness of endeavor
+in every channel save that of literature.  Latterly his fancy
+had been stimulated by reading an account of the profits
+which Canon Farrar had derived from his "Life of Christ." 
+If such a book could command such a bewildering multitude
+of readers, Theron felt there ought to be a chance for him. 
+So clear did constant rumination render this assumption
+that the young pastor in time had come to regard
+this prospective book of his as a substantial asset,
+which could be realized without trouble whenever he got
+around to it.
+
+He had not, it is true, gone to the length of seriously
+considering what should be the subject of his book. 
+That had not seemed to him to matter much, so long as it
+was scriptural.  Familiarity with the process of extracting
+a fixed amount of spiritual and intellectual meat from
+any casual text, week after week, had given him an idea
+that any one of many subjects would do, when the time came
+for him to make a choice.  He realized now that the time
+for a selection had arrived, and almost simultaneously
+found himself with a ready-made decision in his mind. 
+The book should be about Abraham!
+
+Theron Ware was extremely interested in the mechanism
+of his own brain, and followed its workings with a
+lively curiosity.  Nothing could be more remarkable,
+he thought, than to thus discover that, on the instant
+of his formulating a desire to know what he should
+write upon, lo, and behold! there his mind, quite on
+its own initiative, had the answer waiting for him! 
+When he had gone a little further, and the powerful
+range of possibilities in the son's revolt against the
+idolatry of his father, the image-maker, in the exodus
+from the unholy city of Ur, and in the influence of the
+new nomadic life upon the little deistic family group,
+had begun to unfold itself before him, he felt that the hand
+of Providence was plainly discernible in the matter. 
+The book was to be blessed from its very inception.
+
+Walking homeward briskly now, with his eyes on the sidewalk
+and his mind all aglow with crowding suggestions for the
+new work, and impatience to be at it, he came abruptly
+upon a group of men and boys who occupied the whole path,
+and were moving forward so noiselessly that he had not
+heard them coming.  He almost ran into the leader of this
+little procession, and began a stammering apology,
+the final words of which were left unspoken, so solemnly
+heedless of him and his talk were all the faces he saw.
+
+In the centre of the group were four working-men,
+bearing between them an extemporized litter of two poles
+and a blanket hastily secured across them with spikes. 
+Most of what this litter held was covered by another blanket,
+rounded in coarse folds over a shapeless bulk.  From beneath
+its farther end protruded a big broom-like black beard,
+thrown upward at such an angle as to hide everything
+beyond to those in front.  The tall young minister,
+stepping aside and standing tip-toe, could see
+sloping downward behind this hedge of beard a pinched
+and chalk-like face, with wide-open, staring eyes. 
+Its lips, of a dull lilac hue, were moving ceaselessly,
+and made a dry, clicking sound.
+
+Theron instinctively joined himself to those who followed
+the litter--a motley dozen of street idlers, chiefly boys. 
+One of these in whispers explained to him that the man
+was one of Jerry Madden's workmen in the wagon-shops,
+who had been deployed to trim an elm-tree in front
+of his employer's house, and, being unused to such work,
+had fallen from the top and broken all his bones. 
+They would have cared for him at Madden's house, but he
+had insisted upon being taken home.  His name was MacEvoy,
+and he was Joey MacEvoy's father, and likewise Jim's
+and Hughey's and Martin's. After a pause the lad,
+a bright-eyed, freckled, barefooted wee Irishman,
+volunteered the further information that his big brother
+had run to bring "Father Forbess," on the chance that he
+might be in time to administer "extry munction."
+
+The way of the silent little procession led through
+back streets--where women hanging up clothes in the
+yards hurried to the gates, their aprons full of
+clothes-pins, to stare open-mouthed at the passers-by--
+and came to a halt at last in an irregular and muddy lane,
+before one of a half dozen shanties reared among
+the ash-heaps and debris of the town's most bedraggled outskirts.
+
+A stout, middle-aged, red-armed woman, already warned by some
+messenger of calamity, stood waiting on the roadside bank. 
+There were whimpering children clinging to her skirts,
+and a surrounding cluster of women of the neighborhood,
+some of the more elderly of whom, shrivelled little
+crones in tidy caps, and with their aprons to their eyes,
+were beginning in a low-murmured minor the wail
+which presently should rise into the keen of death. 
+Mrs. MacEvoy herself made no moan, and her broad ruddy
+face was stern in expression rather than sorrowful. 
+When the litter stopped beside her, she laid a hand
+for an instant on her husband's wet brow, and looked--
+one could have sworn impassively--into his staring eyes. 
+Then, still without a word, she waved the bearers toward
+the door, and led the way herself.
+
+Theron, somewhat wonderingly, found himself, a minute later,
+inside a dark and ill-smelling room, the air of which was
+humid with the steam from a boiler of clothes on the stove,
+and not in other ways improved by the presence of a jostling
+score of women, all straining their gaze upon the open
+door of the only other apartment--the bed-chamber. Through
+this they could see the workmen laying MacEvoy on the bed,
+and standing awkwardly about thereafter, getting in the
+way of the wife and old Maggie Quirk as they strove
+to remove the garments from his crushed limbs.  As the
+neighbors watched what could be seen of these proceedings,
+they whispered among themselves eulogies of the injured
+man's industry and good temper, his habit of bringing
+his money home to his wife, and the way he kept his Father
+Mathew pledge and attended to his religious duties. 
+They admitted freely that, by the light of his example,
+their own husbands and sons left much to be desired,
+and from this wandered easily off into domestic
+digressions of their own.  But all the while their eyes
+were bent upon the bedroom door; and Theron made out,
+after he had grown accustomed to the gloom and the smell,
+that many of them were telling their beads even while they
+kept the muttered conversation alive.  None of them paid
+any attention to him, or seemed to regard his presence
+there as unusual.
+
+Presently he saw enter through the sunlit street doorway
+a person of a different class.  The bright light shone
+for a passing instant upon a fashionable, flowered hat,
+and upon some remarkably brilliant shade of red hair
+beneath it.  In another moment there had edged along
+through the throng, to almost within touch of him, a tall
+young woman, the owner of this hat and wonderful hair. 
+She was clad in light and pleasing spring attire,
+and carried a parasol with a long oxidized silver
+handle of a quaint pattern.  She looked at him,
+and he saw that her face was of a lengthened oval,
+with a luminous rose-tinted skin, full red lips,
+and big brown, frank eyes with heavy auburn lashes. 
+She made a grave little inclination of her head toward him,
+and he bowed in response.  Since her arrival, he noted,
+the chattering of the others had entirely ceased.
+
+"I followed the others in, in the hope that I might be
+of some assistance," he ventured to explain to her in a
+low murmur, feeling that at last here was some one to whom
+an explanation of his presence in this Romish house was due. 
+"I hope they won't feel that I have intruded."
+
+She nodded her head as if she quite understood. 
+"They'll take the will for the deed," she whispered back. 
+"Father Forbes will be here in a minute.  Do you know is it
+too late?"
+
+Even as she spoke, the outer doorway was darkened by the
+commanding bulk of a newcomer's figure.  The flash of a silk hat,
+and the deferential way in which the assembled neighbors
+fell back to clear a passage, made his identity clear. 
+Theron felt his blood tingle in an unaccustomed way as this
+priest of a strange church advanced across the room--
+a broad-shouldered, portly man of more than middle height,
+with a shapely, strong-lined face of almost waxen pallor,
+and a firm, commanding tread.  He carried in his hands,
+besides his hat, a small leather-bound case.  To this
+and to him the women courtesied and bowed their heads as
+he passed.
+
+"Come with me," whispered the tall girl with the parasol
+to Theron; and he found himself pushing along in her
+wake until they intercepted the priest just outside
+the bedroom door.  She touched Father Forbes on the arm.
+
+"Just to tell you that I am here," she said.  The priest
+nodded with a grave face, and passed into the other room. 
+In a minute or two the workmen, Mrs. MacEvoy, and her helper
+came out, and the door was shut behind them.
+
+"He is making his confession," explained the young lady. 
+"Stay here for a minute."
+
+She moved over to where the woman of the house stood,
+glum-faced and tearless, and whispered something to her. 
+A confused movement among the crowd followed, and out
+of it presently resulted a small table, covered with a
+white cloth, and bearing on it two unlighted candles,
+a basin of water, and a spoon, which was brought forward
+and placed in readiness before the closed door. 
+Some of those nearest this cleared space were kneeling now,
+and murmuring a low buzz of prayer to the click of beads on
+their rosaries.
+
+The door opened, and Theron saw the priest standing in the
+doorway with an uplifted hand.  He wore now a surplice,
+with a purple band over his shoulders, and on his pale
+face there shone a tranquil and tender light.
+
+One of the workmen fetched from the stove a brand,
+lighted the two candles, and bore the table with its
+contents into the bedroom.  The young woman plucked
+Theron's sleeve, and he dumbly followed her into the
+chamber of death, making one of the group of a dozen,
+headed by Mrs. MacEvoy and her children, which filled the
+little room, and overflowed now outward to the street door. 
+He found himself bowing with the others to receive the
+sprinkled holy water from the priest's white fingers;
+kneeling with the others for the prayers; following in
+impressed silence with the others the strange ceremonial
+by which the priest traced crosses of holy oil with his
+thumb upon the eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands, and feet
+of the dying man, wiping off the oil with a piece
+of cotton-batting each time after he had repeated the
+invocation to forgiveness for that particular sense. 
+But most of all he was moved by the rich, novel sound
+of the Latin as the priest rolled it forth in the
+ASPERGES ME, DOMINE, and MISEREATUR VESTRI OMNIPOTENS DEUS,
+with its soft Continental vowels and liquid R's. It seemed
+to him that he had never really heard Latin before. 
+Then the astonishing young woman with the red hair
+declaimed the CONFITEOR, vigorously and with a resonant
+distinctness of enunciation.  It was a different Latin,
+harsher and more sonorous; and while it still dominated
+the murmured undertone of the other's prayers, the last moment came.
+
+Theron had stood face to face with death at many other bedsides;
+no other final scene had stirred him like this. 
+It must have been the girl's Latin chant, with its clanging
+reiteration of the great names--BEATUM MICHAELEM ARCHANGELUM,
+BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, SANCTOS APOSTOLOS PETRUM
+ET PAULUM--invoked with such proud confidence in this
+squalid little shanty, which so strangely affected him.
+
+He came out with the others at last--the candles and the
+folded hands over the crucifix left behind--and walked
+as one in a dream.  Even by the time that he had gained
+the outer doorway, and stood blinking at the bright
+light and filling his lungs with honest air once more,
+it had begun to seem incredible to him that he had seen
+and done all this.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+While Mr. Ware stood thus on the doorstep, through a minute
+of formless musing, the priest and the girl came out, and,
+somewhat to his confusion, made him one of their party. 
+He felt himself flushing under the idea that they would think
+he had waited for them--was thrusting himself upon them. 
+The notion prompted him to bow frigidly in response
+to Father Forbes' pleasant "I am glad to meet you, sir,"
+and his outstretched hand.
+
+"I dropped in by the--the merest accident," Theron said. 
+"I met them bringing the poor man home, and--and quite
+without thinking, I obeyed the impulse to follow them in,
+and didn't realize--"
+
+He stopped short, annoyed by the reflection that this
+was his second apology.  The girl smiled placidly at him,
+the while she put up her parasol.
+
+"It did me good to see you there," she said, quite as if
+she had known him all her life.  "And so it did the rest
+of us."
+
+Father Forbes permitted himself a soft little chuckle,
+approving rather than mirthful, and patted her on the
+shoulder with the air of being fifty years her senior
+instead of fifteen.  To the minister's relief, he changed
+the subject as the three started together toward the road.
+
+"Then, again, no doctor was sent for!" he exclaimed,
+as if resuming a familiar subject with the girl.  Then he
+turned to Theron.  "I dare-say you have no such trouble;
+but with our poorer people it is very vexing. 
+They will not call in a physician, but hurry off first
+for the clergyman.  I don't know that it is altogether
+to avoid doctor's bills, but it amounts to that in effect. 
+Of course in this case it made no difference; but I have
+had to make it a rule not to go out at night unless they
+bring me a physician's card with his assurance that it
+is a genuine affair.  Why, only last winter, I was routed
+up after midnight, and brought off in the mud and pelting
+rain up one of the new streets on the hillside there,
+simply because a factory girl who was laced too tight
+had fainted at a dance.  I slipped and fell into a puddle
+in the darkness, ruined a new overcoat, and got drenched
+to the skin; and when I arrived the girl had recovered
+and was dancing away again, thirteen to the dozen. 
+It was then that I made the rule.  I hope, Mr. Ware,
+that Octavius is producing a pleasant impression upon you
+so far?"
+
+"I scarcely know yet," answered Theron.  The genial talk
+of the priest, with its whimsical anecdote, had in truth
+passed over his head.  His mind still had room for nothing
+but that novel death-bed scene, with the winged captain
+of the angelic host, the Baptist, the glorified Fisherman. 
+and the Preacher, all being summoned down in the pomp
+of liturgical Latin to help MacEvoy to die.  "If you don't
+mind my saying so," he added hesitatingly, "what I have
+just seen in there DID make a very powerful impression
+upon me."
+
+"It is a very ancient ceremony," said the priest;
+"probably Persian, like the baptismal form, although,
+for that matter, we can never dig deep enough for the
+roots of these things.  They all turn up Turanian if we
+probe far enough.  Our ways separate here, I'm afraid. 
+I am delighted to have made your acquaintance, Mr. Ware. 
+Pray look in upon me, if you can as well as not.  We are
+near neighbors, you know."
+
+Father Forbes had shaken hands, and moved off up another
+street some distance, before the voice of the girl
+recalled Theron to himself.
+
+"Of course you knew HIM by name," she was saying, "and he
+knew you by sight, and had talked of you; but MY poor
+inferior sex has to be introduced.  I am Celia Madden. 
+My father has the wagon-shops, and I--I play the organ at
+the church."
+
+"I--I am delighted to make your acquaintance," said Theron,
+conscious as he spoke that he had slavishly echoed the
+formula of the priest.  He could think of nothing better
+to add than, "Unfortunately, we have no organ in our church."
+
+The girl laughed, as they resumed their walk down the street. 
+"I'm afraid I couldn't undertake two," she said,
+and laughed again.  Then she spoke more seriously. 
+"That ceremony must have interested you a good deal,
+never having seen it before.  I saw that it was all new
+to you, and so I made bold to take you under my wing,
+so to speak."
+
+You were very kind," said the young minister.  "It was
+really a great experience for me.  May--may I ask,
+is it a part of your functions, in the church, I mean,
+to attend these last rites?"
+
+"Mercy, no!" replied the girl, spinning the parasol on her
+shoulder and smiling at the thought.  "No; it was only
+because MacEvoy was one of our workmen, and really came
+by his death through father sending him up to trim a tree. 
+Ann MacEvoy will never forgive us that, the longest day
+she lives.  Did you notice her?  She wouldn't speak to me. 
+After you came out, I tried to tell her that we would
+look out for her and the children; but all she would say
+to me was:  'An' fwat would a wheelwright, an' him the
+father of a family, be doin' up a tree?'"
+
+They had come now upon the main street of the village,
+with its flagstone sidewalk overhung by a lofty canopy of
+elm-boughs. Here, for the space of a block, was concentrated
+such fashionable elegance of mansions and ornamental lawns
+as Octavius had to offer; and it was presented with the
+irregularity so characteristic of our restless civilization. 
+Two or three of the houses survived untouched from the
+earlier days--prim, decorous structures, each with its
+gabled centre and lower wings, each with its row of fluted
+columns supporting the classical roof of a piazza across
+its whole front, each vying with the others in the whiteness
+of those wooden walls enveloping its bright green blinds. 
+One had to look over picket fences to see these houses,
+and in doing so caught the notion that they thus railed
+themselves off in pride at being able to remember before
+the railroad came to the village, or the wagon-works were thought of.
+
+Before the neighboring properties the fences had been
+swept away, so that one might stroll from the sidewalk
+straight across the well-trimmed sward to any one of a dozen
+elaborately modern doorways.  Some of the residences,
+thus frankly proffering friendship to the passer-by,
+were of wood painted in drabs and dusky reds,
+with bulging windows which marked the native yearning
+for the mediaeval, and shingles that strove to be
+accounted tiles.  Others--a prouder, less pretentious sort--
+were of brick or stone, with terra-cotta mouldings
+set into the walls, and with real slates covering
+the riot of turrets and peaks and dormer peepholes overhead.
+
+Celia Madden stopped in front of the largest and most
+important-looking of these new edifices, and said,
+holding out her hand:  "Here I am, once more. 
+Good-morning, Mr. Ware."
+
+Theron hoped that his manner did not betray the flash
+of surprise he felt in discovering that his new
+acquaintance lived in the biggest house in Octavius. 
+He remembered now that some one had pointed it out
+as the abode of the owner of the wagon factories;
+but it had not occurred to him before to associate this
+girl with that village magnate.  It was stupid of him,
+of course, because she had herself mentioned her father. 
+He looked at her again with an awkward smile,
+as he formally shook the gloved hand she gave him,
+and lifted his soft hat.  The strong noon sunlight,
+forcing its way down between the elms, and beating upon
+her parasol of lace-edged, creamy silk, made a halo
+about her hair and face at once brilliant and tender. 
+He had not seen before how beautiful she was.  She nodded
+in recognition of his salute, and moved up the lawn walk,
+spinning the sunshade on her shoulder.
+
+Though the parsonage was only three blocks away,
+the young minister had time to think about a good many
+things before he reached home.
+
+First of all, he had to revise in part the arrangement
+of his notions about the Irish.  Save for an occasional
+isolated and taciturn figure among the nomadic portion
+of the hired help in the farm country, Theron had scarcely
+ever spoken to a person of this curiously alien race before. 
+He remembered now that there had been some dozen or more
+Irish families in Tyre, quartered in the outskirts among
+the brickyards, but he had never come in contact with any
+of them, or given to their existence even a passing thought. 
+So far as personal acquaintance went, the Irish had been
+to him only a name.
+
+But what a sinister and repellent name!  His views on
+this general subject were merely those common to his
+communion and his environment.  He took it for granted,
+for example, that in the large cities most of the poverty
+and all the drunkenness, crime, and political corruption
+were due to the perverse qualities of this foreign people--
+qualities accentuated and emphasized in every evil direction
+by the baleful influence of a false and idolatrous religion. 
+It is hardly too much to say that he had never encountered
+a dissenting opinion on this point.  His boyhood had been
+spent in those bitter days when social, political, and blood
+prejudices were fused at white heat in the public
+crucible together.  When he went to the Church Seminary,
+it was a matter of course that every member of the faculty
+was a Republican, and that every one of his classmates
+had come from a Republican household.  When, later on,
+he entered the ministry, the rule was still incredulous
+of exceptions.  One might as well have looked in the
+Nedahma Conference for a divergence of opinion on the
+Trinity as for a difference in political conviction. 
+Indeed, even among the laity, Theron could not feel sure
+that he had ever known a Democrat; that is, at all closely. 
+He understood very little about politics, it is true. 
+If he had been driven into a corner, and forced to attempt
+an explanation of this tremendous partisan unity in which he
+had a share, he would probably have first mentioned the War--
+the last shots of which were fired while he was still
+in petticoats.  Certainly his second reason, however,
+would have been that the Irish were on the other side.
+
+He had never before had occasion to formulate, even in his
+own thoughts, this tacit race and religious aversion in which
+he had been bred.  It rose now suddenly in front of him,
+as he sauntered from patch to patch of sunlight under
+the elms, like some huge, shadowy, and symbolic monument. 
+He looked at it with wondering curiosity, as at something
+he had heard of all his life, but never seen before--
+an abhorrent spectacle, truly!  The foundations upon
+which its dark bulk reared itself were ignorance, squalor,
+brutality and vice.  Pigs wallowed in the mire before its base,
+and burrowing into this base were a myriad of narrow doors,
+each bearing the hateful sign of a saloon, and giving
+forth from its recesses of night the sounds of screams
+and curses.  Above were sculptured rows of lowering,
+ape-like faces from Nast's and Keppler's cartoons,
+and out of these sprang into the vague upper gloom--on the
+one side, lamp-posts from which negroes hung by the neck,
+and on the other gibbets for dynamiters and Molly Maguires,
+and between the two glowed a spectral picture of some
+black-robed tonsured men, with leering satanic masks,
+making a bonfire of the Bible in the public schools.
+
+Theron stared this phantasm hard in the face, and recognized
+it for a very tolerable embodiment of what he had heretofore
+supposed he thought about the Irish.  For an instant,
+the sight of it made him shiver, as if the sunny May
+had of a sudden lapsed back into bleak December. 
+Then he smiled, and the bad vision went off into space. 
+He saw instead Father Forbes, in the white and purple vestments,
+standing by poor MacEvoy's bedside, with his pale,
+chiselled, luminous, uplifted face, and he heard only
+the proud, confident clanging of the girl's recital,--
+BEATUM MICHAELEM ARCHANGELUM, BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM,
+PETRUM ET PAULUM--EM!--AM!--UM!--like strokes on a great
+resonant alarm-bell, attuned for the hearing of heaven. 
+He caught himself on the very verge of feeling that heaven
+must have heard.
+
+Then he smiled again, and laid the matter aside, with a
+parting admission that it had been undoubtedly picturesque
+and impressive, and that it had been a valuable experience
+to him to see it.  At least the Irish, with all their faults,
+must have a poetic strain, or they would not have clung
+so tenaciously to those curious and ancient forms. 
+He recalled having heard somewhere, or read, it might be,
+that they were a people much given to songs and music. 
+And the young lady, that very handsome and friendly
+Miss Madden, had told him that she was a musician! 
+He had a new pleasure in turning this over in his mind. 
+Of all the closed doors which his choice of a career had
+left along his pathway, no other had for him such a magical
+fascination as that on which was graven the lute of Orpheus. 
+He knew not even the alphabet of music, and his conceptions
+of its possibilities ran but little beyond the best
+of the hymn-singing he had heard at Conferences, yet none
+the less the longing for it raised on occasion such mutiny
+in his soul that more than once he had specifically prayed
+against it as a temptation.
+
+Dangerous though some of its tendencies might be, there was
+no gainsaying the fact that a love for music was in the main
+an uplifting influence--an attribute of cultivation. 
+The world was the sweeter and more gentle for it.  And this
+brought him to musing upon the odd chance that the two people
+of Octavius who had given him the first notion of polish
+and intellectual culture in the town should be Irish. 
+The Romish priest must have been vastly surprised at
+his intrusion, yet had been at the greatest pains to act
+as if it were quite the usual thing to have Methodist
+ministers assist at Extreme Unction.  And the young woman--
+how gracefully, with what delicacy, had she comprehended his
+position and robbed it of all its possible embarrassments! 
+It occurred to him that they must have passed, there in
+front of her home, the very tree from which the luckless
+wheelwright had fallen some hours before; and the fact
+that she had forborne to point it out to him took form
+in his mind as an added proof of her refinement of nature.
+
+The midday dinner was a little more than ready when Theron
+reached home, and let himself in by the front door. 
+On Mondays, owing to the moisture and "clutter" of the
+weekly washing in the kitchen, the table was laid in the
+sitting-room, and as he entered from the hall the partner
+of his joys bustled in by the other door, bearing the steaming
+platter of corned beef, dumplings, cabbages, and carrots,
+with arms bared to the elbows, and a red face.  It gave
+him great comfort, however, to note that there were no
+signs of the morning's displeasure remaining on this face;
+and he immediately remembered again those interrupted
+projects of his about the piano and the hired girl.
+
+"Well!  I'd just about begun to reckon that I was
+a widow," said Alice, putting down her fragrant burden. 
+There was such an obvious suggestion of propitiation
+in her tone that Theron went around and kissed her. 
+He thought of saying something about keeping out of the way
+because it was "Blue Monday," but held it back lest it
+should sound like a reproach.
+
+"Well, what kind of a washerwoman does THIS one turn
+out to be?" he asked, after they were seated, and he had
+invoked a blessing and was cutting vigorously into the meat.
+
+"Oh, so-so," replied Alice; "she seems to be particular,
+but she's mortal slow.  If I hadn't stood right over her,
+we shouldn't have had the clothes out till goodness knows when. 
+And of course she's Irish!"
+
+"Well, what of THAT?" asked the minister, with a fine unconcern.
+
+Alice looked up from her plate, with knife and fork
+suspended in air.  "Why, you know we were talking
+only the other day of what a pity it was that none
+of our own people went out washing," she said. 
+"That Welsh woman we heard of couldn't come, after all;
+and they say, too, that she presumes dreadfully upon
+the acquaintance, being a church member, you know.  So we
+simply had to fall back on the Irish.  And even if they do
+go and tell their priest everything they see and hear, why,
+there's one comfort, they can tell about US and welcome. 
+Of course I see to it she doesn't snoop around in here."
+
+Theron smiled.  "That's all nonsense about their telling
+such things to their priests," he said with easy confidence.
+
+"Why, you told me so yourself," replied Alice, briskly. 
+"And I've always understood so, too; they're bound to tell
+EVERYTHING in confession.  That's what gives the Catholic
+Church such a tremendous hold.  You've spoken of it often."
+
+"It must have been by way of a figure of speech,"
+remarked Theron, not with entire directness.  "Women are great
+hands to separate one's observations from their context,
+and so give them meanings quite unintended.  They are also
+great hands," he added genially, "or at least one of them is,
+at making the most delicious dumplings in the world. 
+I believe these are the best even you ever made."
+
+Alice was not unmindful of the compliment, but her thoughts
+were on other things.  "I shouldn't like that woman's priest,
+for example," she said, "to know that we had no piano."
+
+"But if he comes and stands outside our house every
+night and listens--as of course he will," said Theron,
+with mock gravity, "it is only a question of time when he
+must reach that conclusion for himself.  Our only chance,
+however, is that there are some sixteen hundred other
+houses for him to watch, so that he may not get around
+to us for quite a spell.  Why, seriously, Alice, what on
+earth do you suppose Father Forbes knows or cares about
+our poor little affairs, or those of any other Protestant
+household in this whole village?  He has his work to do,
+just as I have mine--only his is ten times as exacting
+in everything except sermons--and you may be sure he is
+only too glad when it is over each day, without bothering
+about things that are none of his business."
+
+"All the same I'm afraid of them," said Alice,
+as if argument were exhausted.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+On the following morning young Mr. Ware anticipated events
+by inscribing in his diary for the day, immediately
+after breakfast, these remarks:  "Arranged about piano. 
+Began work upon book."
+
+The date indeed deserved to be distinguished from
+its fellows.  Theron was so conscious of its importance
+that he not only prophesied in the little morocco-bound
+diary which Alice had given him for Christmas,
+but returned after he had got out upon the front
+steps of the parsonage to have his hat brushed afresh by her.
+
+"Wonders will never cease," she said jocosely.  "With you
+getting particular about your clothes, there isn't
+anything in this wide world that can't happen now!"
+
+"One doesn't go out to bring home a piano every day,"
+he made answer.  "Besides, I want to make such an impression
+upon the man that he will deal gently with that first cash
+payment down.  Do you know," he added, watching her turn
+the felt brim under the wisp-broom's strokes, "I'm thinking
+some of getting me a regular silk stove-pipe hat."
+
+"Why don't you, then?" she rejoined, but without any ring
+of glad acquiescence in her tone.  He fancied that her
+face lengthened a little, and he instantly ascribed it
+to recollections of the way in which the roses had been
+bullied out of her own headgear.
+
+"You are quite sure, now, pet," he made haste to change
+the subject, "that the hired girl can wait just as well
+as not until fall?"
+
+"Oh, MY, yes!"  Alice replied, putting the hat on his head,
+and smoothing back his hair behind his ears.  "She'd only
+be in the way now.  You see, with hot weather coming on,
+there won't be much cooking.  We'll take all our meals
+out here, and that saves so much work that really what
+remains is hardly more than taking care of a bird-cage. And,
+besides, not having her will almost half pay for the piano."
+
+"But when cold weather comes, you're sure you'll consent?"
+he urged.
+
+"Like a shot!" she assured him, and, after a happy
+little caress, he started out again on his momentous mission.
+
+"Thurston's" was a place concerning which opinions differed
+in Octavius.  That it typified progress, and helped more
+than any other feature of the village to bring it up
+to date, no one indeed disputed.  One might move about
+a great deal, in truth, and hear no other view expressed. 
+But then again one might stumble into conversation with
+one small storekeeper after another, and learn that they
+united in resenting the existence of "Thurston's," as
+rival farmers might join to curse a protracted drought. 
+Each had his special flaming grievance.  The little
+dry-goods dealers asked mournfully how they could be
+expected to compete with an establishment which could buy
+bankrupt stocks at a hundred different points, and make
+a profit if only one-third of the articles were sold
+for more than they would cost from the jobber?  The little
+boot and shoe dealers, clothiers, hatters, and furriers,
+the small merchants in carpets, crockery, and furniture,
+the venders of hardware and household utensils, of leathern
+goods and picture-frames, of wall-paper, musical instruments,
+and even toys--all had the same pathetically unanswerable
+question to propound.  But mostly they put it to themselves,
+because the others were at "Thurston's."
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware had entertained rather strong views
+on this subject, and that only a week or two ago. 
+One of his first acquaintances in Octavius had been
+the owner of the principal book-store in the place--
+a gentle and bald old man who produced the complete
+impression of a bibliophile upon what the slightest
+investigation showed to be only a meagre acquaintance
+with publishers' circulars.  But at least he had the air
+of loving his business, and the young minister had enjoyed
+a long talk with, or rather, at him.  Out of this talk
+had come the information that the store was losing money. 
+Not even the stationery department now showed a profit
+worth mentioning.  When Octavius had contained only five
+thousand inhabitants, it boasted four book-stores, two of
+them good ones.  Now, with a population more than doubled,
+only these latter two survived, and they must soon go
+to the wall.  The reason?  It was in a nutshell.  A book
+which sold at retail for one dollar and a half cost the
+bookseller ninety cents.  If it was at all a popular book,
+"Thurston's" advertised it at eighty-nine cents--
+and in any case at a profit of only two or three cents. 
+Of course it was done to widen the establishment's patronage--
+to bring people into the store.  Equally of course,
+it was destroying the book business and debauching the
+reading tastes of the community.  Without the profits from
+the light and ephemeral popular literature of the season,
+the book-store proper could not keep up its stock of more
+solid works, and indeed could not long keep open at all. 
+On the other hand, "Thurston's" dealt with nothing save
+the demand of the moment, and offered only the books
+which were the talk of the week.  Thus, in plain words,
+the book trade was going to the dogs, and it was the same
+with pretty nearly every other trade.
+
+Theron was indignant at this, and on his return home
+told Alice that he desired her to make no purchases
+whatever at "Thurston's." He even resolved to preach
+a sermon on the subject of the modern idea of admiring
+the great for crushing the small, and sketched out some
+notes for it which he thought solved the problem of
+flaying the local abuse without mentioning it by name. 
+They had lain on his desk now for ten days or more,
+and on only the previous Friday he had speculated upon
+using them that coming Sunday.
+
+On this bright and cheerful Tuesday morning he walked
+with a blithe step unhesitatingly down the main street
+to "Thurston's," and entered without any show of repugnance
+the door next to the window wherein, flanked by dangling
+banjos and key-bugles built in pyramids, was displayed
+the sign, "Pianos on the Instalment Plan."
+
+He was recognized by some responsible persons, and treated
+with distinguished deference.  They were charmed with
+the intelligence that he desired a piano, and fascinated
+by his wish to pay for it only a little at a time. 
+They had special terms for clergymen, and made him feel
+as if these were being extended to him on a silver charger
+by kneeling admirers.
+
+It was so easy to buy things here that he was a trifle
+disturbed to find his flowing course interrupted by his
+own entire ignorance as to what kind of piano he wanted. 
+He looked at all they had in stock, and heard them played upon. 
+They differed greatly in price, and, so he fancied,
+almost as much in tone.  It discouraged him to note,
+however, that several of those he thought the finest
+in tone were among the very cheapest in the lot. 
+Pondering this, and staring in hopeless puzzlement
+from one to another of the big black shiny monsters,
+he suddenly thought of something.
+
+"I would rather not decide for myself," he said, "I know
+so little about it.  If you don't mind, I will have a friend
+of mine, a skilled musician, step in and make a selection. 
+I have so much confidence in--in her judgment." 
+He added hurriedly, "It will involve only a day or two's delay."
+
+The next moment he was sorry he had spoken.  What would they
+think when they saw the organist of the Catholic church
+come to pick out a piano for the Methodist parsonage? 
+And how could he decorously prefer the request to her to
+undertake this task?  He might not meet her again for ages,
+and to his provincial notions writing would have seemed
+out of the question.  And would it not be disagreeable to
+have her know that he was buying a piano by part payments? 
+Poor Alice's dread of the washerwoman's gossip occurred
+to him, at this, and he smiled in spite of himself. 
+Then all at once the difficulty vanished.  Of course it
+would come all right somehow.  Everything did.
+
+He was on firmer ground, buying the materials for the new book,
+over on the stationery side.  His original intention had
+been to bestow this patronage upon the old bookseller,
+but these suavely smart people in "Thurston's" had had
+the effect of putting him on his honor when they asked,
+"Would there be anything else?" and he had followed
+them unresistingly.
+
+He indulged to the full his whim that everything entering into
+the construction of "Abraham" should be spick-and-span. He
+watched with his own eyes a whole ream of broad glazed white
+paper being sliced down by the cutter into single sheets,
+and thrilled with a novel ecstasy as he laid his hand
+upon the spotless bulk, so wooingly did it invite him
+to begin.  He tried a score of pens before the right one
+came to hand.  When a box of these had been laid aside,
+with ink and pen-holders and a little bronze inkstand,
+he made a sign that the outfit was complete.  Or no--
+there must be some blotting-paper. He had always used
+those blotting-pads given away by insurance companies--
+his congregations never failed to contain one or more agents,
+who had these to bestow by the armful--but the book
+deserved a virgin blotter.
+
+Theron stood by while all these things were being tied up
+together in a parcel.  The suggestion that they should
+be sent almost hurt him.  Oh, no, he would carry them
+home himself.  So strongly did they appeal to his sanguine
+imagination that he could not forbear hinting to the man
+who had shown him the pianos and was now accompanying him
+to the door that this package under his arm represented
+potentially the price of the piano he was going to have. 
+He did it in a roundabout way, with one of his droll,
+hesitating smiles.  The man did not understand at all,
+and Theron had not the temerity to repeat the remark. 
+He strode home with the precious bundle as fast as
+he could.
+
+"I thought it best, after all, not to commit myself to
+a selection," he explained about the piano at dinner-time. "In
+such a matter as this, the opinion of an expert is everything. 
+I am going to have one of the principal musicians
+of the town go and try them all, and tell me which we ought to have."
+
+"And while he's about it," said Alice, "you might ask
+him to make a little list of some of the new music. 
+I've got way behind the times, being without a piano
+so long.  Tell him not any VERY difficult pieces,
+you know."
+
+"Yes, I know," put in Theron, almost hastily,
+and began talking of other things.  His conversation
+was of the most rambling and desultory sort, because all
+the while the two lobes of his brain, as it were,
+kept up a dispute as to whether Alice ought to have been
+told that this "principal musician" was of her own sex. 
+It would certainly have been better, at the outset,
+he decided; but to mention it now would be to invest the
+fact with undue importance.  Yes, that was quite clear;
+only the clearer it became, from one point of view,
+the shadier it waxed from the other.  The problem really
+disturbed the young minister's mind throughout the meal,
+and his abstraction became so marked at last that his wife
+commented upon it.
+
+"A penny for your thoughts!" she said, with cheerful briskness. 
+This ancient formula of the farm-land had always rather
+jarred on Theron.  It presented itself now to his mind
+as a peculiarly aggravating banality.
+
+"I am going to begin my book this afternoon,"
+he remarked impressively.  "There is a great deal to think about."
+
+It turned out that there was even more to think about than he
+had imagined.  After hours of solitary musing at his desk,
+or of pacing up and down before his open book-shelves,
+Theron found the first shadows of a May-day twilight
+beginning to fall upon that beautiful pile of white paper,
+still unstained by ink.  He saw the book he wanted to write
+before him, in his mental vision, much more distinctly
+than ever, but the idea of beginning it impetuously,
+and hurling it off hot and glowing week by week, had faded
+away like a dream.
+
+This long afternoon, spent face to face with a project
+born of his own brain but yesterday, yet already so
+much bigger than himself, was really a most fruitful
+time for the young clergyman.  The lessons which cut
+most deeply into our consciousness are those we learn
+from our children.  Theron, in this first day's contact
+with the offspring of his fancy, found revealed to him
+an unsuspected and staggering truth.  It was that he
+was an extremely ignorant and rudely untrained young man,
+whose pretensions to intellectual authority among any
+educated people would be laughed at with deserved contempt.
+
+Strangely enough, after he had weathered the first shock,
+this discovery did not dismay Theron Ware.  The very completeness
+of the conviction it carried with it, saturated his mind
+with a feeling as if the fact had really been known to him
+all along.  And there came, too, after a little, an almost
+pleasurable sense of the importance of the revelation. 
+He had been merely drifting in fatuous and conceited blindness. 
+Now all at once his eyes were open; he knew what he
+had to do.  Ignorance was a thing to be remedied, and he
+would forthwith bend all his energies to cultivating
+his mind till it should blossom like a garden. 
+In this mood, Theron mentally measured himself against
+the more conspicuous of his colleagues in the Conference. 
+They also were ignorant, clownishly ignorant:  the difference
+was that they were doomed by native incapacity to go
+on all their lives without ever finding it out.  It was
+obvious to him that his case was better.  There was bright
+promise in the very fact that he had discovered his shortcomings.
+
+He had begun the afternoon by taking down from their
+places the various works in his meagre library which
+bore more or less relation to the task in hand. 
+The threescore books which constituted his printed
+possessions were almost wholly from the press of the
+Book Concern; the few exceptions were volumes which,
+though published elsewhere, had come to him through
+that giant circulating agency of the General Conference,
+and wore the stamp of its approval.  Perhaps it was the
+sight of these half-filled shelves which started this
+day's great revolution in Theron's opinions of himself. 
+He had never thought much before about owning books. 
+He had been too poor to buy many, and the conditions of
+canvassing about among one's parishioners which the thrifty
+Book Concern imposes upon those who would have without buying,
+had always repelled him.  Now, suddenly, as he moved along
+the two shelves, he felt ashamed at their beggarly showing.
+
+"The Land and the Book," in three portly volumes,
+was the most pretentious of the aids which he finally
+culled from his collection.  Beside it he laid
+out "Bible Lands," "Rivers and Lakes of Scripture,"
+"Bible Manners and Customs," the "Genesis and Exodus"
+volume of Whedon's Commentary, some old numbers of the
+"Methodist Quarterly Review," and a copy of "Josephus"
+which had belonged to his grandmother, and had seen
+him through many a weary Sunday afternoon in boyhood. 
+He glanced casually through these, one by one, as he took
+them down, and began to fear that they were not going to be
+of so much use as he had thought.  Then, seating himself,
+he read carefully through the thirteen chapters of Genesis
+which chronicle the story of the founder of Israel.
+
+Of course he had known this story from his earliest years. 
+In almost every chapter he came now upon a phrase or an
+incident which had served him as the basis for a sermon. 
+He had preached about Hagar in the wilderness,
+about Lot's wife, about the visit of the angels,
+about the intended sacrifice of Isaac, about a dozen other
+things suggested by the ancient narrative.  Somehow this
+time it all seemed different to him.  The people he read
+about were altered to his vision.  Heretofore a poetic
+light had shone about them, where indeed they had not
+glowed in a halo of sanctification.  Now, by some chance,
+this light was gone, and he saw them instead as untutored and
+unwashed barbarians, filled with animal lusts and ferocities,
+struggling by violence and foul chicanery to secure
+a foothold in a country which did not belong to them--
+all rude tramps and robbers of the uncivilized plain.
+
+The apparent fact that Abram was a Chaldean struck him
+with peculiar force.  How was it, he wondered, that this
+had never occurred to him before?  Examining himself,
+he found that he had supposed vaguely that there had been
+Jews from the beginning, or at least, say, from the flood. 
+But, no, Abram was introduced simply as a citizen
+of the Chaldean town of Ur, and there was no hint of
+any difference in race between him and his neighbors. 
+It was specially mentioned that his brother, Lot's father,
+died in Ur, the city of his nativity.  Evidently the family
+belonged there, and were Chaldeans like the rest.
+
+I do not cite this as at all a striking discovery, but it
+did have a curious effect upon Theron Ware.  Up to that
+very afternoon, his notion of the kind of book he wanted
+to write had been founded upon a popular book called "Ruth
+the Moabitess," written by a clergyman he knew very well,
+the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin.  This model performance troubled
+itself not at all with difficult points, but went swimmingly
+along through scented summer seas of pretty rhetoric,
+teaching nothing, it is true, but pleasing a good deal
+and selling like hot cakes.  Now, all at once Theron
+felt that he hated that sort of book.  HIS work should
+be of a vastly different order.  He might fairly assume,
+he thought, that if the fact that Abram was a Chaldean
+was new to him, it would fall upon the world in general
+as a novelty.  Very well, then, there was his chance. 
+He would write a learned book, showing who the Chaldeans
+were, and how their manners and beliefs differed from,
+and influenced--
+
+It was at this psychological instant that the wave of
+self-condemnation suddenly burst upon and submerged the
+young clergyman.  It passed again, leaving him staring fixedly
+at the pile of books he had taken down from the shelves,
+and gasping a little, as if for breath.  Then the humorous
+side of the thing, perversely enough, appealed to him,
+and he grinned feebly to himself at the joke of his having
+imagined that he could write learnedly about the Chaldeans,
+or anything else.  But, no, it shouldn't remain a joke! 
+His long mobile face grew serious under the new resolve. 
+He would learn what there was to be learned about the Chaldeans. 
+He rose and walked up and down the room, gathering fresh
+strength of purpose as this inviting field of research
+spread out its vistas before him.  Perhaps--yes, he would
+incidentally explore the mysteries of the Moabitic past
+as well, and thus put the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin to confusion
+on his own subject.  That would in itself be a useful thing,
+because Mifflin wore kid gloves at the Conference,
+and affected an intolerable superiority of dress and demeanor,
+and there would be general satisfaction among the plainer
+and worthier brethren at seeing him taken down a peg.
+
+Now for the first time there rose distinctly in Theron's
+mind that casual allusion which Father Forbes had made
+to the Turanians.  He recalled, too, his momentary feeling
+of mortification at not knowing who the Turanians were,
+at the time.  Possibly, if he had probed this matter more deeply,
+now as he walked and pondered in the little living-room,
+he might have traced the whole of the afternoon's mental
+experiences to that chance remark of the Romish priest. 
+But this speculation did not detain him.  He mused instead
+upon the splendid library Father Forbes must have.
+
+"Well, how does the book come on?  Have you got to 'my
+Lady Keturah' yet?'"
+
+It was Alice who spoke, opening the door from the kitchen,
+and putting in her head with a pretence of great and
+solemn caution, but with a correcting twinkle in her eyes.
+
+"I haven't got to anybody yet," answered Theron, absently. 
+"These big things must be approached slowly."
+
+Come out to supper, then, while the beans are hot,"
+said Alice.
+
+The young minister sat through this other meal, again in
+deep abstraction.  His wife pursued her little pleasantry
+about Keturah, the second wife, urging him with mock gravity
+to scold her roundly for daring to usurp Sarah's place,
+but Theron scarcely heard her, and said next to nothing. 
+He ate sparingly, and fidgeted in his seat, waiting with
+obvious impatience for the finish of the meal. 
+At last he rose abruptly.
+
+"I've got a call to make--something with reference
+to the book," he said.  "I'll run out now, I think,
+before it gets dark."
+
+He put on his hat, and strode out of the house as if his
+errand was of the utmost urgency.  Once upon the street,
+however, his pace slackened.  There was still a good deal
+of daylight outside, and he loitered aimlessly about,
+walking with bowed head and hands clasped behind him,
+until dusk fell.  Then he squared his shoulders,
+and started straight as the crow flies toward the residence
+of Father Forbes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The new Catholic church was the largest and most imposing
+public building in Octavius.  Even in its unfinished condition,
+with a bald roofing of weather-beaten boards marking on
+the stunted tower the place where a spire was to begin
+later on, it dwarfed every other edifice of the sort in
+the town, just as it put them all to shame in the matter
+of the throngs it drew, rain or shine, to its services.
+
+These facts had not heretofore been a source of satisfaction
+to the Rev. Theron Ware.  He had even alluded to the subject
+in terms which gave his wife the impression that he
+actively deplored the strength and size of the Catholic
+denomination in this new home of theirs, and was troubled
+in his mind about Rome generally.  But this evening he
+walked along the extended side of the big structure,
+which occupied nearly half the block, and then,
+turning the corner, passed in review its wide-doored,
+looming front, without any hostile emotions whatever. 
+In the gathering dusk it seemed more massive than ever before,
+but he found himself only passively considering the odd
+statement he had heard that all Catholic Church property
+was deeded absolutely in the name of the Bishop of the diocese.
+
+Only a narrow passage-way separated the church from
+the pastorate--a fine new brick residence standing
+flush upon the street.  Theron mounted the steps,
+and looked about for a bell-pull. Search revealed instead
+a little ivory button set in a ring of metal work. 
+He picked at this for a time with his finger-nail, before
+he made out the injunction, printed across it, to push. 
+Of course! how stupid of him!  This was one of those
+electric bells he had heard so much of, but which had not
+as yet made their way to the class of homes he knew. 
+For custodians of a mediaeval superstition and fanaticism,
+the Catholic clergy seemed very much up to date.  This bell
+made him feel rather more a countryman than ever.
+
+The door was opened by a tall gaunt woman, who stood
+in black relief against the radiance of the hall-way
+while Theron, choosing his words with some diffidence,
+asked if the Rev. Mr. Forbes was in.
+
+"He is" came the hush-voiced answer.  "He's at dinner, though."
+
+It took the young minister a second or two to bring
+into association in his mind this evening hour and this
+midday meal.  Then he began to say that he would call again--
+it was nothing special--but the woman suddenly cut him
+short by throwing the door wide open.
+
+"It's Mr. Ware, is it not?" she asked, in a greatly
+altered tone.  "Sure, he'd not have you go away. 
+Come inside--do, sir!--I'll tell him."
+
+Theron, with a dumb show of reluctance, crossed the threshold. 
+He noted now that the woman, who had bustled down the hall
+on her errand, was gray-haired and incredibly ugly, with a
+dark sour face, glowering black eyes, and a twisted mouth. 
+Then he saw that he was not alone in the hall-way.
+Three men and two women, all poorly clad and obviously
+working people, were seated in meek silence on a bench
+beyond the hat-rack. They glanced up at him for an instant,
+then resumed their patient study of the linoleum pattern
+on the floor at their feet.
+
+"And will you kindly step in, sir?" the elderly Gorgon
+had returned to ask.  She led Mr. Ware along the hall-way
+to a door near the end, and opened it for him to pass
+before her.
+
+He entered a room in which for the moment he could see
+nothing but a central glare of dazzling light beating
+down from a great shaded lamp upon a circular patch
+of white table linen.  Inside this ring of illumination
+points of fire sparkled from silver and porcelain,
+and two bars of burning crimson tracked across the cloth
+in reflection from tall glasses filled with wine. 
+The rest of the room was vague darkness; but the gloom
+seemed saturated with novel aromatic odors, the appetizing
+scent of which bore clear relation to what Theron's
+blinking eyes rested upon.
+
+He was able now to discern two figures at the table,
+outside the glowing circle of the lamp.  They had
+both risen, and one came toward him with cordial celerity,
+holding out a white plump hand in greeting.  He took
+this proffered hand rather limply, not wholly sure
+in the half-light that this really was Father Forbes,
+and began once more that everlasting apology to which he
+seemed doomed in the presence of the priest.  It was
+broken abruptly off by the other's protesting laughter.
+
+"My dear Mr. Ware, I beg of you," the priest urged,
+chuckling with hospitable mirth, "don't, don't apologize! 
+I give you my word, nothing in the world could have
+pleased us better than your joining us here tonight. 
+It was quite dramatic, your coming in as you did. 
+We were speaking of you at that very moment.  Oh, I forgot--
+let me make you acquainted with my friend--my very
+particular friend, Dr. Ledsmar.  Let me take your hat;
+pray draw up a chair.  Maggie will have a place laid for you
+in a minute."
+
+"Oh, I assure you--I couldn't think of it--I've just
+eaten my--my--dinner," expostulated Theron.  He murmured
+more inarticulate remonstrances a moment later, when the
+grim old domestic appeared with plates, serviette,
+and tableware for his use, but she went on spreading
+them before him as if she heard nothing.  Thus committed
+against a decent show of resistance, the young minister did
+eat a little here and there of what was set before him,
+and was human enough to regret frankly that he could
+not eat more.  It seemed to him very remarkable cookery,
+transfiguring so simple a thing as a steak, for example,
+quite out of recognition, and investing the humble
+potato with a charm he had never dreamed of. 
+He wondered from time to time if it would be polite
+to ask how the potatoes were cooked, so that he might tell Alice.
+
+The conversation at the table was not continuous,
+or even enlivened.  After the lapses into silence became marked,
+Theron began to suspect that his refusal to drink wine had
+annoyed them--the more so as he had drenched a large section
+of table-cloth in his efforts to manipulate a siphon instead. 
+He was greatly relieved, therefore, when Father Forbes
+explained in an incidental way that Dr. Ledsmar
+and he customarily ate their meals almost without a word.
+
+"It's a philosophic fad of his," the priest went on smilingly,
+"and I have fallen in with it for the sake of a quiet life;
+so that when we do have company--that is to say,
+once in a blue moon--we display no manners to speak of"
+
+"I had always supposed--that is, I've always heard--
+that it was more healthful to talk at meals," said Theron. 
+"Of course--what I mean--I took it for granted all physicians
+thought so."
+
+Dr. Ledsmar laughed.  "That depends so much upon the
+quality of the meals!" he remarked, holding his glass
+up to the light.
+
+He seemed a man of middle age and an equable disposition. 
+Theron, stealing stray glances at him around the lampshade,
+saw most distinctly of all a broad, impressive dome
+of skull, which, though obviously the result of baldness,
+gave the effect of quite belonging to the face. 
+There were gold-rimmed spectacles, through which shone
+now and again the vivid sparkle of sharp, alert eyes,
+and there was a nose of some sort not easy to classify,
+at once long and thick.  The rest was thin hair and short
+round beard, mouse-colored where the light caught them,
+but losing their outlines in the shadows of the background. 
+Theron had not heard of him among the physicians of Octavius. 
+He wondered if he might not be a doctor of something else
+than medicine, and decided upon venturing the question.
+
+"Oh, yes, it is medicine," replied Ledsmar.  "I am a doctor
+three or four times over, so far as parchments can make one. 
+In some other respects, though, I should think I am
+probably less of a doctor than anybody else now living. 
+I haven't practised--that is, regularly--for many years,
+and I take no interest whatever in keeping abreast
+of what the profession regards as its progress.  I know
+nothing beyond what was being taught in the sixties,
+and that I am glad to say I have mostly forgotten."
+
+"Dear me!" said Theron.  "I had always supposed that
+Science was the most engrossing of pursuits--that once
+a man took it up he never left it."
+
+"But that would imply a connection between Science
+and Medicine!" commented the doctor.  "My dear sir,
+they are not even on speaking terms."
+
+"Shall we go upstairs?" put in the priest, rising from his chair. 
+"It will be more comfortable to have our coffee there--
+unless indeed, Mr. Ware, tobacco is unpleasant to you?"
+
+"Oh, my, no!" the young minister exclaimed, eager to
+free himself from the suggestion of being a kill-joy.
+"I don't smoke myself; but I am very fond of the odor,
+I assure you."
+
+Father Forbes led the way out.  It could be seen now that he
+wore a long house-gown of black silk, skilfully moulded
+to his erect, shapely, and rounded form.  Though he carried
+this with the natural grace of a proud and beautiful belle,
+there was no hint of the feminine in his bearing,
+or in the contour of his pale, firm-set, handsome face. 
+As he moved through the hall-way, the five people
+whom Theron had seen waiting rose from their bench,
+and two of the women began in humble murmurs, "If you
+please, Father," and "Good-evening to your Riverence;
+"but the priest merely nodded and passed on up the staircase,
+followed by his guests.  The people sat down on their bench again.
+
+A few minutes later, reclining at his ease in a huge low chair,
+and feeling himself unaccountably at home in the most
+luxuriously appointed and delightful little room he had
+ever seen, the Rev. Theron Ware sipped his unaccustomed
+coffee and embarked upon an explanation of his errand. 
+Somehow the very profusion of scholarly symbols about him--
+the great dark rows of encased and crowded book-shelves
+rising to the ceiling, the classical engravings upon
+the wall, the revolving book-case, the reading-stand,
+the mass of littered magazines, reviews, and papers
+at either end of the costly and elaborate writing-desk--
+seemed to make it the easier for him to explain without
+reproach that he needed information about Abram.  He told
+them quite in detail the story of his book.
+
+The two others sat watching him through a faint haze of
+scented smoke, with polite encouragement on their faces. 
+Father Forbes took the added trouble to nod understandingly
+at the various points of the narrative, and when it was
+finished gave one of his little approving chuckles.
+
+"This skirts very closely upon sorcery," he said smilingly. 
+"Do you know, there is perhaps not another man in the country
+who knows Assyriology so thoroughly as our friend here,
+Dr. Ledsmar."
+
+"That's putting it too strong," remarked the Doctor. 
+"I only follow at a distance--a year or two behind. 
+But I daresay I can help you.  You are quite welcome
+to anything I have:  my books cover the ground pretty
+well up to last year.  Delitzsch is very interesting;
+but Baudissin's 'Studien zur Semitischen Religionsgeschichte'
+would come closer to what you need.  There are several
+other important Germans--Schrader, Bunsen, Duncker, Hommel,
+and so on."
+
+"Unluckily I--I don't read German readily," Theron explained
+with diffidence.
+
+"That's a pity," said the doctor, "because they do the
+best work--not only in this field, but in most others. 
+And they do so much that the mass defies translation. 
+Well, the best thing outside of German of course is Sayce. 
+I daresay you know him, though."
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head mournfully.  I don't
+seem to know any one," he murmured.
+
+The others exchanged glances.
+
+"But if I may ask, Mr. Ware," pursued the doctor,
+regarding their guest with interest through his spectacles,
+"why do you specially hit upon Abraham?  He is full
+of difficulties--enough, just now, at any rate, to warn
+off the bravest scholar.  Why not take something easier?"
+
+Theron had recovered something of his confidence.  "Oh, no,"
+he said, "that is just what attracts me to Abraham. 
+I like the complexities and contradictions in his character. 
+Take for instance all that strange and picturesque episode
+of Hagar:  see the splendid contrast between the craft and
+commercial guile of his dealings in Egypt and with Abimelech,
+and the simple, straightforward godliness of his
+later years.  No, all those difficulties only attract me. 
+Do you happen to know--of course you would know--do those
+German books, or the others, give anywhere any additional
+details of the man himself and his sayings and doings--
+little things which help, you know, to round out one's
+conception of the individual?"
+
+Again the priest and the doctor stole a furtive glance
+across the young minister's head.  It was Father Forbes
+who replied.
+
+"I fear that you are taking our friend Abraham too literally,
+Mr. Ware," he said, in that gentle semblance of paternal
+tones which seemed to go so well with his gown. 
+"Modern research, you know, quite wipes him out of existence
+as an individual.  The word 'Abram' is merely an eponym--
+it means 'exalted father.'  Practically all the names
+in the Genesis chronologies are what we call eponymous. 
+Abram is not a person at all:  he is a tribe, a sept,
+a clan.  In the same way, Shem is not intended for a man;
+it is the name of a great division of the human race. 
+Heber is simply the throwing back into allegorical substance,
+so to speak, of the Hebrews; Heth of the Hittites;
+Asshur of Assyria."
+
+"But this is something very new, this theory, isn't it?"
+queried Theron.
+
+The priest smiled and shook his head.  "Bless you, no! 
+My dear sir, there is nothing new.  Epicurus and Lucretius
+outlined the whole Darwinian theory more than two thousand
+years ago.  As for this eponym thing, why Saint Augustine
+called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago.  In his 'De
+Civitate Dei,' he expressly says of these genealogical names,
+'GENTES NON HOMINES;' that is, 'peoples, not persons.' 
+It was as obvious to him--as much a commonplace of knowledge--
+as it was to Ezekiel eight hundred years before him."
+
+"It seems passing strange that we should not know
+it now, then," commented Theron; "I mean, that everybody
+shouldn't know it."
+
+Father Forbes gave a little purring chuckle. 
+"Ah, there we get upon contentious ground," he remarked. 
+"Why should 'everybody' be supposed to know anything at all? 
+What business is it of 'everybody's' to know things? 
+The earth was just as round in the days when people
+supposed it to be flat, as it is now.  So the truth
+remains always the truth, even though you give a charter
+to ten hundred thousand separate numskulls to examine
+it by the light of their private judgment, and report
+that it is as many different varieties of something else. 
+But of course that whole question of private judgment
+versus authority is No-Man's-Land for us.  We were speaking
+of eponyms."
+
+"Yes," said Theron; "it is very interesting."
+
+"There is a curious phase of the subject which hasn't been
+worked out much," continued the priest.  "Probably the Germans
+will get at that too, sometime.  They are doing the best Irish
+work in other fields, as it is.  I spoke of Heber and Heth,
+in Genesis, as meaning the Hebrews and the Hittites. 
+Now my own people, the Irish, have far more ancient legends
+and traditions than any other nation west of Athens;
+and you find in their myth of the Milesian invasion
+and conquest two principal leaders called Heber and Ith,
+or Heth.  That is supposed to be comparatively modern--
+about the time of Solomon's Temple.  But these independent
+Irish myths go back to the fall of the Tower of Babel,
+and they have there an ancestor, grandson of Japhet,
+named Fenius Farsa, and they ascribe to him the invention
+of the alphabet.  They took their ancient name of Feine,
+the modern Fenian, from him.  Oddly enough, that is
+the name which the Romans knew the Phoenicians by,
+and to them also is ascribed the invention of the alphabet. 
+The Irish have a holy salmon of knowledge, just like the
+Chaldean man-fish. The Druids' tree-worship is identical
+with that of the Chaldeans--those pagan groves, you know,
+which the Jews were always being punished for building. 
+You see, there is nothing new.  Everything is built on
+the ruins of something else.  Just as the material earth
+is made up of countless billions of dead men's bones,
+so the mental world is all alive with the ghosts of dead
+men's thoughts and beliefs, the wraiths of dead races'
+faiths and imaginings."
+
+Father Forbes paused, then added with a twinkle in his eye: 
+"That peroration is from an old sermon of mine, in the days
+when I used to preach.  I remember rather liking it,
+at the time."
+
+"But you still preach?" asked the Rev. Mr. Ware,
+with lifted brows.
+
+"No! no more!  I only talk now and again," answered the priest,
+with what seemed a suggestion of curtness.  He made haste
+to take the conversation back again.  "The names of these
+dead-and-gone things are singularly pertinacious, though. 
+They survive indefinitely.  Take the modern name Marmaduke,
+for example.  It strikes one as peculiarly modern,
+up-to-date, doesn't it?  Well, it is the oldest name on earth--
+thousands of years older than Adam.  It is the ancient
+Chaldean Meridug, or Merodach.  He was the young god who
+interceded continually between the angry, omnipotent Ea,
+his father, and the humble and unhappy Damkina, or Earth,
+who was his mother.  This is interesting from another
+point of view, because this Merodach or Marmaduke is,
+so far as we can see now, the original prototype of our
+'divine intermediary' idea.  I daresay, though, that if we
+could go back still other scores of centuries, we should
+find whole receding series of types of this Christ-myth of ours."
+
+Theron Ware sat upright at the fall of these words,
+and flung a swift, startled look about the room--
+the instinctive glance of a man unexpectedly confronted
+with peril, and casting desperately about for means of defence
+and escape.  For the instant his mind was aflame with this
+vivid impression--that he was among sinister enemies,
+at the mercy of criminals.  He half rose under the impelling
+stress of this feeling, with the sweat standing on his brow,
+and his jaw dropped in a scared and bewildered stare.
+
+Then, quite as suddenly, the sense of shock was gone;
+and it was as if nothing at all had happened. 
+He drew a long breath, took another sip of his coffee,
+and found himself all at once reflecting almost pleasurably
+upon the charm of contact with really educated people. 
+He leaned back in the big chair again, and smiled to show
+these men of the world how much at his ease he was. 
+It required an effort, he discovered, but he made it bravely,
+and hoped he was succeeding.
+
+"It hasn't been in my power to at all lay hold of what
+the world keeps on learning nowadays about its babyhood,"
+he said.  "All I have done is to try to preserve an
+open mind, and to maintain my faith that the more we know,
+the nearer we shall approach the Throne."
+
+Dr. Ledsmar abruptly scuffled his feet on the floor,
+and took out his watch.  "I'm afraid--" he began.
+
+"No, no!  There's plenty of time," remarked the priest,
+with his soft half-smile and purring tones.  "You finish
+your cigar here with Mr. Ware, and excuse me while I run
+down and get rid of the people in the hall."
+
+Father Forbes tossed his cigar-end into the fender. 
+Then he took from the mantel a strange three-cornered
+black-velvet cap, with a dangling silk tassel at the side,
+put it on his head, and went out.
+
+Theron, being left alone with the doctor, hardly knew what
+to do or say.  He took up a paper from the floor beside him,
+but realized that it would be impolite to go farther,
+and laid it on his knee.  Some trace of that earlier
+momentary feeling that he was in hostile hands came back,
+and worried him.  He lifted himself upright in the chair,
+and then became conscious that what really disturbed him
+was the fact that Dr. Ledsmar had turned in his seat,
+crossed his legs, and was contemplating him with a gravely
+concentrated scrutiny through his spectacles.
+
+This uncomfortable gaze kept itself up a long way
+beyond the point of good manners; but the doctor seemed
+not to mind that at all.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+When Dr. Ledsmar finally spoke, it was in a kindlier tone
+than the young minister had looked for.  "I had half a notion
+of going to hear you preach the other evening," he said;
+"but at the last minute I backed out.  I daresay I shall
+pluck up the courage, sooner or later, and really go. 
+It must be fully twenty years since I last heard a sermon,
+and I had supposed that that would suffice for the rest
+of my life.  But they tell me that you are worth while;
+and, for some reason or other, I find myself curious on
+the subject."
+
+Involved and dubious though the compliment might be,
+Theron felt himself flushing with satisfaction.  He nodded
+his acknowledgment, and changed the topic.
+
+"I was surprised to hear Father Forbes say that he did
+not preach," he remarked.
+
+"Why should he?" asked the doctor, indifferently. 
+"I suppose he hasn't more than fifteen parishioners
+in a thousand who would understand him if he did,
+and of these probably twelve would join in a complaint
+to his Bishop about the heterodox tone of his sermon. 
+There is no point in his going to all that pains,
+merely to incur that risk.  Nobody wants him to preach,
+and he has reached an age where personal vanity no longer
+tempts him to do so.  What IS wanted of him is that he
+should be the paternal, ceremonial, authoritative head
+and centre of his flock, adviser, monitor, overseer,
+elder brother, friend, patron, seigneur--whatever you like--
+everything except a bore.  They draw the line at that. 
+You see how diametrically opposed this Catholic point of
+view is to the Protestant."
+
+"The difference does seem extremely curious to me,"
+said Theron.  "Now, those people in the hall--"
+
+"Go on," put in the doctor, as the other faltered hesitatingly. 
+"I know what you were going to say.  It struck you
+as odd that he should let them wait on the bench there,
+while he came up here to smoke."
+
+Theron smiled faintly.  "I WAS thinking that my--
+my parishioners wouldn't have taken it so quietly. 
+But of course--it is all so different!"
+
+"As chalk from cheese!" said Dr. Ledsmar, lighting a
+fresh cigar.  "I daresay every one you saw there had come
+either to take the pledge, or see to it that one of the
+others took it.  That is the chief industry in the hall,
+so far as I have observed.  Now discipline is an important
+element in the machinery here.  Coming to take the pledge
+implies that you have been drunk and are now ashamed. 
+Both states have their values, but they are opposed. 
+Sitting on that bench tends to develop penitence to the
+prejudice of alcoholism.  But at no stage would it ever
+occur to the occupant of the bench that he was the best
+judge of how long he was to sit there, or that his priest
+should interrupt his dinner or general personal routine,
+in order to administer that pledge.  Now, I daresay you
+have no people at all coming to 'swear off.'"
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head.  "No; if a man with us
+got as bad as all that, he wouldn't come near the church
+at all.  He'd simply drop out, and there would be an end
+to it."
+
+"Quite so," interjected the doctor.  "That is the
+voluntary system.  But these fellows can't drop out. 
+There's no bottom to the Catholic Church.  Everything
+that's in, stays in.  If you don't mind my saying so--
+of course I view you all impartially from the outside--
+but it seems logical to me that a church should exist
+for those who need its help, and not for those who by their
+own profession are so good already that it is they who
+help the church.  Now, you turn a man out of your church
+who behaves badly:  that must be on the theory that his
+remaining in would injure the church, and that in turn
+involves the idea that it is the excellent character
+of the parishioners which imparts virtue to the church. 
+The Catholics' conception, you see, is quite the converse. 
+Such virtue as they keep in stock is on tap, so to speak,
+here in the church itself, and the parishioners come and
+get some for themselves according to their need for it. 
+Some come every day, some only once a year, some perhaps
+never between their baptism and their funeral.  But they
+all have a right here, the professional burglar every whit
+as much as the speckless saint.  The only stipulation
+is that they oughtn't to come under false pretences: 
+the burglar is in honor bound not to pass himself off to his
+priest as the saint.  But that is merely a moral obligation,
+established in the burglar's own interest.  It does
+him no good to come unless he feels that he is playing
+the rules of the game, and one of these is confession. 
+If he cheats there, he knows that he is cheating
+nobody but himself, and might much better have stopped
+away altogether."
+
+Theron nodded his head comprehendingly.  He had a great
+many views about the Romanish rite of confession which did
+not at all square with this statement of the case, but this
+did not seem a specially fit time for bringing them forth. 
+There was indeed a sense of languid repletion in his mind,
+as if it had been overfed and wanted to lie down for awhile. 
+He contented himself with nodding again, and murmuring
+reflectively, "Yes, it is all strangely different."
+
+His tone was an invitation to silence; and the doctor turned
+his attention to the cigar, studying its ash for a minute
+with an air of deep meditation, and then solemnly blowing
+out a slow series of smoke-rings. Theron watched him
+with an indolent, placid eye, wondering lazily if it was,
+after all, so very pleasant to smoke.
+
+There fell upon this silence--with a softness so delicate
+that it came almost like a progression in the hush--
+the sound of sweet music.  For a little, strain and source
+were alike indefinite--an impalpable setting to harmony
+of the mellowed light, the perfumed opalescence of the air,
+the luxury and charm of the room.  Then it rose as by a
+sweeping curve of beauty, into a firm, calm, severe melody,
+delicious to the ear, but as cold in the mind's vision
+as moonlit sculpture.  It went on upward with stately
+collectedness of power, till the atmosphere seemed all
+alive with the trembling consciousness of the presence
+of lofty souls, sternly pure and pitilessly great.
+
+Theron found himself moved as he had never been before. 
+He almost resented the discovery, when it was presented
+to him by the prosaic, mechanical side of his brain,
+that he was listening to organ-music, and that it came
+through the open window from the church close by. 
+He would fain have reclined in his chair and closed
+his eyes, and saturated himself with the uttermost fulness
+of the sensation.  Yet, in absurd despite of himself,
+he rose and moved over to the window.
+
+Only a narrow alley separated the pastorate from the church;
+Mr. Ware could have touched with a walking-stick the
+opposite wall.  Indirectly facing him was the arched and
+mullioned top of a great window.  A dim light from within shone
+through the more translucent portions of the glass below,
+throwing out faint little bars of party-colored radiance
+upon the blackness of the deep passage-way. He could
+vaguely trace by these the outlines of some sort of picture
+on the window.  There were human figures in it, and--yes--
+up here in the centre, nearest him, was a woman's head. 
+There was a halo about it, engirdling rich, flowing waves
+of reddish hair, the lights in which glowed like flame. 
+The face itself was barely distinguishable, but its
+half-suggested form raised a curious sense of resemblance
+to some other face.  He looked at it closely, blankly,
+the noble music throbbing through his brain meanwhile.
+
+"It's that Madden girl!" he suddenly heard a voice say
+by his side.  Dr. Ledsmar had followed him to the window,
+and was close at his shoulder.
+
+Theron's thoughts were upon the puzzling shadowed
+lineaments on the stained glass.  He saw now in a flash
+the resemblance which had baffled him.  "It IS like her,
+of course," he said.
+
+"Yes, unfortunately, it IS just like her," replied the doctor,
+with a hostile note in his voice.  "Whenever I am
+dining here, she always goes in and kicks up that racket. 
+She knows I hate it."
+
+"Oh, you mean that it is she who is playing," remarked Theron. 
+"I thought you referred to--at least--I was thinking of--"
+
+His sentence died off in inconsequence.  He had a
+feeling that he did not want to talk with the doctor
+about the stained-glass likeness.  The music had sunk
+away now into fragmentary and unconnected passages,
+broken here and there by abrupt stops.  Dr. Ledsmar
+stretched an arm out past him and shut the window. 
+"Let's hear as little of the row as we can," he said,
+and the two went back to their chairs.
+
+"Pardon me for the question," the Rev. Mr. Ware said,
+after a pause which began to affect him as constrained,
+"but something you said about dining--you don't
+live here, then?  In the house, I mean?"
+
+The doctor laughed--a characteristically abrupt,
+dry little laugh, which struck Theron at once as bearing
+a sort of black-sheep relationship to the priest's
+habitual chuckle.  "That must have been puzzling you no end,"
+he said--"that notion that the pastorate kept a devil's
+advocate on the premises.  No, Mr. Ware, I don't live here. 
+I inhabit a house of my own--you may have seen it--
+an old-fashioned place up beyond the race-course,
+with a sort of tower at the back, and a big garden. 
+But I dine here three or four times a week.  It is an old
+arrangement of ours.  Vincent and I have been friends
+for many years now.  We are quite alone in the world,
+we two--much to our mutual satisfaction.  You must come
+up and see me some time; come up and have a look over
+the books we were speaking of."
+
+"I am much obliged," said Theron, without enthusiasm. 
+The thought of the doctor by himself did not attract
+him greatly.
+
+The reservation in his tone seemed to interest the doctor. 
+"I suppose you are the first man I have asked in a
+dozen years," he remarked, frankly willing that the young
+minister should appreciate the favor extended him. 
+"It must be fully that since anybody but Vincent Forbes
+has been under my roof; that is, of my own species,
+I mean."
+
+"You live there quite alone," commented Theron.
+
+"Quite--with my dogs and cats and lizards--and my Chinaman. 
+I mustn't forget him."  The doctor noted the inquiry
+in the other's lifted brows, and smilingly explained. 
+"He is my solitary servant.  Possibly he might not appeal
+to you much; but I can assure you he used to interest
+Octavius a great deal when I first brought him here,
+ten years ago or so.  He afforded occupation for all the
+idle boys in the village for a twelve-month at least. 
+They used to lie in wait for him all day long, with stones
+or horse-chestnuts or snowballs, according to the season. 
+The Irishmen from the wagon-works nearly killed him
+once or twice, but he patiently lived it all down. 
+The Chinaman has the patience to live everything down--
+the Caucasian races included.  He will see us all to bed,
+will that gentleman with the pigtail!"
+
+The music over in the church had lifted itself again into form
+and sequence, and defied the closed window.  If anything,
+it was louder than before, and the sonorous roar of the
+bass-pedals seemed to be shaking the very walls.  It was
+something with a big-lunged, exultant, triumphing swing in it--
+something which ought to have been sung on the battlefield
+at the close of day by the whole jubilant army of victors. 
+It was impossible to pretend not to be listening to it;
+but the doctor submitted with an obvious scowl, and bit
+off the tip of his third cigar with an annoyed air.
+
+"You don't seem to care much for music," suggested Mr. Ware,
+when a lull came.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar looked up, lighted match in hand. 
+"Say musicians!" he growled.  "Has it ever occurred to you,"
+he went on, between puffs at the flame, "that the only
+animals who make the noises we call music are of the
+bird family--a debased offshoot of the reptilian creation--
+the very lowest types of the vertebrata now in existence? 
+I insist upon the parallel among humans.  I have in
+my time, sir, had considerable opportunities for studying
+close at hand the various orders of mammalia who devote
+themselves to what they describe as the arts.  It may sound
+a harsh judgement, but I am convinced that musicians stand
+on the very bottom rung of the ladder in the sub-cellar
+of human intelligence, even lower than painters and actors."
+
+This seemed such unqualified nonsense to the Rev. Mr. Ware
+that he offered no comment whatever upon it. 
+He tried instead to divert his thoughts to the stormy
+strains which rolled in through the vibrating brickwork,
+and to picture to himself the large, capable figure of
+Miss Madden seated in the half-light at the organ-board,
+swaying to and fro in a splendid ecstasy of power
+as she evoked at will this superb and ordered uproar. 
+But the doctor broke insistently in upon his musings.
+
+"All art, so-called, is decay," he said, raising his voice. 
+"When a race begins to brood on the beautiful--so-called--
+it is a sign of rot, of getting ready to fall from
+the tree.  Take the Jews--those marvellous old fellows--
+who were never more than a handful, yet have imposed
+the rule of their ideas and their gods upon us for fifteen
+hundred years.  Why?  They were forbidden by their
+most fundamental law to make sculptures or pictures. 
+That was at a time when the Egyptians, when the Assyrians,
+and other Semites, were running to artistic riot. 
+Every great museum in the world now has whole floors
+devoted to statues from the Nile, and marvellous carvings
+from the palaces of Sargon and Assurbanipal.  You can
+get the artistic remains of the Jews during that whole
+period into a child's wheelbarrow.  They had the sense
+and strength to penalize art; they alone survived. 
+They saw the Egyptians go, the Assyrians go, the Greeks go,
+the late Romans go, the Moors in Spain go--all the artistic
+peoples perish.  They remained triumphing over all. 
+Now at last their long-belated apogee is here; their decline
+is at hand.  I am told that in this present generation
+in Europe the Jews are producing a great lot of young
+painters and sculptors and actors, just as for a century
+they have been producing famous composers and musicians. 
+That means the end of the Jews!"
+
+"What! have you only got as far as that?" came the welcome
+interruption of a cheery voice.  Father Forbes had entered
+the room, and stood looking down with a whimsical twinkle
+in his eye from one to the other of his guests.
+
+"You must have been taken over the ground at a very slow pace,
+Mr. Ware," he continued, chuckling softly, "to have
+arrived merely at the collapse of the New Jerusalem. 
+I fancied I had given him time enough to bring you
+straight up to the end of all of us, with that Chinaman
+of his gently slapping our graves with his pigtail. 
+That's where the doctor always winds up, if he's allowed
+to run his course."
+
+"It has all been very interesting, extremely so, I assure you,"
+faltered Theron.  It had become suddenly apparent to him
+that he desired nothing so much as to make his escape--
+that he had indeed only been waiting for the host's return
+to do so.
+
+He rose at this, and explained that he must be going. 
+No special effort being put forth to restrain him,
+he presently made his way out, Father Forbes hospitably
+following him down to the door, and putting a very gracious
+cordiality into his adieux.
+
+The night was warm and black.  Theron stood still in it
+the moment the pastorate door had closed; the sudden
+darkness was so thick that it was as if he had closed
+his eyes.  His dominant sensation was of a deep relief
+and rest after some undue fatigue.  It crossed his mind
+that drunken men probably felt like that as they leaned
+against things on their way home.  He was affected himself,
+he saw, by the weariness and half-nausea following
+a mental intoxication.  The conceit pleased him,
+and he smiled to himself as he turned and took the first
+homeward steps.  It must be growing late, he thought. 
+Alice would be wondering as she waited.
+
+There was a street lamp at the corner, and as he walked
+toward it he noted all at once that his feet were keeping
+step to the movement of the music proceeding from the
+organ within the church--a vaguely processional air,
+marked enough in measure, but still with a dreamy effect. 
+It became a pleasure to identify his progress with the quaint
+rhythm of sound as he sauntered along.  He discovered,
+as he neared the light, that he was instinctively stepping
+over the seams in the flagstone sidewalk as he had done
+as a boy.  He smiled again at this.  There was something
+exceptionally juvenile and buoyant about his mood,
+now that he examined it.  He set it down as a reaction from
+that doctor's extravagant and incendiary talk.  One thing
+was certain--he would never be caught up at that house
+beyond the race-course, with its reptiles and its Chinaman. 
+Should he ever even go to the pastorate again?  He decided
+not to quite definitely answer THAT in the negative,
+but as he felt now, the chances were all against it.
+
+Turning the corner, and walking off into the shadows
+along the side of the huge church building, Theron noted,
+almost at the end of the edifice, a small door--
+the entrance to a porch coming out to the sidewalk--
+which stood wide open.  A thin, pale, vertical line
+of light showed that the inner door, too, was ajar.
+
+Through this wee aperture the organ-music, reduced
+and mellowed by distance, came to him again with that
+same curious, intimate, personal relation which had so moved
+him at the start, before the doctor closed the window. 
+It was as if it was being played for him alone.
+
+He paused for a doubting minute or two, with bowed head,
+listening to the exquisite harmony which floated out to
+caress and soothe and enfold him.  There was no spiritual,
+or at least pious, effect in it now.  He fancied that
+it must be secular music, or, if not, then something
+adapted to marriage ceremonies--rich, vivid, passionate,
+a celebration of beauty and the glory of possession,
+with its ruling note of joy only heightened by soft,
+wooing interludes, and here and there the tremor of a fond,
+timid little sob.
+
+Theron turned away irresolutely, half frightened at the
+undreamt-of impression this music was making upon him. 
+Then, all at once, he wheeled and stepped boldly into
+the porch, pushing the inner door open and hearing it
+rustle against its leathern frame as it swung to behind him.
+
+He had never been inside a Catholic church before.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Jeremiah Madden was supposed to be probably the richest
+man in Octavius.  There was no doubt at all about his
+being its least pretentious citizen.
+
+The huge and ornate modern mansion which he had built,
+putting to shame every other house in the place, gave an effect
+of ostentation to the Maddens as a family; it seemed only
+to accentuate the air of humility which enveloped Jeremiah
+as with a garment.  Everybody knew some version of the many
+tales afloat which, in a kindly spirit, illustrated the
+incongruity between him and his splendid habitation. 
+Some had it that he slept in the shed.  Others told whimsical
+stories of his sitting alone in the kitchen evenings,
+smoking his old clay pipe, and sorrowing because the
+second Mrs. Madden would not suffer the pigs and chickens
+to come in and bear him company.  But no matter how comic
+the exaggeration, these legends were invariably amiable. 
+It lay in no man's mouth to speak harshly of Jeremiah Madden.
+
+He had been born a Connemara peasant, and he would die one. 
+When he was ten years old he had seen some of his
+own family, and most of his neighbors, starve to death. 
+He could remember looking at the stiffened figure of a woman
+stretched on the stones by the roadside, with the green
+stain of nettles on her white lips.  A girl five years or
+so older than himself, also a Madden and distantly related,
+had started in despair off across the mountains to the town
+where it was said the poor-law officers were dealing
+out food.  He could recall her coming back next day,
+wild-eyed with hunger and the fever; the officers had
+refused her relief because her bare legs were not wholly
+shrunken to the bone.  "While there's a calf on the shank,
+there's no starvation," they had explained to her. 
+The girl died without profiting by this official apothegm. 
+The boy found it burned ineffaceably upon his brain. 
+Now, after a lapse of more than forty years, it seemed
+the thing that he remembered best about Ireland.
+
+He had drifted westward as an unconsidered, unresisting item
+in that vast flight of the famine years.  Others whom
+he rubbed against in that melancholy exodus, and deemed
+of much greater promise than himself, had done badly. 
+Somehow he did well.  He learned the wheelwright's trade,
+and really that seemed all there was to tell.  The rest
+had been calm and sequent progression--steady employment
+as a journeyman first; then marriage and a house and lot;
+the modest start as a master; the move to Octavius and
+cheap lumber; the growth of his business, always marked
+of late years stupendous--all following naturally,
+easily, one thing out of another.  Jeremiah encountered
+the idea among his fellows, now and again, that he was
+entitled to feel proud of all this.  He smiled to himself
+at the thought, and then sent a sigh after the smile. 
+What was it all but empty and transient vanity?  The score
+of other Connemara boys he had known--none very fortunate,
+several broken tragically in prison or the gutter,
+nearly all now gone the way of flesh--were as good as he. 
+He could not have it in his heart to take credit for
+his success; it would have been like sneering over their
+poor graves.
+
+Jeremiah Madden was now fifty-three--a little man
+of a reddened, weather-worn skin and a meditative,
+almost saddened, aspect.  He had blue eyes, but his
+scanty iron-gray hair showed raven black in its shadows. 
+The width and prominence of his cheek-bones dominated all
+one's recollections of his face.  The long vertical upper-lip
+and irregular teeth made, in repose, an unshapely mouth;
+its smile, though, sweetened the whole countenance. 
+He wore a fringe of stiff, steel-colored beard, passing from
+ear to ear under his chin.  His week-day clothes were
+as simple as his workaday manners, fitting his short
+black pipe and his steadfast devotion to his business. 
+On Sundays he dressed with a certain rigor of respectability,
+all in black, and laid aside tobacco, at least to the
+public view.  He never missed going to the early Low Mass,
+quite alone.  His family always came later, at the ten
+o'clock High Mass.
+
+There had been, at one time or another, a good many
+members of this family.  Two wives had borne Jeremiah
+Madden a total of over a dozen children.  Of these there
+survived now only two of the first Mrs. Madden's offspring--
+Michael and Celia--and a son of the present wife, who had
+been baptized Terence, but called himself Theodore. 
+This minority of the family inhabited the great new house
+on Main Street.  Jeremiah went every Sunday afternoon
+by himself to kneel in the presence of the majority,
+there where they lay in Saint Agnes' consecrated ground. 
+If the weather was good, he generally extended his
+walk through the fields to an old deserted Catholic
+burial-field, which had been used only in the first years
+after the famine invasion, and now was clean forgotten. 
+The old wagon-maker liked to look over the primitive,
+neglected stones which marked the graves of these earlier exiles. 
+Fully half of the inscriptions mentioned his County Galway--
+there were two naming the very parish adjoining his. 
+The latest date on any stone was of the remoter 'fifties. 
+They had all been stricken down, here in this strange
+land with its bitter winters, while the memory of their
+own soft, humid, gentle west-coast air was fresh within them. 
+Musing upon the clumsy sculpture, with its "R.I.P.," or
+"Pray for the Soul of," half to be guessed under the stain
+and moss of a generation, there would seem to him but a step
+from this present to that heart-rending, awful past. 
+What had happened between was a meaningless vision--
+as impersonal as the passing of the planets overhead. 
+He rarely had an impulse to tears in the new cemetery,
+where his ten children were.  He never left this weed-grown,
+forsaken old God's-acre dry-eyed.
+
+One must not construct from all this the image of a
+melancholy man, as his fellows met and knew him.  Mr. Madden
+kept his griefs, racial and individual, for his own use. 
+To the men about him in the offices and the shops he
+presented day after day, year after year, an imperturbable
+cheeriness of demeanor.  He had been always fortunate
+in the selection of lieutenants and chief helpers. 
+Two of these had grown now into partners, and were almost
+as much a part of the big enterprise as Jeremiah himself. 
+They spoke often of their inability to remember any unjust
+or petulant word of his--much less any unworthy deed. 
+Once they had seen him in a great rage, all the more impressive
+because he said next to nothing.  A thoughtless fellow
+told a dirty story in the presence of some apprentices;
+and Madden, listening to this, drove the offender implacably
+from his employ.  It was years now since any one who knew
+him had ventured upon lewd pleasantries in his hearing. 
+Jokes of the sort which women might hear he was very
+fond of though he had not much humor of his own. 
+Of books he knew nothing whatever, and he made only
+the most perfunctory pretence now and again of reading
+the newspapers.
+
+The elder son Michael was very like his father--diligent,
+unassuming, kindly, and simple--a plain, tall, thin red man
+of nearly thirty, who toiled in paper cap and rolled-up
+shirt-sleeves as the superintendent in the saw-mill,
+and put on no airs whatever as the son of the master. 
+If there was surprise felt at his not being taken into
+the firm as a partner, he gave no hint of sharing it. 
+He attended to his religious duties with great zeal,
+and was President of the Sodality as a matter of course. 
+This was regarded as his blind side; and young employees
+who cultivated it, and made broad their phylacteries
+under his notice, certainly had an added chance of
+getting on well in the works.  To some few whom he knew
+specially well, Michael would confess that if he had had
+the brains for it, he should have wished to be a priest. 
+He displayed no inclination to marry.
+
+The other son, Terence, was some eight years younger,
+and seemed the product of a wholly different race. 
+The contrast between Michael's sandy skin and long gaunt
+visage and this dark boy's handsome, rounded face,
+with its prettily curling black hair, large, heavily
+fringed brown eyes, and delicately modelled features,
+was not more obvious than their temperamental separation. 
+This second lad had been away for years at school,--
+indeed, at a good many schools, for no one seemed to
+manage to keep him long.  He had been with the Jesuits
+at Georgetown, with the Christian Brothers at Manhattan;
+the sectarian Mt.  St. Mary's and the severely secular
+Annapolis had both been tried, and proved misfits. 
+The young man was home again now, and save that his
+name had become Theodore, he appeared in no wise
+changed from the beautiful, wilful, bold, and showy boy
+who had gone away in his teens.  He was still rather
+small for his years, but so gracefully moulded in form,
+and so perfectly tailored, that the fact seemed rather
+an advantage than otherwise.  He never dreamed of going
+near the wagon-works, but he did go a good deal--in fact,
+most of the time--to the Nedahma Club.  His mother spoke
+often to her friends about her fears for his health. 
+He never spoke to his friends about his mother at all.
+
+The second Mrs. Madden did not, indeed, appeal strongly
+to the family pride.  She had been a Miss Foley,
+a dress-maker, and an old maid.  Jeremiah had married
+her after a brief widowerhood, principally because she
+was the sister of his parish priest, and had a considerable
+reputation for piety.  It was at a time when the expansion
+of his business was promising certain wealth, and suggesting
+the removal to Octavius.  He was conscious of a notion that
+his obligations to social respectability were increasing;
+it was certain that the embarrassments of a motherless
+family were.  Miss Foley had shown a good deal of attention
+to his little children.  She was not ill-looking;
+she bore herself with modesty; she was the priest's sister--
+the niece once removed of a vicar-general. And so it came about.
+
+Although those most concerned did not say so, everybody
+could see from the outset the pity of its ever having
+come about at all.  The pious and stiffly respectable
+priest's sister had been harmless enough as a spinster. 
+It made the heart ache to contemplate her as a wife. 
+Incredibly narrow-minded, ignorant, suspicious, vain,
+and sour-tempered, she must have driven a less equable and
+well-rooted man than Jeremiah Madden to drink or flight. 
+He may have had his temptations, but they made no mark on
+the even record of his life.  He only worked the harder,
+concentrating upon his business those extra hours which
+another sort of home-life would have claimed instead. 
+The end of twenty years found him a rich man, but still
+toiling pertinaciously day by day, as if he had his wage
+to earn.  In the great house which had been built to please,
+or rather placate, his wife, he kept to himself as much
+as possible.  The popular story of his smoking alone
+in the kitchen was more or less true; only Michael as a
+rule sat with him, too weak-lunged for tobacco himself,
+but reading stray scraps from the papers to the lonely
+old man, and talking with him about the works,
+the while Jeremiah meditatively sucked his clay pipe. 
+One or two evenings in the week the twain spent up in Celia's
+part of the house, listening with the awe of simple,
+honest mechanics to the music she played for them.
+
+Celia was to them something indefinably less, indescribably more,
+than a daughter and sister.  They could not think there
+had ever been anything like her before in the world;
+the notion of criticising any deed or word of hers
+would have appeared to them monstrous and unnatural.
+
+She seemed to have come up to this radiant and wise and
+marvellously talented womanhood of hers, to their minds,
+quite spontaneously.  There had been a little Celia--
+a red-headed, sulky, mutinous slip of a girl, always at war
+with her step-mother, and affording no special comfort
+or hope to the rest of the family.  Then there was a
+long gap, during which the father, four times a year,
+handed Michael a letter he had received from the superioress
+of a distant convent, referring with cold formality
+to the studies and discipline by which Miss Madden
+might profit more if she had been better brought up,
+and enclosing a large bill.  Then all at once they beheld
+a big Celia, whom they spoke of as being home again,
+but who really seemed never to have been there before--
+a tall, handsome, confident young woman, swift of tongue
+and apprehension, appearing to know everything there was
+to be known by the most learned, able to paint pictures,
+carve wood, speak in divers languages, and make music for
+the gods, yet with it all a very proud lady, one might say
+a queen.
+
+The miracle of such a Celia as this impressed itself
+even upon the step-mother. Mrs. Madden had looked
+forward with a certain grim tightening of her combative
+jaws to the home-coming of the "red-head." She felt
+herself much more the fine lady now than she had been
+when the girl went away.  She had her carriage now,
+and the magnificent new house was nearly finished,
+and she had a greater number of ailments, and spent
+far more money on doctor's bills, than any other lady
+in the whole section.  The flush of pride in her greatest
+achievement up to date--having the most celebrated of New
+York physicians brought up to Octavius by special train--
+still prickled in her blood.  It was in all the papers,
+and the admiration of the flatterers and "soft-sawdherers"--
+wives of Irish merchants and smaller professional men
+who formed her social circle--was raising visions in her
+poor head of going next year with Theodore to Saratoga,
+and fastening the attention of the whole fashionable
+republic upon the variety and resources of her invalidism. 
+Mrs. Madden's fancy did not run to the length of seeing
+her step-daughter also at Saratoga; it pictured her still
+as the sullen and hated "red-head," moping defiantly
+in corners, or courting by her insolence the punishments
+which leaped against their leash in the step-mother's
+mind to get at her.
+
+The real Celia, when she came, fairly took Mrs. Madden's
+breath away.  The peevish little plans for annoyance and tyranny,
+the resolutions born of ignorant and jealous egotism,
+found themselves swept out of sight by the very first swirl
+of Celia's dress-train, when she came down from her room
+robed in peacock blue.  The step-mother could only stare.
+
+Now, after two years of it, Mrs. Madden still viewed her
+step-daughter with round-eyed uncertainty, not unmixed
+with wrathful fear.  She still drove about behind two
+magnificent horses; the new house had become almost
+tiresome by familiarity; her pre-eminence in the interested
+minds of the Dearborn County Medical Society was as
+towering as ever, but somehow it was all different. 
+There was a note of unreality nowadays in Mrs. Donnelly's
+professions of wonder at her bearing up under her
+multiplied maladies; there was almost a leer of mockery
+in the sympathetic smirk with which the Misses Mangan
+listened to her symptoms.  Even the doctors, though they
+kept their faces turned toward her, obviously did not pay
+much attention; the people in the street seemed no longer
+to look at her and her equipage at all.  Worst of all,
+something of the meaning of this managed to penetrate
+her own mind.  She caught now and again a dim glimpse
+of herself as others must have been seeing her for years--
+as a stupid, ugly, boastful, and bad-tempered old nuisance. 
+And it was always as if she saw this in a mirror held
+up by Celia.
+
+Of open discord there had been next to none.  Celia would
+not permit it, and showed this so clearly from the
+start that there was scarcely need for her saying it. 
+It seemed hardly necessary for her to put into words any
+of her desires, for that matter.  All existing arrangements
+in the Madden household seemed to shrink automatically
+and make room for her, whichever way she walked.  A whole
+quarter of the unfinished house set itself apart for her. 
+Partitions altered themselves; door-ways moved across
+to opposite sides; a recess opened itself, tall and deep,
+for it knew not what statue--simply because, it seemed,
+the Lady Celia willed it so.
+
+When the family moved into this mansion, it was with a
+consciousness that the only one who really belonged there
+was Celia.  She alone could behave like one perfectly at home. 
+It seemed entirely natural to the others that she should
+do just what she liked, shut them off from her portion
+of the house, take her meals there if she felt disposed,
+and keep such hours as pleased her instant whim.  If she
+awakened them at midnight by her piano, or deferred her
+breakfast to the late afternoon, they felt that it must be
+all right, since Celia did it.  She had one room furnished
+with only divans and huge, soft cushions, its walls covered
+with large copies of statuary not too strictly clothed,
+which she would suffer no one, not even the servants,
+to enter.  Michael fancied sometimes, when he passed the
+draped entrance to this sacred chamber, that the portiere
+smelt of tobacco, but he would not have spoken of it,
+even had he been sure.  Old Jeremiah, whose established habit
+it was to audit minutely the expenses of his household,
+covered over round sums to Celia's separate banking account,
+upon the mere playful hint of her holding her check-book up,
+without a dream of questioning her.
+
+That the step-mother had joy, or indeed anything but gall
+and wormwood, out of all this is not to be pretended. 
+There lingered along in the recollection of the family some
+vague memories of her having tried to assert an authority
+over Celia's comings and goings at the outset, but they
+grouped themselves as only parts of the general disorder of
+moving and settling, which a fort-night or so quite righted. 
+Mrs. Madden still permitted herself a certain license
+of hostile comment when her step-daughter was not present,
+and listened with gratification to what the women of her
+acquaintance ventured upon saying in the same spirit;
+but actual interference or remonstrance she never
+offered nowadays.  The two rarely met, for that matter,
+and exchanged only the baldest and curtest forms of speech.
+
+Celia Madden interested all Octavius deeply.  This she
+must have done in any case, if only because she was
+the only daughter of its richest citizen.  But the bold,
+luxuriant quality of her beauty, the original and piquant
+freedom of her manners, the stories told in gossip about
+her lawlessness at home, her intellectual attainments,
+and artistic vagaries--these were even more exciting. 
+The unlikelihood of her marrying any one--at least
+any Octavian--was felt to add a certain romantic zest
+to the image she made on the local perceptions. 
+There was no visible young Irishman at all approaching
+the social and financial standard of the Maddens;
+it was taken for granted that a mixed marriage was quite
+out of the question in this case.  She seemed to have
+more business about the church than even the priest. 
+She was always playing the organ, or drilling the choir,
+or decorating the altars with flowers, or looking over
+the robes of the acolytes for rents and stains, or going
+in or out of the pastorate.  Clearly this was not the sort
+of girl to take a Protestant husband.
+
+The gossip of the town concerning her was, however,
+exclusively Protestant.  The Irish spoke of her,
+even among themselves, but seldom.  There was no occasion
+for them to pretend to like her:  they did not know her,
+except in the most distant and formal fashion. 
+Even the members of the choir, of both sexes, had the sense
+of being held away from her at haughty arm's length. 
+No single parishioner dreamed of calling her friend. 
+But when they referred to her, it was always with a cautious
+and respectful reticence.  For one thing, she was the daughter
+of their chief man, the man they most esteemed and loved. 
+For another, reservations they may have had in their souls
+about her touched close upon a delicately sore spot. 
+It could not escape their notice that their Protestant
+neighbors were watching her with vigilant curiosity,
+and with a certain tendency to wink when her name came
+into conversation along with that of Father Forbes. 
+It had never yet got beyond a tendency--the barest
+fluttering suggestion of a tempted eyelid--but the
+whole Irish population of the place felt themselves
+to be waiting, with clenched fists but sinking hearts,
+for the wink itself.
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware had not caught even the faintest
+hint of these overtures to suspicion.
+
+When he had entered the huge, dark, cool vault of the church,
+he could see nothing at first but a faint light up over
+the gallery, far at the other end.  Then, little by little,
+his surroundings shaped themselves out of the gloom. 
+To his right was a rail and some broad steps rising toward
+a softly confused mass of little gray vertical bars
+and the pale twinkle of tiny spots of gilded reflection,
+which he made out in the dusk to be the candles and
+trappings of the altar.  Overhead the great arches faded
+away from foundations of dimly discernible capitals into
+utter blackness.  There was a strange medicinal odor--
+as of cubeb cigarettes--in the air.
+
+After a little pause, he tiptoed noiselessly up the side
+aisle toward the end of the church--toward the light above
+the gallery.  This radiance from a single gas-jet expanded
+as he advanced, and spread itself upward over a burnished
+row of monster metal pipes, which went towering into
+the darkness like giants.  They were roaring at him now--
+a sonorous, deafening, angry bellow, which made everything
+about him vibrate.  The gallery balustrade hid the keyboard
+and the organist from view.  There were only these
+jostling brazen tubes, as big round as trees and as tall,
+trembling with their own furious thunder.  It was for all
+the world as if he had wandered into some vast tragical,
+enchanted cave, and was being drawn against his will--
+like fascinated bird and python--toward fate at the savage
+hands of these swollen and enraged genii.
+
+He stumbled in the obscure light over a kneeling-bench,
+making a considerable racket.  On the instant the noise
+from the organ ceased, and he saw the black figure
+of a woman rise above the gallery-rail and look down.
+
+"Who is it?" the indubitable voice of Miss Madden
+demanded sharply.
+
+Theron had a sudden sheepish notion of turning and running. 
+With the best grace he could summon, he called out an
+explanation instead.
+
+"Wait a minute.  I'm through now.  I'm coming down,"
+she returned.  He thought there was a note of amusement
+in her tone.
+
+She came to him a moment later, accompanied by a thin,
+tall man, whom Theron could barely see in the dark,
+now that the organ-light too was gone.  This man lighted
+a match or two to enable them to make their way out.
+
+When they were on the sidewalk, Celia spoke:  "Walk on ahead,
+Michael!" she said.  "I have some matters to speak of with Mr. Ware."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+"Well, what did you think of Dr. Ledsmar?"
+
+The girl's abrupt question came as a relief to Theron. 
+They were walking along in a darkness so nearly complete
+that he could see next to nothing of his companion. 
+For some reason, this seemed to suggest a sort of impropriety. 
+He had listened to the footsteps of the man ahead--
+whom he guessed to be a servant--and pictured him
+as intent upon getting up early next morning to tell
+everybody that the Methodist minister had stolen into the
+Catholic church at night to walk home with Miss Madden. 
+That was going to be very awkward--yes, worse than awkward! 
+It might mean ruin itself.  She had mentioned
+aloud that she had matters to talk over with him: 
+that of course implied confidences, and the man might
+put heaven only knew what construction on that. 
+It was notorious that servants did ascribe the very worst
+motives to those they worked for.  The bare thought of
+the delight an Irish servant would have in also dragging
+a Protestant clergyman into the thing was sickening. 
+And what could she want to talk to him about, anyway? 
+The minute of silence stretched itself out upon his nerves
+into an interminable period of anxious unhappiness. 
+Her mention of the doctor at last somehow, seemed to lighten
+the situation.
+
+"Oh, I thought he was very smart."  he made haste to answer. 
+"Wouldn't it be better--to--keep close to your man? 
+He--may--think we've gone some other way."
+
+"It wouldn't matter if he did," remarked Celia. 
+She appeared to comprehend his nervousness and take pity
+on it, for she added, "It is my brother Michael, as good
+a soul as ever lived.  He is quite used to my ways."
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware drew a long comforting breath. 
+"Oh, I see!  He went with you to--bring you home."
+
+"To blow the organ," said the girl in the dark, correctingly. 
+"But about that doctor; did you like him?"
+
+"Well," Theron began, "'like' is rather a strong word
+for so short an acquaintance.  He talked very well;
+that is, fluently.  But he is so different from any other
+man I have come into contact with that--"
+
+"What I wanted you to say was that you hated him,"
+put in Celia, firmly.
+
+"I don't make a practice of saying that of anybody,"
+returned Theron, so much at his ease again that he put
+an effect of gentle, smiling reproof into the words. 
+"And why specially should I make an exception for him?"
+
+"Because he's a beast!"
+
+Theron fancied that he understood.  "I noticed that he
+seemed not to have much of an ear for music," he commented,
+with a little laugh.  "He shut down the window when you
+began to play.  His doing so annoyed me, because I--
+I wanted very much to hear it all.  I never heard such
+music before.  I--I came into the church to hear more of it;
+but then you stopped!"
+
+"I will play for you some other time," Celia said,
+answering the reproach in his tone.  "But tonight I wanted
+to talk with you instead."
+
+She kept silent, in spite of this, so long now
+that Theron was on the point of jestingly asking
+when the talk was to begin.  Then she put a question abruptly--
+
+"It is a conventional way of putting it, but are you fond
+of poetry, Mr. Ware?"
+
+"Well, yes, I suppose I am," replied Theron, much mystified. 
+"I can't say that I am any great judge; but I like the
+things that I like--and--"
+
+"Meredith," interposed Celia, "makes one of his women,
+Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe;
+like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again. 
+Does it impress you that way?"
+
+"I don't know that it does," said he, dubiously. 
+It seemed, however, to be her whim to talk literature,
+and he went on:  "I've hardly read Meredith at all. 
+I once borrowed his 'Lucile,' but somehow I never got
+interested in it.  I heard a recitation of his once, though--
+a piece about a dead wife, and the husband and another
+man quarrelling as to whose portrait was in the locket
+on her neck, and of their going up to settle the dispute,
+and finding that it was the likeness of a third man,
+a young priest--and though it was very striking,
+it didn't give me a thirst to know his other poems. 
+I fancied I shouldn't like them.  But I daresay I was wrong. 
+As I get older, I find that I take less narrow views
+of literature--that is, of course, of light literature--
+and that--that--"
+
+Celia mercifully stopped him.  "The reason I asked
+you was--" she began, and then herself paused.  "Or no,--
+never mind that--tell me something else.  Are you fond
+of pictures, statuary, the beautiful things of the world? 
+Do great works of art, the big achievements of the big artists,
+appeal to you, stir you up?"
+
+"Alas! that is something I can only guess at myself,"
+answered Theron, humbly.  "I have always lived in
+little places.  I suppose, from your point of view,
+I have never seen a good painting in my life.  I can only
+say this, though--that it has always weighed on my mind
+as a great and sore deprivation, this being shut out from
+knowing what others mean when they talk and write about art. 
+Perhaps that may help you to get at what you are after. 
+If I ever went to New York, I feel that one of the first
+things I should do would be to see all the picture galleries;
+is that what you meant?  And--would you mind telling me--
+why you--?"
+
+"Why I asked you?"  Celia supplied his halting question. 
+"No, I DON'T mind.  I have a reason for wanting to know--
+to satisfy myself whether I had guessed rightly or not--
+about the kind of man you are.  I mean in the matter of
+temperament and bent of mind and tastes."
+
+The girl seemed to be speaking seriously, and without
+intent to offend.  Theron did not find any comment ready,
+but walked along by her side, wondering much what it was
+all about.
+
+"I daresay you think me 'too familiar on short acquaintance,'"
+she continued, after a little.
+
+"My dear Miss Madden!" he protested perfunctorily.
+
+"No; it is a matter of a good deal of importance,"
+she went on.  "I can see that you are going to be thrown
+into friendship, close contact, with Father Forbes. 
+He likes you, and you can't help liking him.  There is nobody
+else in this raw, overgrown, empty-headed place for you
+and him TO like, nobody except that man, that Dr. Ledsmar. 
+And if you like HIM, I shall hate you!  He has done
+mischief enough already.  I am counting on you to help
+undo it, and to choke him off from doing more.  It would
+be different if you were an ordinary Orthodox minister,
+all encased like a terrapin in prejudices and nonsense. 
+Of course, if you had been THAT kind, we should never have
+got to know you at all.  But when I saw you in MacEvoy's
+cottage there, it was plain that you were one of US--
+I mean a MAN, and not a marionette or a mummy. 
+I am talking very frankly to you, you see.  I want you
+on my side, against that doctor and his heartless,
+bloodless science."
+
+"I feel myself very heartily on your side," replied Theron. 
+She had set their progress at a slower pace, now that the
+lights of the main street were drawing near, as if to prolong
+their talk.  All his earlier reservations had fled. 
+It was almost as if she were a parishioner of his own. 
+"I need hardly tell you that the doctor's whole attitude
+toward--toward revelation--was deeply repugnant to me. 
+It doesn't make it any the less hateful to call it science. 
+I am afraid, though," he went on hesitatingly, "that there
+are difficulties in the way of my helping, as you call it. 
+You see, the very fact of my being a Methodist minister,
+and his being a Catholic priest, rather puts my interference
+out of the question."
+
+"No; that doesn't matter a button," said Celia, lightly. 
+"None of us think of that at all."
+
+"There is the other embarrassment, then," pursued Theron,
+diffidently, "that Father Forbes is a vastly broader and
+deeper scholar--in all these matters--than I am.  How could
+I possibly hope to influence him by my poor arguments? 
+I don't know even the alphabet of the language he thinks in--
+on these subjects, I mean."
+
+"Of course you don't!" interposed the girl, with a
+confidence which the other, for all his meekness,
+rather winced under.  "That wasn't what I meant
+at all.  We don't want arguments from our friends: 
+we want sympathies, sensibilities, emotional bonds. 
+The right person's silence is worth more for companionship
+than the wisest talk in the world from anybody else. 
+It isn't your mind that is needed here, or what you know;
+it is your heart, and what you feel.  You are full
+of poetry, of ideals, of generous, unselfish impulses. 
+You see the human, the warm-blooded side of things. 
+THAT is what is really valuable.  THAT is how you
+can help!"
+
+"You overestimate me sadly," protested Theron, though with
+considerable tolerance for her error in his tone. 
+"But you ought to tell me something about this Dr. Ledsmar. 
+He spoke of being an old friend of the pr--of Father Forbes."
+
+"Oh, yes, they've always known each other; that is,
+for many years.  They were professors together in a college once,
+heaven only knows how long ago.  Then they separated,
+"I fancy they quarrelled, too, before they parted. 
+The doctor came here, where some relative had left him
+the place he lives in.  Then in time the Bishop chanced
+to send Father Forbes here--that was about three years ago,--
+and the two men after a while renewed their old relations. 
+They dine together; that is the doctor's stronghold. 
+He knows more about eating than any other man alive,
+I believe.  He studies it as you would study a language. 
+He has taught old Maggie, at the pastorate there,
+to cook like the mother of all the Delmonicos. 
+And while they sit and stuff themselves, or loll about
+afterward like gorged snakes, they think it is smart
+to laugh at all the sweet and beautiful things in life,
+and to sneer at people who believe in ideals, and to
+talk about mankind being merely a fortuitous product
+of fermentation, and twaddle of that sort.  It makes
+me sick!"
+
+"I can readily see," said Theron, with sympathy, "how such
+a cold, material, and infidel influence as that must shock
+and revolt an essentially religious temperament like yours."
+
+Miss Madden looked up at him.  They had turned into the
+main street, and there was light enough for him to detect
+something startlingly like a grin on her beautiful face.
+
+"But I'm not religious at all, you know," he heard her say. 
+"I'm as Pagan as--anything!  Of course there are forms to
+be observed, and so on; I rather like them than otherwise. 
+I can make them serve very well for my own system; for I
+am myself, you know, an out-an-out Greek."
+
+"Why, I had supposed that you were full blooded Irish,"
+the Rev. Mr. Ware found himself remarking, and then
+on the instant was overwhelmed by the consciousness
+that he had said a foolish thing.  Precisely where
+the folly lay he did not know, but it was impossible
+to mistake the gesture of annoyance which his companion
+had instinctively made at his words.  She had widened
+the distance between them now, and quickened her step. 
+They went on in silence till they were within a block
+of her house.  Several people had passed them who Theron
+felt sure must have recognized them both.
+
+"What I meant was," the girl all at once began, drawing
+nearer again, and speaking with patient slowness, "that I
+find myself much more in sympathy with the Greek thought,
+the Greek theology of the beautiful and the strong,
+the Greek philosophy of life, and all that, than what is
+taught nowadays.  Personally, I take much more stock
+in Plato than I do in Peter.  But of course it is a wholly
+personal affair; I had no business to bother you with it. 
+And for that matter, I oughtn't to have troubled you
+with any of our--"
+
+"I assure you, Miss Madden!" the young minister began,
+with fervor.
+
+"No," she broke in, in a resigned and even downcast tone;
+"let it all be as if I hadn't spoken.  Don't mind anything
+I have said.  If it is to be, it will be.  You can't say
+more than that, can you?"
+
+She looked into his face again, and her large eyes
+produced an impression of deep melancholy, which Theron
+found himself somehow impelled to share.  Things seemed
+all at once to have become very sad indeed.
+
+"It is one of my unhappy nights," she explained,
+in gloomy confidence.  "I get them every once in a while--
+as if some vicious planet or other was crossing in front
+of my good star--and then I'm a caution to snakes. 
+I shut myself up--that's the only thing to do--and have it
+out with myself I didn't know but the organ-music would
+calm me down, but it hasn't. I shan't sleep a wink tonight,
+but just rage around from one room to another,
+piling all the cushions from the divans on to the floor,
+and then kicking them away again.  Do YOU ever have fits
+like that?"
+
+Theron was able to reply with a good conscience in
+the negative.  It occurred to him to add, with jocose intent: 
+"I am curious to know, do these fits, as you call them,
+occupy a prominent part in Grecian philosophy as a general rule?"
+
+Celia gave a little snort, which might have signified
+amusement, but did not speak until they were upon her
+own sidewalk.  "There is my brother, waiting at the gate,"
+she said then, briefly.
+
+"Well, then, I will bid you good-night here, I think,"
+Theron remarked, coming to a halt, and offering his hand. 
+"It must be getting very late, and my--that is--I have
+to be up particularly early tomorrow.  So good-night;
+I hope you will be feeling ever so much better in spirits in
+the morning."
+
+"Oh, that doesn't matter," replied the girl, listlessly. 
+"It's a very paltry little affair, this life of ours,
+at the best of it.  Luckily it's soon done with--
+like a bad dream."
+
+"Tut!  Tut!  I won't have you talk like that!"
+interrupted Theron, with a swift and smart assumption
+of authority.  "Such talk isn't sensible, and it isn't good. 
+I have no patience with it!"
+
+"Well, try and have a little patience with ME, anyway,
+just for tonight," said Celia, taking the reproof with
+gentlest humility, rather to her censor's surprise. 
+"I really am unhappy tonight, Mr. Ware, very unhappy. 
+It seems as if all at once the world had swelled out in
+size a thousandfold, and that poor me had dwindled down
+to the merest wee little red-headed atom--the most helpless
+and forlorn and lonesome of atoms at that."  She seemed
+to force a sorrowful smile on her face as she added: 
+"But all the same it has done me good to be with you--
+I am sure it has--and I daresay that by tomorrow I shall
+be quite out of the blues.  Good-night, Mr. Ware. 
+Forgive my making such an exhibition of myself I WAS
+going to be such a fine early Greek, you know, and I have
+turned out only a late Milesian--quite of the decadence. 
+I shall do better next time.  And good-night again,
+and ever so many thanks."
+
+She was walking briskly away toward the gate now,
+where the shadowy Michael still patiently stood. 
+Theron strode off in the opposite direction, taking long,
+deliberate steps, and bowing his head in thought. 
+He had his hands behind his back, as was his wont,
+and the sense of their recent contact with her firm,
+ungloved hands was, curiously enough, the thing which pushed
+itself uppermost in his mind.  There had been a frank,
+almost manly vigor in her grasp; he said to himself
+that of course that came from her playing so much on
+the keyboard; the exercise naturally would give her large,
+robust hands.
+
+Suddenly he remembered about the piano; he had quite
+forgotten to solicit her aid in selecting it.  He turned,
+upon the impulse, to go back.  She had not entered the gate
+as yet, but stood, shiningly visible under the street lamp,
+on the sidewalk, and she was looking in his direction. 
+He turned again like a shot, and started homeward.
+
+The front door of the parsonage was unlocked, and he
+made his way on tiptoe through the unlighted hall to the
+living-room. The stuffy air here was almost suffocating
+with the evil smell of a kerosene lamp turned down too low. 
+Alice sat asleep in her old farmhouse rocking-chair, with
+an inelegant darning-basket on the table by her side. 
+The whole effect of the room was as bare and squalid
+to Theron's newly informed eye as the atmosphere was
+offensive to his nostrils.  He coughed sharply, and his
+wife sat up and looked at the clock.  It was after eleven.
+
+"Where on earth have you been?" she asked, with a yawn,
+turning up the wick of her sewing-lamp again.
+
+"You ought never to turn down a light like that,"
+said Theron, with a complaining note in his voice. 
+"It smells up the whole place.  I never dreamed of your
+sitting up for me like this.  You ought to have gone
+to bed."
+
+"But how could I guess that you were going to be so late?,"
+she retorted.  "And you haven't told me where you were. 
+Is this book of yours going to keep you up like this
+right along?"
+
+The episode of the book was buried in the young minister's
+mind beneath such a mass of subsequent experiences
+that it required an effort for him to grasp what she
+was talking about.  It seemed as if months had elapsed
+since he was in earnest about that book; and yet he
+had left the house full of it only a few hours before. 
+He shook his wits together, and made answer--
+
+"Oh, bless you, no!  Only there arose a very curious question. 
+You have no idea, literally no conception, of the
+interesting and important problems which are raised
+by the mere fact of Abraham leaving the city of Ur. 
+It's amazing, I assure you.  I hadn't realized it myself."
+
+"Well," remarked Alice, rising--and with good-humor
+and petulance struggling sleepily ill her tone--"all I've
+got to say is, that if Abraham hasn't anything better
+to do than to keep young ministers of the gospel out,
+goodness knows where, till all hours of the night,
+I wish to gracious he'd stayed in the city of Ur right
+straight along."
+
+"You have no idea what a scholarly man Dr. Ledsmar is,"
+Theron suddenly found himself inspired to volunteer. 
+"He has the most marvellous collection of books--a whole
+library devoted to this very subject--and he has put them
+all quite freely at my disposal.  Extremely kind of him,
+isn't it?"
+
+"Ledsmar?  Ledsmar?" queried Alice.  "I don't seem
+to remember the name.  He isn't the little man with
+the birthmark, who sits in the pew behind the Lovejoys,
+is he?  I think some one said he was a doctor."
+
+"Yes, a horse doctor!" said Theron, with a sniff. 
+"No; you haven't seen this Dr. Ledsmar at all.  I--I don't
+know that he attends any church regularly.  I scraped his
+acquaintance quite by accident.  He is really a character. 
+He lives in the big house, just beyond the race-course,
+you know--the one with the tower at the back--"
+
+"No, I don't know.  How should I?  I've hardly poked
+my nose outside of the yard since I have been here."
+
+"Well, you shall go," said the husband, consolingly. 
+"You HAVE been cooped up here too much, poor girl.  I must
+take you out more, really.  I don't know that I could take
+you to the doctor's place--without an invitation, I mean. 
+He is very queer about some things.  He lives there all alone,
+for instance, with only a Chinaman for a servant.  He told
+me I was almost the only man he had asked under his roof
+for years.  He isn't a practising physician at all, you know. 
+He is a scientist; he makes experiments with lizards--
+and things."
+
+"Theron," the wife said, pausing lamp in hand on her way
+to the bedroom, "do you be careful, now!  For all you know
+this doctor may be a loose man, or pretty near an infidel. 
+You've got to be mighty particular in such matters, you know,
+or you'll have the trustees down on you like a 'thousand
+of bricks.'"
+
+"I will thank the trustees to mind their own business,"
+said Theron, stiffly, and the subject dropped.
+
+The bedroom window upstairs was open, and upon the fresh
+night air was borne in the shrill, jangling sound of a piano,
+being played off somewhere in the distance, but so
+vehemently that the noise imposed itself upon the silence
+far and wide.  Theron listened to this as he undressed. 
+It proceeded from the direction of the main street,
+and he knew, as by instinct, that it was the Madden girl
+who was playing.  The incongruity of the hour escaped
+his notice.  He mused instead upon the wild and tropical
+tangle of moods, emotions, passions, which had grown up in
+that strange temperament.  He found something very pathetic
+in that picture she had drawn of herself in forecast,
+roaming disconsolate through her rooms the livelong night,
+unable to sleep.  The woful moan of insomnia seemed
+to make itself heard in every strain from her piano.
+
+Alice heard it also, but being unillumined, she missed
+the romantic pathos.  "I call it disgraceful," she muttered
+from her pillow, "for folks to be banging away on a piano
+at this time of night.  There ought to be a law to prevent it."
+
+"It may be some distressed soul," said Theron, gently,
+"seeking relief from the curse of sleeplessness."
+
+The wife laughed, almost contemptuously. 
+"Distressed fiddlesticks!" was her only other comment.
+
+The music went on for a long time--rising now to strident
+heights, now sinking off to the merest tinkling murmur,
+and broken ever and again by intervals of utter hush. 
+It did not prevent Alice from at once falling sound asleep;
+but Theron lay awake, it seemed to him, for hours,
+listening tranquilly, and letting his mind wander at will
+through the pleasant antechambers of Sleep, where are more
+unreal fantasies than Dreamland itself affords.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+For some weeks the Rev. Theron Ware saw nothing of either
+the priest or the doctor, or the interesting Miss Madden.
+
+There were, indeed, more urgent matters to think about. 
+June had come; and every succeeding day brought closer to hand
+the ordeal of his first Quarterly Conference in Octavius. 
+The waters grew distinctly rougher as his pastoral bark
+neared this difficult passage.
+
+He would have approached the great event with an easier
+mind if he could have made out just how he stood
+with his congregation.  Unfortunately nothing in his
+previous experiences helped him in the least to measure
+or guess at the feelings of these curious Octavians. 
+Their Methodism seemed to be sound enough, and to stick
+quite to the letter of the Discipline, so long as it was
+expressed in formulae.  It was its spirit which he felt
+to be complicated by all sorts of conditions wholly novel to him.
+
+The existence of a line of street-cars in the town,
+for example, would not impress the casual thinker as
+likely to prove a rock in the path of peaceful religion. 
+Theron, in his simplicity, had even thought, when he
+first saw these bobtailed cars bumping along the rails
+in the middle of the main street, that they must be
+a great convenience to people living in the outskirts,
+who wished to get in to church of a Sunday morning. 
+He was imprudent enough to mention this in conversation
+with one of his new parishioners.  Then he learned,
+to his considerable chagrin, that when this line was built,
+some years before, a bitter war of words had been fought
+upon the question of its being worked on the Sabbath day. 
+The then occupant of the Methodist pulpit had so distinguished
+himself above the rest by the solemnity and fervor of his
+protests against this insolent desecration of God's day
+that the Methodists of Octavius still felt themselves
+peculiarly bound to hold this horse-car line, its management,
+and everything connected with it, in unbending aversion. 
+At least once a year they were accustomed to expect a
+sermon denouncing it and all its impious Sunday patrons. 
+Theron made a mental resolve that this year they should
+be disappointed.
+
+Another burning problem, which he had not been called
+upon before to confront, he found now entangled with the
+mysterious line which divided a circus from a menagerie. 
+Those itinerant tent-shows had never come his way heretofore,
+and he knew nothing of that fine balancing proportion between
+ladies in tights on horseback and cages full of deeply
+educational animals, which, even as the impartial rain,
+was designed to embrace alike the just and the unjust. 
+There had arisen inside the Methodist society of Octavius
+some painful episodes, connected with members who took
+their children "just to see the animals," and were convicted
+of having also watched the Rose-Queen of the Arena,
+in her unequalled flying leap through eight hoops,
+with an ardent and unashamed eye.  One of these cases
+still remained on the censorial docket of the church;
+and Theron understood that he was expected to name a
+committee of five to examine and try it.  This he neglected
+to do.
+
+He was no longer at all certain that the congregation
+as a whole liked his sermons.  The truth was, no doubt,
+that he had learned enough to cease regarding the
+congregation as a whole.  He could still rely upon
+carrying along with him in his discourses from the pulpit
+a large majority of interested and approving faces. 
+But here, unhappily, was a case where the majority did
+not rule.  The minority, relatively small in numbers,
+was prodigious in virile force.
+
+More than twenty years had now elapsed since that minor schism
+in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the result of which was
+the independent body known as Free Methodists, had relieved
+the parent flock of its principal disturbing element. 
+The rupture came fittingly at that time when all
+the "isms" of the argumentative fifties were hurled
+violently together into the melting-pot of civil war. 
+The great Methodist Church, South, had broken bodily off
+on the question of State Rights.  The smaller and domestic
+fraction of Free Methodism separated itself upon an issue
+which may be most readily described as one of civilization. 
+The seceders resented growth in material prosperity;
+they repudiated the introduction of written sermons
+and organ-music; they deplored the increasing laxity
+in meddlesome piety, the introduction of polite manners
+in the pulpit and classroom, and the development of even
+a rudimentary desire among the younger people of the
+church to be like others outside in dress and speech
+and deportment.  They did battle as long as they could,
+inside the fold, to restore it to the severely
+straight and narrow path of primitive Methodism. 
+When the adverse odds became too strong for them,
+they quitted the church and set up a Bethel for themselves.
+
+Octavius chanced to be one of the places where they were
+able to hold their own within the church organization. 
+The Methodism of the town had gone along without any
+local secession.  It still held in full fellowship
+the radicals who elsewhere had followed their unbridled
+bent into the strongest emotional vagaries--where excited
+brethren worked themselves up into epileptic fits, and women
+whirled themselves about in weird religious ecstasies,
+like dervishes of the Orient, till they fell headlong
+in a state of trance.  Octavian Methodism was spared
+extravagances of this sort, it is true, but it paid
+a price for the immunity.  The people whom an open split
+would have taken away remained to leaven and dominate
+the whole lump.  This small advanced section, with its men
+of a type all the more aggressive from its narrowness,
+and women who went about solemnly in plain gray garments,
+with tight-fitting, unadorned, mouse-colored sunbonnets,
+had not been able wholly to enforce its views upon the
+social life of the church members, but of its controlling
+influence upon their official and public actions there
+could be no doubt.
+
+The situation had begun to unfold itself to Theron
+from the outset.  He had recognized the episodes of
+the forbidden Sunday milk and of the flowers in poor
+Alice's bonnet as typical of much more that was to come. 
+No week followed without bringing some new fulfilment
+of this foreboding.  Now, at the end of two months,
+he knew well enough that the hitherto dominant minority
+was hostile to him and his ministry, and would do whatever
+it could against him.
+
+Though Theron at once decided to show fight, and did
+not at all waver in that resolve, his courage was in the
+main of a despondent sort.  Sometimes it would flutter
+up to the point of confidence, or at least hopefulness,
+when he met with substantial men of the church who
+obviously liked him, and whom he found himself mentally
+ranging on his side, in the struggle which was to come. 
+But more often it was blankly apparent to him that,
+the moment flags were flying and drums on the roll,
+these amiable fair-weather friends would probably take
+to their heels.
+
+Still, such as they were, his sole hope lay in their support. 
+He must make the best of them.  He set himself doggedly
+to the task of gathering together all those who were
+not his enemies into what, when the proper time came,
+should be known as the pastor's party.  There was plenty
+of apostolic warrant for this.  If there had not been,
+Theron felt that the mere elementary demands of self-defence
+would have justified his use of strategy.
+
+The institution of pastoral calling, particularly that
+inquisitorial form of it laid down in the Discipline,
+had never attracted Theron.  He and Alice had gone about
+among their previous flocks in quite a haphazard fashion,
+without thought of system, much less of deliberate purpose. 
+Theron made lists now, and devoted thought and examination
+to the personal tastes and characteristics of the people
+to be cultivated.  There were some, for example, who would
+expect him to talk pretty much as the Discipline ordained--
+that is, to ask if they had family prayer, to inquire
+after their souls, and generally to minister grace
+to his hearers--and these in turn subdivided themselves
+into classes, ranging from those who would wish nothing
+else to those who needed only a mild spiritual flavor. 
+There were others whom he would please much better by not
+talking shop at all.  Although he could ill afford it,
+he subscribed now for a daily paper that he might have
+a perpetually renewed source of good conversational
+topics for these more worldly calls.  He also bought
+several pounds of candy, pleasing in color, but warranted
+to be entirely harmless, and he made a large mysterious
+mark on the inside of his new silk hat to remind him
+not to go out calling without some of this in his pocket
+for the children.
+
+Alice, he felt, was not helping him in this matter
+as effectively as he could have wished.  Her attitude
+toward the church in Octavius might best be described
+by the word "sulky."  Great allowance was to be made,
+he realized, for her humiliation over the flowers
+in her bonnet.  That might justify her, fairly enough,
+in being kept away from meeting now and again by headaches,
+or undefined megrims.  But it ought not to prevent her
+from going about and making friends among the kindlier
+parishioners who would welcome such a thing, and whom he from
+time to time indicated to her.  She did go to some extent,
+it is true, but she produced, in doing so, an effect
+of performing a duty.  He did not find traces anywhere
+of her having created a brilliant social impression. 
+When they went out together, he was peculiarly conscious
+of having to do the work unaided.
+
+This was not at all like the Alice of former years,
+of other charges.  Why, she had been, beyond comparison,
+the most popular young woman in Tyre.  What possessed her
+to mope like this in Octavius?
+
+Theron looked at her attentively nowadays, when she was
+unaware of his gaze, to try if her face offered any answer
+to the riddle.  It could not be suggested that she was ill. 
+Never in her life had she been looking so well.  She had
+thrown herself, all at once, and with what was to him
+an unaccountable energy, into the creation and management
+of a flower-garden. She was out the better part of
+every day, rain or shine, digging, transplanting, pruning,
+pottering generally about among her plants and shrubs. 
+This work in the open air had given her an aspect of physical
+well-being which it was impossible to be mistaken about.
+
+Her husband was glad, of course, that she had found some
+occupation which at once pleased her and so obviously
+conduced to health.  This was so much a matter of course,
+in fact, that he said to himself over and over again
+that he was glad.  Only--only, sometimes the thought WOULD
+force itself upon his attention that if she did not spend
+so much of her time in her own garden, she would have more
+time to devote to winning friends for them in the Garden
+of the Lord--friends whom they were going to need badly.
+
+The young minister, in taking anxious stock of the chances
+for and against him, turned over often in his mind the
+fact that he had already won rank as a pulpit orator. 
+His sermons had attracted almost universal attention
+at Tyre, and his achievement before the Conference
+at Tecumseh, if it did fail to receive practical reward,
+had admittedly distanced all the other preaching there. 
+It was a part of the evil luck pursuing him that here
+in this perversely enigmatic Octavius his special gift
+seemed to be of no use whatever.  There were times,
+indeed, when he was tempted to think that bad preaching
+was what Octavius wanted.
+
+Somewhere he had heard of a Presbyterian minister, in charge
+of a big city church, who managed to keep well in with a
+watchfully Orthodox congregation, and at the same time
+establish himself in the affections of the community at large,
+by simply preaching two kinds of sermons.  In the morning,
+when almost all who attended were his own communicants,
+he gave them very cautious and edifying doctrinal discourses,
+treading loyally in the path of the Westminster Confession. 
+To the evening assemblages, made up for the larger part
+of outsiders, he addressed broadly liberal sermons,
+literary in form, and full of respectful allusions
+to modern science and the philosophy of the day. 
+Thus he filled the church at both services, and put money
+in its treasury and his own fame before the world. 
+There was of course the obvious danger that the pious
+elders who in the forenoon heard infant damnation
+vigorously proclaimed, would revolt when they heard
+after supper that there was some doubt about even adults
+being damned at all.  But either because the same people
+did not attend both services, or because the minister's
+perfect regularity in the morning was each week regarded
+as a retraction of his latest vagaries of an evening,
+no trouble ever came.
+
+Theron had somewhat tentatively tried this on in Octavius. 
+It was no good.  His parishioners were of the sort who
+would have come to church eight times a day on Sunday,
+instead of two, if occasion offered.  The hope that even
+a portion of them would stop away, and that their places
+would be taken in the evening by less prejudiced strangers
+who wished for intellectual rather than theological food,
+fell by the wayside.  The yearned-for strangers did
+not come; the familiar faces of the morning service
+all turned up in their accustomed places every evening. 
+They were faces which confused and disheartened Theron
+in the daytime.  Under the gaslight they seemed even harder
+and more unsympathetic.  He timorously experimented with
+them for an evening or two, then abandoned the effort.
+
+Once there had seemed the beginning of a chance.  The richest
+banker in Octavius--a fat, sensual, hog-faced old bachelor--
+surprised everybody one evening by entering the church
+and taking a seat.  Theron happened to know who he was;
+even if he had not known, the suppressed excitement
+visible in the congregation, the way the sisters turned
+round to look, the way the more important brethren put
+their heads together and exchanged furtive whispers--
+would have warned him that big game was in view. 
+He recalled afterward with something like self-disgust
+the eager, almost tremulous pains he himself took
+to please this banker.  There was a part of the sermon,
+as it had been written out, which might easily give
+offence to a single man of wealth and free notions
+of life.  With the alertness of a mental gymnast,
+Theron ran ahead, excised this portion, and had ready
+when the gap was reached some very pretty general remarks,
+all the more effective and eloquent, he felt, for having
+been extemporized.  People said it was a good sermon;
+and after the benediction and dispersion some of the
+officials and principal pew-holders remained to talk
+over the likelihood of a capture having been effected. 
+Theron did not get away without having this mentioned
+to him, and he was conscious of sharing deeply the hope
+of the brethren--with the added reflection that it would
+be a personal triumph for himself into the bargain. 
+He was ashamed of this feeling a little later, and of his
+trick with the sermon.  But this chastening product of
+introspection was all the fruit which the incident bore. 
+The banker never came again.
+
+Theron returned one afternoon, a little earlier than usual,
+from a group of pastoral calls.  Alice, who was plucking weeds
+in a border at the shady side of the house, heard his step,
+and rose from her labors.  He was walking slowly,
+and seemed weary.  He took off his high hat, as he saw her,
+and wiped his brow.  The broiling June sun was still
+high overhead.  Doubtless it was its insufferable heat
+which was accountable for the worn lines in his face
+and the spiritless air which the wife's eye detected. 
+She went to the gate, and kissed him as he entered.
+
+"I believe if I were you," she said, "I'd carry an umbrella
+such scorching days as this.  Nobody'd think anything of it. 
+I don't see why a minister shouldn't carry one as much
+as a woman carries a parasol."
+
+Theron gave her a rueful, meditative sort of smile. 
+"I suppose people really do think of us as a kind
+of hybrid female," he remarked.  Then, holding his hat
+in his hand, he drew a long breath of relief at finding
+himself in the shade, and looked about him.
+
+"Why, you've got more posies here, on this one side
+of the house alone, than mother had in her whole yard,"
+he said, after a little.  "Let's see--I know that one: 
+that's columbine, isn't it?  And that's London pride,
+and that's ragged robin.  I don't know any of the others."
+
+Alice recited various unfamiliar names, as she pointed
+out the several plants which bore them, and he listened
+with a kindly semblance of interest.
+
+They strolled thus to the rear of the house, where thick
+clumps of fragrant pinks lined both sides of the path. 
+She picked some of these for him, and gave him more names
+with which to label the considerable number of other plants
+he saw about him.
+
+"I had no idea we were so well provided as all this,"
+he commented at last.  "Those Van Sizers must have been
+tremendous hands for flowers.  You were lucky in following
+such people."
+
+"Van Sizers!" echoed Alice, with contempt.  "All they
+left was old tomato cans and clamshells.  Why, I've put
+in every blessed one of these myself, all except
+those peonies, there, and one brier on the side wall."
+
+"Good for you!" exclaimed Theron, approvingly.  Then it
+occurred to him to ask, "But where did you get them all? 
+Around among our friends?"
+
+"Some few," responded Alice, with a note of hesitation
+in her voice.  "Sister Bult gave me the verbenas, there,
+and the white pinks were a present from Miss Stevens. 
+But most of them Levi Gorringe was good enough to send me--
+from his garden."
+
+"I didn't know that Gorringe had a garden," said Theron. 
+"I thought he lived over his law-office, in the brick
+block, there."
+
+"Well, I don't know that it's exactly HIS," explained Alice;
+"but it's a big garden somewhere outside, where he can
+have anything he likes."  She went on with a little laugh: 
+"I didn't like to question him too closely, for fear he'd
+think I was looking a gift horse in the mouth--or else
+hinting for more.  It was quite his own offer, you know. 
+He picked them all out for me, and brought them here,
+and lent me a book telling me just what to do with each one. 
+And in a few days, now, I am to have another big batch
+of plants--dahlias and zinnias and asters and so on;
+I'm almost ashamed to take them.  But it's such a change
+to find some one in this Octavius who isn't all self!"
+
+"Yes, Gorringe is a good fellow," said Theron.  "I wish he
+was a professing member."  Then some new thought struck him. 
+"Alice," he exclaimed, "I believe I'll go and see him
+this very afternoon.  I don't know why it hasn't occurred
+to me before:  he's just the man whose advice I need most. 
+He knows these people here; he can tell me what to do."
+
+"Aren't you too tired now?" suggested Alice, as Theron
+put on his hat.
+
+"No, the sooner the better," he replied, moving now toward
+the gate.
+
+"Well," she began, "if I were you, I wouldn't say too
+much about--that is, I--but never mind."
+
+"What is it?" asked her husband.
+
+"Nothing whatever," replied Alice, positively.  "It was
+only some nonsense of mine;" and Theron, placidly accepting
+the feminine whim, went off down the street again.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware found Levi Gorringe's law-office
+readily enough, but its owner was not in.  He probably
+would be back again, though, in a quarter of an hour or so,
+the boy said, and the minister at once decided to wait.
+
+Theron was interested in finding that this office-boy was no
+other than Harvey--the lad who brought milk to the parsonage
+every morning.  He remembered now that he had heard good
+things of this urchin, as to the hard work he did to help
+his mother, the Widow Semple, in her struggle to keep
+a roof over her head; and also bad things, in that he did
+not come regularly either to church or Sunday-school. The
+clergyman recalled, too, that Harvey had impressed him as a character.
+
+"Well, sonny, are you going to be a lawyer?" he asked,
+as he seated himself by the window, and looked about him,
+first at the dusty litter of old papers, pamphlets,
+and tape-bound documents in bundles which crowded
+the stuffy chamber, and then at the boy himself.
+
+Harvey was busy at a big box--a rough pine dry-goods
+box which bore the flaring label of an express company,
+and also of a well-known seed firm in a Western city,
+and which the boy had apparently just opened.  He was
+lifting from it, and placing on the table after he had
+shaken off the sawdust and moss in which they were packed,
+small parcels of what looked in the fading light to be
+half-dried plants.
+
+"Well, I don't know--I rather guess not," he made answer,
+as he pursued his task.  "So far as I can make out,
+this wouldn't be the place to start in at, if I WAS going
+to be a lawyer.  A boy can learn here first-rate how to
+load cartridges and clean a gun, and braid trout-flies on
+to leaders, but I don't see much law laying around loose. 
+Anyway," he went on, "I couldn't afford to read law,
+and not be getting any wages.  I have to earn money,
+you know."
+
+Theron felt that he liked the boy.  "Yes," he said,
+with a kindly tone; "I've heard that you are a good,
+industrious youngster.  I daresay Mr. Gorringe will
+see to it that you get a chance to read law, and get
+wages too."
+
+"Oh, I can read all there is here and welcome,"
+the boy explained, stepping toward the window to decipher
+the label on a bundle of roots in his hand, "but that's no
+good unless there's regular practice coming into the office
+all the while.  THAT'S how you learn to be a lawyer. 
+But Gorringe don't have what I call a practice at all. 
+He just sees men in the other room there, with the door shut,
+and whatever there is to do he does it all himself."
+
+The minister remembered a stray hint somewhere that
+Mr. Gorringe was a money-lender--what was colloquially
+called a "note-shaver." To his rustic sense, there was
+something not quite nice about that occupation. 
+It would be indecorous, he felt, to encourage further
+talk about it from the boy.
+
+"What are you doing there?" he inquired, to change
+the subject.
+
+"Sorting out some plants," replied Harvey.  "I don't know
+what's got into Gorringe lately.  This is the third big
+box he's had since I've been here--that is, in six weeks--
+besides two baskets full of rose-bushes. I don't know what he
+does with them.  He carries them off himself somewhere. 
+I've had kind of half a notion that he's figurin'
+on getting married.  I can't think of anything else that
+would make a man spend money like water--just for flowers
+and bushes.  They do get foolish, you know, when they've
+got marriage on the brain."
+
+Theron found himself only imperfectly following
+the theories of the young philosopher. 
+It was his fact that monopolized the minister's attention.
+
+"But as I understand it," he remarked hesitatingly,
+"Brother Gorringe--or rather Mr. Gorringe--gets all the
+plants he wants, everything he likes, from a big garden
+somewhere outside.  I don't know that it is exactly his;
+but I remember hearing something to that effect."
+
+The boy slapped the last litter off his hands, and, as he
+came to the window, shook his head.  "These don't come
+from no garden outside," he declared.  "They come from
+the dealers', and he pays solid cash for 'em.  The invoice
+for this lot alone was thirty-one dollars and sixty cents. 
+There it is on the table.  You can see it for yourself"
+
+Mr. Ware did not offer to look.  "Very likely these
+are for the garden I was speaking of," he said. 
+"Of course you can't go on taking plants out of a garden
+indefinitely without putting others in."
+
+"I don't know anything about any garden that he takes
+plants out of," answered Harvey, and looked meditatively
+for a minute or two out upon the street below.  Then he
+turned to the minister.  "Your wife's doing a good deal
+of gardening this spring, I notice," he said casually. 
+"You'd hardly think it was the same place, she's fixed it
+up so.  If she wants any extra hoeing done, I can always
+get off Saturday afternoons."
+
+"I will remember," said Theron.  He also looked
+out of the window; and nothing more was said until,
+a few moments later, Mr. Gorringe himself came in.
+
+The lawyer seemed both surprised and pleased at discovering
+the identity of his visitor, with whom he shook hands
+in almost an excess of cordiality.  He spread a large
+newspaper over the pile of seedling plants on the table,
+pushed the packing-box under the table with his foot,
+and said almost peremptorily to the boy, "You can go now!" 
+Then he turned again to Theron.
+
+"Well, Mr. Ware, I'm glad to see you," he repeated,
+and drew up a chair by the window.  Things are going all
+right with you, I hope."
+
+Theron noted again the waving black hair, the dark skin,
+and the carefully trimmed mustache and chin-tuft which
+gave the lawyer's face a combined effect of romance
+and smartness.  No; it was the eyes, cool, shrewd,
+dark-gray eyes, which suggested this latter quality. 
+The recollection of having seen one of them wink,
+in deliberate hostility of sarcasm, when those other
+trustees had their backs turned, came mercifully
+at the moment to recall the young minister to his errand.
+
+"I thought I would drop in and have a chat with you,"
+he said, getting better under way as he went on. 
+"Quarterly Conference is only a fortnight off, and I am a
+good deal at sea about what is going to happen."
+
+"I'm not a church member, you know," interposed Gorringe. 
+"That shuts me out of the Quarterly Conference."
+
+"Alas, yes!" said Theron.  "I wish it didn't. I'm afraid
+I'm not going to have any friends to spare there."
+
+"What are you afraid of?" asked the lawyer, seeming now
+to be wholly at his ease again "They can't eat you."
+
+"No, they keep me too lean for that," responded Theron,
+with a pensive smile.  "I WAS going to ask, you know,
+for an increase of salary, or an extra allowance. 
+I don't see how I can go on as it is.  The sum fixed by
+the last Quarterly Conference of the old year, and which I
+am getting now, is one hundred dollars less than my
+predecessor had.  That isn't fair, and it isn't right. 
+But so far from its looking as if I could get an increase,
+the prospect seems rather that they will make me pay
+for the gas and that sidewalk.  I never recovered more
+than about half of my moving expenses, as you know,
+and--and, frankly, I don't know which way to turn. 
+It keeps me miserable all the while."
+
+"That's where you're wrong," said Mr. Gorringe.  "If you
+let things like that worry you, you'll keep a sore skin
+all your life.  You take my advice and just go ahead
+your own gait, and let other folks do the worrying. 
+They ARE pretty close-fisted here, for a fact, but you
+can manage to rub along somehow.  If you should get
+into any real difficulties, why, I guess--" the lawyer
+paused to smile in a hesitating, significant way--"I
+guess some road out can be found all right.  The main
+thing is, don't fret, and don't allow your wife to--
+to fret either."
+
+He stopped abruptly.  Theron nodded in recognition of his
+amiable tone, and the found the nod lengthening itself
+out into almost a bow as the thought spread through his
+mind that this had been nothing more nor less than a
+promise to help him with money if worst came to worst. 
+He looked at Levi Gorringe, and said to himself that the
+intuition of women was wonderful.  Alice had picked him
+out as a friend of theirs merely by seeing him pass the house.
+
+"Yes," he said; "I am specially anxious to keep my wife
+from worrying.  She was surrounded in her girlhood by a
+good deal of what, relatively, we should call luxury,
+and that makes it all the harder for her to be a poor
+minister's wife.  I had quite decided to get her a
+hired girl, come what might, but she thinks she'd rather
+get on without one.  Her health is better, I must admit,
+than it was when we came here.  She works out in her
+garden a great deal, and that seems to agree with her."
+
+"Octavius is a healthy place--that's generally admitted,"
+replied the lawyer, with indifference.  He seemed
+not to be interested in Mrs. Ware's health, but looked
+intently out through the window at the buildings opposite,
+and drummed with his fingers on the arms of his chair.
+
+Theron made haste to revert to his errand.  "Of course,
+your not being in the Quarterly Conference," he said,
+"renders certain things impossible.  But I didn't know
+but you might have some knowledge of how matters are going,
+what plans the officials of the church had; they seem to
+have agreed to tell me nothing."
+
+"Well, I HAVE heard this much," responded Gorringe. 
+"They're figuring on getting the Soulsbys here to raise
+the debt and kind o' shake things up generally. 
+I guess that's about as good as settled.  Hadn't you heard
+of it?"
+
+"Not a breath!" exclaimed Theron, mournfully.  "Well," he
+added upon reflection, "I'm sorry, downright sorry. 
+The debt-raiser seems to me about the lowest-down thing
+we produce.  I've heard of those Soulsbys; I think I saw HIM
+indeed once at Conference, but I believe SHE is the head
+of the firm."
+
+"Yes; she wears the breeches, I understand,"
+said Gorringe sententiously.
+
+"I HAD hoped," the young minister began with a rueful sigh,
+"in fact, I felt quite confident at the outset that I
+could pay off this debt, and put the church generally on
+a new footing, by giving extra attention to my pulpit work. 
+It is hardly for me to say it, but in other places where I
+have been, my preaching has been rather--rather a feature
+in the town itself I have always been accustomed to attract
+to our services a good many non-members, and that,
+as you know, helps tremendously from a money point of view. 
+But somehow that has failed here.  I doubt if the average
+congregations are a whit larger now than they were when I
+came in April.  I know the collections are not."
+
+"No," commented the lawyer, slowly; "you'll never do
+anything in that line in Octavius.  You might, of course,
+if you were to stay here and work hard at it for five
+or six years--"
+
+"Heaven forbid!" groaned Mr. Ware.
+
+"Quite so," put in the other.  "The point is that
+the Methodists here are a little set by themselves. 
+I don't know that they like one another specially,
+but I do know that they are not what you might call
+popular with people outside.  Now, a new preacher
+at the Presbyterian church, or even the Baptist--
+he might have a chance to create talk, and make a stir. 
+But Methodist--no!  People who don't belong won't come near
+the Methodist church here so long as there's any other
+place with a roof on it to go to.  Give a dog a bad name,
+you know.  Well, the Methodists here have got a bad name;
+and if you could preach like Henry Ward Beecher himself you
+wouldn't change it, or get folks to come and hear you."
+
+"I see what you mean," Theron responded.  "I'm not
+particularly surprised myself that Octavius doesn't
+love us, or look to us for intellectual stimulation. 
+I myself leave that pulpit more often than otherwise
+feeling like a wet rag--utterly limp and discouraged. 
+But, if you don't mind my speaking of it, YOU don't belong,
+and yet YOU come."
+
+It was evident that the lawyer did not mind.  He spoke
+freely in reply.  "Oh, yes, I've got into the habit of it. 
+I began going when I first came here, and--and so it grew
+to be natural for me to go.  Then, of course, being the
+only lawyer you have, a considerable amount of my business
+is mixed up in one way or another with your membership;
+you see those are really the things which settle a man
+in a rut, and keep him there."
+
+"I suppose your people were Methodists," said Theron,
+to fill in the pause, "and that is how you originally
+started with us."
+
+Levi Gorringe shook his head.  He leaned back, half closed
+his eyes, put his finger-tips together, and almost smiled
+as if something in retrospect pleased and moved him.
+
+"No," he said; "I went to the church first to see a girl
+who used to go there.  It was long before your time. 
+All her family moved away years ago.  You wouldn't know any
+of them.  I was younger then, and I didn't know as much as I
+do now.  I worshipped the very ground that girl walked on,
+and like a fool I never gave her so much as a hint of it. 
+Looking back now, I can see that I might have had her if I'd
+asked her.  But I went instead and sat around and looked
+at her at church and Sunday-school and prayer-meetings
+Thursday nights, and class-meetings after the sermon. 
+She was devoted to religion and church work; and, thinking it
+would please her, I joined the church on probation. 
+Men can fool themselves easier than they can other people. 
+I actually believed at the time that I had experienced religion. 
+I felt myself full of all sorts of awakenings of the soul
+and so forth.  But it was really that girl.  You see I'm
+telling you the thing just as it was.  I was very happy. 
+I think it was the happiest time of my life.  I remember
+there was a love-feast while I was on probation; and I sat
+down in front, right beside her, and we ate the little
+square chunks of bread and drank the water together, and I
+held one corner of her hymn-book when we stood up and sang. 
+That was the nearest I ever got to her, or to full membership
+in the church.  That very next week, I think it was,
+we learned that she had got engaged to the minister's son--
+a young man who had just become a minister himself. 
+They got married, and went away--and I--somehow I never took
+up my membership when the six months' probation was over. 
+That's how it was."
+
+"It is very interesting," remarked Theron, softly, after a
+little silence--"and very full of human nature."
+
+"Well, now you see," said the lawyer, "what I mean when I
+say that there hasn't been another minister here since,
+that I should have felt like telling this story to. 
+They wouldn't have understood it at all.  They would
+have thought it was blasphemy for me to say straight
+out that what I took for experiencing religion was really
+a girl.  But you are different.  I felt that at once,
+the first time I saw you.  In a pulpit or out of it,
+what I like in a human being is that he SHOULD be human."
+
+"It pleases me beyond measure that you should like me, then"
+returned the young minister, with frank gratification
+shining on his face.  "The world is made all the sweeter
+and more lovable by these--these elements of romance. 
+I am not one of those who would wish to see them banished
+or frowned upon.  I don't mind admitting to you that
+there is a good deal in Methodism--I mean the strict
+practice of its letter which you find here in Octavius--
+that is personally distasteful to me.  I read the other day
+of an English bishop who said boldly, publicly, that no
+modern nation could practise the principles laid down
+in the Sermon on the Mount and survive for twenty-four hours."
+
+"Ha, ha!  That's good!" laughed the lawyer.
+
+"I felt that it was good, too," pursued Theron.  "I am getting
+to see a great many things differently, here in Octavius. 
+Our Methodist Discipline is like the Beatitudes--very helpful
+and beautiful, if treated as spiritual suggestion, but more
+or less of a stumbling-block if insisted upon literally. 
+I declare!" he added, sitting up in his chair, "I never
+talked like this to a living soul before in all my life. 
+Your confidences were contagious."
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware rose as he spoke, and took up his hat.
+
+"Must you be going?" asked the lawyer, also rising. 
+"Well, I'm glad I haven't shocked you.  Come in oftener
+when you are passing.  And if you see anything I can help
+you in, always tell me."
+
+The two men shook hands, with an emphatic and lingering clasp.
+
+"I am glad," said Theron, "that you didn't stop coming
+to church just because you lost the girl."
+
+Levi Gorringe answered the minister's pleasantry
+with a smile which curled his mustache upward,
+and expanded in little wrinkles at the ends of his eyes. 
+"No," he said jestingly.  "I'm death on collecting debts;
+and I reckon that the church still owes me a girl. 
+I'll have one yet."
+
+So, with merriment the echoes of which pleasantly
+accompanied Theron down the stairway, the two men parted.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+Though time lagged in passing with a slowness which seemed
+born of studied insolence, there did arrive at last a day
+which had something definitive about it to Theron's
+disturbed and restless mind.  It was a Thursday, and the
+prayer-meeting to be held that evening would be the last
+before the Quarterly Conference, now only four days off.
+
+For some reason, the young minister found himself dwelling
+upon this fact, and investing it with importance. 
+But yesterday the Quarterly Conference had seemed a long
+way ahead.  Today brought it alarmingly close to hand. 
+He had not heretofore regarded the weekly assemblage
+for prayer and song as a thing calling for preparation,
+or for any preliminary thought.  Now on this Thursday
+morning he went to his desk after breakfast, which was
+a sign that he wanted the room to himself, quite as
+if he had the task of a weighty sermon before him. 
+He sat at the desk all the forenoon, doing no writing,
+it is true, but remembering every once in a while,
+when his mind turned aside from the book in his hands,
+that there was that prayer-meeting in the evening.
+
+Sometimes he reached the point of vaguely wondering why
+this strictly commonplace affair should be forcing itself
+thus upon his attention.  Then, with a kind of mental
+shiver at the recollection that this was Thursday,
+and that the great struggle came on Monday, he would go
+back to his book.
+
+There were a half-dozen volumes on the open desk before him. 
+He had taken them out from beneath a pile of old
+"Sunday-School Advocates" and church magazines, where they
+had lain hidden from Alice's view most of the week. 
+If there had been a locked drawer in the house, he would
+have used it instead to hold these books, which had come
+to him in a neat parcel, which also contained an amiable
+note from Dr. Ledsmar, recalling a pleasant evening in May,
+and expressing the hope that the accompanying works would
+be of some service.  Theron had glanced at the backs of the
+uppermost two, and discovered that their author was Renan. 
+Then he had hastily put the lot in the best place he
+could think of to escape his wife's observation.
+
+He realized now that there had been no need for this secrecy. 
+Of the other four books, by Sayce, Budge, Smith, and Lenormant,
+three indeed revealed themselves to be published under
+religious auspices.  As for Renan, he might have known
+that the name would be meaningless to Alice.  The feeling
+that he himself was not much wiser in this matter than his
+wife may have led him to pass over the learned text-books
+on Chaldean antiquity, and even the volume of Renan
+which appeared to be devoted to Oriental inscriptions,
+and take up his other book, entitled in the translation,
+"Recollections of my Youth."  This he rather glanced through,
+at the outset, following with a certain inattention
+the introductory sketches and essays, which dealt with
+an unfamiliar, and, to his notion, somewhat preposterous
+Breton racial type.  Then, little by little, it dawned
+upon him that there was a connected story in all this;
+and suddenly he came upon it, out in the open, as it were. 
+It was the story of how a deeply devout young man,
+trained from his earliest boyhood for the sacred office,
+and desiring passionately nothing but to be worthy of it,
+came to a point where, at infinite cost of pain to himself
+and of anguish to those dearest to him, he had to declare
+that he could no longer believe at all in revealed religion.
+
+Theron Ware read this all with an excited interest
+which no book had ever stirred in him before.  Much of
+it he read over and over again, to make sure that he
+penetrated everywhere the husk of French habits of thought
+and Catholic methods in which the kernel was wrapped. 
+He broke off midway in this part of the book to go out
+to the kitchen to dinner, and began the meal in silence. 
+To Alice's questions he replied briefly that he was preparing
+himself for the evening's prayer-meeting. She lifted
+her brows in such frank surprise at this that he made
+a further and somewhat rambling explanation about having
+again taken up the work on his book--the book about Abraham.
+
+"I thought you said you'd given that up altogether,"
+she remarked.
+
+"Well," he said, "I WAS discouraged about it for a while. 
+But a man never does anything big without getting
+discouraged over and over again while he's doing it. 
+I don't say now that I shall write precisely THAT book--
+I'm merely reading scientific works about the period,
+just now--but if not that, I shall write some other book. 
+Else how will you get that piano?" he added, with an attempt at
+a smile.
+
+"I thought you had given that up, too!" she replied ruefully. 
+Then before he could speak, she went on:  "Never mind
+the piano; that can wait.  What I've got on my mind
+just now isn't piano; it's potatoes.  Do you know,
+I saw some the other day at Rasbach's, splendid potatoes--
+these are some of them--and fifteen cents a bushel cheaper
+than those dried-up old things Brother Barnum keeps,
+and so I bought two bushels.  And Sister Barnum met me
+on the street this morning, and threw it in my face that
+the Discipline commands us to trade with each other. 
+Is there any such command?"
+
+"Yes," said the husband.  "It's Section 33. 
+Don't you remember?  I looked it up in Tyre.  We are
+to 'evidence our desire of salvation by doing good,
+especially to them that are of the household of faith,
+or groaning so to be; by employing them preferably to others;
+buying one of another; helping each other in business'--
+and so on.  Yes, it's all there."
+
+"Well, I told her I didn't believe it was," put in Alice,
+"and I said that even if it was, there ought to be
+another section about selling potatoes to their minister
+for more than they're worth--potatoes that turn all green
+when you boil them, too.  I believe I'll read up that old
+Discipline myself, and see if it hasn't got some things
+that I can talk back with."
+
+"The very section before that, Number 32, enjoins members
+against 'uncharitable or unprofitable conversation--
+particularly speaking evil of magistrates or ministers.' 
+You'd have 'em there, I think."  Theron had begun
+cheerfully enough, but the careworn, preoccupied look
+returned now to his face.  "I'm sorry if we've fallen out
+with the Barnums," he said.  "His brother-in-law, Davis,
+the Sunday-school superintendent, is a member of the
+Quarterly Conference, you know, and I've been hoping
+that he was on my side.  I've been taking a good deal
+of pains to make up to him."
+
+He ended with a sigh, the pathos of which impressed Alice. 
+"If you think it will do any good," she volunteered,
+"I'll go and call on the Davises this very afternoon. 
+I'm sure to find her at home,--she's tied hand and foot
+with that brood of hers--and you'd better give me some of
+that candy for them."
+
+Theron nodded his approval and thanks, and relapsed
+into silence.  When the meal was over, he brought
+out the confectionery to his wife, and without a word
+went back to that remarkable book.
+
+When Alice returned toward the close of day, to prepare
+the simple tea which was always laid a half-hour earlier
+on Thursdays and Sundays, she found her husband where she
+had left him, still busy with those new scientific works. 
+She recounted to him some incidents of her call upon
+Mrs. Davis, as she took off her hat and put on the big
+kitchen apron--how pleased Mrs. Davis seemed to be;
+how her affection for her sister-in-law, the grocer's wife,
+disclosed itself to be not even skin-deep; how the children
+leaped upon the candy as if they had never seen any before;
+and how, in her belief, Mr. Davis would be heart and soul on
+Theron's side at the Conference.
+
+To her surprise, the young minister seemed not at
+all interested.  He hardly looked at her during
+her narrative, but reclined in the easy-chair with his
+head thrown back, and an abstracted gaze wandering
+aimlessly about the ceiling.  When she avowed her faith
+in the Sunday-school superintendent's loyal partisanship,
+which she did with a pardonable pride in having helped
+to make it secure, her husband even closed his eyes,
+and moved his head with a gesture which plainly bespoke indifference.
+
+"I expected you'd be tickled to death," she remarked,
+with evident disappointment.
+
+"I've a bad headache," he explained, after a minute's pause.
+
+"No wonder!"  Alice rejoined, sympathetically enough,
+but with a note of reproof as well.  "What can you expect,
+staying cooped up in here all day long, poring over
+those books?  People are all the while remarking
+that you study too much.  I tell them, of course,
+that you're a great hand for reading, and always were;
+but I think myself it would be better if you got out more,
+and took more exercise, and saw people.  You know lots
+and slathers more than THEY do now, or ever will, if you
+never opened another book."
+
+Theron regarded her with an expression which she had never
+seen on his face before.  "You don't realize what you
+are saying," he replied slowly.  He sighed as he added,
+with increased gravity, "I am the most ignorant man alive!"
+
+Alice began a little laugh of wifely incredulity, and then
+let it die away as she recognized that he was really
+troubled and sad in his mind.  She bent over to kiss him
+lightly on the brow, and tiptoed her way out into the kitchen.
+
+"I believe I will let you make my excuses at the prayer-meeting
+this evening," he said all at once, as the supper came
+to an end.  He had eaten next to nothing during the meal,
+and had sat in a sort of brown-study from which Alice
+kindly forbore to arouse him.  "I don't know--I hardly
+feel equal to it.  They won't take it amiss--for once--
+if you explain to them that I--I am not at all well."
+
+"Oh, I do hope you're not coming down with anything!" 
+Alice had risen too, and was gazing at him with a solicitude
+the tenderness of which at once comforted, and in some
+obscure way jarred on his nerves.  "Is there anything I
+can do--or shall I go for a doctor?  We've got mustard
+in the house, and senna--I think there's some senna left--
+and Jamaica ginger."
+
+Theron shook his head wearily at her.  "Oh, no,--no!"
+he expostulated.  "It isn't anything that needs drugs,
+or doctors either.  It's just mental worry and fatigue,
+that's all.  An evening's quiet rest in the big chair,
+and early to bed--that will fix me up all right."
+
+"But you'll read; and that will make your head worse,"
+said Alice.
+
+"No, I won't read any more," he promised her, walking slowly
+into the sitting-room, and settling himself in the big chair,
+the while she brought out a pillow from the adjoining
+best bedroom, and adjusted it behind his head.  "That's nice! 
+I'll just lie quiet here, and perhaps doze a little
+till you come back.  I feel in the mood for the rest;
+it will do me all sorts of good."
+
+He closed his eyes; and Alice, regarding his upturned
+face anxiously, decided that already it looked more at
+peace than awhile ago.
+
+"Well, I hope you'll be better when I get back," she said,
+as she began preparations for the evening service. 
+These consisted in combing stiffly back the strands of
+light-brown hair which, during the day, had exuberantly
+loosened themselves over her temples into something
+almost like curls; in fastening down upon this rebellious
+hair a plain brown-straw bonnet, guiltless of all
+ornament save a binding ribbon of dull umber hue;
+and in putting on a thin dark-gray shawl and a pair
+of equally subdued lisle-thread gloves.  Thus attired,
+she made a mischievous little grimace of dislike at her
+puritanical image in the looking-glass over the mantel,
+and then turned to announce her departure.
+
+"Well, I'm off," she said.  Theron opened his eyes to take
+in this figure of his wife dressed for prayer-meeting,
+and then closed them again abruptly.  "All right,"
+he murmured, and then he heard the door shut behind her.
+
+Although he had been alone all day, there seemed to be
+quite a unique value and quality in this present solitude. 
+He stretched out his legs on the opposite chair,
+and looked lazily about him, with the feeling that at
+last he had secured some leisure, and could think
+undisturbed to his heart's content.  There were nearly
+two hours of unbroken quiet before him; and the mere
+fact of his having stepped aside from the routine of
+his duty to procure it; marked it in his thoughts as a
+special occasion, which ought in the nature of things
+to yield more than the ordinary harvest of mental profit.
+
+Theron's musings were broken in upon from time to time
+by rumbling outbursts of hymn-singing from the church
+next door.  Surely, he said to himself, there could be no
+other congregation in the Conference, or in all Methodism,
+which sang so badly as these Octavians did.  The noise,
+as it came to him now and again, divided itself familiarly
+into a main strain of hard, high, sharp, and tinny
+female voices, with three or four concurrent and clashing
+branch strains of part-singing by men who did not know how. 
+How well he already knew these voices!  Through two wooden
+walls he could detect the conceited and pushing note of
+Brother Lovejoy, who tried always to drown the rest out,
+and the lifeless, unmeasured weight of shrill clamor
+which Sister Barnum hurled into every chorus, half closing
+her eyes and sticking out her chin as she did so. 
+They drawled their hymns too, these people, till Theron
+thought he understood that injunction in the Discipline
+against singing too slowly.  It had puzzled him heretofore;
+now he felt that it must have been meant in prophecy
+for Octavius.
+
+It was impossible not to recall in contrast that other
+church music he had heard, a month before, and the
+whole atmosphere of that other pastoral sitting room,
+from which he had listened to it.  The startled and crowded
+impressions of that strange evening had been lying hidden
+in his mind all this while, driven into a corner by the
+pressure of more ordinary, everyday matters.  They came
+forth now, and passed across his brain--no longer confusing
+and distorted, but in orderly and intelligible sequence. 
+Their earlier effect had been one of frightened fascination. 
+Now he looked them over calmly as they lifted themselves,
+one by one, and found himself not shrinking at all,
+or evading anything, but dwelling upon each in turn
+as a natural and welcome part of the most important
+experience of his life.
+
+The young minister had arrived, all at once, at this conclusion. 
+He did not question at all the means by which he had
+reached it.  Nothing was clearer to his mind than the
+conclusion itself--that his meeting, with the priest
+and the doctor was the turning-point in his career. 
+They had lifted him bodily out of the slough of ignorance,
+of contact with low minds and sordid, narrow things,
+and put him on solid ground.  This book he had been reading--
+this gentle, tender, lovable book, which had as much true
+piety in it as any devotional book he had ever read,
+and yet, unlike all devotional books, put its foot firmly
+upon everything which could not be proved in human reason
+to be true--must be merely one of a thousand which men
+like Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar knew by heart. 
+The very thought that he was on the way now to know them,
+too, made Theron tremble.  The prospect wooed him,
+and he thrilled in response, with the wistful and delicate
+eagerness of a young lover.
+
+Somehow, the fact that the priest and the doctor were not
+religious men, and that this book which had so impressed
+and stirred him was nothing more than Renan's recital
+of how he, too, ceased to be a religious man, did not
+take a form which Theron could look square in the face. 
+It wore the shape, instead, of a vague premise that there
+were a great many different kinds of religions--the past
+and dead races had multiplied these in their time literally
+into thousands--and that each no doubt had its central
+support of truth somewhere for the good men who were in it,
+and that to call one of these divine and condemn all
+the others was a part fit only for untutored bigots. 
+Renan had formally repudiated Catholicism, yet could write
+in his old age with the deepest filial affection of the
+Mother Church he had quitted.  Father Forbes could talk
+coolly about the "Christ-myth" without even ceasing to be
+a priest, and apparently a very active and devoted priest. 
+Evidently there was an intellectual world, a world of culture
+and grace, of lofty thoughts and the inspiring communion
+of real knowledge, where creeds were not of importance,
+and where men asked one another, not "Is your soul saved?"
+but "Is your mind well furnished?"  Theron had the sensation
+of having been invited to become a citizen of this world. 
+The thought so dazzled him that his impulses were
+dragging him forward to take the new oath of allegiance
+before he had had time to reflect upon what it was he
+was abandoning.
+
+The droning of the Doxology from the church outside stirred
+Theron suddenly out of his revery.  It had grown quite dark,
+and he rose and lit the gas.  "Blest be the Tie that Binds,"
+they were singing.  He paused, with hand still in air,
+to listen.  That well-worn phrase arrested his attention,
+and gave itself a new meaning.  He was bound to those people,
+it was true, but he could never again harbor the delusion
+that the tie between them was blessed.  There was vaguely
+present in his mind the consciousness that other ties
+were loosening as well.  Be that as it might, one thing
+was certain.  He had passed definitely beyond pretending
+to himself that there was anything spiritually in common
+between him and the Methodist Church of Octavius. 
+The necessity of his keeping up the pretence with others
+rose on the instant like a looming shadow before his
+mental vision.  He turned away from it, and bent his brain
+to think of something else.
+
+The noise of Alice opening the front door came as a
+pleasant digression.  A second later it became clear
+from the sound of voices that she had brought some one
+back with her, and Theron hastily stretched himself out
+again in the armchair, with his head back in the pillow,
+and his feet on the other chair.  He had come mighty
+near forgetting that he was an invalid, and he protected
+himself the further now by assuming an air of lassitude
+verging upon prostration.
+
+"Yes; there's a light burning.  It's all right," he heard
+Alice say.  She entered the room, and Theron's head was too
+bad to permit him to turn it, and see who her companion was.
+
+"Theron dear," Alice began, "I knew you'd be glad to see HER,
+even if you were out of sorts; and I persuaded her just to run
+in for a minute.  Let me introduce you to Sister Soulsby. 
+Sister Soulsby--my husband."
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware sat upright with an energetic start,
+and fastened upon the stranger a look which conveyed anything
+but the satisfaction his wife had been so sure about. 
+It was at the first blush an undisguised scowl, and only
+some fleeting memory of that reflection about needing
+now to dissemble, prevented him from still frowning as he
+rose to his feet, and perfunctorily held out his hand.
+
+"Delighted, I'm sure," he mumbled.  Then, looking up,
+he discovered that Sister Soulsby knew he was not delighted,
+and that she seemed not to mind in the least.
+
+"As your good lady said, I just ran in for a moment,"
+she remarked, shaking his limp hand with a brisk,
+business-like grasp, and dropping it.  "I hate bothering
+sick people, but as we're to be thrown together a good
+deal this next week or so, I thought I'd like to lose
+no time in saying 'howdy.'  I won't keep you up now. 
+Your wife has been sweet enough to ask me to move my trunk
+over here in the morning, so that you'll see enough of me
+and to spare."
+
+Theron looked falteringly into her face, as he strove
+for words which should sufficiently mask the disgust
+this intelligence stirred within him.  A debt-raiser
+in the town was bad enough!  A debt-raiser quartered
+in the very parsonage!--he ground his teeth to think of it.
+
+Alice read his hesitation aright.  "Sister Soulsby
+went to the hotel," she hastily put in; "and Loren
+Pierce was after her to come and stay at his house,
+and I ventured to tell her that I thought we could
+make her more comfortable here."  She accompanied this
+by so daring a grimace and nod that her husband woke
+up to the fact that a point in Conference politics was involved.
+
+He squeezed a doubtful smile upon his features.  "We shall
+both do our best," he said.  It was not easy, but he
+forced increasing amiability into his glance and tone. 
+"Is Brother Soulsby here, too?" he asked.
+
+The debt-raiser shook her head--again the prompt,
+decisive movement, so like a busy man of affairs. 
+"No," she answered.  "He's doing supply down on the Hudson
+this week, but he'll be here in time for the Sunday
+morning love-feast. I always like to come on ahead,
+and see how the land lies.  Well, good-night! Your head
+will be all right in the morning."
+
+Precisely what she meant by this assurance, Theron did
+not attempt to guess.  He received her adieu, noted the
+masterful manner in which she kissed his wife, and watched
+her pass out into the hall, with the feeling uppermost
+that this was a person who decidedly knew her way about. 
+Much as he was prepared to dislike her, and much as he
+detested the vulgar methods her profession typified,
+he could not deny that she seemed a very capable sort
+of woman.
+
+This mental concession did not prevent his fixing upon Alice,
+when she returned to the room, a glance of obvious disapproval.
+
+"Theron," she broke forth, to anticipate his reproach,
+"I did it for the best.  The Pierces would have got
+her if I hadn't cut in.  I thought it would help
+to have her on our side.  And, besides, I like her. 
+She's the first sister I've seen since we've been in this
+hole that's had a kind word for me--or--or sympathized
+with me!  And--and--if you're going to be offended--
+I shall cry!"
+
+There were real tears on her lashes, ready to make good
+the threat.  "Oh, I guess I wouldn't," said Theron,
+with an approach to his old, half-playful manner. 
+"If you like her, that's the chief thing."
+
+Alice shook her tear-drops away.  "No," she replied,
+with a wistful smile; "the chief thing is to have her
+like you.  She's as smart as a steel trap--that woman is--
+and if she took the notion, I believe she could help get us
+a better place."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+The ensuing week went by with a buzz and whirl,
+circling about Theron Ware's dizzy consciousness like
+some huge, impalpable teetotum sent spinning under Sister
+Soulsby's resolute hands.  Whenever his vagrant memory
+recurred to it, in after months, he began by marvelling,
+and ended with a shudder of repulsion.
+
+It was a week crowded with events, which seemed to him
+to shoot past so swiftly that in effect they came all
+of a heap.  He never essayed the task, in retrospect,
+of arranging them in their order of sequence. 
+They had, however, a definite and interdependent
+chronology which it is worth the while to trace.
+
+Mrs. Soulsby brought her trunk round to the parsonage bright
+and early on Friday morning, and took up her lodgement
+in the best bedroom, and her headquarters in the house
+at large, with a cheerful and business-like manner. 
+She desired nothing so much, she said, as that people
+should not put themselves out on her account, or allow
+her to get in their way.  She appeared to mean this, too,
+and to have very good ideas about securing its realization.
+
+During both Friday and the following day, indeed, Theron saw
+her only at the family meals.  There she displayed a hearty
+relish for all that was set before her which quite won
+Mrs. Ware's heart, and though she talked rather more than
+Theron found himself expecting from a woman, he could not deny
+that her conversation was both seemly and entertaining. 
+She had evidently been a great traveller, and referred
+to things she had seen in Savannah or Montreal or Los
+Angeles in as matter-of-fact fashion as he could have spoken
+of a visit to Tecumseh.  Theron asked her many questions
+about these and other far-off cities, and her answers
+were all so pat and showed so keen and clear an eye that
+he began in spite of himself to think of her with a
+certain admiration.
+
+She in turn plied him with inquiries about the principal
+pew-holders and members of his congregation--their means,
+their disposition, and the measure of their devotion. 
+She put these queries with such intelligence, and seemed
+to assimilate his replies with such an alert understanding,
+that the young minister was spurred to put dashes of character
+in his descriptions, and set forth the idiosyncrasies
+and distinguishing earmarks of his flock with what he
+felt afterward might have been too free a tongue.  But at
+the time her fine air of appreciation led him captive. 
+He gossiped about his parishioners as if he enjoyed it. 
+He made a specially happy thumb-nail sketch for her of
+one of his trustees, Erastus Winch, the loud-mouthed,
+ostentatiously jovial, and really cold-hearted cheese-buyer.
+She was particularly interested in hearing about this man. 
+The personality of Winch seemed to have impressed her,
+and she brought the talk back to him more than once,
+and prompted Theron to the very threshold of indiscretion
+in his confidences on the subject.
+
+Save at meal-times, Sister Soulsby spent the two days out
+around among the Methodists of Octavius.  She had little
+or nothing to say about what she thus saw and heard,
+but used it as the basis for still further inquiries. 
+She told more than once, however, of how she had been
+pressed here or there to stay to dinner or supper, and how
+she had excused herself.  "I've knocked about too much,"
+she would explain to the Wares, "not to fight shy of random
+country cooking.  When I find such a born cook as you are--
+well I know when I'm well off."  Alice flushed with pleased
+pride at this, and Theron himself felt that their visitor
+showed great good sense.  By Saturday noon, the two
+women were calling each other by their first names. 
+Theron learned with a certain interest that Sister Soulsby's
+Christian name was Candace.
+
+It was only natural that he should give even more
+thought to her than to her quaint and unfamiliar old
+Ethiopian name.  She was undoubtedly a very smart woman. 
+To his surprise she had never introduced in her talk any
+of the stock religious and devotional phrases which official
+Methodists so universally employed in mutual converse. 
+She might have been an insurance agent, or a school-teacher,
+visiting in a purely secular household, so little parade
+of cant was there about her.
+
+He caught himself wondering how old she was. 
+She seemed to have been pretty well over the whole
+American continent, and that must take years of time. 
+Perhaps, however, the exertion of so much travel would tend
+to age one in appearance.  Her eyes were still youthful--
+decidedly wise eyes, but still juvenile.  They had sparkled
+with almost girlish merriment at some of his jokes. 
+She turned them about a good deal when she spoke,
+making their glances fit and illustrate the things she said. 
+He had never met any one whose eyes played so constant
+and prominent a part in their owner's conversation. 
+Theron had never seen a play; but he had encountered
+the portraits of famous queens of the drama several times
+in illustrated papers or shop windows, and it occurred
+to him that some of the more marked contortions of Sister
+Soulsby's eyes--notably a trick she had of rolling
+them swiftly round and plunging them, so to speak,
+into an intent, yearning, one might almost say devouring,
+gaze at the speaker--were probably employed by eminent
+actresses like Ristori and Fanny Davenport.
+
+The rest of Sister Soulsby was undoubtedly subordinated
+in interest to those eyes of hers.  Sometimes her face
+seemed to be reviving temporarily a comeliness which
+had been constant in former days; then again it would
+look decidedly, organically, plain.  It was the worn
+and loose-skinned face of a nervous, middle-aged woman,
+who had had more than her share of trouble, and drank too
+much tea.  She wore the collar of her dress rather low;
+and Theron found himself wondering at this, because,
+though long and expansive, her neck certainly showed
+more cords and cavities than consorted with his vague
+ideal of statuesque beauty.  Then he wondered at himself
+for thinking about it, and abruptly reined up his fancy,
+only to find that it was playing with speculations
+as to whether her yellowish complexion was due to that
+tea-drinking or came to her as a legacy of Southern blood.
+
+He knew that she was born in the South because she said so. 
+From the same source he learned that her father had been
+a wealthy planter, who was ruined by the war, and sank into
+a premature grave under the weight of his accumulated losses. 
+The large dark rings around her eyes grew deeper still in
+their shadows when she told about this, and her ordinarily
+sharp voice took on a mellow cadence, with a soft,
+drawling accent, turning U's into O's, and having no R's
+to speak of.  Theron had imbibed somewhere in early days
+the conviction that the South was the land of romance,
+of cavaliers and gallants and black eyes flashing behind
+mantillas and outspread fans, and somehow when Sister
+Soulsby used this intonation she suggested all these things.
+
+But almost all her talk was in another key--a brisk,
+direct, idiomatic manner of speech, with an intonation
+hinting at no section in particular.  It was merely that
+of the city-dweller as distinguished from the rustic. 
+She was of about Alice's height, perhaps a shade taller. 
+It did not escape the attention of the Wares that she wore
+clothes of a more stylish cut and a livelier arrangement of hues
+than any Alice had ever dared own, even in lax-minded Tyre. 
+The two talked of this in their room on Friday night;
+and Theron explained that congregations would tolerate
+things of this sort with a stranger which would be sharply
+resented in the case of local folk whom they controlled. 
+It was on this occasion that Alice in turn told Theron
+she was sure Mrs. Soulsby had false teeth--a confidence
+which she immediately regretted as an act of treachery
+to her sex.
+
+On Saturday afternoon, toward evening, Brother Soulsby
+arrived, and was guided to the parsonage by his wife,
+who had gone to the depot to meet him.  They must have
+talked over the situation pretty thoroughly on the way,
+for by the time the new-comer had washed his face
+and hands and put on a clean collar, Sister Soulsby
+was ready to announce her plan of campaign in detail.
+
+Her husband was a man of small stature and, like herself,
+of uncertain age.  He had a gentle, if rather dry,
+clean-shaven face, and wore his dust-colored hair
+long behind.  His little figure was clad in black
+clothes of a distinctively clerical fashion, and he
+had a white neck-cloth neatly tied under his collar. 
+The Wares noted that he looked clean and amiable
+rather than intellectually or spiritually powerful,
+as he took the vacant seat between theirs, and joined
+them in concentrating attention upon Mrs. Soulsby.
+
+This lady, holding herself erect and alert on the edge
+of the low, big easy-chair had the air of presiding
+over a meeting.
+
+"My idea is," she began, with an easy implication that no
+one else's idea was needed, "that your Quarterly Conference,
+when it meets on Monday, must be adjourned to Tuesday. 
+We will have the people all out tomorrow morning
+to love-feast, and announcement can be made there,
+and at the morning service afterward, that a series
+of revival meetings are to be begun that same evening. 
+Mr. Soulsby and I can take charge in the evening, and we'll
+see to it that THAT packs the house--fills the church
+to overflowing Monday evening.  Then we'll quietly turn
+the meeting into a debt-raising convention, before they
+know where they are, and we'll wipe off the best part
+of the load.  Now, don't you see," she turned her eyes
+full upon Theron as she spoke, "you want to hold your
+Quarterly Conference AFTER this money's been raised,
+not before."
+
+"I see what you mean," Mr. Ware responded gravely. 
+"But--"
+
+"But what!"  Sister Soulsby interjected, with vivacity.
+
+"Well," said Theron, picking his words, "in the first place,
+it rests with the Presiding Elder to say whether
+an adjournment can be made until Tuesday, not with me."
+
+"That's all right.  Leave that to me," said the lady.
+
+"In the second place," Theron went on, still more hesitatingly,
+"there seems a certain--what shall I say?--indirection in--in--"
+
+"In getting them together for a revival, and springing
+a debt-raising on them?"  Sister Soulsby put in. 
+"Why, man alive, that's the best part of it.  You ought
+to be getting some notion by this time what these Octavius
+folks of yours are like.  I've only been here two days,
+but I've got their measure down to an allspice. 
+Supposing you were to announce tomorrow that the debt
+was to be raised Monday.  How many men with bank-accounts
+would turn up, do you think?  You could put them all in
+your eye, sir--all in your eye!"
+
+"Very possibly you're right," faltered the young minister.
+
+"Right?  Why, of course I'm right," she said,
+with placid confidence.  "You've got to take folks as you
+find them; and you've got to find them the best way
+you can.  One place can be worked, managed, in one way,
+and another needs quite a different way, and both ways
+would be dead frosts--complete failures--in a third."
+
+Brother Soulsby coughed softly here, and shuffled his feet
+for an instant on the carpet.  His wife resumed her remarks
+with slightly abated animation, and at a slower pace.
+
+"My experience," she said, "has shown me that the Apostle
+was right.  To properly serve the cause, one must be
+all things to all men.  I have known very queer things
+indeed turn out to be means of grace.  You simply CAN'T
+get along without some of the wisdom of the serpent. 
+We are commanded to have it, for that matter.  And now,
+speaking of that, do you know when the Presiding Elder
+arrives in town today, and where he is going to eat supper
+and sleep?"
+
+Theron shook his head.  "All I know is he isn't likely
+to come here," he said, and added sadly, "I'm afraid he's
+not an admirer of mine."
+
+"Perhaps that's not all his fault," commented Sister Soulsby. 
+"I'll tell you something.  He came in on the same train
+as my husband, and that old trustee Pierce of yours was
+waiting for him with his buggy, and I saw like a flash
+what was in the wind, and the minute the train stopped I
+caught the Presiding Elder, and invited him in your name
+to come right here and stay; told him you and Alice were
+just set on his coming--wouldn't take no for an answer. 
+Of course he couldn't come--I knew well enough he had
+promised old Pierce--but we got in our invitation anyway,
+and it won't do you any harm.  Now, that's what I call
+having some gumption--wisdom of the serpent, and so on."
+
+"I'm sure," remarked Alice, "I should have been mortified
+to death if he had come.  We lost the extension-leaf
+to our table in moving, and four is all it'll seat decently."
+
+Sister Soulsby smiled winningly into the wife's honest face. 
+"Don't you see, dear," she explained patiently, "I only
+asked him because I knew he couldn't come.  A little butter
+spreads a long way, if it's only intelligently warmed."
+
+"It was certainly very ingenious of you," Theron began
+almost stiffly.  Then he yielded to the humanities,
+and with a kindling smile added, "And it was as kind
+as kind could be.  I'm afraid you're wrong about it's
+doing me any good, but I can see how well you meant it,
+and I'm grateful."
+
+"We COULD have sneaked in the kitchen table, perhaps,
+while he was out in the garden, and put on the extra
+long tablecloth," interjected Alice, musingly.
+
+Sister Soulsby smiled again at Sister Ware, but without
+any words this time; and Alice on the instant rose,
+with the remark that she must be going out to see
+about supper.
+
+"I'm going to insist on coming out to help you,"
+Mrs. Soulsby declared, "as soon as I've talked over one
+little matter with your husband.  Oh, yes, you must
+let me this time.  I insist!"
+
+As the kitchen door closed behind Mrs. Ware, a swift
+and apparently significant glance shot its way across
+from Sister Soulsby's roving, eloquent eyes to the calmer
+and smaller gray orbs of her husband.  He rose to his feet,
+made some little explanation about being a gardener himself,
+and desiring to inspect more closely some rhododendrons
+he had noticed in the garden, and forthwith moved
+decorously out by the other door into the front hall. 
+They heard his footsteps on the gravel beneath the window
+before Mrs. Soulsby spoke again.
+
+"You're right about the Presiding Elder, and you're wrong,"
+she said.  "He isn't what one might call precisely in love
+with you.  Oh, I know the story--how you got into debt
+at Tyre, and he stepped in and insisted on your being
+denied Tecumseh and sent here instead."
+
+"HE was responsible for that, then, was he?" broke in Theron,
+with contracted brows.
+
+"Why, don't you make any effort to find out anything at ALL
+she asked pertly enough, but with such obvious good-nature
+that he could not but have pleasure in her speech. 
+"Why, of course he did it!  Who else did you suppose?"
+
+"Well," said the young minister, despondently, "if he's
+as much against me as all that, I might as well hang up
+my fiddle and go home."
+
+Sister Soulsby gave a little involuntary groan of impatience. 
+She bent forward, and, lifting her eyes, rolled them at him
+in a curve of downward motion which suggested to his fancy
+the image of two eagles in a concerted pounce upon a lamb.
+
+"My friend," she began, with a new note of impressiveness
+in her voice, "if you'll pardon my saying it, you haven't
+got the spunk of a mouse.  If you're going to lay down,
+and let everybody trample over you just as they please,
+you're right!  You MIGHT as well go home.  But now here,
+this is what I wanted to say to you:  Do you just keep your hands
+off these next few days, and leave this whole thing to me. 
+I'll pull it into shipshape for you.  No--wait a minute--
+don't interrupt now.  I have taken a liking to you. 
+You've got brains, and you've got human nature in you,
+and heart.  What you lack is SABE--common-sense. You'll
+get that, too, in time, and meanwhile I'm not going to stand
+by and see you cut up and fed to the dogs for want of it. 
+I'll get you through this scrape, and put you on your
+feet again, right-side-up-with care, because, as I said,
+I like you.  I like your wife, too, mind.  She's a good,
+honest little soul, and she worships the very ground you
+tread on.  Of course, as long as people WILL marry in
+their teens, the wrong people will get yoked up together. 
+But that's neither here nor there.  She's a kind sweet
+little body, and she's devoted to you, and it isn't every
+intellectual man that gets even that much.  But now
+it's a go, is it?  You promise to keep quiet, do you,
+and leave the whole show absolutely to me?  Shake hands
+on it."
+
+Sister Soulsby had risen, and stood now holding out her hand
+in a frank, manly fashion.  Theron looked at the hand,
+and made mental notes that there were a good many veins
+discernible on the small wrist, and that the forearm
+seemed to swell out more than would have been expected
+in a woman producing such a general effect of leanness. 
+He caught the shine of a thin bracelet-band of gold under
+the sleeve.  A delicate, significant odor just hinted
+its presence in the air about this outstretched arm--
+something which was not a perfume, yet deserved as gracious
+a name.
+
+He rose to his feet, and took the proffered hand with a
+deliberate gesture, as if he had been cautiously weighing
+all the possible arguments for and against this momentous compact.
+
+"I promise," he said gravely, and the two palms squeezed
+themselves together in an earnest clasp.
+
+"Right you are," exclaimed the lady, once more with
+cheery vivacity.  "Mind, when it's all over, I'm going
+to give you a good, serious, downright talking to--
+a regular hoeing-over. I'm not sure I shan't give
+you a sound shaking into the bargain.  You need it. 
+And now I'm going out to help Alice."
+
+The Reverend Mr. Ware remained standing after his new friend
+had left the room, and his meditative face wore an even
+unusual air of abstraction.  He strolled aimlessly over,
+after a time, to the desk by the window, and stood there
+looking out at the slight figure of Brother Soulsby,
+who was bending over and attentively regarding some pink
+blossoms on a shrub through what seemed to be a pocket
+magnifying-glass.
+
+What remained uppermost in his mind was not this interesting
+woman's confident pledge of championship in his material
+difficulties.  He found himself dwelling instead upon her
+remark about the incongruous results of early marriages. 
+He wondered idly if the little man in the white tie,
+fussing out there over that rhododendron-bush, had figured
+in her thoughts as an example of these evils.  Then he reflected
+that they had been mentioned in clear relation to talk about Alice.
+
+Now that he faced this question, it was as if he had been
+consciously ignoring and putting it aside for a long time. 
+How was it, he asked himself now, that Alice, who had
+once seemed so bright and keen-witted, who had in truth
+started out immeasurably his superior in swiftness of
+apprehension and readiness in humorous quips and conceits,
+should have grown so dull?  For she was undoubtedly slow
+to understand things nowadays.  Her absurd lugging in of
+the extension-table problem, when the great strategic
+point of that invitation foisted upon the Presiding Elder
+came up, was only the latest sample of a score of these
+heavy-minded exhibitions that recalled themselves to him. 
+And outsiders were apparently beginning to notice it. 
+He knew by intuition what those phrases, "good, honest
+little soul" and "kind, sweet little body" signified,
+when another woman used them to a husband about his wife. 
+The very employment of that word "little" was enough,
+considering that there was scarcely more than a hair's
+difference between Mrs. Soulsby and Alice, and that they
+were both rather tall than otherwise, as the stature of
+women went.
+
+What she had said about the chronic misfortunes of
+intellectual men in such matters gave added point to those
+meaning phrases.  Nobody could deny that geniuses and men
+of conspicuous talent had as a rule, all through history,
+contracted unfortunate marriages.  In almost every
+case where their wives were remembered at all, it was
+on account of their abnormal stupidity, or bad temper,
+or something of that sort.  Take Xantippe, for example,
+and Shakespeare's wife, and--and--well, there was Byron,
+and Bulwer-Lytton, and ever so many others.
+
+Of course there was nothing to be done about it. 
+These things happened, and one could only put the best
+possible face on them, and live one's appointed life
+as patiently and contentedly as might be.  And Alice
+undoubtedly merited all the praise which had been so
+generously bestowed upon her.  She was good and honest
+and kindly, and there could be no doubt whatever
+as to her utter devotion to him.  These were tangible,
+solid qualities, which must always secure respect for her. 
+It was true that she no longer seemed to be very popular
+among people.  He questioned whether men, for instance,
+like Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar would care much
+about her.  Visions of the wifeless and academic calm
+in which these men spent their lives--an existence
+consecrated to literature and knowledge and familiarity
+with all the loftiest and noblest thoughts of the past--
+rose and enveloped him in a cloud of depression.  No such
+lot would be his!  He must labor along among ignorant
+and spiteful narrow-minded people to the end of his days,
+pocketing their insults and fawning upon the harsh hands of
+jealous nonentities who happened to be his official masters,
+just to keep a roof over his head--or rather Alice's.
+He must sacrifice everything to this, his ambitions,
+his passionate desires to do real good in the world on
+a large scale, his mental freedom, yes, even his chance
+of having truly elevating, intellectual friendships. 
+For it was plain enough that the men whose friendship
+would be of genuine and stimulating profit to him would
+not like her.  Now that he thought of it, she seemed
+latterly to make no friends at all.
+
+Suddenly, as he watched in a blank sort of way Brother
+Soulsby take out a penknife, and lop an offending twig
+from a rose-bush against the fence, something occurred
+to him.  There was a curious exception to that rule
+of Alice's isolation.  She had made at least one friend. 
+Levi Gorringe seemed to like her extremely.
+
+As if his mind had been a camera, Theron snapped a
+shutter down upon this odd, unbidden idea, and turned
+away from the window.
+
+The sounds of an active, almost strenuous conversation
+in female voices came from the kitchen.  Theron opened
+the door noiselessly, and put in his head, conscious of
+something furtive in his intention.
+
+"You must dreen every drop of water off the spinach,
+mind, before you put it over, or else--"
+
+It was Sister Soulsby's sharp and penetrating tones
+which came to him.  Theron closed the door again,
+and surrendered himself once more to the circling whirl
+of his thoughts.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+A love-feast at nine in the morning opened the public
+services of a Sunday still memorable in the annals
+of Octavius Methodism.
+
+This ceremony, which four times a year preceded the sessions
+of the Quarterly Conference, was not necessarily an event
+of importance.  It was an occasion upon which the brethren
+and sisters who clung to the old-fashioned, primitive
+ways of the itinerant circuit-riders, let themselves go
+with emphasized independence, putting up more vehement
+prayers than usual, and adding a special fervor of noise
+to their "Amens!" and other interjections--and that was all.
+
+It was Theron's first love-feast in Octavius, and as the
+big class-room in the church basement began to fill up,
+and he noted how the men with ultra radical views and the
+women clad in the most ostentatious drabs and grays were
+crowding into the front seats, he felt his spirits sinking. 
+He had literally to force himself from sentence to sentence,
+when the time came for him to rise and open the proceedings
+with an exhortation.  He had eagerly offered this function
+to the Presiding Elder, the Rev. Aziel P. Larrabee,
+who sat in severe silence on the little platform behind him,
+but had been informed that the dignitary would lead off
+in giving testimony later on.  So Theron, feeling all
+the while the hostile eyes of the Elder burning holes
+in his back, dragged himself somehow through the task. 
+He had never known any such difficulty of speech before. 
+The relief was almost overwhelming when he came to the
+customary part where all are adjured to be as brief
+as possible in witnessing for the Lord, because the time
+belongs to all the people, and the Discipline forbids
+the feast to last more than ninety minutes.  He delivered
+this injunction to brevity with marked earnestness,
+and then sat down abruptly.
+
+There was some rather boisterous singing, during which
+the stewards, beginning with the platform, passed plates
+of bread cut in small cubes, and water in big plated
+pitchers and tumblers, about among the congregation,
+threading their way between the long wooden benches
+ordinarily occupied at this hour by the children of
+the Sunday-school, and helping each brother and sister
+in turn.  They held by the old custom, here in Octavius,
+and all along the seats the sexes alternated, as they
+do at a polite dinner-table.
+
+Theron impassively watched the familiar scene.  The early
+nervousness had passed away.  He felt now that he was not
+in the least afraid of these people, even with the Presiding
+Elder thrown in.  Folks who sang with such unintelligence,
+and who threw themselves with such undignified fervor
+into this childish business of the bread and water,
+could not be formidable antagonists for a man of intellect. 
+He had never realized before what a spectacle the
+Methodist love-feast probably presented to outsiders. 
+What must they think of it!
+
+He had noticed that the Soulsbys sat together, in the centre
+and toward the front.  Next to Brother Soulsby sat Alice. 
+He thought she looked pale and preoccupied, and set it
+down in passing to her innate distaste for the somber
+garments she was wearing, and for the company she perforce
+found herself in.  Another head was in the way, and for a
+time Theron did not observe who sat beside Alice on the
+other side.  When at last he saw that it was Levi Gorringe,
+his instinct was to wonder what the lawyer must be saying
+to himself about these noisy and shallow enthusiasts. 
+A recurring emotion of loyalty to the simple people
+among whom, after all, he had lived his whole life,
+prompted him to feel that it wasn't wholly nice of Gorringe
+to come and enjoy this revelation of their foolish side,
+as if it were a circus.  There was some vague memory in his
+mind which associated Gorringe with other love-feasts,
+and with a cynical attitude toward them.  Oh, yes! he
+had told how he went to one just for the sake of sitting
+beside the girl he admired--and was pursuing.
+
+The stewards had completed their round, and the loud,
+discordant singing came to an end.  There ensued a
+little pause, during which Theron turned to the Presiding
+Elder with a gesture of invitation to take charge of the
+further proceedings.  The Elder responded with another gesture,
+calling his attention to something going on in front.
+
+Brother and Sister Soulsby, to the considerable surprise
+of everybody, had risen to their feet, and were standing
+in their places, quite motionless, and with an air of
+professional self-assurance dimly discernible under a large
+show of humility.  They stood thus until complete silence
+had been secured.  Then the woman, lifting her head,
+began to sing.  The words were "Rock of Ages," but no one
+present had heard the tune to which she wedded them. 
+Her voice was full and very sweet, and had in it
+tender cadences which all her hearers found touching. 
+She knew how to sing, and she put forth the words
+so that each was distinctly intelligible.  There came
+a part where Brother Soulsby, lifting his head in turn,
+took up a tuneful second to her air.  Although the
+two did not, as one could hear by listening closely,
+sing the same words at the same time, they produced none
+the less most moving and delightful harmonies of sound.
+
+The experience was so novel and charming that listeners
+ran ahead in their minds to fix the number of verses there
+were in the hymn, and to hope that none would be left out. 
+Toward the end, when some of the intolerably self-conceited
+local singers, fancying they had caught the tune,
+started to join in, they were stopped by an indignant
+"sh-h!" which rose from all parts of the class-room;
+and the Soulsbys, with a patient and pensive kindliness
+written on their uplifted faces, gave that verse over again.
+
+What followed seemed obviously restrained and modified by the
+effect of this unlooked-for and tranquillizing overture. 
+The Presiding Elder was known to enjoy visits to old-fashioned
+congregations like that of Octavius, where he could
+indulge to the full his inner passion for high-pitched
+passionate invocations and violent spiritual demeanor,
+but this time he spoke temperately, almost soothingly. 
+The most tempestuous of the local witnesses for the Lord
+gave in their testimony in relatively pacific tones,
+under the influence of the spell which good music had
+laid upon the gathering.  There was the deepest interest
+as to what the two visitors would do in this way. 
+Brother Soulsby spoke first, very briefly and in well rounded
+and well-chosen, if conventional, phrases.  His wife,
+following him, delivered in a melodious monotone some
+equally hackneyed remarks.  The assemblage, listening in
+rapt attention, felt the suggestion of reserved power in
+every sentence she uttered, and burst forth, as she dropped
+into her seat, in a loud chorus of approving ejaculations. 
+The Soulsbys had captured Octavius with their first outer
+skirmish line.
+
+Everything seemed to move forward now with a new zest
+and spontaneity.  Theron had picked out for the occasion
+the best of those sermons which he had prepared in Tyre,
+at the time when he was justifying his ambition to be
+accounted a pulpit orator.  It was orthodox enough,
+but had been planned as the framework for picturesque
+and emotional rhetoric rather than doctrinal edification. 
+He had never dreamed of trying it on Octavius before,
+and only on the yesterday had quavered at his own daring
+in choosing it now.  Nothing but the desire to show Sister
+Soulsby what was in him had held him to the selection.
+
+Something of this same desire no doubt swayed and steadied
+him now in the pulpit.  The labored slowness of his beginning
+seemed to him to be due to nervous timidity, until suddenly,
+looking down into those big eyes of Sister Soulsby's,
+which were bent gravely upon him from where she sat beside
+Alice in the minister's pew, he remembered that it was
+instead the studied deliberation which art had taught him. 
+He went on, feeling more and more that the skill and
+histrionic power of his best days were returning to him,
+were as marked as ever--nay, had never triumphed before
+as they were triumphing now.  The congregation watched
+and listened with open, steadfast eyes and parted lips. 
+For the first time in all that weary quarter, their
+faces shone.  The sustaining sparkle of their gaze lifted
+him to a peroration unrivalled in his own recollection of himself.
+
+He sat down, and bent his head forward upon the open Bible,
+breathing hard, but suffused with a glow of satisfaction. 
+His ears caught the music of that sighing rustle through
+the audience which bespeaks a profound impression. 
+He could scarcely keep the fingers of his hands,
+covering his bowed face in a devotional posture as they were,
+from drumming a jubilant tattoo.  His pulses did this
+in every vein, throbbing with excited exultation. 
+The insistent whim seized him, as he still bent thus
+before his people, to whisper to his own heart, "At last!--
+The dogs!"
+
+The announcement that in the evening a series of revival
+meetings was to be inaugurated, had been made at the
+love-feast, and it was repeated now from the pulpit,
+with the added statement that for the once the class-meetings
+usually following this morning service would be suspended. 
+Then Theron came down the steps, conscious after a fashion
+that the Presiding Elder had laid a propitiatory hand on his
+shoulder and spoken amiably about the sermon, and that several
+groups of more or less important parishioners were waiting
+in the aisle and the vestibule to shake hands and tell him
+how much they had enjoyed the sermon.  His mind perversely
+kept hold of the thought that all this came too late. 
+He politely smiled his way along out, and, overtaking the
+Soulsbys and his wife near the parsonage gate, went in with them.
+
+At the cold, picked-up noonday meal which was the Sunday
+rule of the house, Theron rather expected that his guests
+would talk about the sermon, or at any rate about the events
+of the morning.  A Sabbath chill seemed to have settled
+upon both their tongues.  They ate almost in silence,
+and their sparse remarks touched upon topics far removed
+from church affairs.  Alice too, seemed strangely
+disinclined to conversation.  The husband knew her face
+and its varying moods so well that he could see she
+was laboring under some very powerful and deep emotion. 
+No doubt it was the sermon, the oratorical swing of which
+still tingled in his own blood, that had so affected her. 
+If she had said so, it would have pleased him, but she
+said nothing.
+
+After dinner, Brother Soulsby disappeared in his bedroom,
+with the remark that he guessed he would lie down awhile. 
+Sister Soulsby put on her bonnet, and, explaining that she
+always prepared herself for an evening's work by a long
+solitary walk, quitted the house.  Alice, after she had put
+the dinner things away, went upstairs, and stayed there. 
+Left to himself, Theron spent the afternoon in the
+easy-chair, and, in the intervals of confused introspection,
+read "Recollections of my Youth" through again from cover
+to cover.
+
+He went through the remarkable experiences attending
+the opening of the revival, when evening came, as one in
+a dream.  Long before the hour for the service arrived,
+the sexton came in to tell him that the church was already
+nearly full, and that it was going to be impossible
+to present any distinction in the matter of pews. 
+When the party from the parsonage went over--after another
+cold and mostly silent meal--it was to find the interior
+of the church densely packed, and people being turned
+away from the doors.
+
+Theron was supposed to preside over what followed, and he
+did sit on the central chair in the pulpit, between the
+Presiding Elder and Brother Soulsby, and on the several
+needful occasions did rise and perfunctorily make the formal
+remarks required of him.  The Elder preached a short,
+but vigorously phrased sermon.  The Soulsbys sang three or
+four times--on each occasion with familiar hymnal words set
+to novel, concerted music--and then separately exhorted
+the assemblage.  The husband's part seemed well done. 
+If his speech lacked some of the fire of the divine girdings
+which older Methodists recalled, it still led straight,
+and with kindling fervency, up to a season of power. 
+The wife took up the word as he sat down.  She had risen
+from one of the side-seats; and, speaking as she walked,
+she moved forward till she stood within the altar-rail,
+immediately under the pulpit, and from this place,
+facing the listening throng, she delivered her harangue. 
+Those who watched her words most intently got the least
+sense of meaning from them.  The phrases were all familiar
+enough--"Jesus a very present help," "Sprinkled by the Blood,"
+"Comforted by the Word," "Sanctified by the Spirit,"
+"Born into the Kingdom," and a hundred others--but it
+was as in the case of her singing:  the words were old;
+the music was new.
+
+What Sister Soulsby said did not matter.  The way she
+said it--the splendid, searching sweep of her great eyes;
+the vibrating roll of her voice, now full of tears, now scornful,
+now boldly, jubilantly triumphant; the sympathetic swaying
+of her willowy figure under the stress of her eloquence--
+was all wonderful.  When she had finished, and stood,
+flushed and panting, beneath the shadow of the pulpit,
+she held up a hand deprecatingly as the resounding "Amens!"
+and "Bless the Lords!" began to well up about her.
+
+"You have heard us sing," she said, smiling to apologize
+for her shortness of breath.  "Now we want to hear you sing!"
+
+Her husband had risen as she spoke, and on the instant,
+with a far greater volume of voice than they had hitherto
+disclosed, the two began "From Greenland's Icy Mountains,"
+in the old, familiar tune.  It did not need Sister Soulsby's
+urgent and dramatic gesture to lift people to their feet. 
+The whole assemblage sprang up, and, under the guidance
+of these two powerful leading voices, thundered the hymn
+out as Octavius had never heard it before.
+
+While its echoes were still alive, the woman began
+speaking again.  "Don't sit down!" she cried. 
+"You would stand up if the President of the United
+States was going by, even if he was only going fishing. 
+How much more should you stand up in honor of living
+souls passing forward to find their Saviour!"
+
+The psychological moment was upon them.  Groans and
+cries arose, and a palpable ferment stirred the throng. 
+The exhortation to sinners to declare themselves, to come
+to the altar, was not only on the revivalist's lips: 
+it seemed to quiver in the very air, to be borne on every
+inarticulate exclamation in the clamor of the brethren. 
+A young woman, with a dazed and startled look in her eyes,
+rose in the body of the church tremblingly hesitated for
+a moment, and then, with bowed head and blushing cheeks,
+pressed her way out from the end of a crowded pew and down
+the aisle to the rail.  A triumphant outburst of welcoming
+ejaculations swelled to the roof as she knelt there,
+and under its impetus others followed her example. 
+With interspersed snatches of song and shouted encouragements
+the excitement reached its height only when twoscore people,
+mostly young, were tightly clustered upon their knees
+about the rail, and in the space opening upon the aisle. 
+Above the confusion of penitential sobs and moans, and the
+hysterical murmurings of members whose conviction of entire
+sanctity kept them in their seats, could be heard the voices
+of the Presiding Elder, the Soulsbys, and the elderly
+deacons of the church, who moved about among the kneeling
+mourners, bending over them and patting their shoulders,
+and calling out to them:  "Fasten your thoughts on Jesus!" 
+"Oh, the Precious Blood!"  "Blessed be His Name!" 
+"Seek Him, and you shall find Him!"  "Cling to Jesus,
+and Him Crucified!"
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware did not, with the others, descend from
+the pulpit.  Seated where he could not see Sister Soulsby,
+he had failed utterly to be moved by the wave of enthusiasm
+she had evoked.  What he heard her say disappointed him. 
+He had expected from her more originality, more spice of
+her own idiomatic, individual sort.  He viewed with a cold
+sense of aloofness the evidences of her success when they
+began to come forward and abase themselves at the altar. 
+The instant resolve that, come what might, he would not go
+down there among them, sprang up ready-made in his mind. 
+He saw his two companions pass him and descend the pulpit
+stairs, and their action only hardened his resolution. 
+If an excuse were needed, he was presiding, and the place
+to preside in was the pulpit.  But he waived in his mind
+the whole question of an excuse.
+
+After a little, he put his hand over his face, leaning the
+elbow forward on the reading-desk. The scene below would have
+thrilled him to the marrow six months--yes, three months ago. 
+He put a finger across his eyes now, to half shut it out. 
+The spectacle of these silly young "mourners"--kneeling
+they knew not why, trembling at they could not tell what,
+pledging themselves frantically to dogmas and mysteries
+they knew nothing of, under the influence of a hubbub
+of outcries as meaningless in their way, and inspiring
+in much the same way, as the racket of a fife and
+drum corps--the spectacle saddened and humiliated
+him now.  He was conscious of a dawning sense of shame
+at being even tacitly responsible for such a thing. 
+His fancy conjured up the idea of Dr. Ledsmar coming
+in and beholding this maudlin and unseemly scene,
+and he felt his face grow hot at the bare thought.
+
+Looking through his fingers, Theron all at once saw
+something which caught at his breath with a sharp clutch. 
+Alice had risen from the minister's pew--the most conspicuous
+one in the church--and was moving down the aisle toward
+the rail, her uplifted face chalk-like in its whiteness,
+and her eyes wide-open, looking straight ahead.
+
+The young pastor could scarcely credit his sight. 
+He thrust aside his hand, and bent forward, only to see
+his wife sink upon her knees among the rest, and to hear
+this notable accession to the "mourners" hailed by a
+tumult of approving shouts.  Then, remembering himself,
+he drew back and put up his hand, shutting out the strange
+scene altogether.  To see nothing at all was a relief,
+and under cover he closed his eyes, and bit his teeth together.
+
+A fresh outburst of thanksgivings, spreading noisily
+through the congregation, prompted him to peer through
+his fingers again.  Levi Gorringe was making his way
+down the aisle--was at the moment quite in front. 
+Theron found himself watching this man with the stern
+composure of a fatalist.  The clamant brethren down below
+were stirred to new excitement by the thought that the
+sceptical lawyer, so long with them, yet not of them,
+had been humbled and won by the outpourings of the Spirit. 
+Theron's perceptions were keener.  He knew that Gorringe
+was coming forward to kneel beside Alice; The knowledge
+left him curiously undisturbed.  He saw the lawyer advance,
+gently insinuate himself past the form of some kneeling
+mourner who was in his way, and drop on his knees close
+beside the bowed figure of Alice.  The two touched
+shoulders as they bent forward beneath Sister Soulsby's
+outstretched hands, held over them as in a blessing. 
+Theron looked fixedly at them, and professed to himself
+that he was barely interested.
+
+A little afterward, he was standing up in his place,
+and reading aloud a list of names which one of the stewards
+had given him.  They were the names of those who had
+asked that evening to be taken into the church as members
+on probation.  The sounds of the recent excitement
+were all hushed now, save as two or three enthusiasts
+in a corner raised their voices in abrupt greeting of
+each name in its turn, but Theron felt somehow that this
+noise had been transferred to the inside of his head. 
+A continuous buzzing went on there, so that the sound
+of his voice was far-off and unfamiliar in his ears.
+
+He read through the list--comprising some fifteen items--
+and pronounced the names with great distinctness. 
+It was necessary to take pains with this, because the
+only name his blurred eyes seemed to see anywhere on the
+foolscap sheet was that of Levi Gorringe.  When he had
+finished and was taking his seat, some one began speaking
+to him from the body of the church.  He saw that this
+was the steward, who was explaining to him that the most
+important name of the lot--that of Brother Gorringe--
+had not been read out.
+
+Theron smiled and shook his head.  Then, when the Presiding
+Elder touched him on the arm, and assured him that he had
+not mentioned the name in question, he replied quite simply,
+and with another smile, "I thought it was the only name
+I did read out."
+
+Then he sat down abruptly, and let his head fall to one side. 
+There were hurried movements inside the pulpit, and people
+in the audience had begun to stand up wonderingly,
+when the Presiding Elder, with uplifted hands, confronted them.
+
+"We will omit the Doxology, and depart quietly after
+the benediction," he said.  "Brother Ware seems to have
+been overcome by the heat."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+When Theron woke next morning, Alice seemed to have dressed
+and left the room--a thing which had never happened before.
+
+This fact connected itself at once in his brain with the
+recollection of her having made an exhibition of herself
+the previous evening--going forward before all eyes to join
+the unconverted and penitent sinners, as if she were
+some tramp or shady female, instead of an educated lady,
+a professing member from her girlhood, and a minister's wife. 
+It crossed his mind that probably she had risen and got
+away noiselessly, for very shame at looking him in the face,
+after such absurd behavior.
+
+Then he remembered more, and grasped the situation. 
+He had fainted in church, and had been brought home and helped
+to bed.  Dim memories of unaccustomed faces in the bedroom,
+of nauseous drugs and hushed voices, came to him out of the
+night-time. Now that he thought of it, he was a sick man. 
+Having settled this, he went off to sleep again,
+a feverish and broken sleep, and remained in this state
+most of the time for the following twenty-four hours. 
+In the brief though numerous intervals of waking, he found
+certain things clear in his mind.  One was that he was
+annoyed with Alice, but would dissemble his feelings. 
+Another was that it was much pleasanter to be ill than to be
+forced to attend and take part in those revival meetings. 
+These two ideas came and went in a lazy, drowsy fashion,
+mixing themselves up with other vagrant fancies, yet always
+remaining on top.
+
+In the evening the singing from the church next door
+filled his room.  The Soulsbys' part of it was worth
+keeping awake for.  He turned over and deliberately
+dozed when the congregation sang.
+
+Alice came up a number of times during the day to ask
+how he felt, and to bring him broth or toast-water. On
+several occasions, when he heard her step, the perverse
+inclination mastered him to shut his eyes, and pretend
+to be asleep, so that she might tip-toe out again. 
+She had a depressed and thoughtful air, and spoke to him
+like one whose mind was on something else.  Neither of
+them alluded to what had happened the previous evening. 
+Toward the close of the long day, she came to ask him
+whether he would prefer her to remain in the house,
+instead of attending the meeting.
+
+"Go, by all means," he said almost curtly.
+
+The Presiding Elder and the Sunday-school superintendent
+called early Tuesday morning at the parsonage to make
+brotherly inquiries, and Theron was feeling so much better
+that he himself suggested their coming upstairs to see him. 
+The Elder was in good spirits; he smiled approvingly,
+and even put in a jocose word or two while the superintendent
+sketched for the invalid in a cheerful way the leading
+incidents of the previous evening.
+
+There had been an enormous crowd, even greater than that of
+Sunday night, and everybody had been looking forward to another
+notable and exciting season of grace.  These expectations
+were especially heightened when Sister Soulsby ascended
+the pulpit stairs and took charge of the proceedings. 
+She deferred to Paul's views about women preachers
+on Sundays, she said; but on weekdays she had just as much
+right to snatch brands from the burning as Paul, or Peter,
+or any other man.  She went on like that, in a breezy,
+off-hand fashion which tickled the audience immensely,
+and led to the liveliest anticipations of what would
+happen when she began upon the evening's harvest of souls.
+
+But it was something else that happened.  At a signal from
+Sister Soulsby the steward got up, and, in an unconcerned sort
+of way, went through the throng to the rear of the church,
+locked the doors, and put the keys in their pockets. 
+The sister dryly explained now to the surprised congregation
+that there was a season for all things, and that on the
+present occasion they would suspend the glorious work
+of redeeming fallen human nature, and take up instead
+the equally noble task of raising some fifteen hundred
+dollars which the church needed in its business.  The doors
+would only be opened again when this had been accomplished.
+
+The brethren were much taken aback by this trick, and they
+permitted themselves to exchange a good many scowling and
+indignant glances, the while their professional visitors
+sang another of their delightfully novel sacred duets. 
+Its charm of harmony for once fell upon unsympathetic ears. 
+But then Sister Soulsby began another monologue, defending
+this way of collecting money, chaffing the assemblage
+with bright-eyed impudence on their having been trapped,
+and scoring, one after another, neat and jocose little
+personal points on local characteristics, at which everybody
+but the individual touched grinned broadly.  She was
+so droll and cheeky, and withal effective in her talk,
+that she quite won the crowd over.  She told a story
+about a woodchuck which fairly brought down the house.
+
+"A man," she began, with a quizzical twinkle in her eye,
+"told me once about hunting a woodchuck with a pack
+of dogs, and they chased it so hard that it finally
+escaped only by climbing a butternut-tree. 'But,
+my friend,' I said to him, 'woodchucks can't climb trees--
+butternut-trees or any other kind--and you know it!' 
+All he said in reply to me was:  'This woodchuck had to
+climb a tree!'  And that's the way with this congregation. 
+You think you can't raise $1,500, but you've GOT to."
+
+So it went on.  She set them all laughing; and then,
+with a twist of the eyes and a change of voice, lo,
+and behold, she had them nearly crying in the same breath. 
+Under the pressure of these jumbled emotions, brethren began
+to rise up in their pews and say what they would give. 
+The wonderful woman had something smart and apt to say about
+each fresh contribution, and used it to screw up the general
+interest a notch further toward benevolent hysteria. 
+With songs and jokes and impromptu exhortations and
+prayers she kept the thing whirling, until a sort of duel
+of generosity began between two of the most unlikely men--
+Erastus Winch and Levi Gorringe.  Everybody had been surprised
+when Winch gave his first $50; but when he rose again,
+half an hour afterward, and said that, owing to the high
+public position of some of the new members on probation,
+he foresaw a great future for the church, and so felt
+moved to give another $25, there was general amazement. 
+Moved by a common instinct, all eyes were turned upon
+Levi Gorringe, and he, without the slightest hesitation,
+stood up and said he would give $100. There was something
+in his tone which must have annoyed Brother Winch, for he shot
+up like a dart, and called out, "Put me down for fifty more;
+"and that brought Gorringe to his feet with an added $50,
+and then the two went on raising each other till the
+assemblage was agape with admiring stupefaction.
+
+This gladiatorial combat might have been going on till now,
+the Sunday-school superintendent concluded, if Winch
+hadn't subsided.  The amount of the contributions hadn't
+been figured up yet, for Sister Soulsby kept the list;
+but there had been a tremendous lot of money raised. 
+Of that there could be no doubt.
+
+The Presiding Elder now told Theron that the Quarterly
+Conference had been adjourned yesterday till today. 
+He and Brother Davis were even now on their way to attend
+the session in the church next door.  The Elder added,
+with an obvious kindly significance, that though Theron was
+too ill to attend it, he guessed his absence would do him
+no harm.  Then the two men left the room, and Theron went
+to sleep again.
+
+Another almost blank period ensued, this time lasting
+for forty-eight hours.  The young minister was enfolded
+in the coils of a fever of some sort, which Brother Soulsby,
+who had dabbled considerably in medicine, admitted that
+he was puzzled about.  Sometimes he thought that it
+was typhoid, and then again there were symptoms which
+looked suspiciously like brain fever.  The Methodists
+of Octavius counted no physician among their numbers,
+and when, on the second day, Alice grew scared, and decided,
+with Brother Soulsby's assent, to call in professional
+advice, the only doctor's name she could recall was that
+of Ledsmar.  She was conscious of an instinctive dislike
+for the vague image of him her fancy had conjured up,
+but the reflection that he was Theron's friend, and so
+probably would be more moderate in his charges, decided her.
+
+Brother Soulsby showed a most comforting tact and swiftness
+of apprehension when Alice, in mentioning Dr. Ledsmar's
+name, disclosed by her manner a fear that his being
+sent for would create talk among the church people. 
+He volunteered at once to act as messenger himself, and,
+with no better guide than her dim hints at direction,
+found the doctor and brought him back to the parsonage.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar expressly disclaimed to Soulsby all pretence
+of professional skill, and made him understand that he
+went along solely because he liked Mr. Ware, and was
+interested in him, and in any case would probably be of
+as much use as the wisest of strange physicians--a view
+which the little revivalist received with comprehending
+nods of tacit acquiescence.  Ledsmar came, and was taken
+up to the sick-room. He sat on the bedside and talked
+with Theron awhile, and then went downstairs again. 
+To Alice's anxious inquiries, he replied that it seemed
+to him merely a case of over-work and over-worry, about
+which there was not the slightest occasion for alarm.
+
+"But he says the strangest things," the wife put in. 
+"He has been quite delirious at times."
+
+"That means only that his brain is taking a rest as well
+as his body," remarked Ledsmar.  "That is Nature's way
+of securing an equilibrium of repose--of recuperation. 
+He will come out of it with his mind all the fresher
+and clearer."
+
+"I don't believe he knows shucks!" was Alice's comment
+when she closed the street door upon Dr. Ledsmar. 
+"Anybody could have come in and looked at a sick man
+and said, 'Leave him alone.'  You expect something more
+from a doctor.  It's his business to say what to do. 
+And I suppose he'll charge two dollars for just telling me
+that my husband was resting!"
+
+"No," said Brother Soulsby, "he said he never practised,
+and that he would come only as a friend."
+
+"Well, it isn't my idea of a friend--not to prescribe
+a single thing," protested Alice.
+
+Yet it seemed that no prescription was needed, after all. 
+The next morning Theron woke to find himself feeling
+quite restored in spirits and nerves.  He sat up in bed,
+and after an instant of weakly giddiness, recognized that
+he was all right again.  Greatly pleased, he got up,
+and proceeded to dress himself.  There were little recurring
+hints of faintness and vertigo, while he was shaving,
+but he had the sense to refer these to the fact that he
+was very, very hungry.  He went downstairs, and smiled
+with the pleased pride of a child at the surprise which his
+appearance at the door created.  Alice and the Soulsbys
+were at breakfast.  He joined them, and ate voraciously,
+declaring that it was worth a month's illness to have things
+taste so good once more.
+
+"You still look white as a sheet," said Alice, warningly. 
+"If I were you, I'd be careful in my diet for a spell yet."
+
+For answer, Theron let Sister Soulsby help him again
+to ham and eggs.  He talked exclusively to Sister Soulsby,
+or rather invited her by his manner to talk to him,
+and listened and watched her with indolent content. 
+There was a sort of happy and purified languor in his physical
+and mental being, which needed and appreciated just this--
+to sit next a bright and attractive woman at a good breakfast,
+and be ministered to by her sprightly conversation,
+by the flash of her informing and inspiring eyes,
+and the nameless sense of support and repose which her
+near proximity exhaled.  He felt himself figuratively
+leaning against Sister Soulsby's buoyant personality,
+and resting.
+
+Brother Soulsby, like the intelligent creature he was,
+ate his breakfast in peace; but Alice would interpose
+remarks from time to time.  Theron was conscious of a
+certain annoyance at this, and knew that he was showing
+it by an exaggerated display of interest in everything
+Sister Soulsby said, and persisted in it.  There trembled
+in the background of his thoughts ever and again the
+recollection of a grievance against his wife--an offence
+which she had committed--but he put it aside as something
+to be grappled and dealt with when he felt again like
+taking up the serious and disagreeable things of life. 
+For the moment, he desired only to be amused by Sister Soulsby. 
+Her casual mention of the fact that she and her husband
+were taking their departure that very day, appealed to him
+as an added reason for devoting his entire attention to her.
+
+"You mustn't forget that famous talking-to you threatened me with--
+that 'regular hoeing-over,' you know," he reminded her,
+when he found himself alone with her after breakfast. 
+He smiled as he spoke, in frank enjoyment of the prospect.
+
+Sister Soulsby nodded, and aided with a roll of her eyes
+the effect of mock-menace in her uplifted forefinger. 
+"Oh, never fear," she cried.  "You'll catch it hot and strong. 
+But that'll keep till afternoon.  Tell me, do you feel
+strong enough to go in next door and attend the trustees'
+meeting this forenoon?  It's rather important that you
+should be there, if you can spur yourself up to it. 
+By the way, you haven't asked what happened at the Quarterly
+Conference yesterday."
+
+Theron sighed, and made a little grimace of repugnance. 
+"If you knew how little I cared!" he said.  "I did hope
+you'd forget all about mentioning that--and everything
+else connected with--the next door.  You talk so much more
+interestingly about other things."
+
+"Here's gratitude for you!" exclaimed Sister Soulsby,
+with a gay simulation of despair.  "Why, man alive,
+do you know what I've done for you?  I got around on
+the Presiding Elder's blind side, I captured old Pierce,
+I wound Winch right around my little finger, I worked
+two or three of the class-leaders--all on your account. 
+The result was you went through as if you'd had your ears
+pinned back, and been greased all over.  You've got an
+extra hundred dollars added to your salary; do you hear? 
+On the sixth question of the order of business the Elder ruled
+that the recommendation of the last conference's estimating
+committee could be revised (between ourselves he was wrong,
+but that doesn't matter) , and so you're in clover. 
+And very friendly things were said about you, too."
+
+"It was very kind of you," said Theron.  "I am really
+extremely grateful to you."  He shook her by the hand
+to make up for what he realized to be a lack of fervor
+in his tones.
+
+"Well, then," Sister Soulsby replied, "you pull
+yourself together, and take your place as chairman
+of the trustees' meeting, and see to it that,
+whatever comes up, you side with old Pierce and Winch."
+
+"Oh, THEY'RE my friends now, are they?" asked Theron,
+with a faint play of irony about his lips.
+
+"Yes, that's your ticket this election," she answered briskly,
+"and mind you vote it straight.  Don't bother about
+reasons now.  Just take it from me, as the song says,
+'that things have changed since Willie died.'  That's all. 
+And then come back here, and this afternoon we'll have
+a good old-fashioned jaw."
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware, walking with ostentatious feebleness,
+and forcing a conventional smile upon his wan face,
+duly made his unexpected appearance at the trustees'
+meeting in one of the smaller classrooms.  He received their
+congratulations gravely, and shook hands with all three. 
+It required an effort to do this impartially, because,
+upon sight of Levi Gorringe, there rose up suddenly
+within him an emotion of fierce dislike and enmity. 
+In some enigmatic way his thoughts had kept themselves
+away from Gorringe ever since Sunday evening.  Now they
+concentrated with furious energy and swiftness upon him. 
+Theron seemed able in a flash of time to coordinate
+many recollections of Gorringe--the early liking Alice
+had professed for him, the mystery of those purchased
+plants in her garden, the story of the girl he had
+lost in church, his offer to lend him money, the way
+in which he had sat beside Alice at the love-feast
+and followed her to the altar-rail in the evening. 
+These raced abreast through the young minister's brain,
+yet with each its own image, and its relation to the others
+clearly defined.
+
+He found the nerve, all the same, to take this third trustee
+by the hand, and to thank him for his congratulations,
+and even to say, with a surface smile of welcome,
+"It is BROTHER Gorringe, now, I remember."
+
+The work before the meeting was chiefly of a routine kind. 
+In most places this would have been transacted by the stewards;
+but in Octavius these minor officials had degenerated
+into mere ceremonial abstractions, who humbly ratified,
+or by arrangement anticipated, the will of the powerful,
+mortgage-owning trustees.  Theron sat languidly at
+the head of the table while these common-place matters
+passed in their course, noting the intonations of
+Gorringe's voice as he read from his secretary's book,
+and finding his ear displeased by them.  No issue arose
+upon any of these trivial affairs, and the minister,
+feeling faint and weary in the heat, wondered why Sister
+Soulsby had insisted on his coming.
+
+All at once he sat up straight, with an instinctive warning
+in his mind that here was the thing.  Gorringe had taken up
+the subject of the "debt-raising" evening, and read out its
+essentials as they had been embodied in a report of the stewards. 
+The gross sum obtained, in cash and promises, was $1,860.
+The stewards had collected of this a trifle less than half,
+but hoped to get it all in during the ensuing quarter. 
+There were, also, the bill of Mr. and Mrs. Soulsby for
+$150, and the increases of $100 in the pastor's salary
+and $25 in the apportioned contribution of the charge
+toward the Presiding Elder's maintenance, the two latter
+items of which the Quarterly Conference had sanctioned.
+
+"I want to hear the names of the subscribers and their
+amounts read out," put in Brother Pierce.
+
+When this was done, it became apparent that much more than
+half of the entire amount had been offered by two men. 
+Levi Gorringe's $450 and Erastus Winch's $425 left only
+$985 to be divided up among some seventy or eighty other
+members of the congregation.
+
+Brother Pierce speedily stopped the reading of these
+subordinate names.  "They're of no concern whatever,"
+he said, despite the fact that his own might have been
+reached in time.  "Those first names are what I was
+getting at.  Have those two first amounts, the big ones,
+be'n paid?"
+
+"One has--the other not," replied Gorringe.
+
+"PRE-cisely," remarked the senior trustee.  "And I'm goin'
+to move that it needn't be paid, either.  When Brother Winch,
+here, began hollerin' out those extra twenty-fives and fifties,
+that evening, it was under a complete misapprehension. 
+He'd be'n on the Cheese Board that same Monday afternoon,
+and he'd done what he thought was a mighty big stroke
+of business, and he felt liberal according.  I know
+just what that feelin' is myself.  If I'd be'n makin'
+a mint o' money, instead o' losin' all the while, as I do,
+I'd 'a' done just the same.  But the next day, lo, and behold,
+Brother Winch found that it was all a mistake--he hadn't
+made a single penny."
+
+"Fact is, I lost by the whole transaction," put in
+Erastus Winch, defiantly.
+
+"Just so," Brother Pierce went on.  "He lost money. 
+You have his own word for it.  Well, then, I say it would
+be a burning shame for us to consent to touch one penny
+of what he offered to give, in the fullness of his heart,
+while he was laborin' under that delusion.  And I move he
+be not asked for it.  We've got quite as much as we need,
+without it.  I put my motion."
+
+"That is, YOU don't put it," suggested Winch, correctingly. 
+"You move it, and Brother Ware, whom we're all so glad
+to see able to come and preside--he'll put it."
+
+There was a moment's silence.  "You've heard the motion,"
+said Theron, tentatively, and then paused for possible remarks. 
+He was not going to meddle in this thing himself, and Gorringe
+was the only other who might have an opinion to offer. 
+The necessities of the situation forced him to glance at
+the lawyer inquiringly.  He did so, and turned his eyes
+away again like a shot.  Gorringe was looking him squarely
+in the face, and the look was freighted with satirical contempt.
+
+The young minister spoke between clinched teeth. 
+"All those in favor will say aye."
+
+Brothers Pierce and Winch put up a simultaneous
+and confident "Aye."
+
+"No, you don't!" interposed the lawyer, with deliberate,
+sneering emphasis.  "I decidedly protest against Winch's
+voting.  He's directly interested, and he mustn't vote. 
+Your chairman knows that perfectly well."
+
+"Yes, I think Brother Winch ought not to vote," decided Theron,
+with great calmness.  He saw now what was coming,
+and underneath his surface composure there were sharp flutterings.
+
+"Very well, then," said Gorringe.  "I vote no, and it's a tie. 
+It rests with the chairman now to cast the deciding vote,
+and say whether this interesting arrangement shall go
+through or not."
+
+"Me?" said Theron, eying the lawyer with a cool self-control
+which had come all at once to him.  "Me?  Oh, I vote Aye."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+"Well, I did what you told me to do," Theron Ware remarked
+to Sister Soulsby, when at last they found themselves
+alone in the sitting-room after the midday meal.
+
+It had taken not a little strategic skirmishing to
+secure the room to themselves for the hospitable Alice,
+much touched by the thought of her new friend's departure
+that very evening had gladly proposed to let all the work
+stand over until night, and devote herself entirely
+to Sister Soulsby.  When, finally, Brother Soulsby
+conceived and deftly executed the coup of interesting
+her in the budding of roses, and then leading her off
+into the garden to see with her own eyes how it was done,
+Theron had a sense of being left alone with a conspirator. 
+The notion impelled him to plunge at once into the heart
+of their mystery.
+
+"I did what you told me to do," he repeated, looking up
+from his low easy-chair to where she sat by the desk;
+"and I dare say you won't be surprised when I add that I
+have no respect for myself for doing it."
+
+"And yet you would go and do it right over again, eh?"
+the woman said, in bright, pert tones, nodding her head,
+and smiling at him with roguish, comprehending eyes. 
+"Yes, that's the way we're built.  We spend our lives doing
+that sort of thing."
+
+"I don't know that you would precisely grasp my meaning,"
+said the young minister, with a polite effort in his
+words to mask the untoward side of the suggestion. 
+"It is a matter of conscience with me; and I am pained
+and shocked at myself."
+
+Sister Soulsby drummed for an absent moment with her thin,
+nervous fingers on the desk-top. "I guess maybe you'd
+better go and lie down again," she said gently. 
+"You're a sick man, still, and it's no good your worrying
+your head just now with things of this sort.  You'll see
+them differently when you're quite yourself again."
+
+"No, no," pleaded Theron.  "Do let us have our talk out! 
+I'm all right.  My mind is clear as a bell.  Truly, I've
+really counted on this talk with you."
+
+"But there's something else to talk about, isn't there,
+besides--besides your conscience?" she asked. 
+Her eyes bent upon him a kindly pressure as she spoke,
+which took all possible harshness from her meaning.
+
+Theron answered the glance rather than her words. 
+"I know that you are my friend," he said simply.
+
+Sister Soulsby straightened herself, and looked down upon
+him with a new intentness.  "Well, then," she began,
+"let's thrash this thing out right now, and be done with it. 
+You say it's hurt your conscience to do just one little
+hundredth part of what there was to be done here. 
+Ask yourself what you mean by that.  Mind, I'm not quarrelling,
+and I'm not thinking about anything except just your own
+state of mind.  You think you soiled your hands by doing
+what you did.  That is to say, you wanted ALL the dirty
+work done by other people.  That's it, isn't it?"
+
+"The Rev. Mr. Ware sat up, in turn, and looked doubtingly
+into his companion's face.
+
+"Oh, we were going to be frank, you know," she added,
+with a pleasant play of mingled mirth and honest liking
+in her eyes.
+
+"No," he said, picking his words, "my point would
+rather be that--that there ought not to have been any
+of what you yourself call this--this 'dirty work.' 
+THAT is my feeling."
+
+"Now we're getting at it," said Sister Soulsby, briskly. 
+"My dear friend, you might just as well say that potatoes
+are unclean and unfit to eat because manure is put
+into the ground they grow in.  Just look at the case. 
+Your church here was running behind every year. 
+Your people had got into a habit of putting in nickels
+instead of dimes, and letting you sweat for the difference. 
+That's a habit, like tobacco, or biting your fingernails,
+or anything else.  Either you were all to come to smash here,
+or the people had to be shaken up, stood on their heads,
+broken of their habit.  It's my business--mine and Soulsby's--
+to do that sort of thing.  We came here and we did it--
+did it up brown, too.  We not only raised all the money
+the church needs, and to spare, but I took a personal shine
+to you, and went out of my way to fix up things for you. 
+It isn't only the extra hundred dollars, but the whole
+tone of the congregation is changed toward you now. 
+You'll see that they'll be asking to have you back here,
+next spring.  And you're solid with your Presiding Elder,
+too.  Well, now, tell me straight--is that worth while,
+or not?"
+
+"I've told you that I am very grateful," answered the
+minister, "and I say it again, and I shall never be tired
+of repeating it.  But--but it was the means I had in mind."
+
+"Quite so," rejoined the sister, patiently.  "If you saw
+the way a hotel dinner was cooked, you wouldn't be able
+to stomach it.  Did you ever see a play?  In a theatre,
+I mean.  I supposed not.  But you'll understand when I say
+that the performance looks one way from where the audience sit,
+and quite a different way when you are behind the scenes. 
+THERE you see that the trees and houses are cloth,
+and the moon is tissue paper, and the flying fairy is a
+middle-aged woman strung up on a rope.  That doesn't prove
+that the play, out in front, isn't beautiful and affecting,
+and all that.  It only shows that everything in this
+world is produced by machinery--by organization. 
+The trouble is that you've been let in on the stage,
+behind the scenes, so to speak, and you're so green--
+if you'll pardon me--that you want to sit down and cry
+because the trees ARE cloth, and the moon IS a lantern. 
+And I say, don't be such a goose!"
+
+"I see what you mean," Theron said, with an answering smile. 
+He added, more gravely, "All the same, the Winch business
+seems to me--"
+
+"Now the Winch business is my own affair," Sister Soulsby
+broke in abruptly.  I take all the responsibility for that. 
+You need know nothing about it.  You simply voted as you
+did on the merits of the case as he presented them--
+that's all."
+
+"But--" Theron began, and then paused.  Something had occurred
+to him, and he knitted his brows to follow its course
+of expansion in his mind.  Suddenly he raised his head. 
+"Then you arranged with Winch to make those bogus offers--
+just to lead others on?" he demanded.
+
+Sister Soulsby's large eyes beamed down upon him in reply,
+at first in open merriment, then more soberly, till their
+regard was almost pensive.
+
+"Let us talk of something else," she said.  "All that is
+past and gone.  It has nothing to do with you, anyway. 
+I've got some advice to give you about keeping up this
+grip you've got on your people."
+
+The young minister had risen to his feet while she spoke. 
+He put his hands in his pockets, and with rounded shoulders
+began slowly pacing the room.  After a turn or two he came
+to the desk, and leaned against it.
+
+"I doubt if it's worth while going into that," he said,
+in the solemn tone of one who feels that an irrevocable thing
+is being uttered.  She waited to hear more, apparently. 
+"I think I shall go away--give up the ministry," he added.
+
+Sister Soulsby's eyes revealed no such shock of consternation
+as he, unconsciously, had looked for.  They remained quite calm;
+and when she spoke, they deepened, to fit her speech,
+with what he read to be a gaze of affectionate melancholy--
+one might say pity.  She shook her head slowly.
+
+"No--don't let any one else hear you say that," she replied. 
+"My poor young friend, it's no good to even think it. 
+The real wisdom is to school yourself to move along smoothly,
+and not fret, and get the best of what's going.  I've known
+others who felt as you do--of course there are times
+when every young man of brains and high notions feels
+that way--but there's no help for it.  Those who tried
+to get out only broke themselves.  Those who stayed in,
+and made the best of it--well, one of them will be a bishop
+in another ten years."
+
+Theron had started walking again.  "But the moral degradation
+of it!" he snapped out at her over his shoulder. 
+"I'd rather earn the meanest living, at an honest trade,
+and be free from it."
+
+"That may all be," responded Sister Soulsby.  "But it isn't
+a question of what you'd rather do.  It's what you can do. 
+How could you earn a living?  What trade or business do you
+suppose you could take up now, and get a living out of? 
+Not one, my man, not one."
+
+Theron stopped and stared at her.  This view of his
+capabilities came upon him with the force and effect
+of a blow.
+
+"I don't discover, myself," he began stumblingly,
+"that I'm so conspicuously inferior to the men I see
+about me who do make livings, and very good ones, too."
+
+"Of course you're not," she replied with easy promptness;
+"you're greatly the other way, or I shouldn't be taking this
+trouble with you.  But you're what you are because you're
+where you are.  The moment you try on being somewhere else,
+you're done for.  In all this world nobody else comes to
+such unmerciful and universal grief as the unfrocked priest."
+
+The phrase sent Theron's fancy roving.  "I know a
+Catholic priest," he said irrelevantly, "who doesn't
+believe an atom in--in things."
+
+"Very likely," said Sister Soulsby.  "Most of us do. 
+But you don't hear him talking about going and earning
+his living, I'll bet!  Or if he does, he takes powerful
+good care not to go, all the same.  They've got horse-sense,
+those priests.  They're artists, too.  They know how to
+allow for the machinery behind the scenes."
+
+"But it's all so different," urged the young minister;
+"the same things are not expected of them.  Now I sat
+the other night and watched those people you got up
+around the altar-rail, groaning and shouting and crying,
+and the others jumping up and down with excitement,
+and Sister Lovejoy--did you see her?--coming out of her pew
+and regularly waltzing in the aisle, with her eyes shut,
+like a whirling dervish--I positively believe it was
+all that made me ill.  I couldn't stand it.  I can't
+stand it now.  I won't go back to it!  Nothing shall
+make me!"
+
+"Oh-h, yes, you will," she rejoined soothingly. 
+"There's nothing else to do.  Just put a good face on it,
+and make up your mind to get through by treading on as few
+corns as possible, and keeping your own toes well in,
+and you'll be surprised how easy it'll all come to be. 
+You were speaking of the revival business.  Now that exemplifies
+just what I was saying--it's a part of our machinery. 
+Now a church is like everything else,--it's got to have a boss,
+a head, an authority of some sort, that people will listen
+to and mind.  The Catholics are different, as you say. 
+Their church is chuck-full of authority--all the way
+from the Pope down to the priest--and accordingly they
+do as they're told.  But the Protestants--your Methodists
+most of all--they say 'No, we won't have any authority,
+we won't obey any boss.'  Very well, what happens? 
+We who are responsible for running the thing, and raising
+the money and so on--we have to put on a spurt every once
+in a while, and work up a general state of excitement;
+and while it's going, don't you see that THAT is the authority,
+the motive power, whatever you like to call it, by which
+things are done?  Other denominations don't need it. 
+We do, and that's why we've got it."
+
+"But the mean dishonesty of it all!"  Theron broke forth. 
+He moved about again, his bowed face drawn as with
+bodily suffering.  "The low-born tricks, the hypocrisies! 
+I feel as if I could never so much as look at these people
+here again without disgust."
+
+"Oh, now that's where you make your mistake,"
+Sister Soulsby put in placidly.  "These people
+of yours are not a whit worse than other people. 
+They've got their good streaks and their bad streaks,
+just like the rest of us.  Take them by and large,
+they're quite on a par with other folks the whole country through."
+
+"I don't believe there's another congregation in the
+Conference where--where this sort of thing would have
+been needed, or, I might say, tolerated," insisted Theron.
+
+"Perhaps you're right," the other assented; "but that only
+shows that your people here are different from the others--
+not that they're worse.  You don't seem to realize: 
+Octavius, so far as the Methodists are concerned,
+is twenty or thirty years behind the times.  Now that has
+its advantages and its disadvantages.  The church here is
+tough and coarse, and full of grit, like a grindstone;
+and it does ministers from other more niminy-piminy places
+all sorts of good to come here once in a while and rub
+themselves up against it.  It scours the rust and mildew off
+from their piety, and they go back singing and shouting. 
+But of course it's had a different effect with you. 
+You're razor-steel instead of scythe-steel, and the
+grinding's been too rough and violent for you.  But you
+see what I mean.  These people here really take their
+primitive Methodism seriously.  To them the profession
+of entire sanctification is truly a genuine thing.  Well,
+don't you see, when people just know that they're saved,
+it doesn't seem to them to matter so much what they do. 
+They feel that ordinary rules may well be bent and twisted
+in the interest of people so supernaturally good as they are. 
+That's pure human nature.  It's always been like that."
+
+Theron paused in his walk to look absently at her. 
+"That thought," he said, in a vague, slow way, "seems to
+be springing up in my path, whichever way I turn. 
+It oppresses me, and yet it fascinates me--this idea
+that the dead men have known more than we know, done more
+than we do; that there is nothing new anywhere; that--"
+
+"Never mind the dead men," interposed Sister Soulsby. 
+"Just you come and sit down here.  I hate to have you
+straddling about the room when I'm trying to talk to you."
+
+Theron obeyed, and as he sank into the low seat, Sister Soulsby
+drew up her chair, and put her hand on his shoulder. 
+Her gaze rested upon his with impressive steadiness.
+
+"And now I want to talk seriously to you, as a friend,"
+she began.  "You mustn't breathe to any living soul the shadow
+of a hint of this nonsense about leaving the ministry. 
+I could see how you were feeling--I saw the book you were
+reading the first time I entered this room--and that made me
+like you; only I expected to find you mixing up more worldly
+gumption with your Renan.  Well, perhaps I like you all the
+better for not having it--for being so delightfully fresh. 
+At any rate, that made me sail in and straighten your affairs
+for you.  And now, for God's sake, keep them straight. 
+Just put all notions of anything else out of your head. 
+Watch your chief men and women, and be friends with them. 
+Keep your eye open for what they think you ought to do,
+and do it.  Have your own ideas as much as you like,
+read what you like, say 'Damn' under your breath as much
+as you like, but don't let go of your job.  I've knocked
+about too much, and I've seen too many promising young
+fellows cut their own throats for pure moonshine,
+not to have a right to say that."
+
+Theron could not be insensible to the friendly hand on
+his shoulder, or to the strenuous sincerity of the voice
+which thus adjured him.
+
+"Well," he said vaguely, smiling up into her earnest eyes,
+"if we agree that it IS moonshine."
+
+"See here!" she exclaimed, with renewed animation,
+patting his shoulder in a brisk, automatic way, to point
+the beginnings of her confidences:  "I'll tell you something. 
+It's about myself.  I've got a religion of my own,
+and it's got just one plank in it, and that is that the time
+to separate the sheep from the goats is on Judgment Day,
+and that it can't be done a minute before."
+
+The young minister took in the thought, and turned it
+about in his mind, and smiled upon it.
+
+"And that brings me to what I'm going to tell you,"
+Sister Soulsby continued.  She leaned back in her chair,
+and crossed her knees so that one well-shaped and
+artistically shod foot poised itself close to Theron's hand. 
+Her eyes dwelt upon his face with an engaging candor.
+
+"I began life," she said, "as a girl by running
+away from a stupid home with a man that I knew was
+married already.  After that, I supported myself for a
+good many years--generally, at first, on the stage. 
+I've been a front-ranker in Amazon ballets, and I've
+been leading lady in comic opera companies out West. 
+I've told fortunes in one room of a mining-camp hotel
+where the biggest game of faro in the Territory went
+on in another.  I've been a professional clairvoyant,
+and I've been a professional medium, and I've been within
+one vote of being indicted by a grand jury, and the money
+that bought that vote was put up by the smartest and most
+famous train-gambler between Omaha and 'Frisco, a gentleman
+who died in his boots and took three sheriff's deputies
+along with him to Kingdom-Come. Now, that's MY record."
+
+Theron looked earnestly at her, and said nothing.
+
+"And now take Soulsby," she went on.  "Of course I take
+it for granted there's a good deal that he has never felt
+called upon to mention.  He hasn't what you may call
+a talkative temperament.  But there is also a good deal
+that I do know.  He's been an actor, too, and to this
+day I'd back him against Edwin Booth himself to recite
+'Clarence's Dream.'  And he's been a medium, and then he
+was a travelling phrenologist, and for a long time he
+was advance agent for a British Blondes show, and when I
+first saw him he was lecturing on female diseases--
+and he had HIS little turn with a grand jury too.  In fact,
+he was what you may call a regular bad old rooster."
+
+Again Theron suffered the pause to lapse without comment--
+save for an amorphous sort of conversation which he felt
+to be going on between his eyes and those of Sister Soulsby.
+
+"Well, then," she resumed, "so much for us apart. 
+Now about us together.  We liked each other from the start. 
+We compared notes, and we found that we had both soured
+on living by fakes, and that we were tired of the road,
+and wanted to settle down and be respectable in our old age. 
+We had a little money--enough to see us through a year or two. 
+Soulsby had always hungered and longed to own a garden
+and raise flowers, and had never been able to stay long
+enough in one place to see so much as a bean-pod ripen. 
+So we took a little place in a quiet country village
+down on the Southern Tier, and he planted everything
+three deep all over the place, and I bought a roomful
+of cheap good books, and we started in.  We took to it
+like ducks to water for a while, and I don't say that we
+couldn't have stood it out, just doing nothing, to this
+very day; but as luck would have it, during the first
+winter there was a revival at the local Methodist church,
+and we went every evening--at first just to kill time,
+and then because we found we liked the noise and excitement
+and general racket of the thing.  After it was all
+over each of us found that the other had been mighty
+near going up to the rail and joining the mourners. 
+And another thing had occurred to each of us, too--that is,
+what tremendous improvements there were possible in the
+way that amateur revivalist worked up his business. 
+This stuck in our crops, and we figured on it all through
+the winter.--Well, to make a long story short, we finally went
+into the thing ourselves."
+
+"Tell me one thing," interposed Theron.  "I'm anxious
+to understand it all as we go along.  Were you and he
+at any time sincerely converted?--that is, I mean,
+genuinely convicted of sin and conscious of--you know
+what I mean!"
+
+"Oh, bless you, yes," responded Sister Soulsby. 
+"Not only once--dozens of times--I may say every time. 
+We couldn't do good work if we weren't. But that's a matter
+of temperament--of emotions."
+
+"Precisely.  That was what I was getting at," explained Theron.
+
+"Well, then, hear what I was getting at," she went on. 
+"You were talking very loudly here about frauds and
+hypocrisies and so on, a few minutes ago.  Now I say
+that Soulsby and I do good, and that we're good fellows. 
+Now take him, for example.  There isn't a better citizen
+in all Chemung County than he is, or a kindlier neighbor,
+or a better or more charitable man.  I've known him to stay
+up a whole winter's night in a poor Irishman's stinking
+and freezing stable, trying to save his cart-horse for him,
+that had been seized with some sort of fit.  The man's
+whole livelihood, and his family's, was in that horse;
+and when it died, Soulsby bought him another, and never
+told even ME about it.  Now that I call real piety,
+if you like."
+
+"So do I," put in Theron, cordially.
+
+"And this question of fraud," pursued his companion,--
+"look at it in this light.  You heard us sing.  Well, now,
+I was a singer, of course, but Soulsby hardly knew one
+note from another.  I taught him to sing, and he went
+at it patiently and diligently, like a little man. 
+And I invented that scheme of finding tunes which the crowd
+didn't know, and so couldn't break in on and smother. 
+I simply took Chopin--he is full of sixths, you know--
+and I got all sorts of melodies out of his waltzes and
+mazurkas and nocturnes and so on, and I trained Soulsby
+just to sing those sixths so as to make the harmony,
+and there you are.  He couldn't sing by himself any more than
+a crow, but he's got those sixths of his down to a hair. 
+Now that's machinery, management, organization.  We take
+these tunes, written by a devil-may-care Pole who was living
+with George Sand openly at the time, and pass 'em off
+on the brethren for hymns.  It's a fraud, yes; but it's
+a good fraud.  So they are all good frauds.  I say frankly
+that I'm glad that the change and the chance came to help
+Soulsby and me to be good frauds."
+
+"And the point is that I'm to be a good fraud, too,"
+commented the young minister.
+
+She had risen, and he got to his feet as well. 
+He instinctively sought for her hand, and pressed it warmly,
+and held it in both his, with an exuberance of gratitude
+and liking in his manner.
+
+Sister Soulsby danced her eyes at him with a saucy little
+shake of the head.  "I'm afraid you'll never make a really
+GOOD fraud," she said.  "You haven't got it in you. 
+Your intentions are all right, but your execution is
+hopelessly clumsy.  I came up to your bedroom there twice
+while you were sick, just to say 'howdy,' and you kept
+your eyes shut, and all the while a blind horse could
+have told that you were wide awake."
+
+"I must have thought it was my wife," said Theron.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+When the lingering dusk finally settled down upon this
+long summer evening, the train bearing the Soulsbys
+homeward was already some score of miles on its way,
+and the Methodists of Octavius had nearly finished their
+weekly prayer-meeting.
+
+After the stirring events of the revival, it was only
+to be expected that this routine, home-made affair
+should suffer from a reaction.  The attendance was larger
+than usual, perhaps, but the proceedings were spiritless
+and tame.  Neither the pastor nor his wife was present
+at the beginning, and the class-leader upon whom control
+devolved made but feeble headway against the spell of
+inertia which the hot night-air laid upon the gathering. 
+Long pauses intervened between the perfunctory
+praise-offerings and supplications, and the hymns weariedly
+raised from time to time fell again in languor by the wayside.
+
+Alice came in just as people were beginning to hope
+that some one would start the Doxology, and bring matters
+to a close.  Her appearance apparently suggested this
+to the class-leader, for in a few moments the meeting
+had been dismissed, and some of the members, on their
+way out, were shaking hands with their minister's wife,
+and expressing the polite hope that he was better. 
+The worried look in her face, and the obvious stains
+of recent tears upon her cheeks imparted an added point
+and fervor to these inquiries, but she replied to all in
+tones of studied tranquillity that, although not feeling
+well enough to attend prayer-meeting, Brother Ware was
+steadily recovering strength, and confidently expected
+to be in complete health by Sunday.  They left her,
+and could hardly wait to get into the vestibule to ask
+one another in whispers what on earth she could have been
+crying about.
+
+Meanwhile Brother Ware improved his convalescent state
+by pacing slowly up and down under the elms on the side
+of the street opposite the Catholic church.  There were
+no houses here for a block and more; the sidewalk was
+broken in many places, so that passers-by avoided it;
+the overhanging boughs shrouded it all in obscurity;
+it was preeminently a place to be alone in.
+
+Theron had driven to the depot with his guests an hour before,
+and after a period of pleasant waiting on the platform,
+had said good-bye to them as the train moved away. 
+Then he turned to Alice, who had also accompanied them
+in the carriage, and was conscious of a certain annoyance
+at her having come.  That long familiar talk of the
+afternoon had given him the feeling that he was entitled
+to bid farewell to Sister Soulsby--to both the Soulsbys--
+by himself.
+
+"I am afraid folks will think it strange--neither of us
+attending the prayer-meeting," he said, with a suggestion
+of reproof in his tone, as they left the station-yard.
+
+"If we get back in time, I'll run in for a minute,"
+answered Alice, with docility.
+
+"No--no," he broke in.  "I'm not equal to walking so fast. 
+You run on ahead, and explain matters, and I will come
+along slowly."
+
+"The hack we came in is still there in the yard,"
+the wife suggested.  "We could drive home in that. 
+I don't believe it would cost more than a quarter--
+and if you're feeling badly--"
+
+"But I am NOT feeling badly," Theron replied,
+with frank impatience.  "Only I feel--I feel
+that being alone with my thoughts would be good for me."
+
+"Oh, certainly--by all means!"  Alice had said, and turned
+sharply on her heel.
+
+Being alone with these thoughts, Theron strolled aimlessly about,
+and did not think at all.  The shadows gathered, and fireflies
+began to disclose their tiny gleams among the shrubbery
+in the gardens.  A lamp-lighter came along, and passed him,
+leaving in his wake a straggling double line of lights,
+glowing radiantly against the black-green of the trees. 
+This recalled to Theron that he had heard that the town
+council lit the street lamps by the almanac, and economized
+gas when moonshine was due.  The idea struck him as droll,
+and he dwelt upon it in various aspects, smiling at some
+of its comic possibilities.  Looking up in the middle
+of one of these whimsical conceits, the sportive impulse
+died suddenly within him.  He realized that it was dark,
+and that the massive black bulk reared against the sky
+on the other side of the road was the Catholic church. 
+The other fact, that he had been there walking to and
+fro for some time, was borne in upon him more slowly. 
+He turned, and resumed the pacing up and down with a
+still more leisurely step, musing upon the curious way
+in which people's minds all unconsciously follow about
+where instincts and intuitions lead.
+
+No doubt it was what Sister Soulsby had said about
+Catholics which had insensibly guided his purposeless
+stroll in this direction.  What a woman that was! 
+Somehow the purport of her talk--striking, and even
+astonishing as he had found it--did not stand out so clearly
+in his memory as did the image of the woman herself. 
+She must have been extremely pretty once.  For that
+matter she still was a most attractive-looking woman. 
+It had been a genuine pleasure to have her in the house--
+to see her intelligent responsive face at the table--
+to have it in one's power to make drafts at will upon
+the fund of sympathy and appreciation, of facile mirth
+and ready tenderness in those big eyes of hers.  He liked
+that phrase she had used about herself--"a good fellow." 
+It seemed to fit her to a "t."  And Soulsby was a good
+fellow too.  All at once it occurred to him to wonder whether
+they were married or not.
+
+But really that was no affair of his, he reflected. 
+A citizen of the intellectual world should be above
+soiling his thoughts with mean curiosities of that sort,
+and he drove the impertinent query down again under the
+surface of his mind.  He refused to tolerate, as well,
+sundry vagrant imaginings which rose to cluster about and
+literalize the romance of her youth which Sister Soulsby
+had so frankly outlined.  He would think upon nothing
+but her as he knew her,--the kindly, quick-witted, capable
+and charming woman who had made such a brilliant break
+in the monotony of life at that dull parsonage of his. 
+The only genuine happiness in life must consist in having
+bright, smart, attractive women like that always about.
+
+The lights were visible now in the upper rooms of Father Forbes'
+pastorate across the way.  Theron paused for a second to
+consider whether he wanted to go over and call on the priest. 
+He decided that mentally he was too fagged and flat for such
+an undertaking.  He needed another sort of companionship--
+some restful, soothing human contact, which should exact
+nothing from him in return, but just take charge of him,
+with soft, wise words and pleasant plays of fancy,
+and jokes and--and--something of the general effect created
+by Sister Soulsby's eyes.  The thought expanded itself,
+and he saw that he had never realized before--nay,
+never dreamt before--what a mighty part the comradeship
+of talented, sweet-natured and beautiful women must
+play in the development of genius, the achievement
+of lofty aims, out in the great world of great men. 
+To know such women--ah, that would never fall to his hapless lot.
+
+The priest's lamps blinked at him through the trees. 
+He remembered that priests were supposed to be even further
+removed from the possibilities of such contact than he
+was himself.  His memory reverted to that horribly ugly old
+woman whom Father Forbes had spoken of as his housekeeper. 
+Life under the same roof with such a hag must be even
+worse than--worse than--
+
+The young minister did not finish the comparison, even in the
+privacy of his inner soul.  He stood instead staring over
+at the pastorate, in a kind of stupor of arrested thought. 
+The figure of a woman passed in view at the nearest window--
+a tall figure with pale summer clothes of some sort,
+and a broad summer hat--a flitting effect of diaphanous
+shadow between him and the light which streamed from
+the casement.
+
+Theron felt a little shiver run over him, as if the delicate
+coolness of the changing night-air had got into his blood. 
+The window was open, and his strained hearing thought
+it caught the sound of faint laughter.  He continued
+to gaze at the place where the vision had appeared,
+the while a novel and strange perception unfolded itself
+upon his mind.
+
+He had come there in the hope of encountering Celia Madden.
+
+Now that he looked this fact in the face, there was nothing
+remarkable about it.  In truth, it was simplicity itself. 
+He was still a sick man, weak in body and dejected in spirits. 
+The thought of how unhappy and unstrung he was came to him
+now with an insistent pathos that brought tears to his eyes. 
+He was only obeying the universal law of nature--the law
+which prompts the pallid spindling sprout of the potato
+in the cellar to strive feebly toward the light.
+
+From where he stood in the darkness he stretched
+out his hands in the direction of that open window. 
+The gesture was his confession to the overhanging boughs,
+to the soft night-breeze, to the stars above--and it
+bore back to him something of the confessional's vague
+and wistful solace.  He seemed already to have drawn
+down into his soul a taste of the refreshment it craved. 
+He sighed deeply, and the hot moisture smarted again upon
+his eyelids, but this time not all in grief.  With his
+tender compassion for himself there mingled now a flutter
+of buoyant prescience, of exquisite expectancy.
+
+Fate walked abroad this summer night.  The street door
+of the pastorate opened, and in the flood of illumination
+which spread suddenly forth over the steps and sidewalk,
+Theron saw again the tall form, with the indefinitely
+light-hued flowing garments and the wide straw hat. 
+He heard a tuneful woman's voice call out "Good-night, Maggie,"
+and caught no response save the abrupt closing of the door,
+which turned everything black again with a bang. 
+He listened acutely for another instant, and then with long,
+noiseless strides made his way down his deserted side
+of the street.  He moderated his pace as he turned
+to cross the road at the corner, and then, still masked
+by the trees, halted altogether, in a momentary tumult
+of apprehension.  No--yes--it was all right.  The girl
+sauntered out from the total darkness into the dim starlight
+of the open corner.
+
+"Why, bless me, is that you, Miss Madden?"
+
+Celia seemed to discern readily enough, through the
+accents of surprise, the identity of the tall, slim man
+who addressed her from the shadows.
+
+"Good-evening, Mr. Ware," she said, with prompt affability. 
+"I'm so glad to find you out again.  We heard you were ill."
+
+"I have been very ill," responded Theron, as they
+shook hands and walked on together.  He added, with a
+quaver in his voice, "I am still far from strong. 
+I really ought not to be out at all.  But--but the
+longing for--for--well, I COULDN'T stay in any longer. 
+Even if it kills me, I shall be glad I came out tonight."
+
+"Oh, we won't talk of killing," said Celia.  "I don't
+believe in illnesses myself"
+
+"But you believe in collapses of the nerves," put in Theron,
+with gentle sadness, "in moral and spiritual and mental
+breakdowns.  I remember how I was touched by the way you
+told me YOU suffered from them.  I had to take what you said
+then for granted.  I had had no experience of it myself. 
+But now I know what it is."  He drew a long, pathetic sigh. 
+"Oh, DON'T I know what it is!" he repeated gloomily.
+
+"Come, my friend, cheer up," Celia purred at him,
+in soothing tones.  He felt that there was a deliciously
+feminine and sisterly intuition in her speech,
+and in the helpful, nurse-like way in which she drew
+his arm through hers.  He leaned upon this support,
+and was glad of it in every fibre of his being.
+
+"Do you remember?  You promised--that last time I saw you--
+to play for me," he reminded her.  They were passing
+the little covered postern door at the side and rear of
+the church as he spoke, and he made a half halt to point
+the coincidence.
+
+"Oh, there's no one to blow the organ," she said,
+divining his suggestion.  "And I haven't the key--
+and, besides, the organ is too heavy and severe
+for an invalid.  It would overwhelm you tonight."
+
+"Not as you would know how to play it for me,"
+urged Theron, pensively.  "I feel as if good music to-night
+would make me well again.  I am really very ill and weak--
+and unhappy!"
+
+The girl seemed moved by the despairing note in his voice. 
+She invited him by a sympathetic gesture to lean even more
+directly on her arm.
+
+"Come home with me, and I'll play Chopin to you," she said,
+in compassionate friendliness.  "He is the real medicine
+for bruised and wounded nerves.  You shall have as much
+of him as you like."
+
+The idea thus unexpectedly thrown forth spread itself
+like some vast and inexpressibly alluring vista before
+Theron's imagination.  The spice of adventure in it
+fascinated his mind as well, but for a shrinking moment
+the flesh was weak.
+
+"I'm afraid your people would--would think it strange,"
+he faltered--and began also to recall that he had some
+people of his own who would be even more amazed.
+
+"Nonsense," said Celia, in fine, bold confidence, and with
+a reassuring pressure on his arm.  "I allow none of my
+people to question what I do.  They never dream of such
+a preposterous thing.  Besides, you will see none of them. 
+Mrs. Madden is at the seaside, and my father and brother
+have their own part of the house.  I shan't listen for
+a minute to your not coming.  Come, I'm your doctor. 
+I'm to make you well again."
+
+There was further conversation, and Theron more or less
+knew that he was bearing a part in it, but his whole
+mind seemed concentrated, in a sort of delicious terror,
+upon the wonderful experience to which every footstep
+brought him nearer.  His magnetized fancy pictured a great
+spacious parlor, such as a mansion like the Maddens'
+would of course contain, and there would be a grand piano,
+and lace curtains, and paintings in gold frames,
+and a chandelier, and velvet easy-chairs, and he would sit
+in one of these, surrounded by all the luxury of the rich,
+while Celia played to him.  There would be servants about,
+he presumed, and very likely they would recognize him,
+and of course they would talk about it to Tom, Dick and
+Harry afterward.  But he said to himself defiantly that he
+didn't care.
+
+He withdrew his arm from hers as they came upon the
+well-lighted main street.  He passed no one who seemed
+to know him.  Presently they came to the Madden place,
+and Celia, without waiting for the gravelled walk,
+struck obliquely across the lawn.  Theron, who had been
+lagging behind with a certain circumspection, stepped
+briskly to her side now.  Their progress over the soft,
+close-cropped turf in the dark together, with the scent
+of lilies and perfumed shrubs heavy on the night air,
+and the majestic bulk of the big silent house rising
+among the trees before them, gave him a thrilling sense
+of the glory of individual freedom.
+
+"I feel a new man already," he declared, as they swung
+along on the grass.  He breathed a long sigh of content,
+and drew nearer, so that their shoulders touched now
+and again as they walked.  In a minute more they were
+standing on the doorstep, and Theron heard the significant
+jingle of a bunch of keys which his companion was groping
+for in her elusive pocket.  He was conscious of trembling
+a little at the sound.
+
+It seemed that, unlike other people, the Maddens did
+not have their parlor on the ground-floor, opening off
+the front hall.  Theron stood in the complete darkness
+of this hall, till Celia had lit one of several candles
+which were in their hand-sticks on a sort of sideboard
+next the hat-rack. She beckoned him with a gesture
+of her head, and he followed her up a broad staircase,
+magnificent in its structural appointments of inlaid woods,
+and carpeted with what to his feet felt like down. 
+The tiny light which his guide bore before her half revealed,
+as they passed in their ascent, tall lengths of tapestry,
+and the dull glint of armor and brazen discs in shadowed
+niches on the nearer wall.  Over the stair-rail lay an open
+space of such stately dimensions, bounded by terminal lines
+of decoration so distant in the faint candle-flicker,
+that the young country minister could think of no word
+but "palatial" to fit it all.
+
+At the head of the flight, Celia led the way along a wide
+corridor to where it ended.  Here, stretched from side to side,
+and suspended from broad hoops of a copper-like metal,
+was a thick curtain, of a uniform color which Theron at
+first thought was green, and then decided must be blue. 
+She pushed its heavy folds aside, and unlocked another door. 
+He passed under the curtain behind her, and closed
+the door.
+
+The room into which he had made his way was not at all
+after the fashion of any parlor he had ever seen.  In the
+obscure light it was difficult to tell what it resembled. 
+He made out what he took to be a painter's easel,
+standing forth independently in the centre of things. 
+There were rows of books on rude, low shelves. 
+Against one of the two windows was a big, flat writing-table--
+or was it a drawing-table?--littered with papers. 
+Under the other window was a carpenter's bench, with a large
+mound of something at one end covered with a white cloth. 
+On a table behind the easel rose a tall mechanical contrivance,
+the chief feature of which was a thick upright spiral screw. 
+The floor was of bare wood stained brown.  The walls of this
+queer room had photographs and pictures, taken apparently
+from illustrated papers, pinned up at random for their
+only ornament.
+
+Celia had lighted three or four other candles on the mantel. 
+She caught the dumfounded expression with which her
+guest was surveying his surroundings, and gave a merry
+little laugh.
+
+"This is my workshop," she explained.  "I keep this
+for the things I do badly--things I fool with.  If I want
+to paint, or model in clay, or bind books, or write,
+or draw, or turn on the lathe, or do some carpentering,
+here's where I do it.  All the things that make a mess
+which has to be cleaned up--they are kept out here--
+because this is as far as the servants are allowed
+to come."
+
+She unlocked still another door as she spoke--a door
+which was also concealed behind a curtain.
+
+"Now," she said, holding up the candle so that its reddish
+flare rounded with warmth the creamy fulness of her chin
+and throat, and glowed upon her hair in a flame of orange
+light--"now I will show you what is my very own."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+Theron Ware looked about him with frankly undisguised astonishment.
+
+The room in which he found himself was so dark at first
+that it yielded little to the eye, and that little seemed
+altogether beyond his comprehension.  His gaze helplessly
+followed Celia and her candle about as she busied herself
+in the work of illumination.  When she had finished,
+and pinched out the taper, there were seven lights in
+the apartment--lights beaming softly through half-opaque
+alternating rectangles of blue and yellow glass.  They must
+be set in some sort of lanterns around against the wall,
+he thought, but the shape of these he could hardly make out.
+
+Gradually his sight adapted itself to this subdued light,
+and he began to see other things.  These queer lamps
+were placed, apparently, so as to shed a special radiance
+upon some statues which stood in the corners of the chamber,
+and upon some pictures which were embedded in the walls. 
+Theron noted that the statues, the marble of which lost
+its aggressive whiteness under the tinted lights,
+were mostly of naked men and women; the pictures, four or
+five in number, were all variations of a single theme--
+the Virgin Mary and the Child.
+
+A less untutored vision than his would have caught
+more swiftly the scheme of color and line in which
+these works of art bore their share.  The walls of
+the room were in part of flat upright wooden columns,
+terminating high above in simple capitals, and they were
+all painted in pale amber and straw and primrose hues,
+irregularly wavering here and there toward suggestions
+of white.  Between these pilasters were broader panels of
+stamped leather, in gently varying shades of peacock blue. 
+These contrasted colors vaguely interwove and mingled
+in what he could see of the shadowed ceiling far above. 
+They were repeated in the draperies and huge cushions
+and pillows of the low, wide divan which ran about
+three sides of the room.  Even the floor, where it
+revealed itself among the scattered rugs, was laid in a
+mosaic pattern of matched woods, which, like the rugs,
+gave back these same shifting blues and uncertain yellows.
+
+The fourth side of the apartment was broken in outline
+at one end by the door through which they had entered,
+and at the other by a broad, square opening,
+hung with looped-back curtains of a thin silken stuff. 
+Between the two apertures rose against the wall what
+Theron took at first glance to be an altar.  There were
+pyramidal rows of tall candles here on either side,
+each masked with a little silken hood; below, in the centre,
+a shelf-like projection supported what seemed a massive,
+carved casket, and in the beautiful intricacies of this,
+and the receding canopy of delicate ornamentation
+which depended above it, the dominant color was white,
+deepening away in its shadows, by tenderly minute gradations,
+to the tints which ruled the rest of the room.
+
+Celia lighted some of the high, thick tapers in these candelabra,
+and opened the top of the casket.  Theron saw with
+surprise that she had uncovered the keyboard of a piano. 
+He viewed with much greater amazement her next proceeding--
+which was to put a cigarette between her lips, and,
+bending over one of the candles with it for an instant,
+turn to him with a filmy, opalescent veil of smoke above her head.
+
+"Make yourself comfortable anywhere," she said, with a
+gesture which comprehended all the divans and pillows
+in the place.  "Will you smoke?"
+
+"I have never tried since I was a little boy," said Theron,
+"but I think I could.  If you don't mind, I should like
+to see."
+
+Lounging at his ease on the oriental couch, Theron
+experimented cautiously upon the unaccustomed tobacco,
+and looked at Celia with what he felt to be the confident
+quiet of a man of the world.  She had thrown aside
+her hat, and in doing so had half released some of the
+heavy strands of hair coiled at the back of her head. 
+His glance instinctively rested upon this wonderful hair
+of hers.  There was no mistaking the sudden fascination
+its disorder had for his eye.
+
+She stood before him with the cigarette poised daintily
+between thumb and finger of a shapely hand, and smiled
+comprehendingly down on her guest.
+
+"I suffered the horrors of the damned with this hair
+of mine when I was a child," she said.  "I daresay
+all children have a taste for persecuting red-heads;
+but it's a specialty with Irish children.  They get hold
+somehow of an ancient national superstition, or legend,
+that red hair was brought into Ireland by the Danes. 
+It's been a term of reproach with us since Brian Boru's time
+to call a child a Dane.  I used to be pursued and baited
+with it every day of my life, until the one dream of my
+ambition was to get old enough to be a Sister of Charity,
+so that I might hide my hair under one of their big
+beastly white linen caps.  I've got rather away from that
+ideal since, I'm afraid," she added, with a droll downward
+curl of her lip.
+
+"Your hair is very beautiful," said Theron, in the calm
+tone of a connoisseur.
+
+"I like it myself," Celia admitted, and blew a little
+smoke-ring toward him.  "I've made this whole room
+to match it.  The colors, I mean," she explained,
+in deference to his uplifted brows.  "Between us, we make
+up what Whistler would call a symphony.  That reminds me--
+I was going to play for you.  Let me finish the cigarette first."
+
+Theron felt grateful for her reticence about the fact
+that he had laid his own aside.  "I have never seen
+a room at all like this," he remarked.  You are right;
+it does fit you perfectly."
+
+She nodded her sense of his appreciation.  "It is what
+I like," she said.  "It expresses ME.  I will not have
+anything about me--or anybody either--that I don't like. 
+I suppose if an old Greek could see it, it would make
+him sick, but it represents what I mean by being a Greek. 
+It is as near as an Irishman can get to it."
+
+"I remember your puzzling me by saying that you were
+a Greek."
+
+Celia laughed, and tossed the cigarette-end away. 
+"I'd puzzle you more, I'm afraid, if I tried to explain
+to you what I really meant by it.  I divide people
+up into two classes, you know--Greeks and Jews. 
+Once you get hold of that principle, all other divisions
+and classifications, such as by race or language
+or nationality, seem pure foolishness.  It is the only
+true division there is.  It is just as true among negroes
+or wild Indians who never heard of Greece or Jerusalem,
+as it is among white folks.  That is the beauty of it. 
+It works everywhere, always."
+
+"Try it on me," urged Theron, with a twinkling eye. 
+"Which am I?"
+
+"Both," said the girl, with a merry nod of the head. 
+"But now I'll play.  I told you you were to hear Chopin. 
+I prescribe him for you.  He is the Greekiest of the Greeks. 
+THERE was a nation where all the people were artists,
+where everybody was an intellectual aristocrat, where the
+Philistine was as unknown, as extinct, as the dodo. 
+Chopin might have written his music for them."
+
+"I am interested in Shopang," put in Theron, suddenly recalling
+Sister Soulsby's confidences as to the source of her tunes. 
+"He lived with--what's his name--George something. 
+We were speaking about him only this afternoon."
+
+Celia looked down into her visitor's face at first
+inquiringly, then with a latent grin about her lips. 
+"Yes--George something," she said, in a tone which mystified him.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware was sitting up, a minute afterward,
+in a ferment of awakened consciousness that he had
+never heard the piano played before.  After a little,
+he noiselessly rearranged the cushions, and settled himself
+again in a recumbent posture.  It was beyond his strength
+to follow that first impulse, and keep his mind abreast
+with what his ears took in.  He sighed and lay back,
+and surrendered his senses to the mere unthinking charm
+of it all.
+
+It was the Fourth Prelude that was singing in the air
+about him--a simple, plaintive strain wandering at will
+over a surface of steady rhythmic movement underneath,
+always creeping upward through mysteries of sweetness,
+always sinking again in cadences of semi-tones. With
+only a moment's pause, there came the Seventh Waltz--
+a rich, bold confusion which yet was not confused. 
+Theron's ears dwelt with eager delight upon the chasing
+medley of swift, tinkling sounds, but it left his
+thoughts free.
+
+From where he reclined, he turned his head to scrutinize,
+one by one, the statues in the corners.  No doubt they
+were beautiful--for this was a department in which he
+was all humility--and one of them, the figure of a
+broad-browed, stately, though thick-waisted woman,
+bending slightly forward and with both arms broken off,
+was decently robed from the hips downward.  The others were
+not robed at all.  Theron stared at them with the erratic,
+rippling jangle of the waltz in his ears, and felt that he
+possessed a new and disturbing conception of what female
+emancipation meant in these later days.  Roving along
+the wall, his glance rested again upon the largest of the
+Virgin pictures--a full-length figure in sweeping draperies,
+its radiant, aureoled head upturned in rapt adoration,
+its feet resting on a crescent moon which shone forth
+in bluish silver through festooned clouds of cherubs. 
+The incongruity between the unashamed statues and this
+serene incarnation of holy womanhood jarred upon him for
+the instant.  Then his mind went to the piano.
+
+Without a break the waltz had slowed and expanded into
+a passage of what might be church music, an exquisitely
+modulated and gently solemn chant, through which a soft,
+lingering song roved capriciously, forcing the listener
+to wonder where it was coming out, even while it caressed
+and soothed to repose.
+
+He looked from the Madonna to Celia.  Beyond the carelessly
+drooping braids and coils of hair which blazed between
+the candles, he could see the outline of her brow
+and cheek, the noble contour of her lifted chin and full,
+modelled throat, all pink as the most delicate rose leaf
+is pink, against the cool lights of the altar-like wall. 
+The sight convicted him in the court of his own soul
+as a prurient and mean-minded rustic.  In the presence
+of such a face, of such music, there ceased to be any such
+thing as nudity, and statues no more needed clothes than
+did those slow, deep, magnificent chords which came now,
+gravely accumulating their spell upon him.
+
+"It is all singing!" the player called out to him over
+her shoulder, in a minute of rest.  "That is what Chopin does--
+he sings!"
+
+She began, with an effect of thinking of something else,
+the Sixth Nocturne, and Theron at first thought she was not
+playing anything in particular, so deliberately, haltingly,
+did the chain of charm unwind itself into sequence. 
+Then it came closer to him than the others had done. 
+The dreamy, wistful, meditative beauty of it all at once
+oppressed and inspired him.  He saw Celia's shoulders sway
+under the impulse of the RUBATO license--the privilege
+to invest each measure with the stress of the whole,
+to loiter, to weep, to run and laugh at will--and the
+music she made spoke to him as with a human voice. 
+There was the wooing sense of roses and moonlight,
+of perfumes, white skins, alluring languorous eyes,
+and then--
+
+"You know this part, of course," he heard her say.
+
+On the instant they had stepped from the dark, scented,
+starlit garden, where the nightingale sang, into a great cathedral. 
+A sombre and lofty anthem arose, and filled the place
+with the splendor of such dignified pomp of harmony and
+such suggestions of measureless choral power and authority
+that Theron sat abruptly up, then was drawn resistlessly
+to his feet.  He stood motionless in the strange room,
+feeling most of all that one should kneel to hear such music.
+
+"This you'll know too--the funeral march from the Second
+Sonata," she was saying, before he realized that the end
+of the other had come.  He sank upon the divan again,
+bending forward and clasping his hands tight around his knees. 
+His heart beat furiously as he listened to the weird,
+mediaeval processional, with its wild, clashing chords
+held down in the bondage of an orderly sadness. 
+There was a propelling motion in the thing--a sense of being
+borne bodily along--which affected him like dizziness. 
+He breathed hard through the robust portions of stern,
+vigorous noise, and rocked himself to and fro when, as rosy
+morn breaks upon a storm-swept night, the drums are silenced
+for the sweet, comforting strain of solitary melody. 
+The clanging minor harmonies into which the march relapses
+came to their abrupt end.  Theron rose once more,
+and moved with a hesitating step to the piano.
+
+"I want to rest a little," he said, with his hand
+on her shoulder.
+
+"Whew! so do I," exclaimed Celia, letting her hands fall
+with an exaggerated gesture of weariness.  "The sonatas take
+it out of one!  They are hideously difficult, you know. 
+They are rarely played."
+
+"I didn't know," remarked Theron.  She seemed not to mind
+his hand upon her shoulder, and he kept it there. 
+"I didn't know anything about music at all.  What I do know
+now is that--that this evening is an event in my life."
+
+She looked up at him and smiled.  He read unsuspected
+tendernesses and tolerances of friendship in the depths
+of her eyes, which emboldened him to stir the fingers
+of that audacious hand in a lingering, caressing trill
+upon her shoulder.  The movement was of the faintest,
+but having ventured it, he drew his hand abruptly away.
+
+"You are getting on," she said to him.  There was an
+enigmatic twinkle in the smile with which she continued
+to regard him.  "We are Hellenizing you at a great rate."
+
+A sudden thought seemed to strike her.  She shifted
+her eyes toward vacancy with a swift, abstracted glance,
+reflected for a moment, then let a sparkling half-wink
+and the dimpling beginnings of an almost roguish smile
+mark her assent to the conceit, whatever it might be.
+
+"I will be with you in a moment," he heard her say;
+and while the words were still in his ears she had risen
+and passed out of sight through the broad, open doorway
+to the right.  The looped curtains fell together behind her. 
+Presently a mellow light spread over their delicately
+translucent surface--a creamy, undulating radiance which
+gave the effect of moving about among the myriad folds
+of the silk.
+
+Theron gazed at these curtains for a little, then straightened
+his shoulders with a gesture of decision, and, turning on his heel,
+went over and examined the statues in the further corners minutely.
+
+"If you would like some more, I will play you the Berceuse now."
+
+Her voice came to him with a delicious shock. 
+He wheeled round and beheld her standing at the piano,
+with one hand resting, palm upward, on the keys.  She was
+facing him.  Her tall form was robed now in some shapeless,
+clinging drapery, lustrous and creamy and exquisitely soft,
+like the curtains.  The wonderful hair hung free and luxuriant
+about her neck and shoulders, and glowed with an intensity
+of fiery color which made all the other hues of the room
+pale and vague.  A fillet of faint, sky-like blue drew
+a gracious span through the flame of red above her temples,
+and from this there rose the gleam of jewels.  Her head
+inclined gently, gravely, toward him--with the posture
+of that armless woman in marble he had been studying--
+and her brown eyes, regarding him from the shadows,
+emitted light.
+
+"It is a lullaby--the only one he wrote," she said, as Theron,
+pale-faced and with tightened lips, approached her. 
+"No--you mustn't stand there," she added, sinking into
+the seat before the instrument; "go back and sit where
+you were."
+
+The most perfect of lullabies, with its swaying
+abandonment to cooing rhythm, ever and again rising
+in ripples to the point of insisting on something,
+one knows not what, and then rocking, melting away
+once more, passed, so to speak, over Theron's head. 
+He leaned back upon the cushions, and watched the white,
+rounded forearm which the falling folds of this strange,
+statue-like drapery made bare.
+
+There was more that appealed to his mood in the Third Ballade. 
+It seemed to him that there were words going along with it--
+incoherent and impulsive yet very earnest words,
+appealing to him in strenuous argument and persuasion. 
+Each time he almost knew what they said, and strained after
+their meaning with a passionate desire, and then there
+would come a kind of cuckoo call, and everything would
+swing dancing off again into a mockery of inconsequence.
+
+Upon the silence there fell the pure, liquid, mellifluous
+melody of a soft-throated woman singing to her lover.
+
+"It is like Heine--simply a love-poem," said the girl,
+over her shoulder.
+
+Theron followed now with all his senses, as she carried
+the Ninth Nocturne onward.  The stormy passage, which she
+banged finely forth, was in truth a lover's quarrel;
+and then the mild, placid flow of sweet harmonies into
+which the furore sank, dying languorously away upon
+a silence all alive with tender memories of sound--
+was that not also a part of love?
+
+They sat motionless through a minute--the man on the divan,
+the girl at the piano--and Theron listened for what he
+felt must be the audible thumping of his heart.
+
+Then, throwing back her head, with upturned face, Celia began
+what she had withheld for the last--the Sixteenth Mazurka. 
+This strange foreign thing she played with her eyes closed,
+her head tilted obliquely so that Theron could see the
+rose-tinted, beautiful countenance, framed as if asleep
+in the billowing luxuriance of unloosed auburn hair. 
+He fancied her beholding visions as she wrought the music--
+visions full of barbaric color and romantic forms. 
+As his mind swam along with the gliding, tricksy phantom
+of a tune, it seemed as if he too could see these visions--
+as if he gazed at them through her eyes.
+
+It could not be helped.  He lifted himself noiselessly to
+his feet, and stole with caution toward her.  He would hear
+the rest of this weird, voluptuous fantasy standing thus,
+so close behind her that he could look down upon her full,
+uplifted lace--so close that, if she moved, that glowing
+nimbus of hair would touch him.
+
+There had been some curious and awkward pauses in this
+last piece, which Theron, by some side cerebration,
+had put down to her not watching what her fingers did. 
+There came another of these pauses now--an odd,
+unaccountable halt in what seemed the middle of everything. 
+He stared intently down upon her statuesque, dreaming face
+during the hush, and caught his breath as he waited. 
+There fell at last a few faltering ascending notes,
+making a half-finished strain, and then again there
+was silence.
+
+Celia opened her eyes, and poured a direct, deep gaze
+into the face above hers.  Its pale lips were parted
+in suspense, and the color had faded from its cheeks.
+
+"That is the end," she said, and, with a turn of her lithe body,
+stood swiftly up, even while the echoes of the broken
+melody seemed panting in the air about her for completion.
+
+Theron put his hands to his face, and pressed them tightly
+against eyes and brow for an instant.  Then, throwing them
+aside with an expansive downward sweep of the arms,
+and holding them clenched, he returned Celia's glance. 
+It was as if he had never looked into a woman's eyes before.
+
+"It CAN'T be the end!" he heard himself saying,
+in a low voice charged with deep significance.  He held
+her gaze in the grasp of his with implacable tenacity. 
+There was a trouble about breathing, and the mosaic
+floor seemed to stir under his feet.  He clung defiantly
+to the one idea of not releasing her eyes.
+
+"How COULD it be the end?" he demanded, lifting an uncertain
+hand to his breast as he spoke, and spreading it there
+as if to control the tumultuous fluttering of his heart. 
+"Things don't end that way!"
+
+A sharp, blinding spasm of giddiness closed upon and
+shook him, while the brave words were on his lips. 
+He blinked and tottered under it, as it passed, and then
+backed humbly to his divan and sat down, gasping a little,
+and patting his hand on his heart.  There was fright
+written all over his whitened face.
+
+"We--we forgot that I am a sick man," he said feebly,
+answering Celia's look of surprised inquiry with a forced,
+wan smile.  "I was afraid my heart had gone wrong."
+
+She scrutinized him for a further moment, with growing
+reassurance in her air.  Then, piling up the pillows
+and cushions behind him for support, for all the world
+like a big sister again, she stepped into the inner room,
+and returned with a flagon of quaint shape and a tiny glass. 
+She poured this latter full to the brim of a thick yellowish,
+aromatic liquid, and gave it him to drink.
+
+"This Benedictine is all I happen to have," she said. 
+"Swallow it down.  It will do you good."
+
+Theron obeyed her.  It brought tears to his eyes; but,
+upon reflection, it was grateful and warming.  He did feel
+better almost immediately.  A great wave of comfort seemed
+to enfold him as he settled himself back on the divan. 
+For that one flashing instant he had thought that he
+was dying.  He drew a long grateful breath of relief,
+and smiled his content.
+
+Celia had seated herself beside him, a little away. 
+She sat with her head against the wall, and one foot curled
+under her, and almost faced him.
+
+"I dare say we forced the pace a little," she remarked,
+after a pause, looking down at the floor, with the puckers
+of a ruminating amusement playing in the corners of her mouth. 
+"It doesn't do for a man to get to be a Greek all of a sudden. 
+He must work along up to it gradually."
+
+He remembered the music.  "Oh, if I only knew how to tell you,"
+he murmured ecstatically, "what a revelation your playing
+has been to me!  I had never imagined anything like it. 
+I shall think of it to my dying day."
+
+He began to remember as well the spirit that was in the air
+when the music ended.  The details of what he had felt
+and said rose vaguely in his mind.  Pondering them,
+his eye roved past Celia's white-robed figure to the broad,
+open doorway beyond.  The curtains behind which she
+had disappeared were again parted and fastened back. 
+A dim light was burning within, out of sight, and its faint
+illumination disclosed a room filled with white marbles,
+white silks, white draperies of varying sorts, which shaped
+themselves, as he looked, into the canopy and trappings
+of an extravagantly over-sized and sumptuous bed. 
+He looked away again.
+
+"I wish you would tell me what you really mean by that Greek
+idea of yours," he said with the abruptness of confusion.
+
+Celia did not display much enthusiasm in the tone
+of her answer.  "Oh," she said almost indifferently,
+"lots of things.  Absolute freedom from moral bugbears,
+for one thing.  The recognition that beauty is the only
+thing in life that is worth while.  The courage to kick
+out of one's life everything that isn't worth while;
+and so on."
+
+"But," said Theron, watching the mingled delicacy and power
+of the bared arm and the shapely grace of the hand which she
+had lifted to her face, "I am going to get you to teach it
+ALL to me."  The memories began crowding in upon him now,
+and the baffling note upon which the mazurka had stopped
+short chimed like a tuning-fork in his ears.  "I want to
+be a Greek myself, if you're one.  I want to get as close
+to you--to your ideal, that is, as I can.  You open up
+to me a whole world that I had not even dreamed existed. 
+We swore our friendship long ago, you know:  and now,
+after tonight--you and the music have decided me. 
+I am going to put the things out of MY life that are
+not worthwhile.  Only you must help me; you must tell me
+how to begin."
+
+He looked up as he spoke, to enforce the almost tender
+entreaty of his words.  The spectacle of a yawn,
+only fractionally concealed behind those talented fingers,
+chilled his soft speech, and sent a flush over his face. 
+He rose on the instant.
+
+Celia was nothing abashed at his discovery.  She laughed
+gayly in confession of her fault, and held her hand out to
+let him help her disentangle her foot from her draperies,
+and get off the divan.  It seemed to be her meaning that he
+should continue holding her hand after she was also standing.
+
+"You forgive me, don't you?" she urged smilingly. 
+"Chopin always first excites me, then sends me to sleep. 
+You see how YOU sleep tonight!"
+
+The brown, velvety eyes rested upon him, from under their
+heavy lids, with a languorous kindliness.  Her warm,
+large palm clasped his in frank liking.
+
+"I don't want to sleep at all," Mr. Ware was impelled to say. 
+"I want to lie awake and think about--about everything
+all over again."
+
+She smiled drowsily.  "And you're sure you feel strong
+enough to walk home?"
+
+"Yes," he replied, with a lingering dilatory note,
+which deepened upon reflection into a sigh.  "Oh, yes."
+
+He followed her and her candle down the magnificent
+stairway again.  She blew the light out in the hall,
+and, opening the front door, stood with him for a silent
+moment on the threshold.  Then they shook hands once more,
+and with a whispered good-night, parted.
+
+Celia, returning to the blue and yellow room, lighted a cigarette
+and helped herself to some Benedictine in the glass which
+Theron had used.  She looked meditatively at this little glass
+for a moment, turning it about in her fingers with a smile. 
+The smile warmed itself suddenly into a joyous laugh. 
+She tossed the glass aside, and, holding out her flowing
+skirts with both hands, executed a swinging pirouette
+in front of the gravely beautiful statue of the armless woman.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+It was apparent to the Rev. Theron Ware, from the very
+first moment of waking next morning, that both he and
+the world had changed over night.  The metamorphosis,
+in the harsh toils of which he had been laboring blindly
+so long, was accomplished.  He stood forth, so to speak,
+in a new skin, and looked about him, with perceptions
+of quite an altered kind, upon what seemed in every way
+a fresh existence.  He lacked even the impulse to turn
+round and inspect the cocoon from which he had emerged. 
+Let the past bury the past.  He had no vestige of interest
+in it.
+
+The change was not premature.  He found himself not in
+the least confused by it, or frightened.  Before he had
+finished shaving, he knew himself to be easily and comfortably
+at home in his new state, and master of all its requirements.
+
+It seemed as if Alice, too, recognized that he had become
+another man, when he went down and took his chair at the
+breakfast table.  They had exchanged no words since their
+parting in the depot-yard the previous evening--an event
+now faded off into remote vagueness in Theron's mind. 
+He smiled brilliantly in answer to the furtive,
+half-sullen, half-curious glance she stole at him,
+as she brought the dishes in.
+
+"Ah! potatoes warmed up in cream!" he said, with hearty
+pleasure in his tone.  "What a mind-reader you are,
+to be sure!"
+
+"I'm glad you're feeling so much better," she said briefly,
+taking her seat.
+
+"Better?" he returned.  "I'm a new being!"
+
+She ventured to look him over more freely, upon this assurance. 
+He perceived and catalogued, one by one, the emotions
+which the small brain was expressing through those shallow
+blue eyes of hers.  She was turning over this, that,
+and the other hostile thought and childish grievance--
+most of all she was dallying with the idea of asking him
+where he had been till after midnight.  He smiled affably
+in the face of this scattering fire of peevish glances,
+and did not dream of resenting any phase of them all.
+
+"I am going down to Thurston's this morning, and order
+that piano sent up today," he announced presently,
+in a casual way.
+
+"Why, Theron, can we afford it?" the wife asked,
+regarding him with surprise.
+
+"Oh, easily enough," he replied light-heartedly. "You
+know they've increased my salary."
+
+She shook her head.  "No, I didn't. How should I? 
+You don't realize it," she went on, dolefully, "but you're
+getting so you don't tell me the least thing about your
+affairs nowadays."
+
+Theron laughed aloud.  "You ought to be grateful--
+such melancholy affairs as mine have been till now,"
+he declared--"that is, if it weren't absurd to think
+such a thing."  Then, more soberly, he explained: 
+"No, my girl, it is you who don't realize.  I am carrying
+big projects in my mind--big, ambitious thoughts and
+plans upon which great things depend.  They no doubt
+make me seem preoccupied and absent-minded; but it
+is a wife's part to understand, and make allowances,
+and not intrude trifles which may throw everything out
+of gear.  Don't think I'm scolding, my girl.  I only
+speak to reassure you and--and help you to comprehend. 
+Of course I know that you wouldn't willingly embarrass my--
+my career."
+
+"Of course not," responded Alice, dubiously; "but--but--
+"
+
+"But what?  Theron felt compelled by civility to say,
+though on the instant he reproached himself for the weakness
+of it.
+
+"Well--I hardly know how to say it," she faltered, "but it
+was nicer in the old days, before you bothered your head
+about big projects, and your career, as you call it,
+and were just a good, earnest, simple young servant
+of the Lord.  Oh, Theron!" she broke forth suddenly,
+with tearful zeal, "I get sometimes lately almost scared
+lest you should turn out to be a--a BACKSLIDER!"
+
+The husband sat upright, and hardened his countenance. 
+But yesterday the word would have had in it all sorts
+of inherited terrors for him.  This morning's dawn
+of a new existence revealed it as merely an empty and
+stupid epithet.
+
+"These are things not to be said," he admonished her,
+after a moment's pause, and speaking with carefully
+measured austerity.  "Least of all are they to be said
+to a clergyman--by his wife."
+
+It was on the tip of Alice's tongue to retort, "Better by
+his wife than by outsiders!" but she bit her lips,
+and kept the gibe back.  A rebuke of this form and gravity
+was a novelty in their relations.  The fear that it had
+been merited troubled, even while it did not convince,
+her mind, and the puzzled apprehension was to be read
+plainly enough on her face.
+
+Theron, noting it, saw a good deal more behind.  Really,
+it was amazing how much wiser he had grown all at once. 
+He had been married for years, and it was only this morning
+that he suddenly discovered how a wife ought to be handled. 
+He continued to look sternly away into space for a little. 
+Then his brows relaxed slowly and under the visible
+influence of melting considerations.  He nodded his head,
+turned toward her abruptly, and broke the silence with
+labored amiability.
+
+"Come, come--the day began so pleasantly--it was so good
+to feel well again--let us talk about the piano instead. 
+That is," he added, with an obvious overture to playfulness,
+"if the thought of having a piano is not too distasteful
+to you."
+
+Alice yielded almost effusively to his altered mood. 
+They went together into the sitting-room, to measure
+and decide between the two available spaces which were at
+their disposal, and he insisted with resolute magnanimity
+on her settling this question entirely by herself. 
+When at last he mentioned the fact that it was Friday,
+and he would look over some sermon memoranda before
+he went out, Alice retired to the kitchen in openly
+cheerful spirits.
+
+Theron spread some old manuscript sermons before him
+on his desk, and took down his scribbling-book as well. 
+But there his application flagged, and he surrendered
+himself instead, chin on hand, to staring out at
+the rhododendron in the yard.  He recalled how he had
+seen Soulsby patiently studying this identical bush. 
+The notion of Soulsby, not knowing at all how to sing,
+yet diligently learning those sixths, brought a smile
+to his mind; and then he seemed to hear Celia calling out
+over her shoulder, "That's what Chopin does--he sings!" 
+The spirit of that wonderful music came back to him,
+enfolded him in its wings.  It seemed to raise itself up--
+a palpable barrier between him and all that he had known
+and felt and done before.  That was his new birth--
+that marvellous night with the piano.  The conceit pleased him--
+not the less because there flashed along with it the thought
+that it was a poet that had been born.  Yes; the former
+country lout, the narrow zealot, the untutored slave
+groping about in the dark after silly superstitions,
+cringing at the scowl of mean Pierces and Winches,
+was dead.  There was an end of him, and good riddance. 
+In his place there had been born a Poet--he spelled the word
+out now unabashed--a child of light, a lover of beauty and
+sweet sounds, a recognizable brother to Renan and Chopin--
+and Celia!
+
+Out of the soothing, tenderly grateful revery, a practical
+suggestion suddenly took shape.  He acted upon it
+without a moment's delay, getting out his letter-pad,
+and writing hurriedly--
+
+"Dear Miss Madden,--Life will be more tolerable to me
+if before nightfall I can know that there is a piano
+under my roof.  Even if it remains dumb, it will be some
+comfort to have it here and look at it, and imagine
+how a great master might make it speak.
+
+"Would it be too much to beg you to look in at Thurston's,
+say at eleven this forenoon, and give me the inestimable
+benefit of your judgment in selecting an instrument?
+
+"Do not trouble to answer this, for I am leaving home now,
+but shall call at Thurston's at eleven, and wait.
+
+"Thanking you in anticipation,
+
+"I am--"
+
+Here Theron's fluency came to a sharp halt.  There were adverbs
+enough and to spare on the point of his pen, but the right
+one was not easy to come at.  "Gratefully," "faithfully,"
+"sincerely," "truly"--each in turn struck a false note. 
+He felt himself not quite any of these things. 
+At last he decided to write just the simple word "yours,"
+and then wavered between satisfaction at his boldness,
+dread lest he had been over-bold, and, worst of the lot,
+fear that she would not notice it one way or the other--
+all the while he sealed and addressed the letter, put it
+carefully in an inner pocket, and got his hat.
+
+There was a moment's hesitation as to notifying the kitchen
+of his departure.  The interests of domestic discipline seemed
+to point the other way.  He walked softly through the hall,
+and let himself out by the front door without a sound.
+
+Down by the canal bridge he picked out an idle boy to his mind--
+a lad whose aspect appeared to promise intelligence
+as a messenger, combined with large impartiality in
+sectarian matters.  He was to have ten cents on his return;
+and he might report himself to his patron at the bookstore yonder.
+
+Theron was grateful to the old bookseller for remaining
+at his desk in the rear.  There was a tacit compliment
+in the suggestion that he was not a mere customer,
+demanding instant attention.  Besides, there was no keeping
+"Thurston's" out of conversations in this place.
+
+Loitering along the shelves, the young minister's eye
+suddenly found itself arrested by a name on a cover. 
+There were a dozen narrow volumes in uniform binding,
+huddled together under a cardboard label of "Eminent
+Women Series."  Oddly enough, one of these bore the title
+"George Sand."  Theron saw there must be some mistake,
+as he took the book down, and opened it.  His glance
+hit by accident upon the name of Chopin.  Then he read
+attentively until almost the stroke of eleven.
+
+"We have to make ourselves acquainted with all sorts
+of queer phases of life," he explained in self-defence
+to the old bookseller, then counting out the money for
+the book from his lean purse.  He smiled as he added,
+"There seems something almost wrong about taking advantage
+of the clergyman's discount for a life of George Sand."
+
+"I don't know," answered the other, pleasantly.  "Guess she
+wasn't so much different from the rest of 'em--except
+that she didn't mind appearances.  We know about her. 
+We don't know about the others."
+
+"I must hurry," said Theron, turning on his heel. 
+The haste with which he strode out of the store,
+crossed the street, and made his way toward Thurston's,
+did not prevent his thinking much upon the astonishing
+things he had encountered in this book.  Their relation
+to Celia forced itself more and more upon his mind. 
+He could recall the twinkle in her eye, the sub-mockery
+in her tone, as she commented with that half-contemptuous
+"Yes--George something!" upon his blundering ignorance. 
+His mortification at having thus exposed his dull
+rusticity was swallowed up in conjectures as to just
+what her tolerant familiarity with such things involved. 
+He had never before met a young unmarried woman who would
+have confessed to him any such knowledge.  But then,
+of course, he had never known a girl who resembled Celia
+in any other way.  He recognized vaguely that he must
+provide himself with an entire new set of standards by which
+to measure and comprehend her.  But it was for the moment
+more interesting to wonder what her standards were. 
+Did she object to George Sand's behavior?  Or did she
+sympathize with that sort of thing?  Did those statues,
+and the loose-flowing diaphonous toga and unbound hair,
+the cigarettes, the fiery liqueur, the deliberately
+sensuous music--was he to believe that they signified--?
+
+"Good-morning, Mr. Ware.  You have managed by a miracle
+to hit on one of my punctual days," said Celia.
+
+She was standing on the doorstep, at the entrance to the
+musical department of Thurston's. He had not noticed
+before the fact that the sun was shining.  The full glare
+of its strong light, enveloping her figure as she stood,
+and drawing the dazzled eye for relief to the bower
+of softened color, close beneath her parasol of creamy
+silk and lace, was what struck him now first of all. 
+It was as if Celia had brought the sun with her.
+
+Theron shook hands with her, and found joy in the perception,
+that his own hand trembled.  He put boldly into words
+the thought that came to him.
+
+"It was generous of you," he said, "to wait for me out here,
+where all might delight in the sight of you, instead of
+squandering the privilege on a handful of clerks inside."
+
+Miss Madden beamed upon him, and nodded approval.
+
+"Alcibiades never turned a prettier compliment,"
+she remarked.  They went in together at this, and Theron
+made a note of the name.
+
+During the ensuing half-hour, the young minister followed
+about even more humbly than the clerks in Celia's
+commanding wake.  There were a good many pianos in the big
+show-room overhead, and Theron found himself almost awed
+by their size and brilliancy of polish, and the thought
+of the tremendous sum of money they represented altogether. 
+Not so with the organist.  She ordered them rolled around
+this way or that, as if they had been so many checkers on
+a draught-board. She threw back their covers with the scant
+ceremony of a dispensary dentist opening paupers' mouths. 
+She exploited their several capacities with masterful hands,
+not deigning to seat herself, but just slightly
+bending forward, and sweeping her fingers up and down
+their keyboards--able, domineering fingers which pounded,
+tinkled, meditated, assented, condemned, all in a flash, and
+amid what affected the layman's ears as a hopelessly discordant hubbub.
+
+Theron moved about in the group, nursing her parasol
+in his arms, and watching her.  The exaggerated deference
+which the clerks and salesmen showed to her as the rich
+Miss Madden, seemed to him to be mixed with a certain
+assertion of the claims of good-fellowship on the score
+of her being a musician.  There undoubtedly was a sense
+of freemasonry between them.  They alluded continually
+in technical terms to matters of which he knew nothing,
+and were amused at remarks of hers which to him carried
+no meaning whatever.  It was evident that the young
+men liked her, and that their liking pleased her. 
+It thrilled him to think that she knew he liked her,
+too, and to recall what abundant proofs she had given
+that here, also, she had pleasure in the fact.  He clung
+insistently to the memory of these evidences.  They helped
+him to resist a disagreeable tendency to feel himself
+an intruder, an outsider, among these pianoforte experts.
+
+When it was all over, Celia waved the others aside,
+and talked with Theron.  "I suppose you want me to tell you
+the truth," she said.  "There's nothing here really good. 
+It is always much better to buy of the makers direct."
+
+"Do they sell on the instalment plan?" he asked. 
+There was a wistful effect in his voice which caught
+her attention.
+
+She looked away--out through the window on the street below--
+for a moment.  Then her eyes returned to his, and regarded
+him with a comforting, friendly, half-motherly glance,
+recalling for all the world the way Sister Soulsby had
+looked at him at odd times.
+
+"Oh, you want it at once--I see," she remarked softly. 
+"Well, this Adelberger is the best value for the money."
+
+Mr. Ware followed her finger, and beheld with dismay
+that it pointed toward the largest instrument in the room--
+a veritable leviathan among pianos.  The price of this
+had been mentioned as $600. He turned over the fact
+that this was two-thirds his yearly salary, and found
+the courage to shake his head.
+
+"It would be too large--much too large--for the room,"
+he explained.  "And, besides, it is more than I like to pay--
+or CAN pay, for that matter."  It was pitiful to be
+explaining such details, but there was no help for it.
+
+They picked out a smaller one, which Celia said was at
+least of fair quality.  "Now leave all the bargaining
+to me," she adjured him.  "These prices that they talk
+about in the piano trade are all in the air.  There are
+tremendous discounts, if one knows how to insist upon them. 
+All you have to do is to tell them to send it to your house--
+you wanted it today, you said?"
+
+"Yes--in memory of yesterday," he murmured.
+
+She herself gave the directions, and Thurston's people,
+now all salesmen again, bowed grateful acquiescence. 
+Then she sailed regally across the room and down the stairs,
+drawing Theron in her train.  The hirelings made salaams
+to him as well; it would have been impossible to interpose
+anything so trivial and squalid as talk about terms and dates
+of payment.
+
+"I am ever so much obliged to you," he said fervently,
+in the comparative solitude of the lower floor.  She had
+paused to look at something in the book-department.
+
+"Of course I was entirely at your service; don't mention it,"
+she replied, reaching forth her hand in an absent way
+for her parasol.
+
+He held up instead the volume he had purchased.  "Guess what
+that is!  You never would guess in this wide world!" 
+His manner was surcharged with a sense of the surreptitious.
+
+"Well, then, there's no good trying, IS there?"
+commented Celia, her glance roving again toward the shelves.
+
+"It is a life of George Sand," whispered Theron. 
+"I've been reading it this morning--all the Chopin part--
+while I was waiting for you."
+
+To his surprise, there was an apparently displeased
+contraction of her brows as he made this revelation. 
+For the instant, a dreadful fear of having offended her
+seized upon and sickened him.  But then her face cleared,
+as by magic.  She smiled, and let her eyes twinkle
+in laughter at him, and lifted a forefinger in the most
+winning mockery of admonition.
+
+"Naughty! naughty!" she murmured back, with a roguishly
+solemn wink.
+
+He had no response ready for this, but mutely handed
+her the parasol.  The situation had suddenly grown
+too confused for words, or even sequent thoughts. 
+Uppermost across the hurly-burly of his mind there
+scudded the singular reflection that he should never hear
+her play on that new piano of his.  Even as it flashed
+by out of sight, he recognized it for one of the griefs
+of his life; and the darkness which followed seemed
+nothing but a revolt against the idea of having a piano
+at all.  He would countermand the order.  He would--
+but she was speaking again.
+
+They had strolled toward the door, and her voice was as
+placidly conventional as if the talk had never strayed
+from the subject of pianos.  Theron with an effort
+pulled himself together, and laid hold of her words.
+
+"I suppose you will be going the other way," she was saying. 
+"I shall have to be at the church all day.  We have just
+got a new Mass over from Vienna, and I'm head over heels
+in work at it.  I can have Father Forbes to myself today,
+too.  That bear of a doctor has got the rheumatism,
+and can't come out of his cave, thank Heaven!"
+
+And then she was receding from view, up the sunlit,
+busy sidewalk, and Theron, standing on the doorstep,
+ruefully rubbed his chin.  She had said he was going
+the other way, and, after a little pause, he made her
+words good, though each step he took seemed all in despite
+of his personal inclinations.  Some of the passers-by
+bowed to him, and one or two paused as if to shake hands
+and exchange greetings.  He nodded responses mechanically,
+but did not stop.  It was as if he feared to interrupt
+the process of lifting his reluctant feet and propelling
+them forward, lest they should wheel and scuttle off
+in the opposite direction.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+Deliberate as his progress was, the diminishing number of
+store-fronts along the sidewalk, and the increasing proportion
+of picket-fences enclosing domestic lawns, forced upon
+Theron's attention the fact that he was nearing home. 
+It was a trifle past the hour for his midday meal. 
+He was not in the least hungry; still less did he feel any
+desire just now to sit about in that library living-room
+of his.  Why should he go home at all?  There was no
+reason whatever--save that Alice would be expecting him. 
+Upon reflection, that hardly amounted to a reason. 
+Wives, with their limited grasp of the realities of life,
+were always expecting their husbands to do things
+which it turned out not to be feasible for them to do. 
+The customary male animal spent a considerable part of his
+life in explaining to his mate why it had been necessary
+to disappoint or upset her little plans for his comings
+and goings.  It was in the very nature of things that it
+should be so.
+
+Sustained by these considerations, Mr. Ware slackened his steps,
+then halted irresolutely, and after a minute's hesitation,
+entered the small temperance restaurant before which,
+as by intuition, he had paused.  The elderly woman who
+placed on the tiny table before him the tea and rolls
+he ordered, was entirely unknown to him, he felt sure,
+yet none the less she smiled at him, and spoke almost
+familiarly--"I suppose Mrs. Ware is at the seaside,
+and you are keeping bachelor's hall?"
+
+"Not quite that," he responded stiffly, and hurried
+through the meagre and distasteful repast, to avoid
+any further conversation.
+
+There was an idea underlying her remark, however, which
+recurred to him when he had paid his ten cents and got
+out on the street again.  There was something interesting
+in the thought of Alice at the seaside.  Neither of them
+had ever laid eyes on salt water, but Theron took for granted
+the most extravagant landsman's conception of its curative
+and invigorating powers.  It was apparent to him that he
+was going to pay much greater attention to Alice's happiness
+and well-being in the future than he had latterly done. 
+He had bought her, this very day, a superb new piano. 
+He was going to simply insist on her having a hired girl. 
+And this seaside notion--why, that was best of all.
+
+His fancy built up pleasant visions of her feasting her
+delighted eyes upon the marvel of a great ocean storm,
+or roaming along a beach strewn with wonderful marine shells,
+exhibiting an innocent joy in their beauty.  The fresh
+sea-breeze blew through her hair, as he saw her in mind's eye,
+and brought the hardy flush of health back upon her rather
+pallid cheeks.  He was prepared already hardly to know her,
+so robust and revivified would she have become, by the
+time he went down to the depot to meet her on her return.
+
+For his imagination stopped short of seeing himself
+at the seaside.  It sketched instead pictures of whole
+weeks of solitary academic calm, alone with his books
+and his thoughts.  The facts that he had no books,
+and that nobody dreamed of interfering with his thoughts,
+subordinated themselves humbly to his mood.  The prospect,
+as he mused fondly upon it, expanded to embrace the
+priest's and the doctor's libraries; the thoughts which
+he longed to be alone with involved close communion
+with their thoughts.  It could not but prove a season
+of immense mental stimulation and ethical broadening. 
+It would have its lofty poetic and artistic side as well;
+the languorous melodies of Chopin stole over his revery,
+as he dwelt upon these things, and soft azure and golden
+lights modelled forth the exquisite outlines of tall
+marble forms.
+
+He opened the gate leading to Dr. Ledsmar's house.  His walk
+had brought him quite out of the town, and up, by a broad
+main highway which yet took on all sorts of sylvan charms,
+to a commanding site on the hillside.  Below, in the valley,
+lay Octavius, at one end half-hidden in factory smoke,
+at the other, where narrow bands of water gleamed
+upon the surface of a broad plain piled symmetrically
+with lumber, presenting an oddly incongruous suggestion
+of forest odors and the simplicity of the wilderness. 
+In the middle distance, on gradually rising ground,
+stretched a wide belt of dense, artificial foliage,
+peeping through which tiled turrets and ornamented
+chimneys marked the polite residences of those who,
+though they neither stoked the furnace fires to the west,
+nor sawed the lumber on the east, lived in purple and fine
+linen from the profits of this toil.  Nearer at hand,
+pastures with grazing cows on the one side of the road,
+and the nigh, weather-stained board fence of the race-course
+on the other, completed the jumble of primitive rusticity
+and urban complications characterizing the whole picture.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar's house, toward which Theron's impulses had been
+secretly leading him ever since Celia's parting remark
+about the rheumatism, was of that spacious and satisfying
+order of old-fashioned houses which men of leisure and
+means built for themselves while the early traditions
+of a sparse and contented homogeneous population were
+still strong in the Republic.  There was a hospitable look
+about its wide veranda, its broad, low bulk, and its big,
+double front door, which did not fit at all with the sketch
+of a man-hating recluse that the doctor had drawn of himself.
+
+Theron had prepared his mind for the effect of being
+admitted by a Chinaman, and was taken somewhat aback
+when the door was opened by the doctor himself. 
+His reception was pleasant enough, almost cordial,
+but the sense of awkwardness followed him into his host's
+inner room and rested heavily upon his opening speech.
+
+"I heard, quite by accident, that you were ill," he said,
+laying aside his hat.
+
+"It's nothing at all," replied Ledsmar.  "Merely a stiff
+shoulder that I wear from time to time in memory of my father. 
+It ought to be quite gone by nightfall.  It was good of you
+to come, all the same.  Sit down if you can find a chair. 
+As usual, we are littered up to our eyes here.  That's it--
+throw those things on the floor."
+
+Mr. Ware carefully deposited an armful of pamphlets on the
+rug at his feet, and sat down.  Litter was indeed the word
+for what he saw about him.  Bookcases, chairs, tables,
+the corners of the floor, were all buried deep under
+disorderly strata of papers, diagrams, and opened books. 
+One could hardly walk about without treading on them. 
+The dust which danced up into the bar of sunshine streaming in
+from the window, as the doctor stepped across to another chair,
+gave Theron new ideas about the value of Chinese servants.
+
+"I must thank you, first of all, doctor," he began,
+"for your kindness in coming when I was ill.  'I was sick,
+and ye visited me.'"
+
+"You mustn't think of it that way," said Ledsmar; "your friend
+came for me, and of course I went; and gladly too. 
+There was nothing that I could do, or that anybody
+could do.  Very interesting man, that friend of yours. 
+And his wife, too--both quite out of the common. 
+I don't know when I've seen two such really genuine people. 
+I should like to have known more of them.  Are they
+still here?"
+
+"They went yesterday," Theron replied.  His earlier shyness
+had worn off, and he felt comfortably at his ease. 
+"I don't know," he went on, "that the word 'genuine'
+is just what would have occurred to me to describe
+the Soulsbys.  The, are very interesting people, as you say--
+MOST interesting--and there was a time, l dare say,
+when I should have believed in their sincerity.  But of
+course I saw them and their performance from the inside--
+like one on the stage of a theatre, you know, instead of
+in the audience, and--well, I understand things better
+than I used to."
+
+The doctor looked over his spectacles at him with a
+suggestion of inquiry in his glance, and Theron continued: 
+"I had several long talks with her; she told me very
+frankly the whole story of her life--and and it was
+decidedly queer, I can assure you!  I may say to you--
+you will understand what I mean--that since my talk
+with you, and the books you lent me, I see many
+things differently.  Indeed, when I think upon it sometimes
+my old state of mind seems quite incredible to me. 
+I can use no word for my new state short of illumination."
+
+Dr. Ledsmar continued to regard his guest with that calm,
+interrogatory scrutiny of his.  He did not seem disposed
+to take up the great issue of illumination.  "I suppose,"
+he said after a little, "no woman can come in contact
+with a priest for any length of time WITHOUT telling him
+the 'story of her life,' as you call it.  They all do it. 
+The thing amounts to a law."
+
+The young minister's veins responded with a pleasurable
+thrill to the use of the word "priest" in obvious allusion
+to himself.  "Perhaps in fairness I ought to explain,"
+he said, "that in her case it was only done in the course
+of a long talk about myself.  I might say that it
+was by way of kindly warning to me.  She saw how I
+had become unsettled in many--many of my former views--
+and she was nervous lest this should lead me to--to--"
+
+"To throw up the priesthood," the doctor interposed upon
+his hesitation.  "Yes, I know the tribe.  Why, my dear sir,
+your entire profession would have perished from the memory
+of mankind, if it hadn't been for women.  It is a very
+curious subject.  Lots of thinkers have dipped into it,
+but no one has gone resolutely in with a search-light
+and exploited the whole thing.  Our boys, for instance,
+traverse in their younger years all the stages of the
+childhood of the race.  They have terrifying dreams
+of awful monsters and giant animals of which they have
+never so much as heard in their waking hours; they pass
+through the lust for digging caves, building fires,
+sleeping out in the woods, hunting with bows and arrows--
+all remote ancestral impulses; they play games with stones,
+marbles, and so on at regular stated periods of the year
+which they instinctively know, just as they were played
+in the Bronze Age, and heaven only knows how much earlier. 
+But the boy goes through all this, and leaves it behind him--
+so completely that the grown man feels himself more
+a stranger among boys of his own place who are thinking
+and doing precisely the things he thought and did a few
+years before, than he would among Kurds or Esquimaux. 
+But the woman is totally different.  She is infinitely
+more precocious as a girl.  At an age when her slow brother
+is still stubbing along somewhere in the neolithic period,
+she has flown way ahead to a kind of mediaeval stage,
+or dawn of mediaevalism, which is peculiarly her own. 
+Having got there, she stays there; she dies there. 
+The boy passes her, as the tortoise did the hare. 
+He goes on, if he is a philosopher, and lets her remain
+in the dark ages, where she belongs.  If he happens to be
+a fool, which is customary, he stops and hangs around in
+her vicinity."
+
+Theron smiled.  "We priests," he said, and paused again
+to enjoy the words--"I suppose I oughtn't to inquire
+too closely just where we belong in the procession."
+
+"We are considering the question impersonally,"
+said the doctor.  "First of all, what you regard as
+religion is especially calculated to attract women. 
+They remain as superstitious today, down in the marrow
+of their bones, as they were ten thousand years ago. 
+Even the cleverest of them are secretly afraid of omens,
+and respect auguries.  Think of the broadest women
+you know.  One of them will throw salt over her shoulder
+if she spills it.  Another drinks money from her cup
+by skimming the bubbles in a spoon.  Another forecasts
+her future by the arrangement of tea-grounds. They
+make the constituency to which an institution based
+on mysteries, miracles, and the supernatural generally,
+would naturally appeal.  Secondly, there is the personality
+of the priest."
+
+"Yes," assented Ware.  There rose up before him,
+on the instant, the graceful, portly figure and strong,
+comely face of Father Forbes.
+
+"Women are not a metaphysical people.  They do not
+easily follow abstractions.  They want their dogmas
+and religious sentiments embodied in a man, just as they
+do their romantic fancies.  Of course you Protestants,
+with your married clergy, see less of the effects of this
+than celibates do, but even with you there is a great deal
+in it.  Why, the very institution of celibacy itself
+was forced upon the early Christian Church by the scandal
+of rich Roman ladies loading bishops and handsome priests
+with fabulous gifts until the passion for currying favor
+with women of wealth, and marrying them or wheedling
+their fortunes from them, debauched the whole priesthood. 
+You should read your Jerome."
+
+"I will--certainly," said the listener, resolving to
+remember the name and refer it to the old bookseller.
+
+"Well, whatever laws one sect or another makes, the woman's
+attitude toward the priest survives.  She desires to see
+him surrounded by flower-pots and candles, to have him
+smelling of musk.  She would like to curl his hair,
+and weave garlands in it.  Although she is not learned
+enough to have ever heard of such things, she intuitively
+feels in his presence a sort of backwash of the old pagan
+sensuality and lascivious mysticism which enveloped
+the priesthood in Greek and Roman days.  Ugh!  It makes
+one sick!"
+
+Dr. Ledsmar rose, as he spoke, and dismissed the topic with
+a dry little laugh.  "Come, let me show you round a bit,"
+he said.  "My shoulder is easier walking than sitting."
+
+"Have you never written a book yourself?" asked Theron,
+getting to his feet.
+
+"I have a thing on serpent-worship," the scientist
+replied--"written years ago."
+
+"I can't tell you how I should enjoy reading it,"
+urged the other.
+
+The doctor laughed again.  "You'll have to learn German,
+then, I 'm afraid.  It is still in circulation in Germany,
+I believe, on its merits as a serious book.  I haven't
+a copy of the edition in English.  THAT was all exhausted
+by collectors who bought it for its supposed obscenity,
+like Burton's 'Arabian Nights.'  Come this way, and I
+will show you my laboratory."
+
+They moved out of the room, and through a passage,
+Ledsmar talking as he led the way.  "I took up that subject,
+when I was at college, by a curious chance.  I kept a young
+monkey in my rooms, which had been born in captivity. 
+I brought home from a beer hall--it was in Germany--
+some pretzels one night, and tossed one toward the monkey. 
+He jumped toward it, then screamed and ran back shuddering
+with fright.  I couldn't understand it at first.  Then I
+saw that the curled pretzel, lying there on the floor,
+was very like a little coiled-up snake.  The monkey had
+never seen a snake, but it was in his blood to be afraid
+of one.  That incident changed my whole life for me. 
+Up to that evening, I had intended to be a lawyer."
+
+Theron did not feel sure that he had understood the point
+of the anecdote.  He looked now, without much interest,
+at some dark little tanks containing thick water, a row of small
+glass cases with adders and other lesser reptiles inside,
+and a general collection of boxes, jars, and similar
+receptacles connected with the doctor's pursuits. 
+Further on was a smaller chamber, with a big empty furnace,
+and shelves bearing bottles and apparatus like a drugstore.
+
+It was pleasanter in the conservatory--a low,
+spacious structure with broad pathways between the plants,
+and an awning over the sunny side of the roof.  The plants
+were mostly orchids, he learned.  He had read of them,
+but never seen any before.  No doubt they were curious;
+but he discovered nothing to justify the great fuss
+made about them.  The heat grew oppressive inside,
+and he was glad to emerge into the garden.  He paused
+under the grateful shade of a vine-clad trellis, took off
+his hat, and looked about him with a sigh of relief. 
+Everything seemed old-fashioned and natural and delightfully
+free from pretence in the big, overgrown field of flowers
+and shrubs.
+
+Theron recalled with some surprise Celia's indictment
+of the doctor as a man with no poetry in his soul. 
+"You must be extremely fond of flowers," he remarked.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar shrugged his well shoulder.  "They have their points,"
+he said briefly.  "These are all dioecious here.  Over beyond
+are monoecious species.  My work is to test the probabilities
+for or against Darwin's theory that hermaphroditism
+in plants is a late by-product of these earlier forms."
+
+"And is his theory right?" asked Mr. Ware, with a polite
+show of interest.
+
+"We may know in the course of three or four hundred years,"
+replied Ledsmar.  He looked up into his guest's face
+with a quizzical half-smile. "That is a very brief period
+for observation when such a complicated question as sex
+is involved," he added.  "We have been studying the female
+of our own species for some hundreds of thousands of years,
+and we haven't arrived at the most elementary rules
+governing her actions."
+
+They had moved along to a bed of tall plants, the more
+forward of which were beginning to show bloom.  "Here another
+task will begin next month," the doctor observed. 
+"These are salvias, pentstemons, and antirrhinums,
+or snapdragons, planted very thick for the purpose. 
+Humble-bees bore holes through their base, to save
+the labor of climbing in and out of the flowers,
+and we don't quite know yet why some hive-bees discover
+and utilize these holes at once, while others never do. 
+It may be merely the old-fogy conservatism of the individual,
+or there may be a law in it."
+
+These seemed very paltry things for a man of such wisdom
+to bother his head about.  Theron looked, as he was bidden,
+at the rows of hives shining in the hot sun on a bench
+along the wall, but offered no comment beyond a casual,
+"My mother was always going to keep bees, but somehow she
+never got around to it.  They say it pays very well, though."
+
+"The discovery of the reason why no bee will touch the
+nectar of the EPIPACTIS LATIFOLIA, though it is sweet
+to our taste, and wasps are greedy for it, WOULD pay,"
+commented the doctor.  "Not like a blue rhododendron,
+in mere money, but in recognition.  Lots of men have
+achieved a half-column in the 'Encyclopedia Britannica'
+on a smaller basis than that."
+
+They stood now at the end of the garden, before a small,
+dilapidated summer-house. On the bench inside, facing him,
+Theron saw a strange recumbent figure stretched at
+full length, apparently sound asleep, or it might be dead. 
+Looking closer, with a startled surprise, he made out
+the shaven skull and outlandish garb of a Chinaman. 
+He turned toward his guide in the expectation of a scene.
+
+The doctor had already taken out a note-book and pencil,
+and was drawing his watch from his pocket.  He stepped into
+the summer-house, and, lifting the Oriental's limp arm,
+took account of his pulse.  Then, with head bowed low,
+side-wise, he listened for the heart-action. Finally,
+he somewhat brusquely pushed back one of the Chinaman's eyelids,
+and made a minute inspection of what the operation disclosed. 
+Returning to the light, he inscribed some notes in
+his book, put it back in his pocket, and came out. 
+In answer to Theron's marvelling stare, he pointed toward
+a pipe of odd construction lying on the floor beneath
+the sleeper.
+
+"This is one of my regular afternoon duties," he explained,
+again with the whimsical half-smile. "I am increasing his
+dose monthly by regular stages, and the results promise
+to be rather remarkable.  Heretofore, observations have been
+made mostly on diseased or morbidly deteriorated subjects. 
+This fellow of mine is strong as an ox, perfectly nourished,
+and watched over intelligently.  He can assimilate opium
+enough to kill you and me and every other vertebrate
+creature on the premises, without turning a hair, and he
+hasn't got even fairly under way yet."
+
+The thing was unpleasant, and the young minister turned away. 
+They walked together up the path toward the house. 
+His mind was full now of the hostile things which Celia
+had said about the doctor.  He had vaguely sympathized
+with her then, upon no special knowledge of his own. 
+Now he felt that his sentiments were vehemently in accord
+with hers.  The doctor WAS a beast.
+
+And yet--as they moved slowly along through the garden
+the thought took sudden shape in his mind--it would be
+only justice for him to get also the doctor's opinion
+of Celia.  Even while they offended and repelled him,
+he could not close his eyes to the fact that the doctor's
+experiments and occupations were those of a patient
+and exact man of science--a philosopher.  And what he
+had said about women--there was certainly a great deal
+of acumen and shrewd observation in that.  If he would
+only say what he really thought about Celia, and about
+her relations with the priest!  Yes, Theron recognized
+now there was nothing else that he so much needed light
+upon as those puzzling ties between Celia and Father Forbes.
+
+He paused, with a simulated curiosity, about one of
+the flower-beds. "Speaking of women and religion"--
+he began, in as casual a tone as he could command--
+"I notice curiously enough in my own case, that as I develop
+in what you may call the--the other direction, my wife,
+who formerly was not especially devote, is being strongly
+attracted by the most unthinking and hysterical side of--
+of our church system."
+
+The doctor looked at him, nodded, and stooped to nip
+some buds from a stalk in the bed.
+
+"And another case," Theron went on--"of course it was all
+so new and strange to me--but the position which Miss
+Madden seems to occupy about the Catholic Church here--
+I suppose you had her in mind when you spoke."
+
+Ledsmar stood up.  "My mind has better things to busy
+itself with than mad asses of that description,"
+he replied.  "She is not worth talking about--a mere
+bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed lewdness. 
+If she were even a type, she might be worth considering;
+but she is simply an abnormal sport, with a little brain
+addled by notions that she is like Hypatia, and a large
+impudence rendered intolerable by the fact that she
+has money.  Her father is a decent man.  He ought to have
+her whipped."
+
+Mr. Ware drew himself erect, as he listened to these
+outrageous words.  It would be unmanly, he felt, to allow
+such comments upon an absent friend to pass unrebuked. 
+Yet there was the courtesy due to a host to be considered. 
+His mind, fluttering between these two extremes,
+alighted abruptly upon a compromise.  He would speak
+so as to show his disapproval, yet not so as to prevent
+his finding out what he wanted to know.  The desire
+to hear Ledsmar talk about Celia and the priest seemed
+now to have possessed him for a long time, to have
+dictated his unpremeditated visit out here, to have been
+growing in intensity all the while he pretended to be
+interested in orchids and bees and the drugged Chinaman. 
+It tugged passionately at his self-control as he spoke.
+
+"I cannot in the least assent to your characterization
+of the lady," he began with rhetorical dignity.
+
+"Bless me!" interposed the doctor, with deceptive
+cheerfulness, "that is not required of you at all. 
+It is a strictly personal opinion, offered merely
+as a contribution to the general sum of hypotheses."
+
+"But," Theron went on, feeling his way, "of course,
+I gathered that evening that you had prejudices in the matter;
+but these are rather apart from the point I had in view. 
+We were speaking, you will remember, of the traditional
+attitude of women toward priests--wanting to curl their
+hair and put flowers in it, you know, and that suggested
+to me some individual illustrations, and it occurred
+to me to wonder just what were the relations between Miss
+Madden and--and Father Forbes.  She said this morning,
+for instance--I happened to meet her, quite by accident--
+that she was going to the church to practise a new piece,
+and that she could have Father Forbes to herself all day. 
+Now that would be quite an impossible remark in our--that is,
+in any Protestant circles--and purely as a matter of comparison,
+I was curious to ask you just how much there was in it. 
+I ask you, because going there so much you have had exceptional
+opportunities for--"
+
+A sharp exclamation from his companion interrupted
+the clergyman's hesitating monologue.  It began like a
+high-pitched, violent word, but dwindled suddenly into a groan
+of pain.  The doctor's face, too, which had on the flash
+of Theron's turning seemed given over to unmixed anger,
+took on an expression of bodily suffering instead.
+
+"My shoulder has grown all at once excessively painful,"
+he said hastily.  "I'm afraid I must ask you to excuse me,
+Mr. Ware."
+
+Carrying the afflicted side with ostentatious caution,
+he led the way without ado round the house to the front
+gate on the road.  He had put his left hand under his coat
+to press it against his aching shoulder, and his right hung
+palpably helpless.  This rendered it impossible for him
+to shake hands with his guest in parting.
+
+"You're sure there's nothing I can do," said Theron,
+lingering on the outer side of the gate.  "I used to rub
+my father's shoulders and back; I'd gladly--"
+
+"Oh, not for worlds!" groaned the doctor.  His anguish
+was so impressive that Theron, as he walked down the road,
+quite missed the fact that there had been no invitation
+to come again.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar stood for a minute or two, his gaze meditatively
+following the retreating figure.  Then he went in, opening the
+front door with his right hand, and carrying himself once more
+as if there were no such thing as rheumatism in the world. 
+He wandered on through the hall into the laboratory,
+and stopped in front of the row of little tanks full of water.
+
+Some deliberation was involved in whatever his purpose might be,
+for he looked from one tank to another with a pondering,
+dilatory gaze.  At last he plunged his hand into the opaque
+fluid and drew forth a long, slim, yellowish-green lizard,
+with a coiling, sinuous tail and a pointed, evil head. 
+The reptile squirmed and doubled itself backward around
+his wrist, darting out and in with dizzy swiftness its tiny
+forked tongue.
+
+The doctor held the thing up to the light, and, scrutinizing it
+through his spectacles, nodded his head in sedate approval. 
+A grim smile curled in his beard.
+
+"Yes, you are the type," he murmured to it, with evident
+enjoyment in the conceit.  "Your name isn't Johnny any more. 
+It's the Rev. Theron Ware."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+The annual camp-meeting of the combined Methodist
+districts of Octavius and Thessaly was held this year in
+the second half of September, a little later than usual. 
+Of the nine days devoted to this curious survival of
+primitive Wesleyanism, the fifth fell upon a Saturday. 
+On the noon of that day the Rev. Theron Ware escaped
+for some hours from the burden of work and incessant
+observation which he shared with twenty other preachers,
+and walked alone in the woods.
+
+The scene upon which he turned his back was one worth
+looking at.  A spacious, irregularly defined clearing
+in the forest lay level as a tennis-court, under the soft
+haze of autumn sunlight.  In the centre was a large,
+roughly constructed frame building, untouched by paint,
+but stained and weather-beaten with time.  Behind it were some
+lines of horse-sheds, and still further on in that direction,
+where the trees began, the eye caught fragmentary
+glimpses of low roofs and the fronts of tiny cottages,
+withdrawn from full view among the saplings and underbrush. 
+At the other side of the clearing, fully fourscore tents
+were pitched, some gray and mended, others dazzlingly
+white in their newness.  The more remote of these tents
+fell into an orderly arrangement of semi-circular form,
+facing that part of the engirdling woods where the trees
+were largest, and their canopy of overhanging foliage
+was lifted highest from the ground.  Inside this half-ring
+of tents were many rounded rows of benches, which followed
+in narrowing lines the idea of an amphitheatre cut in two. 
+In the centre, just under the edge of the roof of boughs,
+rose a wooden pagoda, in form not unlike an open-air stand
+for musicians.  In front of this, and leading from it
+on the level of its floor, there projected a platform,
+railed round with aggressively rustic woodwork. 
+The nearest benches came close about this platform.
+
+At the hour when Theron started away, there were few enough
+signs of life about this encampment.  The four or five
+hundred people who were in constant residence were eating
+their dinners in the big boarding-house, or the cottages
+or the tents.  It was not the time of day for strangers. 
+Even when services were in progress by daylight,
+the regular attendants did not make much of a show,
+huddled in a gray-black mass at the front of the auditorium,
+by comparison with the great green and blue expanses
+of nature about them.
+
+The real spectacle was in the evening when, as the
+shadows gathered, big clusters of kerosene torches,
+hung on the trees facing the audience were lighted. 
+The falling darkness magnified the glow of the lights,
+and the size and importance of what they illumined. 
+The preacher, bending forward over the rails of the platform,
+and fastening his eyes upon the abashed faces of those
+on the "anxious seat" beneath him, borrowed an effect
+of druidical mystery from the wall of blackness about him,
+from the flickering reflections on the branches far above,
+from the cool night air which stirred across the clearing. 
+The change was in the blood of those who saw and heard
+him, too.  The decorum and half-heartedness of their
+devotions by day deepened under the glare of the torches
+into a fervent enthusiasm, even before the services began. 
+And if there was in the rustic pulpit a man whose prayers
+or exhortations could stir their pulses, they sang and
+groaned and bellowed out their praises with an almost
+barbarous license, such as befitted the wilderness.
+
+But in the evening not all were worshippers.  For a dozen
+miles round on the country-side, young farm-workers and
+their girls regarded the camp-meeting as perhaps the chief
+event of the year--no more to be missed than the country
+fair or the circus, and offering, from many points of view,
+more opportunities for genuine enjoyment than either. 
+Their behavior when they came was pretty bad--not the less
+so because all the rules established by the Presiding
+Elders for the regulation of strangers took it for granted
+that they would act as viciously as they knew how. 
+These sight-seers sometimes ventured to occupy the back benches
+where the light was dim.  More often they stood outside,
+in the circular space between the tents and the benches,
+and mingled cat-calls, drovers' yelps, and all sorts
+of mocking cries and noises with the "Amens" of the
+earnest congregation.  Their rough horse-play on the
+fringe of the sanctified gathering was grievous enough;
+everybody knew that much worse things went on further
+out in the surrounding darkness.  Indeed, popular report
+gave to these external phases of the camp-meeting an even
+more evil fame than attached to the later moonlight
+husking-bees, or the least reputable of the midwinter
+dances at Dave Randall's low halfway house.
+
+Cynics said that the Methodists found consolation
+for this scandal in the large income they derived from
+their unruly visitors' gate-money. This was unfair. 
+No doubt the money played its part, but there was something
+else far more important.  The pious dwellers in the camp,
+intent upon reviving in their poor modern way the character
+and environment of the heroic early days, felt the need
+of just this hostile and scoffing mob about them to bring
+out the spirit they sought.  Theirs was pre-eminently
+a fighting religion, which languished in peaceful
+fair weather, but flamed high in the storm.  The throng
+of loafers and light-minded worldlings of both sexes,
+with their jeering interruptions and lewd levity of conduct,
+brought upon the scene a kind of visible personal devil,
+with whom the chosen could do battle face to face. 
+The daylight services became more and more perfunctory,
+as the sojourn in the woods ran its course, and interest
+concentrated itself upon the night meetings, for the reason
+that THEN came the fierce wrestle with a Beelzebub of flesh
+and blood.  And it was not so one-sided a contest, either!
+
+No evening passed without its victories for the pulpit. 
+Careless or mischievous young people who were pushed into
+the foremost ranks of the mockers, and stood grinning
+and grimacing under the lights, would of a sudden feel
+a spell clamped upon them.  They would hear a strange,
+quavering note in the preacher's voice, catch the sense
+of a piercing, soul-commanding gleam in his eye--
+not at all to be resisted.  These occult forces would
+take control of them, drag them forward as in a dream
+to the benches under the pulpit, and abase them there like
+worms in the dust.  And then the preacher would descend,
+and the elders advance, and the torch-fires would sway
+and dip before the wind of the mighty roar that went up
+in triumph from the brethren.
+
+These combats with Satan at close quarters, if they
+made the week-day evenings exciting, reacted with an
+effect of crushing dulness upon the Sunday services. 
+The rule was to admit no strangers to the grounds from
+Saturday night to Monday morning.  Every year attempts
+were made to rescind or modify this rule, and this season
+at least three-fourths of the laymen in attendance had
+signed a petition in favor of opening the gates.  The two
+Presiding Elders, supported by a dozen of the older preachers,
+resisted the change, and they had the backing of the more
+bigoted section of the congregation from Octavius. 
+The controversy reached a point where Theron's Presiding
+Elder threatened to quit the grounds, and the leaders
+of the open-Sunday movement spoke freely of the ridiculous
+figure which its cranks and fanatics made poor Methodism
+cut in the eyes of modern go-ahead American civilization. 
+Then Theron Ware saw his opportunity, and preached
+an impromptu sermon upon the sanctity of the Sabbath,
+which ended all discussion.  Sometimes its arguments seemed
+to be on one side, sometimes on the other, but always
+they were clothed with so serene a beauty of imagery,
+and moved in such a lofty and rarefied atmosphere
+of spiritual exaltation, that it was impossible to link
+them to so sordid a thing as this question of gate-money.
+When he had finished, nobody wanted the gates opened. 
+The two factions found that the difference between them had
+melted out of existence.  They sat entranced by the charm
+of the sermon; then, glancing around at the empty benches,
+glaringly numerous in the afternoon sunlight, they whispered
+regrets that ten thousand people had not been there
+to hear that marvellous discourse.  Theron's conquest was
+of exceptional dimensions.  The majority, whose project
+he had defeated, were strangers who appreciated and
+admired his effort most.  The little minority of his
+own flock, though less susceptible to the influence
+of graceful diction and delicately balanced rhetoric,
+were proud of the distinction he had reflected upon them,
+and delighted with him for having won their fight. 
+The Presiding Elders wrung his hand with a significant grip. 
+The extremists of his own charge beamed friendship upon
+him for the first time.  He was the veritable hero of the week.
+
+The prestige of this achievement made it the easier
+for Theron to get away by himself next day, and walk in
+the woods.  A man of such power had a right to solitude. 
+Those who noted his departure from the camp remembered
+with pleasure that he was to preach again on the morrow. 
+He was going to commune with God in the depths of the forest,
+that the Message next day might be clearer and more
+luminous still.
+
+Theron strolled for a little, with an air of aimlessness,
+until he was well outside the more or less frequented
+neighborhood of the camp.  Then he looked at the sun
+and the lay of the land with that informing scrutiny
+of which the farm-bred boy never loses the trick, turned,
+and strode at a rattling pace down the hillside. 
+He knew nothing personally of this piece of woodland--
+a spur of the great Adirondack wilderness thrust southward
+into the region of homesteads and dairies and hop-fields--
+but he had prepared himself by a study of the map, and he
+knew where he wanted to go.  Very Soon he hit upon the path
+he had counted upon finding, and at this he quickened
+his gait.
+
+Three months of the new life had wrought changes
+in Theron.  He bore himself more erectly, for one thing;
+his shoulders were thrown back, and seemed thicker. 
+The alteration was even more obvious in his face. 
+The effect of lank, wistful, sallow juvenility had vanished. 
+It was the countenance of a mature, well-fed, and confident man,
+firmer and more rounded in its outlines, and with a glow
+of health on its whole surface.  Under the chin were
+the suggestions of fulness which bespeak an easy mind. 
+His clothes were new; the frock-coat fitted him, and the thin,
+dark-colored autumn overcoat, with its silk lining exposed
+at the breast, gave a masculine bulk and shape to his figure. 
+He wore a shining tall hat, and, in haste though he was,
+took pains not to knock it against low-hanging branches.
+
+All had gone well--more than well--with him.  The second
+Quarterly Conference had passed without a ripple. 
+Both the attendance and the collections at his church were
+larger than ever before, and the tone of the congregation
+toward him was altered distinctly for the better. 
+As for himself, he viewed with astonished delight the progress
+he had made in his own estimation.  He had taken Sister
+Soulsby's advice, and the results were already wonderful. 
+He had put aside, once and for all, the thousand foolish
+trifles and childish perplexities which formerly had racked
+his brain, and worried him out of sleep and strength. 
+He borrowed all sorts of books boldly now from the Octavius
+public library, and could swim with a calm mastery
+and enjoyment upon the deep waters into which Draper
+and Lecky and Laing and the rest had hurled him. 
+He dallied pleasurably, a little languorously, with a dozen
+aspects of the case against revealed religion, ranging from
+the mild heterodoxy of Andover's qualms to the rude
+Ingersoll's rollicking negation of God himself, as a woman
+of coquetry might play with as many would-be lovers. 
+They amused him; they were all before him to choose;
+and he was free to postpone indefinitely the act
+of selection.  There was a sense of the luxurious in this
+position which softened bodily as well as mental fibres. 
+He ceased to grow indignant at things below or outside
+his standards, and he bought a small book which treated
+of the care of the hand and finger nails.
+
+Alice had accepted with deference his explanation that
+shapely hands played so important a part in pulpit oratory. 
+For that matter, she now accepted whatever he said or did
+with admirable docility.  It was months since he could
+remember her venturing upon a critical attitude toward him.
+
+She had not wished to leave home, for the seaside or any
+other resort, during the summer, but had worked outside
+in her garden more than usual.  This was inexpensive, and it
+seemed to do her as much good as a holiday could have done. 
+Her new devotional zeal was now quite an odd thing;
+it had not slackened at all from the revival pitch. 
+At the outset she had tried several times to talk with her
+husband upon this subject.  He had discouraged conversation
+about her soul and its welfare, at first obliquely, then,
+under compulsion, with some directness.  His thoughts
+were absorbed, he said, by the contemplation of vast,
+abstract schemes of creation and the government of the universe,
+and it only diverted and embarrassed his mind to try
+to fasten it upon the details of personal salvation. 
+Thereafter the topic was not broached between them.
+
+She bestowed a good deal of attention, too, upon her piano. 
+The knack of a girlish nimbleness of touch had returned
+to her after a few weeks, and she made music which Theron
+supposed was very good--for her.  It pleased him,
+at all events, when he sat and listened to it; but he had
+a far greater pleasure, as he listened, in dwelling upon
+the memories of the yellow and blue room which the sounds
+always brought up.  Although three months had passed,
+Thurston's had never asked for the first payment on the piano,
+or even sent in a bill.  This impressed him as being
+peculiarly graceful behavior on his part, and he recognized
+its delicacy by not going near Thurston's at all.
+
+An hour's sharp walk, occasionally broken by short
+cuts across open pastures, but for the most part on
+forest paths, brought Theron to the brow of a small knoll,
+free from underbrush, and covered sparsely with
+beech-trees. The ground was soft with moss and the
+powdered remains of last year's foliage; the leaves above
+him were showing the first yellow stains of autumn. 
+A sweet smell of ripening nuts was thick upon the air,
+and busy rustlings and chirpings through the stillness told
+how the chipmunks and squirrels were attending to their harvest.
+
+Theron had no ears for these noises of the woodland. 
+He had halted, and was searching through the little
+vistas offered between the stout gray trunks of the
+beeches for some sign of a more sophisticated sort. 
+Yes! there were certainly voices to be heard, down in
+the hollow.  And now, beyond all possibility of mistake,
+there came up to him the low, rhythmic throb of music. 
+It was the merest faint murmur of music, made up almost
+wholly of groaning bass notes, but it was enough. 
+He moved down the slope, swiftly at first, then with
+increasing caution.  The sounds grew louder as he advanced,
+until he could hear the harmony of the other strings
+in its place beside the uproar of the big fiddles,
+and distinguish from both the measured noise of many feet
+moving as one.
+
+He reached a place from which, himself unobserved,
+he could overlook much of what he had come to see.
+
+The bottom of the glade below him lay out in the full sunshine,
+as flat and as velvety in its fresh greenness as a garden lawn. 
+Its open expanse was big enough to accommodate several
+distinct crowds, and here the crowds were--one massed about
+an enclosure in which young men were playing at football,
+another gathered further off in a horse-shoe curve at
+the end of a baseball diamond, and a third thronging
+at a point where the shade of overhanging woods began,
+focussed upon a centre of interest which Theron could
+not make out.  Closer at hand, where a shallow stream
+rippled along over its black-slate bed, some little boys,
+with legs bared to the thighs, were paddling about,
+under the charge of two men clad in long black gowns. 
+There were others of these frocked monitors scattered
+here and there upon the scene--pallid, close-shaven,
+monkish figures, who none the less wore modern hats,
+and superintended with knowledge the games of the period. 
+Theron remembered that these were the Christian Brothers,
+the semi-monastic teachers of the Catholic school.
+
+And this was the picnic of the Catholics of Octavius. 
+He gazed in mingled amazement and exhilaration upon
+the spectacle.  There seemed to be literally thousands
+of people on the open fields before him, and apparently
+there were still other thousands in the fringes of the woods
+round about.  The noises which arose from this multitude--
+the shouts of the lads in the water, the playful
+squeals of the girls in the swings, the fused uproar
+of the more distant crowds, and above all the diligent,
+ordered strains of the dance-music proceeding from
+some invisible distance in the greenwood--charmed his
+ears with their suggestion of universal merriment. 
+He drew a long breath--half pleasure, half wistful regret--
+as he remembered that other gathering in the forest
+which he had left behind.
+
+At any rate, it should be well behind him today, whatever the
+morrow might bring!  Evidently he was on the wrong side
+of the circle for the headquarters of the festivities. 
+He turned and walked to the right through the beeches,
+making a detour, under cover, of the crowds at play. 
+At last he rounded the long oval of the clearing,
+and found himself at the very edge of that largest throng
+of all, which had been too far away for comprehension
+at the beginning.  There was no mystery now.  A rough,
+narrow shed, fully fifty feet in length, imposed itself
+in an arbitrary line across the face of this crowd,
+dividing it into two compact halves.  Inside this shed,
+protected all round by a waist-high barrier of boards,
+on top of which ran a flat, table-like covering, were twenty
+men in their shirt-sleeves, toiling ceaselessly to keep
+abreast of the crowd's thirst for beer.  The actions
+of these bartenders greatly impressed Theron.  They moved
+like so many machines, using one hand, apparently, to take
+money and give change, and with the other incessantly
+sweeping off rows of empty glasses, and tossing forward
+in their place fresh, foaming glasses five at a time. 
+Hundreds of arms and hands were continually stretched out,
+on both sides of the shed, toward this streaming bar,
+and through the babel of eager cries rose without pause the
+racket of mallets tapping new kegs.
+
+Theron had never seen any considerable number of his
+fellow-citizens engaged in drinking lager beer before. 
+His surprise at the facility of those behind the bar
+began to yield, upon observation, to a profound amazement
+at the thirst of those before it.  The same people
+seemed to be always in front, emptying the glasses
+faster than the busy men inside could replenish them,
+and clamoring tirelessly for more.  Newcomers had to
+force their way to the bar by violent efforts, and once
+there they stayed until pushed bodily aside.  There were
+actually women to be seen here and there in the throng,
+elbowing and shoving like the rest for a place at the front. 
+Some of the more gallant young men fought their way outward,
+from time to time, carrying for safety above their heads
+glasses of beer which they gave to young and pretty girls
+standing on the fringe of the crowd, among the trees.
+
+Everywhere a remarkable good-humor prevailed. 
+Once a sharp fight broke out, just at the end of the bar
+nearest Theron, and one young man was knocked down. 
+A rush of the onlookers confused everything before the
+minister's eyes for a minute, and then he saw the aggrieved
+combatant up on his legs again, consenting under the kindly
+pressure of the crowd to shake hands with his antagonist,
+and join him in more beer.  The incident caught his fancy. 
+There was something very pleasingly human, he thought,
+in this primitive readiness to resort to fisticuffs,
+and this frank and genial reconciliation.
+
+Perhaps there was something contagious in this wholesale
+display of thirst, for the Rev. Mr. Ware became conscious
+of a notion that he should like to try a glass of beer. 
+He recalled having heard that lager was really a most
+harmless beverage.  Of course it was out of the question
+that he should show himself at the bar.  Perhaps some one
+would bring him out a glass, as if he were a pretty girl. 
+He looked about for a possible messenger.  Turning, he found
+himself face to face with two smiling people, into whose
+eyes he stared for an instant in dumfounded blankness. 
+Then his countenance flashed with joy, and he held out both
+hands in greeting.  It was Father Forbes and Celia.
+
+"We stole down upon you unawares," said the priest,
+in his cheeriest manner.  He wore a brown straw hat,
+and loose clothes hardly at all clerical in form,
+and had Miss Madden's arm drawn lightly within his own. 
+"We could barely believe our eyes--that it could be you
+whom we saw, here among the sinners!"
+
+"I am in love with your sinners," responded Theron,
+as he shook hands with Celia, and trusted himself to look
+fully into her eyes.  "I've had five days of the saints,
+over in another part of the woods, and they've bored the
+head off me."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+At the command of Father Forbes, a lad who was loitering
+near them went down through the throng to the bar,
+and returned with three glasses of beer.  It pleased
+the Rev. Mr. Ware that the priest should have taken it
+for granted that he would do as the others did.  He knocked
+his glass against theirs in compliance with a custom strange
+to him, but which they seemed to understand very well. 
+The beer itself was not so agreeable to the taste as he
+had expected, but it was cold and refreshing.
+
+When the boy had returned with the glasses, the three
+stood for a moment in silence, meditatively watching
+the curious scene spread below them.  Beyond the bar,
+Theron could catch now through the trees regularly
+recurring glimpses of four or five swings in motion. 
+These were nearest him, and clearest to the vision
+as well, at the instant when they reached their highest
+forward point.  The seats were filled with girls,
+some of them quite grown young women, and their curving
+upward sweep through the air was disclosing at its climax
+a remarkable profusion of white skirts and black stockings. 
+The sight struck him as indecorous in the extreme, and he
+turned his eyes away.  They met Celia's; and there was
+something latent in their brown depths which prompted him,
+after a brief dalliance of interchanging glances, to look
+again at the swings.
+
+"That old maid Curran is really too ridiculous,
+with those white stockings of hers," remarked Celia;
+"some friend ought to tell her to dye them."
+
+"Or pad them," suggested Father Forbes, with a gay
+little chuckle.  "I daresay the question of swings and ladies'
+stockings hardly arises with you, over at the camp-meeting, Mr. Ware?"
+
+Theron laughed aloud at the conceit.  "I should say not!"
+he replied.
+
+"I'm just dying to see a camp-meeting!" said Celia. 
+"You hear such racy accounts of what goes on at them."
+
+"Don't go, I beg of you!" urged Theron, with doleful emphasis. 
+"Don't let's even talk about them.  I should like to feel
+this afternoon as if there was no such thing within
+a thousand miles of me as a camp-meeting. Do you know,
+all this interests me enormously.  It is a revelation to me
+to see these thousands of good, decent, ordinary people,
+just frankly enjoying themselves like human beings. 
+I suppose that in this whole huge crowd there isn't
+a single person who will mention the subject of his soul
+to any other person all day long."
+
+"I should think the assumption was a safe one," said the
+priest, smilingly, "unless," he added on afterthought,
+"it be by way of a genial profanity.  There used to be
+some old Clare men who said 'Hell to my soul!' when they
+missed at quoits, but I haven't heard it for a long time. 
+I daresay they're all dead."
+
+"I shall never forget that death-bed--where I saw you first,"
+remarked Theron, musingly.  "I date from that experience
+a whole new life.  I have been greatly struck lately,
+in reading our 'Northern Christian Advocate' to see
+in the obituary notices of prominent Methodists how over
+and over again it is recorded that they got religion
+in their youth through being frightened by some illness
+of their own, or some epidemic about them.  The cholera
+year of 1832 seems to have made Methodists hand over fist. 
+Even to this day our most successful revivalists,
+those who work conversions wholesale wherever they go,
+do it more by frightful pictures of hell-fire surrounding
+the sinner's death-bed than anything else.  You could
+hear the same thing at our camp-meeting tonight, if you
+were there."
+
+"There isn't so much difference as you think,"
+said Father Forbes, dispassionately.  "Your people keep
+examining their souls, just as children keep pulling up
+the bulbs they have planted to see are there any roots yet. 
+Our people are more satisfied to leave their souls alone,
+once they have been planted, so to speak, by baptism. 
+But fear of hell governs them both, pretty much alike. 
+As I remember saying to you once before, there is really
+nothing new under the sun.  Even the saying isn't new. 
+Though there seem to have been the most tremendous changes
+in races and civilizations and religions, stretching over
+many thousands of years, yet nothing is in fact altered
+very much.  Where religions are concerned, the human race
+are still very like savages in a dangerous wood in the dark,
+telling one another ghost stories around a camp-fire. They
+have always been like that."
+
+"What nonsense!" cried Celia.  "I have no patience with
+such gloomy rubbish.  The Greeks had a religion full
+of beauty and happiness and light-heartedness, and they
+weren't frightened of death at all.  They made the image
+of death a beautiful boy, with a torch turned down. 
+Their greatest philosophers openly preached and practised
+the doctrine of suicide when one was tired of life. 
+Our own early Church was full of these broad and beautiful
+Greek ideas.  You know that yourself!  And it was only
+when your miserable Jeromes and Augustines and Cyrils
+brought in the abominable meannesses and cruelties
+of the Jewish Old Testament, and stamped out the sane
+and lovely Greek elements in the Church, that Christians
+became the poor, whining, cowardly egotists they are,
+troubling about their little tin-pot souls, and scaring
+themselves in their churches by skulls and crossbones."
+
+"My dear Celia," interposed the priest, patting her
+shoulder gently, "we will have no Greek debate today. 
+Mr. Ware has been permitted to taboo camp-meetings,
+and I claim the privilege to cry off on Greeks.  Look at
+those fellows down there, trampling over one another
+to get more beer.  What have they to do with Athens,
+or Athens with them?  I take it, Mr. Ware," he went on,
+with a grave face but a twinkling eye, "that what we are
+observing here in front of us is symbolical of a great
+ethical and theological revolution, which in time will modify
+and control the destiny of the entire American people. 
+You see those young Irishmen there, struggling like pigs at
+a trough to get their fill of German beer.  That signifies
+a conquest of Teuton over Kelt more important and far-reaching
+in its results than the landing of Hengist and Horsa. 
+The Kelt has come to grief heretofore--or at least been
+forced to play second fiddle to other races--because he
+lacked the right sort of a drink.  He has in his blood an
+excess of impulsive, imaginative, even fantastic qualities. 
+It is much easier for him to make a fool of himself,
+to begin with, than it is for people of slower wits and
+more sluggish temperaments.  When you add whiskey to that,
+or that essence of melancholia which in Ireland they call
+'porther,' you get the Kelt at his very weakest and worst. 
+These young men down there are changing all that. 
+They have discovered lager.  Already many of them
+can outdrink the Germans at their own beverage. 
+The lager-drinking Irishman in a few generations will
+be a new type of humanity--the Kelt at his best. 
+He will dominate America.  He will be THE American. 
+And his church--with the Italian element thrown clean out
+of it, and its Pope living, say, in Baltimore or Georgetown--
+will be the Church of America."
+
+"Let us have some more lager at once," put in Celia. 
+"This revolution can't be hurried forward too rapidly."
+
+Theron could not feel sure how much of the priest's discourse
+was in jest, how much in earnest.  "It seems to me,"
+he said, "that as things are going, it doesn't look much
+as if the America of the future will trouble itself about
+any kind of a church.  The march of science must very soon
+produce a universal scepticism.  It is in the nature of
+human progress.  What all intelligent men recognize today,
+the masses must surely come to see in time."
+
+Father Forbes laughed outright this time.  "My dear
+Mr. Ware," he said, as they touched glasses again,
+and sipped the fresh beer that had been brought them,
+"of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless
+and empty as this idea that humanity progresses. 
+The savage's natural impression is that the world he
+sees about him was made for him, and that the rest
+of the universe is subordinated to him and his world,
+and that all the spirits and demons and gods occupy
+themselves exclusively with him and his affairs. 
+That idea was the basis of every pagan religion, and it
+is the basis of the Christian religion, simply because it
+is the foundation of human nature.  That foundation is just
+as firm and unshaken today as it was in the Stone Age. 
+It will always remain, and upon it will always be built
+some kind of a religious superstructure.  'Intelligent men,'
+as you call them, really have very little influence,
+even when they all pull one way.  The people as a whole
+soon get tired of them.  They give too much trouble. 
+The most powerful forces in human nature are self-protection
+and inertia.  The middle-aged man has found out that the
+chief wisdom in life is to bend to the pressures about him,
+to shut up and do as others do.  Even when he thinks he
+has rid his own mind of superstitions, he sees that he
+will best enjoy a peaceful life by leaving other peoples'
+superstitions alone.  That is always the ultimate view of
+the crowd."
+
+"But I don't see," observed Theron, "granting that all
+this is true, how you think the Catholic Church will come
+out on top.  I could understand it of Unitarianism,
+or Universalism, or the Episcopal Church, where nobody
+seems to have to believe particularly in anything except
+the beauty of its burial service, but I should think the very
+rigidity of the Catholic creed would make it impossible. 
+There everything is hard and fast; nothing is elastic;
+there is no room for compromise."
+
+"The Church is always compromising," explained the priest,
+"only it does it so slowly that no one man lives long
+enough to quite catch it at the trick.  No; the great
+secret of the Catholic Church is that it doesn't debate
+with sceptics.  No matter what points you make against it,
+it is never betrayed into answering back.  It simply says
+these things are sacred mysteries, which you are quite
+free to accept and be saved, or reject and be damned. 
+There is something intelligible and fine about an attitude
+like that.  When people have grown tired of their absurd
+and fruitless wrangling over texts and creeds which,
+humanly speaking, are all barbaric nonsense, they will
+come back to repose pleasantly under the Catholic roof,
+in that restful house where things are taken for granted. 
+There the manners are charming, the service excellent,
+the decoration and upholstery most acceptable to the eye,
+and the music"--he made a little mock bow here to Celia--"the
+music at least is divine.  There you have nothing to do but
+be agreeable, and avoid scandal, and observe the convenances. 
+You are no more expected to express doubts about the
+Immaculate Conception than you are to ask the lady whom
+you take down to dinner how old she is.  Now that is, as I
+have said, an intelligent and rational church for people
+to have.  As the Irish civilize themselves--you observe
+them diligently engaged in the process down below there--
+and the social roughness of their church becomes softened
+and ameliorated, Americans will inevitably be attracted
+toward it.  In the end, it will embrace them all, and be
+modified by them, and in turn influence their development,
+till you will have a new nation and a new national church,
+each representative of the other."
+
+"And all this is to be done by lager beer!" 
+Theron ventured to comment, jokingly.  He was conscious
+of a novel perspiration around the bridge of his nose,
+which was obviously another effect of the drink.
+
+The priest passed the pleasantry by.  "No," he said seriously;
+"what you must see is that there must always be a church. 
+If one did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. 
+It is needed, first and foremost, as a police force. 
+It is needed, secondly, so to speak, as a fire insurance. 
+It provides the most even temperature and pure atmosphere
+for the growth of young children.  It furnishes the best
+obtainable social machinery for marrying off one's daughters,
+getting to know the right people, patching up quarrels,
+and so on.  The priesthood earn their salaries as
+the agents for these valuable social arrangements. 
+Their theology is thrown in as a sort of intellectual
+diversion, like the ritual of a benevolent organization. 
+There are some who get excited about this part of it,
+just as one hears of Free-Masons who believe that the sun
+rises and sets to exemplify their ceremonies.  Others take
+their duties more quietly, and, understanding just
+what it all amounts to, make the best of it, like you
+and me."
+
+Theron assented to the philosophy and the compliment
+by a grave bow.  "Yes, that is the idea--to make the best
+of it," he said, and fastened his regard boldly this
+time upon the swings.
+
+"We were both ordained by our bishops," continued the priest,
+"at an age when those worthy old gentlemen would not have
+trusted our combined wisdom to buy a horse for them."
+
+"And I was married," broke in Theron, with an eagerness
+almost vehement, "when I had only just been ordained! 
+At the worst, YOU had only the Church fastened upon your back,
+before you were old enough to know what you wanted. 
+It is easy enough to make the best of THAT, but it is
+different with me."
+
+A marked silence followed this outburst.  The Rev. Mr. Ware
+had never spoken of his marriage to either of these
+friends before; and something in their manner seemed
+to suggest that they did not find the subject inviting,
+now that it had been broached.  He himself was filled
+with a desire to say more about it.  He had never clearly
+realized before what a genuine grievance it was. 
+The moisture at the top of his nose merged itself into
+tears in the corners of his eyes, as the cruel enormity
+of the sacrifice he had made in his youth rose before him. 
+His whole life had been fettered and darkened by it. 
+He turned his gaze from the swings toward Celia, to claim
+the sympathy he knew she would feel for him.
+
+But Celia was otherwise engaged.  A young man had
+come up to her--a tall and extremely thin young man,
+soberly dressed, and with a long, gaunt, hollow-eyed face,
+the skin of which seemed at once florid and pale. 
+He had sandy hair and the rough hands of a workman;
+but he was speaking to Miss Madden in the confidential
+tones of an equal.
+
+"I can do nothing at all with him," this newcomer said
+to her.  "He'll not be said by me.  Perhaps he'd listen
+to you!"
+
+"It's likely I'll go down there!" said Celia. 
+"He may do what he likes for all me!  Take my advice,
+Michael, and just go your way, and leave him to himself. 
+There was a time when I would have taken out my eyes
+for him, but it was love wasted and thrown away. 
+After the warnings he's had, if he WILL bring trouble
+on himself, let's make it no affair of ours."
+
+Theron had found himself exchanging glances of inquiry
+with this young man.  "Mr. Ware," said Celia, here, "let me
+introduce you to my brother Michael--my full brother."
+
+Mr. Ware remembered him now, and began, in response to the
+other's formal bow, to say something about their having
+met in the dark, inside the church.  But Celia held up
+her hand.  "I'm afraid, Mr. Ware," she said hurriedly,
+"that you are in for a glimpse of the family skeleton. 
+I will apologize for the infliction in advance."
+
+Wonderingly, Theron followed her look, and saw another
+young man who had come up the path from the crowd below,
+and was close upon them.  The minister recognized in him
+a figure which had seemed to be the centre of almost every
+group about the bar that he had studied in detail.  He was
+a small, dapper, elegantly attired youth, with dark hair,
+and the handsome, regularly carved face of an actor. 
+He advanced with a smiling countenance and unsteady step--
+his silk hat thrust back upon his head, his frock-coat and
+vest unbuttoned, and his neckwear disarranged--and saluted
+the company with amiability.
+
+"I saw you up here, Father Forbes," he said, with a
+thickened and erratic utterance.  "Whyn't you come
+down and join us?  I'm setting 'em up for everybody. 
+You got to take care of the boys, you know.  I'll blow
+in the last cent I've got in the world for the boys,
+every time, and they know it.  They're solider for me
+than they ever were for anybody.  That's how it is. 
+If you stand by the boys, the boys'll stand by you. 
+I'm going to the Assembly for this district, and they ain't
+nobody can stop me.  The boys are just red hot for me. 
+Wish you'd come down, Father Forbes, and address a few
+words to the meeting--just mention that I'm a candidate,
+and say I'm bound to win, hands down.  That'll make you solid
+with the boys, and we'll be all good fellows together. 
+Come on down!"
+
+The priest affably disengaged his arm from the clutch
+which the speaker had laid upon it, and shook his head
+in gentle deprecation.  "No, no; you must excuse me,
+Theodore," he said.  "We mustn't meddle in politics, you know."
+
+"Politics be damned!" urged Theodore, grabbing the priest's
+other arm, and tugging at it stoutly to pull him down
+the path.  "I say, boys" he shouted to those below,
+"here's Father Forbes, and he's going to come down
+and address the meeting.  Come on, Father!  Come down,
+and have a drink with the boys!"
+
+It was Celia who sharply pulled his hand away from the
+priest's arm this time.  "Go away with you!" she snapped
+in low, angry tones at the intruder.  "You should be
+ashamed of yourself!  If you can't keep sober yourself,
+you can at least keep your hands off the priest.  I should
+think you'd have more decency, when you're in such a state
+as this, than to come where I am.  If you've no respect
+for yourself, you might have that much respect for me! 
+And before strangers, too!
+
+"Oh, I mustn't come where YOU are, eh?" remarked the peccant
+Theodore, straightening himself with an elaborate effort. 
+"You've bought these woods, have you?  I've got a hundred
+friends here, all the same, for every one you'll ever
+have in your life, Red-head, and don't you forget it."
+
+"Go and spend your money with them, then, and don't come
+insulting decent people," said Celia.
+
+"Before strangers, too!" the young man called out,
+with beery sarcasm.  "Oh, we'll take care of the
+strangers all right."  He had not seemed to be aware of
+Theron's presence, much less his identity, before; but he
+turned to him now with a knowing grin.  "I'm running
+for the Assembly, Mr. Ware," he said, speaking loudly
+and with deliberate effort to avoid the drunken elisions
+and comminglings to which his speech tended, "and I want
+you to fix up the Methodists solid for me.  I'm going
+to drive over to the camp-meeting tonight, me and some
+of the boys in a barouche, and I'll put a twenty-dollar
+bill on their plate.  Here it is now, if you want to see it."
+
+As the young man began fumbling in a vest-pocket, Theron
+gathered his wits together.
+
+"You'd better not go this evening," he said, as convincingly
+as he knew how; "because the gates will be closed very early,
+and the Saturday-evening services are of a particularly
+special nature, quite reserved for those living on the grounds."
+
+"Rats!" said Theodore, raising his head, and abandoning
+the search for the bill.  "Why don't you speak out
+like a man, and say you think I'm too drunk?"
+
+"I don't think that is a question which need arise
+between us, Mr. Madden," murmured Theron, confusedly.
+
+"Oh, don't you make any mistake!  A hell of a lot of
+questions arise between us, Mr. Ware," cried Theodore,
+with a sudden accession of vigor in tone and mien. 
+"And one of 'em is--go away from me, Michael!--one of 'em is,
+I say, why don't you leave our girls alone?  They've got
+their own priests to make fools of themselves over,
+without any sneak of a Protestant parson coming meddling
+round them.  You're a married man into the bargain;
+and you've got in your house this minute a piano that my
+sister bought and paid for.  Oh, I've seen the entry
+in Thurston's books!  You have the cheek to talk to me
+about being drunk--why--"
+
+These remarks were never concluded, for Father Forbes
+here clapped a hand abruptly over the offending mouth,
+and flung his free arm in a tight grip around the young
+man's waist.  "Come with me, Michael!" he said, and the two
+men led the reluctant and resisting Theodore at a sharp
+pace off into the woods.
+
+Theron and Celia stood and watched them disappear among
+the undergrowth.  "It's the dirty Foley blood that's in him,"
+he heard her say, as if between clenched teeth.
+
+The girl's big brown eyes, when Theron looked into them again,
+were still fixed upon the screen of foliage, and dilated
+like those of a Medusa mask.  The blood had gone away,
+and left the fair face and neck as white, it seemed to him,
+as marble.  Even her lips, fiercely bitten together,
+appeared colorless.  The picture of consuming and powerless
+rage which she presented, and the shuddering tremor
+which ran over her form, as visible as the quivering track
+of a gust of wind across a pond, awed and frightened him.
+
+Tenderness toward her helpless state came too, and uppermost. 
+He drew her arm into his, and turned their backs upon
+the picnic scene.
+
+"Let us walk a little up the path into the woods," he said,
+"and get away from all this."
+
+"The further away the better," she answered bitterly,
+and he felt the shiver run through her again as she spoke.
+
+The methodical waltz-music from that unseen dancing
+platform rose again above all other sounds.  They moved
+up the woodland path, their steps insensibly falling
+into the rhythm of its strains, and vanished from sight
+among the trees.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+Theron and Celia walked in silence for some minutes,
+until the noises of the throng they had left behind were lost. 
+The path they followed had grown indefinite among the
+grass and creepers of the forest carpet; now it seemed
+to end altogether in a little copse of young birches,
+the delicately graceful stems of which were clustered
+about a parent stump, long since decayed and overgrown
+with lichens and layers of thick moss.
+
+As the two paused, the girl suddenly sank upon her knees,
+then threw herself face forward upon the soft green bark
+which had formed itself above the roots of the ancient
+mother-tree. Her companion looked down in pained amazement
+at what he saw.  Her body shook with the violence of
+recurring sobs, or rather gasps of wrath and grief Her hands,
+with stiffened, claw-like fingers, dug into the moss
+and tangle of tiny vines, and tore them by the roots. 
+The half-stifled sounds of weeping that arose from where her
+face grovelled in the leaves were terrible to his ears. 
+He knew not what to say or do, but gazed in resourceless
+suspense at the strange figure she made.  It seemed a
+cruelly long time that she lay there, almost at his feet,
+struggling fiercely with the fury that was in her.
+
+All at once the paroxysms passed away, the sounds of wild
+weeping ceased.  Celia sat up, and with her handkerchief
+wiped the tears and leafy fragments from her face. 
+She rearranged her hat and the braids of her hair with swift,
+instinctive touches, brushed the woodland debris from
+her front, and sprang to her feet.
+
+"I'm all right now," she said briskly.  There was palpable
+effort in her light tone, and in the stormy sort of smile
+which she forced upon her blotched and perturbed countenance,
+but they were only too welcome to Theron's anxious mood.
+
+"Thank God!" he blurted out, all radiant with relief. 
+"I feared you were going to have a fit--or something."
+
+Celia laughed, a little artificially at first, then with a
+genuine surrender to the comic side of his visible fright. 
+The mirth came back into the brown depths of her eyes again,
+and her face cleared itself of tear-stains and the marks
+of agitation.  "I AM a nice quiet party for a Methodist
+minister to go walking in the woods with, am I not?"
+she cried, shaking her skirts and smiling at him.
+
+"I am not a Methodist minister--please!" answered Theron--"at
+least not today--and here--with you!  I am just a man--
+nothing more--a man who has escaped from lifelong imprisonment,
+and feels for the first time what it is to be free!"
+
+"Ah, my friend," Celia said, shaking her head slowly,
+"I'm afraid you deceive yourself.  You are not by any
+means free.  You are only looking out of the window
+of your prison, as you call it.  The doors are locked,
+just the same."
+
+"I will smash them!" he declared, with confidence. 
+"Or for that matter, I HAVE smashed them--battered them
+to pieces.  You don't realize what progress I have made,
+what changes there have been in me since that night,
+you remember that wonderful night!  I am quite another being,
+I assure you!  And really it dates from way beyond that--
+why, from the very first evening, when I came to you in
+the church.  The window in Father Forbes' room was open,
+and I stood by it listening to the music next door,
+and I could just faintly see on the dark window across
+the alley-way a stained-glass picture of a woman. 
+I suppose it was the Virgin Mary.  She had hair like yours,
+and your face, too; and that is why I went into the church
+and found you.  Yes, that is why."
+
+Celia regarded him with gravity.  "You will get yourself
+into great trouble, my friend," she said.
+
+"That's where you're wrong," put in Theron.  "Not that I'd
+mind any trouble in this wide world, so long as you called
+me 'my friend,' but I'm not going to get into any at all. 
+I know a trick worth two of that.  I've learned to be a showman. 
+I can preach now far better than I used to, and I can get
+through my work in half the time, and keep on the right
+side of my people, and get along with perfect smoothness. 
+I was too green before.  I took the thing seriously,
+and I let every mean-fisted curmudgeon and crazy fanatic
+worry me, and keep me on pins and needles.  I don't
+do that any more.  I've taken a new measure of life. 
+I see now what life is really worth, and I'm going
+to have my share of it.  Why should I deliberately deny
+myself all possible happiness for the rest of my days,
+simply because I made a fool of myself when I was in
+my teens?  Other men are not eternally punished like that,
+for what they did as boys, and I won't submit to it either. 
+I will be as free to enjoy myself as--as Father Forbes."
+
+Celia smiled softly, and shook her head again.  "Poor man,
+to call HIM free!" she said:  "why, he is bound hand and foot. 
+You don't in the least realize how he is hedged about,
+the work he has to do, the thousand suspicious eyes
+that watch his every movement, eager to bring the Bishop
+down upon him.  And then think of his sacrifice--
+the great sacrifice of all--to never know what love means,
+to forswear his manhood, to live a forlorn, celibate life--
+you have no idea how sadly that appeals to a woman."
+
+"Let us sit down here for a little," said Theron;
+"we seem at the end of the path."  She seated herself
+on the root-based mound, and he reclined at her side,
+with an arm carelessly extended behind her on the moss.
+
+"I can see what you mean," he went on, after a pause. 
+"But to me, do you know, there is an enormous fascination
+in celibacy.  You forget that I know the reverse of the medal. 
+I know how the mind can be cramped, the nerves harassed,
+the ambitions spoiled and rotted, the whole existence
+darkened and belittled, by--by the other thing.  I have
+never talked to you before about my marriage."
+
+"I don't think we'd better talk about it now," observed Celia. 
+"There must be many more amusing topics."
+
+He missed the spirit of her remark.  "You are right,"
+he said slowly.  "It is too sad a thing to talk about. 
+But there! it is my load, and I bear it, and there's nothing
+more to be said."
+
+Theron drew a heavy sigh, and let his fingers toy
+abstractedly with a ribbon on the outer edge of Celia's
+penumbra of apparel.
+
+"No," she said.  "We mustn't snivel, and we mustn't sulk. 
+When I get into a rage it makes me ill, and I storm my way
+through it and tear things, but it doesn't last long,
+and I come out of it feeling all the better.  I don't know
+that I've ever seen your wife.  I suppose she hasn't got
+red hair?"
+
+"I think it's a kind of light brown," answered Theron,
+with an effect of exerting his memory.
+
+"It seems that you only take notice of hair
+in stained-glass windows," was Celia's comment.
+
+"Oh-h!" he murmured reproachfully, "as if--as if--
+but I won't say what I was going to."
+
+"That's not fair!" she said.  The little touch of whimsical
+mockery which she gave to the serious declaration was
+delicious to him.  "You have me at such a disadvantage! 
+Here am I rattling out whatever comes into my head,
+exposing all my lightest emotions, and laying bare my
+very heart in candor, and you meditate, you turn things
+over cautiously in your mind, like a second Machiavelli. 
+I grow afraid of you; you are so subtle and mysterious in
+your reserves."
+
+Theron gave a tug at the ribbon, to show the joy he had
+in her delicate chaff.  "No, it is you who are secretive,"
+he said.  "You never told me about--about the piano."
+
+The word was out!  A minute before it had seemed incredible
+to him that he should ever have the courage to utter it--
+but here it was.  He laid firm hold upon the ribbon,
+which it appeared hung from her waist, and drew himself
+a trifle nearer to her.  "I could never have consented
+to take it, I'm afraid," he went on in a low voice,
+if I had known.  And even as it is, I fear it won't
+be possible."
+
+"What are you afraid of?" asked Celia.  "Why shouldn't you
+take it?  People in your profession never do get anything
+unless it's given to them, do they?  I've always understood
+it was like that.  I've often read of donation parties--
+that's what they're called, isn't it?--where everybody
+is supposed to bring some gift to the minister. 
+Very well, then, I've simply had a donation party of my own,
+that's all.  Unless you mean that my being a Catholic
+makes a difference.  I had supposed you were quite free
+from that kind of prejudice."
+
+"So I am!  Believe me, I am!" urged Theron.  "When I'm
+with you, it seems impossible to realize that there are
+people so narrow and contracted in their natures as to take
+account of such things.  It is another atmosphere that I
+breathe near you.  How could you imagine that such a thought--
+about our difference of creed--would enter my head? 
+In fact," he concluded with a nervous half-laugh, "there
+isn't any such difference.  Whatever your religion is,
+it's mine too.  You remember--you adopted me as a Greek."
+
+"Did I?" she rejoined.  "Well, if that's the case,
+it leaves you without a leg to stand on.  I challenge you
+to find any instance where a Greek made any difficulties
+about accepting a piano from a friend.  But seriously--
+while we are talking about it--you introduced the subject: 
+I didn't--I might as well explain to you that I had
+no such intention, when I picked the instrument out. 
+It was later, when I was talking to Thurston's people
+about the price, that the whim seized me.  Now it
+is the one fixed rule of my life to obey my whims. 
+Whatever occurs to me as a possibly pleasant thing to do,
+straight like a hash, I go and do it.  It is the only
+way that a person with means, with plenty of money,
+can preserve any freshness of character.  If they stop
+to think what it would be prudent to do, they get crusted
+over immediately.  That is the curse of rich people--
+they teach themselves to distrust and restrain every
+impulse toward unusual actions.  They get to feel that it
+is more necessary for them to be cautious and conventional
+than it is for others.  I would rather work at a wash-tub
+than occupy that attitude toward my bank account.  I fight
+against any sign of it that I detect rising in my mind. 
+The instant a wish occurs to me, I rush to gratify it. 
+That is my theory of life.  That accounts for the piano;
+and I don't see that you've anything to say about it at
+all."
+
+It seemed very convincing, this theory of life. 
+Somehow, the thought of Miss Madden's riches had never
+before assumed prominence in Theron's mind.  Of course
+her father was very wealthy, but it had not occurred to him
+that the daughter's emancipation might run to the length
+of a personal fortune.  He knew so little of rich people and their ways!
+
+He lifted his head, and looked up at Celia with an awakened
+humility and awe in his glance.  The glamour of a separate
+banking-account shone upon her.  Where the soft woodland
+light played in among the strands of her disordered hair,
+he saw the veritable gleam of gold.  A mysterious new
+suggestion of power blended itself with the beauty of
+her face, was exhaled in the faint perfume of her garments. 
+He maintained a timorous hold upon the ribbon, wondering at
+his hardihood in touching it, or being near her at all.
+
+What surprises me," he heard himself saying, "is that
+you are contented to stay in Octavius.  I should think
+that you would travel--go abroad--see the beautiful
+things of the world, surround yourself with the luxuries
+of big cities--and that sort of thing."
+
+Celia regarded the forest prospect straight in front of her
+with a pensive gaze.  "Sometime--no doubt I will sometime,"
+she said abstractedly.
+
+"One reads so much nowadays," he went on, "of American
+heiresses going to Europe and marrying dukes and noblemen. 
+I suppose you will do that too.  Princes would fight one
+another for you."
+
+The least touch of a smile softened for an instant
+the impassivity of her countenance.  Then she stared
+harder than ever at the vague, leafy distance.  "That is
+the old-fashioned idea," she said, in a musing tone,
+"that women must belong to somebody, as if they were curios,
+or statues, or race-horses. You don't understand,
+my friend, that I have a different view.  I am myself,
+and I belong to myself, exactly as much as any man. 
+The notion that any other human being could conceivably obtain
+the slightest property rights in me is as preposterous,
+as ridiculous, as--what shall I say?--as the notion
+of your being taken out with a chain on your neck and
+sold by auction as a slave, down on the canal bridge. 
+I should be ashamed to be alive for another day, if any
+other thought were possible to me."
+
+"That is not the generally accepted view, I should think,"
+faltered Theron.
+
+"No more is it the accepted view that young married
+Methodist ministers should sit out alone in the
+woods with red-headed Irish girls.  No, my friend,
+let us find what the generally accepted views are,
+and as fast as we find them set our heels on them. 
+There is no other way to live like real human beings. 
+What on earth is it to me that other women crawl about on
+all-fours, and fawn like dogs on any hand that will buckle
+a collar onto them, and toss them the leavings of the table? 
+I am not related to them.  I have nothing to do with them. 
+They cannot make any rules for me.  If pride and dignity
+and independence are dead in them, why, so much the worse
+for them!  It is no affair of mine.  Certainly it is no
+reason why I should get down and grovel also.  No; I at
+least stand erect on my legs."
+
+Mr. Ware sat up, and stared confusedly, with round eyes
+and parted lips, at his companion.  Instinctively his brain
+dragged forth to the surface those epithets which the doctor
+had hurled in bitter contempt at her--"mad ass, a mere
+bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed lewdness." 
+The words rose in their order on his memory, hard and
+sharp-edged, like arrow-heads. But to sit there, quite at
+her side; to breathe the same air, and behold the calm
+loveliness of her profile; to touch the ribbon of her dress--
+and all the while to hold these poisoned darts of abuse
+levelled in thought at her breast--it was monstrous. 
+He could have killed the doctor at that moment. 
+With an effort, he drove the foul things from his mind--
+scattered them back into the darkness.  He felt that he
+had grown pale, and wondered if she had heard the groan
+that seemed to have been forced from him in the struggle. 
+Or was the groan imaginary?
+
+Celia continued to sit unmoved, composedly looking
+upon vacancy.  Theron's eyes searched her face in vain
+for any sign of consciousness that she had astounded and
+bewildered him.  She did not seem to be thinking of him
+at all.  The proud calm of her thoughtful countenance
+suggested instead occupation with lofty and remote
+abstractions and noble ideals.  Contemplating her,
+he suddenly perceived that what she had been saying
+was great, wonderful, magnificent.  An involuntary thrill
+ran through his veins at recollection of her words. 
+His fancy likened it to the sensation he used to feel
+as a youth, when the Fourth of July reader bawled forth
+that opening clause:  "When, in the course of human events,
+it becomes necessary," etc.  It was nothing less than
+another Declaration of Independence he had been listening to.
+
+He sank again recumbent at her side, and stretched the
+arm behind her, nearer than before.  "Apparently, then,
+you will never marry."  His voice trembled a little.
+
+"Most certainly not!" said Celia.
+
+"You spoke so feelingly a little while ago," he ventured along,
+with hesitation, "about how sadly the notion of a priest's
+sacrificing himself--never knowing what love meant--
+appealed to a woman.  I should think that the idea
+of sacrificing herself would seem to her even sadder still."
+
+"I don't remember that we mentioned THAT," she replied. 
+"How do you mean--sacrificing herself?"
+
+Theron gathered some of the outlying folds of her dress
+in his hand, and boldly patted and caressed them. 
+"You, so beautiful and so free, with such fine talents
+and abilities," he murmured; "you, who could have the whole
+world at your feet--are you, too, never going to know
+what love means?  Do you call that no sacrifice?  To me it
+is the most terrible that my imagination can conceive."
+
+Celia laughed--a gentle, amused little laugh, in which
+Theron's ears traced elements of tenderness.  "You must
+regulate that imagination of yours," she said playfully. 
+"It conceives the thing that is not.  Pray, when"--and here,
+turning her head, she bent down upon his face a gaze of
+arch mock-seriousness--"pray, when did I describe myself
+in these terms?  When did I say that I should never know
+what love meant?"
+
+For answer Theron laid his head down upon his arm,
+and closed his eyes, and held his face against the draperies
+encircling her.  "I cannot think!" he groaned.
+
+The thing that came uppermost in his mind, as it swayed
+and rocked in the tempest of emotion, was the strange
+reminiscence of early childhood in it all.  It was
+like being a little boy again, nestling in an innocent,
+unthinking transport of affection against his mother's skirts. 
+The tears he felt scalding his eyes were the spontaneous,
+unashamed tears of a child; the tremulous and exquisite
+joy which spread, wave-like, over him, at once reposeful
+and yearning, was full of infantile purity and sweetness. 
+He had not comprehended at all before what wellsprings
+of spiritual beauty, what limpid depths of idealism,
+his nature contained.
+
+"We were speaking of our respective religions,"
+he heard Celia say, as imperturbably as if there
+had been no digression worth mentioning.
+
+"Yes," he assented, and moved his head so that he
+looked up at her back hair, and the leaves high above,
+mottled against the sky.  The wish to lie there, where now
+he could just catch the rose-leaf line of her under-chin
+as well, was very strong upon him.  "Yes?" he repeated.
+
+"I cannot talk to you like that," she said; and he sat
+up again shamefacedly.
+
+"Yes--I think we were speaking of religions--some time ago,"
+he faltered, to relieve the situation.  The dreadful
+thought that she might be annoyed began to oppress him.
+
+"Well, you said whatever my religion was, it was yours too. 
+That entitles you at least to be told what the religion is. 
+Now, I am a Catholic."
+
+Theron, much mystified, nodded his head.  Could it
+be possible--was there coming a deliberate suggestion
+that he should become a convert?  "Yes--I know," he murmured.
+
+"But I should explain that I am only a Catholic in the sense
+that its symbolism is pleasant to me.  You remember what
+Schopenhauer said--you cannot have the water by itself: 
+you must also have the jug that it is in.  Very well;
+the Catholic religion is my jug.  I put into it the things
+I like.  They were all there long ago, thousands of years ago. 
+The Jews threw them out; we will put them back again. 
+We will restore art and poetry and the love of beauty,
+and the gentle, spiritual, soulful life.  The Greeks
+had it; and Christianity would have had it too, if it
+hadn't been for those brutes they call the Fathers. 
+They loved ugliness and dirt and the thought of hell-fire.
+They hated women.  In all the earlier stages of the Church,
+women were very prominent in it.  Jesus himself
+appreciated women, and delighted to have them about him,
+and talk with them and listen to them.  That was
+the very essence of the Greek spirit; and it breathed
+into Christianity at its birth a sweetness and a grace
+which twenty generations of cranks and savages like Paul
+and Jerome and Tertullian weren't able to extinguish. 
+But the very man, Cyril, who killed Hypatia, and thus began
+the dark ages, unwittingly did another thing which makes
+one almost forgive him.  To please the Egyptians, he secured
+the Church's acceptance of the adoration of the Virgin. 
+It is that idea which has kept the Greek spirit alive,
+and grown and grown, till at last it will rule the world. 
+It was only epileptic Jews who could imagine a religion without
+sex in it."
+
+"I remember the pictures of the Virgin in your room,"
+said Theron, feeling more himself again.  "I wondered
+if they quite went with the statues."
+
+The remark won a smile from Celia's lips.
+
+"They get along together better than you suppose,"
+she answered.  "Besides, they are not all pictures of Mary. 
+One of them, standing on the moon, is of Isis with the infant
+Horus in her arms.  Another might as well be Mahamie,
+bearing the miraculously born Buddha, or Olympias
+with her child Alexander, or even Perictione holding
+her babe Plato--all these were similar cases, you know. 
+Almost every religion had its Immaculate Conception. 
+What does it all come to, except to show us that man
+turns naturally toward the worship of the maternal idea? 
+That is the deepest of all our instincts--love of woman,
+who is at once daughter and wife and mother.  It is that that
+makes the world go round."
+
+Brave thoughts shaped themselves in Theron's mind,
+and shone forth in a confident yet wistful smile on his face.
+
+"lt is a pity you cannot change estates with me for one minute,"
+he said, in steady, low tone.  "Then you would realize
+the tremendous truth of what you have been saying. 
+It is only your intellect that has reached out and grasped
+the idea.  If you were in my place, you would discover
+that your heart was bursting with it as well."
+
+Celia turned and looked at him.
+
+"I myself," he went on, "would not have known, half an hour ago,
+what you meant by the worship of the maternal idea. 
+I am much older than you.  I am a strong, mature man. 
+But when I lay down there, and shut my eyes--because the
+charm and marvel of this whole experience had for the moment
+overcome me--the strangest sensation seized upon me. 
+It was absolutely as if I were a boy again, a good,
+pure-minded, fond little child, and you were the mother
+that I idolized."
+
+Celia had not taken her eyes from his face.  "I find myself
+liking you better at this moment," she said, with gravity,
+"than I have ever liked you before."
+
+Then, as by a sudden impulse, she sprang to her feet. 
+"Come!" she cried, her voice and manner all vivacity
+once more, "we have been here long enough."
+
+Upon the instant, as Theron was more laboriously getting up,
+it became apparent to them both that perhaps they had been
+there too long.
+
+A boy with a gun under his arm, and two gray squirrels
+tied by the tails slung across his shoulder, stood at
+the entrance to the glade, some dozen paces away,
+regarding them with undisguised interest.  Upon the discovery
+that he was in turn observed, he resumed his interrupted
+progress through the woods, whistling softly as he went,
+and vanished among the trees.
+
+"Heavens above!" groaned Theron, shudderingly.
+
+"Know him?" he went on, in answer to the glance of inquiry on
+his companion's face.  "I should think I did!  He spades my--
+my wife's garden for her.  He used to bring our milk. 
+He works in the law office of one of my trustees--
+the one who isn't friendly to me, but is very friendly
+indeed with my--with Mrs. Ware.  Oh, what shall I do? 
+It may easily mean my ruin!"
+
+Celia looked at him attentively.  The color had gone out of
+his face, and with it the effect of earnestness and mental
+elevation which, a minute before, had caught her fancy. 
+"Somehow, I fear that I do not like you quite so much
+just now, my friend," she remarked.
+
+"In God's name, don't say that!" urged Theron. 
+He raised his voice in agitated entreaty.  "You don't
+know what these people are--how they would leap at the
+barest hint of a scandal about me.  In my position I
+am a thousand times more defenceless than any woman. 
+Just a single whisper, and I am done for!"
+
+"Let me point out to you, Mr. Ware," said Celia, slowly,
+"that to be seen sitting and talking with me, whatever doubts
+it may raise as to a gentleman's intellectual condition,
+need not necessarily blast his social reputation beyond
+all hope whatever."
+
+Theron stared at her, as if he had not grasped her meaning. 
+Then he winced visibly under it, and put out his hands
+to implore her.  "Forgive me!  Forgive me!" he pleaded. 
+"I was beside myself for the moment with the fright
+of the thing.  Oh, say you do forgive me, Celia!" 
+He made haste to support this daring use of her name. 
+"I have been so happy today--so deeply, so vastly happy--
+like the little child I spoke of--and that is so new in my
+lonely life--that--the suddenness of the thing--it just for
+the instant unstrung me.  Don't be too hard on me for it! 
+And I had hoped, too--I had had such genuine heartfelt
+pleasure in the thought--that, an hour or two ago, when you
+were unhappy, perhaps it had been some sort of consolation
+to you that I was with you."
+
+Celia was looking away.  When he took her hand she did not
+withdraw it, but turned and nodded in musing general assent
+to what he had said.  "Yes, we have both been unstrung,
+as you call it, today," she said, decidedly out of pitch. 
+"Let each forgive the other, and say no more about it."
+
+She took his arm, and they retraced their steps
+along the path, again in silence.  The labored noise
+of the orchestra, as it were, returned to meet them. 
+They halted at an intersecting footpath.
+
+"I go back to my slavery--my double bondage," said Theron,
+letting his voice sink to a sigh.  "But even if I am put
+on the rack for it, I shall have had one day of glory."
+
+"I think you may kiss me, in memory of that one day--
+or of a few minutes in that day," said Celia.
+
+Their lips brushed each other in a swift, almost perfunctory caress.
+
+Theron went his way at a hurried pace, the sobered tones
+of her "good-bye" beating upon his brain with every
+measure of the droning waltz-music.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+The memory of the kiss abode with Theron.  Like Aaron's rod,
+it swallowed up one by one all competing thoughts
+and recollections, and made his brain its slave.
+
+Even as he strode back through the woods to the
+camp-meeting, it was the kiss that kept his feet in motion,
+and guided their automatic course.  All along the watches
+of the restless night, it was the kiss that bore him
+sweet company, and wandered with him from one broken
+dream of bliss to another.  Next day, it was the kiss
+that made of life for him a sort of sunlit wonderland. 
+He preached his sermon in the morning, and took his
+appointed part in the other services of afternoon
+and evening, apparently to everybody's satisfaction: 
+to him it was all a vision.
+
+When the beautiful full moon rose, this Sunday evening,
+and glorified the clearing and the forest with its mellow
+harvest radiance, he could have groaned with the burden
+of his joy.  He went out alone into the light, and bared
+his head to it, and stood motionless for a long time. 
+In all his life, he had never been impelled as powerfully
+toward earnest and soulful thanksgiving.  The impulse
+to kneel, there in the pure, tender moonlight, and lift up
+offerings of praise to God, kept uppermost in his mind. 
+Some formless resignation restrained him from the
+act itself, but the spirit of it hallowed his mood. 
+He gazed up at the broad luminous face of the satellite. 
+"You are our God," he murmured.  "Hers and mine! 
+You are the most beautiful of heavenly creatures, as she is
+of the angels on earth.  I am speechless with reverence for
+you both."
+
+It was not until the camp-meeting broke up, four days later,
+and Theron with the rest returned to town, that the material
+aspects of what had happened, and might be expected
+to happen, forced themselves upon his mind.  The kiss
+was a child of the forest.  So long as Theron remained
+in the camp, the image of the kiss, which was enshrined
+in his heart and ministered to by all his thoughts,
+continued enveloped in a haze of sylvan mystery,
+like a dryad.  Suggestions of its beauty and holiness
+came to him in the odors of the woodland, at the sight
+of wild flowers and water-lilies. When he walked alone
+in unfamiliar parts of the forest, he carried about with him
+the half-conscious idea of somewhere coming upon a strange,
+hidden pool which mortal eye had not seen before--a deep,
+sequestered mere of spring-fed waters, walled in by rich,
+tangled growths of verdure, and bearing upon its virgin
+bosom only the shadows of the primeval wilderness,
+and the light of the eternal skies.  His fancy dwelt
+upon some such nook as the enchanted home of the fairy
+that possessed his soul.  The place, though he never
+found it, became real to him.  As he pictured it,
+there rose sometimes from among the lily-pads, stirring
+the translucent depths and fluttering over the water's
+surface drops like gems, the wonderful form of a woman,
+with pale leaves wreathed in her luxuriant red hair,
+and a skin which gave forth light.
+
+With the homecoming to Octavius, his dreams began to take
+more account of realities.  In a day or two he was wide awake,
+and thinking hard.  The kiss was as much as ever the
+ceaseless companion of his hours, but it no longer insisted
+upon shrouding itself in vines and woodland creepers,
+or outlining itself in phosphorescent vagueness against mystic
+backgrounds of nymph-haunted glades.  It advanced out into
+the noonday, and assumed tangible dimensions and substance. 
+He saw that it was related to the facts of his daily life,
+and had, in turn, altered his own relations to all these facts.
+
+What ought he to do?  What COULD he do?  Apparently, nothing
+but wait.  He waited for a week--then for another week. 
+The conclusion that the initiative had been left to him
+began to take shape in his mind.  From this it seemed
+but a step to the passionate resolve to act at once.
+
+Turning the situation over and over in his anxious
+thoughts, two things stood out in special prominence. 
+One was that Celia loved him.  The other was that the
+boy in Gorringe's law office, and possibly Gorringe,
+and heaven only knew how many others besides, had reasons
+for suspecting this to be true.
+
+And what about Celia?  Side by side with the moving
+rapture of thinking about her as a woman, there rose
+the substantial satisfaction of contemplating her as
+Miss Madden.  She had kissed him, and she was very rich. 
+The things gradually linked themselves before his eyes. 
+He tried a thousand varying guesses at what she proposed
+to do, and each time reined up his imagination by the
+reminder that she was confessedly a creature of whims,
+who proposed to do nothing, but was capable of all things.
+
+And as to the boy.  If he had blabbed what he saw, it was
+incredible that somebody should not take the subject up,
+and impart a scandalous twist to it, and send it rolling
+like a snowball to gather up exaggeration and foul
+innuendo till it was big enough to overwhelm him. 
+What would happen to him if a formal charge were preferred
+against him?  He looked it up in the Discipline. 
+Of course, if his accusers magnified their mean
+suspicions and calumnious imaginings to the point of
+formulating a charge, it would be one of immorality. 
+They could prove nothing; there was nothing to prove. 
+At the worst, it was an indiscretion, which would
+involve his being admonished by his Presiding Elder. 
+Or if these narrow bigots confused slanders with proofs,
+and showed that they intended to convict him, then it would
+be open to him to withdraw from the ministry, in advance
+of his condemnation.  His relation to the church would
+be the same as if he had been expelled, but to the outer
+world it would be different.  And supposing he did withdraw
+from the ministry?
+
+Yes; this was the important point.  What if he did
+abandon this mistaken profession of his?  On its mental
+side the relief would be prodigious, unthinkable. 
+But on the practical side, the bread-and-butter side? 
+For some days Theron paused with a shudder when he reached
+this question.  The thought of the plunge into unknown
+material responsibilities gave him a sinking heart. 
+He tried to imagine himself lecturing, canvassing for
+books or insurance policies, writing for newspapers--
+and remained frightened.  But suddenly one day it occurred
+to him that these qualms and forebodings were sheer folly. 
+Was not Celia rich?  Would she not with lightning swiftness draw
+forth that check-book, like the flashing sword of a champion
+from its scabbard, and run to his relief?  Why, of course. 
+It was absurd not to have thought of that before.
+
+He recalled her momentary anger with him, that afternoon
+in the woods, when he had cried out that discovery would
+mean ruin to him.  He saw clearly enough now that she
+had been grieved at his want of faith in her protection. 
+In his flurry of fright, he had lost sight of the fact that,
+if exposure and trouble came to him, she would naturally
+feel that she had been the cause of his martyrdom. 
+It was plain enough now.  If he got into hot water,
+it would be solely on account of his having been seen
+with her.  He had walked into the woods with her--"the
+further the better" had been her own words--out of
+pure kindliness, and the desire to lead her away from
+the scene of her brother's and her own humiliation. 
+But why amplify arguments?  Her own warm heart would
+tell her, on the instant, how he had been sacrificed
+for her sake, and would bring her, eager and devoted,
+to his succor.
+
+That was all right, then.  Slowly, from this point,
+suggestions expanded themselves.  The future could be,
+if he willed it, one long serene triumph of love,
+and lofty intellectual companionship, and existence
+softened and enriched at every point by all that wealth
+could command, and the most exquisite tastes suggest. 
+Should he will it!  Ah! the question answered itself. 
+But he could not enter upon this beckoning heaven of
+a future until he had freed himself.  When Celia said
+to him, "Come!" he must not be in the position to reply,
+"I should like to, but unfortunately I am tied by the leg." 
+He should have to leave Octavius, leave the ministry,
+leave everything.  He could not begin too soon to face
+these contingencies.
+
+Very likely Celia had not thought it out as far as this. 
+With her, it was a mere vague "sometime I may." 
+But the harder masculine sense, Theron felt,
+existed for the very purpose of correcting and giving
+point to these loose feminine notions of time and space. 
+It was for him to clear away the obstacles, and map
+the plans out with definite decision.
+
+One warm afternoon, as he lolled in his easy-chair under
+the open window of his study, musing upon the ever-shifting
+phases of this vast, complicated, urgent problem,
+some chance words from the sidewalk in front came
+to his ears, and, coming, remained to clarify his thoughts.
+
+Two ladies whose voices were strange to him had stopped--
+as so many people almost daily stopped--to admire the garden
+of the parsonage.  One of them expressed her pleasure
+in general terms.  Said the other--
+
+"My husband declares those dahlias alone couldn't
+be matched for thirty dollars, and that some of those
+gladiolus must have cost three or four dollars apiece. 
+I know we've spent simply oceans of money on our garden,
+and it doesn't begin to compare with this."
+
+"It seems like a sinful waste to me," said her companion.
+
+"No-o," the other hesitated.  "No, I don't think quite that--
+if you can afford it just as well as not.  But it does
+seem to me that I'd rather live in a little better house,
+and not spend it ALL on flowers.  Just LOOK at that cactus!"
+
+The voices died away.  Theron sat up, with a look of arrested
+thought upon his face, then sprang to his feet and moved
+hurriedly through the parlor to an open front window. 
+Peering out with caution he saw that the two women receding
+from view were fashionably dressed and evidently came
+from homes of means.  He stared after them in a blank
+way until they turned a corner.
+
+He went into the hall then, put on his frock-coat and hat,
+and stepped out into the garden.  He was conscious
+of having rather avoided it heretofore--not altogether
+without reasons of his own, lying unexamined somewhere
+in the recesses of his mind.  Now he walked slowly about,
+and examined the flowers with great attentiveness. 
+The season was advancing, and he saw that many plants
+had gone out of bloom.  But what a magnificent plenitude
+of blossoms still remained!
+
+Thirty dollars' worth of dahlias--that was what the stranger
+had said.  Theron hardly brought himself to credit the statement;
+but all the same it was apparent to even his uninformed
+eye that these huge, imbricated, flowering masses,
+with their extraordinary half-colors, must be unusual. 
+He remembered that the boy in Gorringe's office had spoken
+of just one lot of plants costing thirty-one dollars and
+sixty cents, and there had been two other lots as well. 
+The figures remained surprisingly distinct in his memory. 
+It was no good deceiving himself any longer:  of course
+these were the plants that Gorringe had spent his money upon,
+here all about him.
+
+As he surveyed them with a sour regard, a cool breeze stirred
+across the garden.  The tall, over-laden flower-spikes
+of gladioli bent and nodded at him; the hollyhocks and
+flaming alvias, the clustered blossoms on the standard roses,
+the delicately painted lilies on their stilt-like stems,
+fluttered in the wind, and seemed all bowing satirically
+to him.  "Yes, Levi Gorringe paid for us!"  He almost
+heard their mocking declaration.
+
+Out in the back-yard, where a longer day of sunshine dwelt,
+there were many other flowers, and notably a bed of geraniums
+which literally made the eye ache.  Standing at this
+rear corner of the house, he caught the droning sound of
+Alice's voice, humming a hymn to herself as she went about
+her kitchen work.  He saw her through the open window. 
+She was sweeping, and had a sort of cap on her head
+which did not add to the graces of her appearance. 
+He looked at her with a hard glance, recalling as a fresh
+grievance the ten days of intolerable boredom he had
+spent cooped up in a ridiculous little tent with her,
+at the camp-meeting. She must have realized at the time
+how odious the enforced companionship was to him. 
+Yes, beyond doubt she did.  It came back to him now
+that they had spoken but rarely to each other.  She had
+not even praised his sermon upon the Sabbath-question,
+which every one else had been in raptures over.  For that
+matter she no longer praised anything he did, and took
+obvious pains to preserve toward him a distant demeanor. 
+So much the better, he felt himself thinking.  If she
+chose to behave in that offish and unwifely fashion,
+she could blame no one but herself for its results.
+
+She had seen him, and came now to the window,
+watering-pot and broom in hand.  She put her head out,
+to breathe a breath of dustless air, and began as if she
+would smile on him.  Then her face chilled and stiffened,
+as she caught his look.
+
+"Shall you be home for supper?" she asked, in her iciest tone.
+
+He had not thought of going out before.  The question,
+and the manner of it, gave immediate urgency to the idea
+of going somewhere.  "I may or I may not," he replied. 
+"It is quite impossible for me to say."  He turned on his
+heel with this, and walked briskly out of the yard and down
+the street.
+
+It was the most natural thing that presently he should
+be strolling past the Madden house, and letting a covert
+glance stray over its front and the grounds about it,
+as he loitered along.  Every day since his return
+from the woods he had given the fates this chance of
+bringing Celia to meet him, without avail.  He had hung
+about in the vicinity of the Catholic church on several
+evenings as well, but to no purpose.  The organ inside
+was dumb, and he could detect no signs of Celia's
+presence on the curtains of the pastorate next door. 
+This day, too, there was no one visible at the home
+of the Maddens, and he walked on, a little sadly. 
+It was weary work waiting for the signal that never came.
+
+But there were compensations.  His mind reverted doggedly to
+the flowers in his garden, and to Alice's behavior toward him. 
+They insisted upon connecting themselves in his thoughts. 
+Why should Levi Gorringe, a money-lender, and therefore
+the last man in the world to incur reckless expenditure,
+go and buy perhaps a hundred dollars, worth of flowers
+for his wife's garden?  It was time--high time--to face
+this question.  And his experiencing religion afterward,
+just when Alice did, and marching down to the rail to kneel
+beside her--that was a thing to be thought of, too.
+
+Meditation, it is true, hardly threw fresh light upon
+the matter.  It was incredible, of course, that there
+should be anything wrong.  To even shape a thought of Alice
+in connection with gallantry would be wholly impossible. 
+Nor could it be said that Gorringe, in his new capacity
+as a professing church-member, had disclosed any sign
+of ulterior motives, or of insincerity.  Yet there the
+facts were.  While Theron pondered them, their mystery,
+if they involved a mystery, baffled him altogether. 
+But when he had finished, he found himself all the same
+convinced that neither Alice nor Gorringe would be free
+to blame him for anything he might do.  He had grounds
+for complaint against them.  If he did not himself know
+just what these grounds were, it was certain enough
+that THEY knew.  Very well, then, let them take the
+responsibility for what happened.
+
+It was indeed awkward that at the moment, as Theron
+chanced to emerge temporarily from his brown-study, his
+eyes fell full upon the spare, well-knit form of Levi
+Gorringe himself, standing only a few feet away, in the
+staircase entrance to his law office.  His lean face,
+browned by the summer's exposure, had a more Arabian
+aspect than ever.  His hands were in his pockets, and he
+held an unlighted cigar between his teeth.  He looked
+the Rev. Mr. Ware over calmly, and nodded recognition.
+
+Theron had halted instinctively.  On the instant he would
+have given a great deal not to have stopped at all. 
+It was stupid of him to have paused, but it would not do
+now to go on without words of some sort.  He moved over to
+the door-way, and made a half-hearted pretence of looking
+at the photographs in one of the show-cases at its side. 
+As Mr. Gorringe did not take his hands from his pockets,
+there was no occasion for any formal greeting.
+
+"I had no idea that they took such good pictures in Octavius,"
+Theron remarked after a minute's silence, still bending
+in examination of the photographs.
+
+"They ought to; they charge New York prices,"
+observed the lawyer, sententiously.
+
+Theron found in the words confirmation of his feeling that
+Gorringe was not naturally a lavish or extravagant man. 
+Rather was he a careful and calculating man, who spent money
+only for a purpose.  Though the minister continued gazing
+at the stiff presentments of local beauties and swains,
+his eyes seemed to see salmon-hued hollyhocks and spotted
+lilies instead.  Suddenly a resolve came to him. 
+He stood erect, and faced his trustee.
+
+"Speaking of the price of things," he said, with an effort
+of arrogance in his measured tone, "I have never had
+an opportunity before of mentioning the subject of the
+flowers you have so kindly furnished for my--for MY garden."
+
+"Why mention it now?" queried Gorringe, with nonchalance. 
+He turned his cigar about with a movement of his lips,
+and worked it into the corner of his mouth.  He did not find
+it necessary to look at Theron at all.
+
+"Because--" began Mr. Ware, and then hesitated--"because--well,
+it raises a question of my being under obligation,
+which I--"
+
+"Oh, no, sir," said the lawyer; "put that out of your mind. 
+You are no more under obligation to me than I am to you. 
+Oh, no, make yourself easy about that.  Neither of us
+owes the other anything."
+
+"Not even good-will--I take that to be your meaning,"
+retorted Theron, with some heat.
+
+"The words are yours, sir," responded Gorringe, coolly. 
+"I do not object to them."
+
+"As you like," put in the other.  "If it be so, why,
+then all the more reason why I should, under the circumstances--"
+
+"Under what circumstances?" interposed the lawyer. 
+"Let us be clear about this thing as we go along. 
+To what circumstances do you refer?"
+
+He had turned his eyes now, and looked Theron in the face. 
+A slight protrusion of his lower jaw had given the cigar
+an upward tilt under the black mustache.
+
+"The circumstances are that you have brought or sent
+to my garden a great many very expensive flower-plants
+and bushes and so on."
+
+"And you object?  I had not supposed that clergymen
+in general--and you in particular--were so sensitive. 
+Have donation parties, then, gone out of date?"
+
+"I understand your sneer well enough," retorted Theron,
+"but that can pass.  The main point is, that you did me
+the honor to send these plants--or to smuggle them in--
+but never once deigned to hint to me that you had done so. 
+No one told me.  Except by mere accident, I should not have
+known to this day where they came from."
+
+Mr. Gorringe twisted the cigar at another angle,
+with lines of grim amusement about the corner of his mouth. 
+"I should have thought," he said with dry deliberation,
+"that possibly this fact might have raised in your mind
+the conceivable hypothesis that the plants might not be
+intended for you at all."
+
+"That is precisely it, sir," said Theron.  There were
+people passing, and he was forced to keep his voice down. 
+It would have been a relief, he felt, to shout.  "That is it--
+they were not intended for me."
+
+"Well, then, what are you talking about?"  The lawyer's
+speech had become abrupt almost to incivility.
+
+"I think my remarks have been perfectly clear,"
+said the minister, with dignity.  It was a new experience
+to be addressed in that fashion.  It occurred to him
+to add, "Please remember that I am not in the witness-box,
+to be bullied or insulted by a professional."
+
+Gorringe studied Theron's face attentively with a cold,
+searching scrutiny.  "You may thank your stars you're not!"
+he said, with significance.
+
+What on earth could he mean?  The words and the menacing
+tone greatly impressed Theron.  Indeed, upon reflection,
+he found that they frightened him.  The disposition to
+adopt a high tone with the lawyer was melting away.
+
+"I do not see," he began, and then deliberately allowed
+his voice to take on an injured and plaintive inflection--"I
+do not see why you should adopt this tone toward me--
+Brother Gorringe."
+
+The lawyer scowled, and bit sharply into the cigar,
+but said nothing.
+
+"If I have unconsciously offended you in any way," Theron went on,
+"I beg you to tell me how.  I liked you from the beginning
+of my pastorate here, and the thought that latterly we
+seemed to be drifting apart has given me much pain. 
+But now it is still more distressing to find you actually
+disposed to quarrel with me.  Surely, Brother Gorringe,
+between a pastor and a probationer who--"
+
+"No," Gorringe broke in; "quarrel isn't the word for it. 
+There isn't any quarrel, Mr. Ware."  He stepped down from
+the door-stone to the sidewalk as he spoke, and stood face
+to face with Theron.  Working-men with dinner-pails, and
+factory girls, were passing close to them, and he lowered
+his voice to a sharp, incisive half-whisper as he added,
+"It wouldn't be worth any grown man's while to quarrel
+with so poor a creature as you are."
+
+Theron stood confounded, with an empty stare of bewilderment
+on his face.  It rose in his mind that the right thing
+to feel was rage, righteous indignation, fury; but for
+the life of him, he could not muster any manly anger. 
+The character of the insult stupefied him.
+
+"I do not know that I have anything to say to you in reply,"
+he remarked, after what seemed to him a silence of minutes. 
+His lips framed the words automatically, but they
+expressed well enough the blank vacancy of his mind. 
+The suggestion that anybody deemed him a "poor creature"
+grew more astounding, incomprehensible, as it swelled in
+his brain.
+
+"No, I suppose not," snapped Gorringe.  "You're not the
+sort to stand up to men; your form is to go round the
+corner and take it out of somebody weaker than yourself--
+a defenceless woman, for instance."
+
+"Oh--ho!" said Theron.  The exclamation had uttered itself. 
+The sound of it seemed to clarify his muddled thoughts;
+and as they ranged themselves in order, he began to understand. 
+"Oh--ho!" he said again, and nodded his head in token
+of comprehension.
+
+The lawyer, chewing his cigar with increased activity,
+glared at him.  "What do you mean?" he demanded peremptorily.
+
+"Mean?" said the minister.  "Oh, nothing that I feel
+called upon to explain to you."
+
+It was passing strange, but his self-possession had all at once
+returned to him.  As it became more apparent that the lawyer
+was losing his temper, Theron found the courage to turn up
+the corners of his lips in show of a bitter little smile
+of confidence.  He looked into the other's dusky face,
+and flaunted this smile at it in contemptuous defiance. 
+"It is not a subject that I can discuss with propriety--
+at this stage," he added.
+
+"Damn you!  Are you talking about those flowers?"
+
+"Oh, I am not talking about anything in particular,"
+returned Theron, "not even the curious choice of language
+which my latest probationer seems to prefer."
+
+"Go and strike my name off the list!" said Gorringe,
+with rising passion.  "I was a fool to ever have it there. 
+To think of being a probationer of yours--my God!"
+
+"That will be a pity--from one point of view," remarked Theron,
+still with the ironical smile on his lips.  "You seemed
+to enter upon the new life with such deliberation and fixity
+of purpose, too!  I can imagine the regrets your withdrawal
+will cause, in certain quarters.  I only hope that it will
+not discourage those who accompanied you to the altar,
+and shared your enthusiasm at the time."  He had spoken
+throughout with studied slowness and an insolent nicety of utterance.
+
+"You had better go away!" broke forth Gorringe. 
+"If you don't, I shall forget myself."
+
+"For the first time?" asked Theron.  Then, warned by the flash
+in the lawyer's eye, he turned on his heel and sauntered,
+with a painstaking assumption of a mind quite at ease,
+up the street.
+
+Gorringe's own face twitched and his veins tingled
+as he looked after him.  He spat the shapeless cigar
+out of his mouth into the gutter, and, drawing forth
+another from his pocket, clenched it between his teeth,
+his gaze following the tall form of the Methodist minister
+till it was merged in the crowd.
+
+"Well, I'm damned!" he said aloud to himself.
+
+The photographer had come down to take in his showcases for
+the night.  He looked up from his task at the exclamation,
+and grinned inquiringly.
+
+"I've just been talking to a man," said the lawyer,
+"who's so much meaner than any other man I ever heard
+of that it takes my breath away.  He's got a wife that's
+as pure and good as gold, and he knows it, and she
+worships the ground he walks on, and he knows that too. 
+And yet the scoundrel is around trying to sniff out some
+shadow of a pretext for misusing her worse than he's
+already done.  Yes, sir; he'd be actually tickled to death
+if he could nose up some hint of a scandal about her--
+something that he could pretend to believe, and work for
+his own advantage to levy blackmail, or get rid of her,
+or whatever suited his book.  I didn't think there was such
+an out-and-out cur on this whole footstool.  I almost wish,
+by God, I'd thrown him into the canal!"
+
+"Yes, you lawyers must run against some pretty snide specimens,"
+remarked the photographer, lifting one of the cases from its sockets.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+Theron spent half an hour in aimless strolling about
+the streets.  From earliest boyhood his mind had always
+worked most clearly when he walked alone.  Every mental
+process which had left a mark upon his memory and his career--
+the daydreams of future academic greatness and fame
+which had fashioned themselves in his brain as a farm lad;
+the meditations, raptures, and high resolves of his
+student period at the seminary; the more notable sermons
+and powerful discourse by which he had revealed the genius
+that was in him to astonished and delighted assemblages--
+all were associated in his retrospective thoughts
+with solitary rambles.
+
+He had a very direct and vivid consciousness now that it was
+good to be on his legs, and alone.  He had never in his life
+been more sensible of the charm of his own companionship. 
+The encounter with Gorringe seemed to have cleared all
+the clouds out of his brain, and restored lightness to
+his heart.  After such an object lesson, the impossibility
+of his continuing to sacrifice himself to a notion
+of duty to these low-minded and coarse-natured villagers
+was beyond all argument.  There could no longer be any
+doubt about his moral right to turn his back upon them,
+to wash his hands of the miserable combination of hypocrisy
+and hysterics which they called their spiritual life.
+
+And the question of Gorringe and Alice, that too
+stood precisely where he wanted it.  Even in his
+own thoughts, he preferred to pursue it no further. 
+Between them somewhere an offence of concealment,
+it might be of conspiracy, had been committed against him. 
+It was no business of his to say more, or to think more. 
+He rested his case simply on the fact, which could not
+be denied, and which he was not in the least interested
+to have explained, one way or the other.  The recollection
+of Gorringe's obvious disturbance of mind was especially
+pleasant to him.  He himself had been magnanimous almost
+to the point of weakness.  He had gone out of his way
+to call the man "brother," and to give him an opportunity
+of behaving like a gentleman; but his kindly forbearance
+had been wasted.  Gorringe was not the man to understand
+generous feelings, much less rise to their level. 
+He had merely shown that he would be vicious if he knew how. 
+It was more important and satisfactory to recall that he
+had also shown a complete comprehension of the injured
+husband's grievance.  The fact that he had recognized it
+was enough--was, in fact, everything.
+
+In the background of his thoughts Theron had carried
+along a notion of going and dining with Father Forbes
+when the time for the evening meal should arrive. 
+The idea in itself attracted him, as a fitting capstone
+to his resolve not to go home to supper.  It gave just
+the right kind of character to his domestic revolt. 
+But when at last he stood on the doorstep of the pastorate,
+waiting for an answer to the tinkle of the electric bell he
+had heard ring inside, his mind contained only the single
+thought that now he should hear something about Celia. 
+Perhaps he might even find her there; but he put that
+suggestion aside as slightly unpleasant.
+
+The hag-faced housekeeper led him, as before,
+into the dining-room. It was still daylight, and he saw
+on the glance that the priest was alone at the table,
+with a book beside him to read from as he ate.
+
+Father Forbes rose and came forward, greeting his visitor
+with profuse urbanity and smiles.  If there was a perfunctory
+note in the invitation to sit down and share the meal,
+Theron did not catch it.  He frankly displayed his pleasure
+as he laid aside his hat, and took the chair opposite his host.
+
+"It is really only a few months since I was here,
+in this room, before," he remarked, as the priest closed
+his book and tossed it to one side, and the housekeeper came
+in to lay another place.  "Yet it might have been years,
+many long years, so tremendous is the difference
+that the lapse of time has wrought in me."
+
+"I am afraid we have nothing to tempt you very much,
+Mr. Ware," remarked Father Forbes, with a gesture of his
+plump white hand which embraced the dishes in the centre
+of the table.  "May I send you a bit of this boiled mutton? 
+I have very homely tastes when I am by myself."
+
+"I was saying," Theron observed, after some moments had
+passed in silence, "that I date such a tremendous revolution
+in my thoughts, my beliefs, my whole mind and character,
+from my first meeting with you, my first coming here. 
+I don't know how to describe to you the enormous change
+that has come over me; and I owe it all to you."
+
+"I can only hope, then, that it is entirely
+of a satisfactory nature," said the priest, politely smiling.
+
+"Oh, it is so splendidly satisfactory!" said Theron,
+with fervor.  "I look back at myself now with wonder and pity. 
+It seems incredible that, such a little while ago,
+I should have been such an ignorant and unimaginative clod
+of earth, content with such petty ambitions and actually
+proud of my limitations."
+
+"And you have larger ambitions now?" asked the other. 
+"Pray let me help you to some potatoes.  I am afraid
+that ambitions only get in our way and trip us up. 
+We clergymen are like street-car horses.  The more
+steadily we jog along between the rails, the better it is
+for us."
+
+"Oh, I don't intend to remain in the ministry,"
+declared Theron.  The statement seemed to him a little bald,
+now that he had made it; and as his companion lifted
+his brows in surprise, he added stumblingly:  "That is,
+as I feel now, it seems to me impossible that I should
+remain much longer.  With you, of course, it is different. 
+You have a thousand things to interest and pleasantly
+occupy you in your work and its ceremonies, so that mere
+belief or non-belief in the dogma hardly matters. 
+But in our church dogma is everything.  If you take
+that away, or cease to have its support, the rest
+is intolerable, hideous."
+
+Father Forbes cut another slice of mutton for himself. 
+"It is a pretty serious business to make such a change at
+your time of life.  I take it for granted you will think
+it all over very carefully before you commit yourself." 
+He said this with an almost indifferent air, which rather
+chilled his listener's enthusiasm.
+
+"Oh, yes,", Theron made answer; "I shall do nothing rash. 
+But I have a good many plans for the future."
+
+Father Forbes did not ask what these were, and a brief
+further period of silence fell upon the table.
+
+"I hope everything went off smoothly at the picnic,"
+Theron ventured, at last.  "I have not seen any of you
+since then."
+
+The priest shook his head and sighed.  "No," he said. 
+"It is a bad business.  I have had a great deal of
+unhappiness out of it this past fortnight.  That young
+man who was rude to you--of course it was mere drunken,
+irresponsible nonsense on his part--has got himself into
+a serious scrape, I'm afraid.  It is being kept quite
+within the family, and we hope to manage so that it will
+remain there, but it has terribly upset his father and
+his sister.  But that, after all, is not so hard to bear
+as the other affliction that has come upon the Maddens. 
+You remember Michael, the other brother?  He seems to have
+taken cold that evening, or perhaps over-exerted himself. 
+He has been seized with quick consumption.  He will hardly
+last till snow flies."
+
+"Oh, I am GRIEVED to hear that!"  Theron spoke with
+tremulous earnestness.  It seemed to him as if Michael
+were in some way related to him.
+
+"It is very hard upon them all," the priest went on. 
+"Michael is as sweet and holy a character as it is possible
+for any one to think of.  He is the apple of his father's eye. 
+They were inseparable, those two.  Do you know the father,
+Mr. Madden?"
+
+Theron shook his head.  "I think I have seen him," he said. 
+"A small man, with gray whiskers."
+
+"A peasant," said Father Forbes, "but with a heart of gold. 
+Poor man! he has had little enough out of his riches. 
+Ah, the West Coast people, what tragedies I have seen among
+them over here!  They have rudimentary lung organizations,
+like a frog's, to fit the mild, wet soft air they
+live in.  The sharp air here kills them off like flies
+in a frost.  Whole families go.  I should think there
+are a dozen of old Jeremiah's children in the cemetery. 
+If Michael could have passed his twenty-eighth year,
+there would have been hope for him, at least till his
+thirty-fifth. These pulmonary things seem to go by sevens,
+you know."
+
+"I didn't know," said Theron.  "It is very strange--
+and very sad."  His startled mind was busy, all at once,
+with conjectures as to Celia's age.
+
+"The sister--Miss Madden--seems extremely strong,"
+he remarked tentatively.
+
+"Celia may escape the general doom," said the priest. 
+His guest noted that he clenched his shapely white
+hand on the table as he spoke, and that his gentle,
+carefully modulated voice had a gritty hardness in its tone. 
+"THAT would be too dreadful to think of," he added.
+
+Theron shuddered in silence, and strove to shut his mind
+against the thought.
+
+"She has taken Michael's illness so deeply to heart,"
+the priest proceeded, "and devoted herself to him
+so untiringly that I get a little nervous about her. 
+I have been urging her to go away and get a change of air
+and scene, if only for a few days.  She does not sleep well,
+and that is always a bad thing."
+
+"I think I remember her telling me once that sometimes
+she had sleepless spells," said Theron.  "She said that
+then she banged on her piano at all hours, or dragged
+the cushions about from room to room, like a wild woman. 
+A very interesting young lady, don't you find her so?"
+
+Father Forbes let a wan smile play on his lips. 
+"What, our Celia?" he said.  "Interesting!  Why, Mr. Ware,
+there is no one like her in the world.  She is as unique as--
+what shall I say?--as the Irish are among races. 
+Her father and mother were both born in mud-cabins, and she--
+she might be the daughter of a hundred kings, except that
+they seem mostly rather under-witted than otherwise. 
+She always impresses me as a sort of atavistic idealization
+of the old Kelt at his finest and best.  There in Ireland
+you got a strange mixture of elementary early peoples,
+walled off from the outer world by the four seas, and free
+to work out their own racial amalgam on their own lines. 
+They brought with them at the outset a great inheritance
+of Eastern mysticism.  Others lost it, but the Irish,
+all alone on their island, kept it alive and brooded
+on it, and rooted their whole spiritual side in it. 
+Their religion is full of it; their blood is full of it;
+our Celia is fuller of it than anybody else.  The Ireland
+of two thousand years ago is incarnated in her.  They are
+the merriest people and the saddest, the most turbulent and
+the most docile, the most talented and the most unproductive,
+the most practical and the most visionary, the most devout
+and the most pagan.  These impossible contradictions war
+ceaselessly in their blood.  When I look at Celia, I seem
+to see in my mind's eye the fair young-ancestral mother of
+them all."
+
+Theron gazed at the speaker with open admiration. 
+"I love to hear you talk," he said simply.
+
+An unbidden memory flitted upward in his mind. 
+Those were the very words that Alice had so often on her
+lips in their old courtship days.  How curious it was! 
+He looked at the priest, and had a quaint sensation
+of feeling as a romantic woman must feel in the presence
+of a specially impressive masculine personality. 
+It was indeed strange that this soft-voiced, portly
+creature in a gown, with his white, fat hands and his
+feline suavity of manner, should produce such a commanding
+and unique effect of virility.  No doubt this was a part
+of the great sex mystery which historically surrounded
+the figure of the celibate priest as with an atmosphere. 
+Women had always been prostrating themselves before it. 
+Theron, watching his companion's full, pallid face in the
+lamp-light, tried to fancy himself in the priest's place,
+looking down upon these worshipping female forms. 
+He wondered what the celibate's attitude really was. 
+The enigma fascinated him.
+
+Father Forbes, after his rhetorical outburst, and been eating. 
+He pushed aside his cheese-plate. "I grow enthusiastic
+on the subject of my race sometimes," he remarked,
+with the suggestion of an apology.  "But I make up
+for it other times--most of the time--by scolding them. 
+If it were not such a noble thing to be an Irishman,
+it would be ridiculous."
+
+"Ah," said Theron, deprecatingly, "who would not be
+enthusiastic in talking of Miss Madden?  What you said
+about her was perfect.  As you spoke, I was thinking
+how proud and thankful we ought to be for the privilege
+of knowing her--we who do know her well--although of course
+your friendship with her is vastly more intimate than mine--
+than mine could ever hope to be."
+
+The priest offered no comment, and Theron went on: 
+"I hardly know how to describe the remarkable impression she
+makes upon me.  I can't imagine to myself any other young
+woman so brilliant or broad in her views, or so courageous. 
+Of course, her being so rich makes it easier for her to do
+just what she wants to do, but her bravery is astonishing
+all the same.  We had a long and very sympathetic talk
+in the woods, that day of the picnic, after we left you. 
+I don't know whether she spoke to you about it?"
+
+Father Forbes made a movement of the head and eyes
+which seemed to negative the suggestion.
+
+"Her talk," continued Theron, "gave me quite new
+ideas of the range and capacity of the female mind. 
+I wonder that everybody in Octavius isn't full of praise
+and admiration for her talents and exceptional character. 
+In such a small town as this, you would think she would
+be the centre of attention--the pride of the place."
+
+"I think she has as much praise as is good for her,"
+remarked the priest, quietly.
+
+"And here's a thing that puzzles me," pursued Mr. Ware. 
+"I was immensely surprised to find that Dr. Ledsmar
+doesn't even think she is smart--or at least he professes
+the utmost intellectual contempt for her, and says
+he dislikes her into the bargain.  But of course she
+dislikes him, too, so that's only natural.  But I can't
+understand his denying her great ability."
+
+The priest smiled in a dubious way.  "Don't borrow
+unnecessary alarm about that, Mr. Ware," he said,
+with studied smoothness of modulated tones.  "These two
+good friends of mine have much enjoyment out of the idea
+that they are fighting for the mastery over my poor
+unstable character.  It has grown to be a habit with them,
+and a hobby as well, and they pursue it with tireless zest. 
+There are not many intellectual diversions open to us here,
+and they make the most of this one.  It amuses them,
+and it is not without its charms for me, in my capacity as
+an interested observer.  It is a part of the game that they
+should pretend to themselves that they detest each other. 
+In reality I fancy that they like each other very much. 
+At any rate, there is nothing to be disturbed about."
+
+His mellifluous tones had somehow the effect of suggesting
+to Theron that he was an outsider and would better mind
+his own business.  Ah, if this purring pussy-cat of a
+priest only knew how little of an outsider he really was! 
+The thought gave him an easy self-control.
+
+"Of course," he said, "our warm mutual friendship makes
+the observation of these little individual vagaries
+merely a part of a delightful whole.  I should not
+dream of discussing Miss Madden's confidences to me,
+or the doctor's either, outside our own little group."
+
+Father Forbes reached behind him and took from a
+chair his black three-cornered cap with the tassel. 
+"Unfortunately I have a sick call waiting me," he said,
+gathering up his gown and slowly rising.
+
+"Yes, I saw the man sitting in the hall," remarked Theron,
+getting to his feet.
+
+"I would ask you to go upstairs and wait," the priest
+went on, "but my return, unhappily, is quite uncertain. 
+Another evening I may be more fortunate.  I am leaving town
+tomorrow for some days, but when I get back--"
+
+The polite sentence did not complete itself.  Father Forbes
+had come out into the hall, giving a cool nod to the
+working-man, who rose from the bench as they passed,
+and shook hands with his guest on the doorstep.
+
+When the door had closed upon Mr. Ware, the priest turned
+to the man.  "You have come about those frames," he said. 
+"If you will come upstairs, I will show you the prints,
+and you can give me a notion of what can be done with them. 
+I rather fancy the idea of a triptych in carved old English,
+if you can manage it."
+
+After the workman had gone away, Father Forbes put
+on slippers and an old loose soutane, lighted a cigar,
+and, pushing an easy-chair over to the reading lamp,
+sat down with a book.  Then something occurred to him,
+and he touched the house-bell at his elbow.
+
+"Maggie," he said gently, when the housekeeper appeared at
+the door, "I will have the coffee and FINE CHAMPAGNE up here,
+if it is no trouble.  And--oh, Maggie--I was compelled this
+evening to turn the blameless visit of the framemaker into
+a venial sin, and that involves a needless wear and tear
+of conscience.  I think that--hereafter--you understand?--
+I am not invariably at home when the Rev. Mr. Ware does
+me the honor to call."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+That night brought the first frost of the season
+worth counting.  In the morning, when Theron came downstairs,
+his casual glance through the window caught a desolate
+picture of blackened dahlia stalks and shrivelled blooms. 
+The gayety and color of the garden were gone,
+and in their place was shabby and dishevelled ruin. 
+He flung the sash up and leaned out.  The nipping autumn
+air was good to breathe.  He looked about him, surveying
+the havoc the frost had wrought among the flowers, and smiled.
+
+At breakfast he smiled again--a mirthless and
+calculated smile.  "I see that Brother Gorringe's
+flowers have come to grief over night," he remarked.
+
+Alice looked at him before she spoke, and saw on his
+face a confirmation of the hostile hint in his voice. 
+She nodded in a constrained way, and said nothing.
+
+"Or rather, I should say, "Theron went on, with deliberate
+words, "the late Brother Gorringe's flowers."
+
+"How do you mean--LATE" asked his wife, swiftly.
+
+"Oh, calm yourself!" replied the husband.  He is not dead. 
+He has only intimated to me his desire to sever his connection. 
+I may add that he did so in a highly offensive manner."
+
+"I am very sorry," said Alice, in a low tone, and with
+her eyes on her plate.
+
+"I took it for granted you would be grieved at his backsliding,"
+remarked Theron, making his phrases as pointed as he could. 
+"He was such a promising probationer, and you took
+such a keen interest in his spiritual awakening. 
+But the frost has nipped his zeal--along with the hundred
+or more dollars' worth of flowers by which he testified
+his faith.  I find something interesting in their having
+been blasted simultaneously."
+
+Alice dropped all pretence of interest in her breakfast. 
+With a flushed face and lips tightly compressed,
+she made a movement as if to rise from her chair. 
+Then, changing her mind, she sat bolt upright and faced
+her husband.
+
+"I think we had better have this out right now," she said,
+in a voice which Theron hardly recognized.  "You have
+been hinting round the subject long enough--too long. 
+There are some things nobody is obliged to put up with,
+and this is one of them.  You will oblige me by saying out
+in so many words what it is you are driving at."
+
+The outburst astounded Theron.  He laid down his knife
+and fork, and gazed at his wife in frank surprise. 
+She had so accustomed him, of late, to a demeanor almost
+abject in its depressed docility that he had quite
+forgotten the Alice of the old days, when she had spirit
+and courage enough for two, and a notable tongue of her own. 
+The flash in her eyes and the lines of resolution
+about her mouth and chin for a moment daunted him. 
+Then he observed by a flutter of the frill at her wrist
+that she was trembling.
+
+"I am sure I have nothing to 'say out in so many words,'
+as you put it," he replied, forcing his voice into cool,
+impassive tones.  "I merely commented upon a coincidence,
+that was all.  If, for any reason under the sun, the subject
+chances to be unpleasant to you, I have no earthly desire
+to pursue it."
+
+"But I insist upon having it pursued!" returned Alice. 
+"I've had just all I can stand of your insinuations
+and innuendoes, and it's high time we had some plain talk. 
+Ever since the revival, you have been dropping sly,
+underhand hints about Mr. Gorringe and--and me.  Now I ask
+you what you mean by it."
+
+Yes, there was a shake in her voice, and he could see
+how her bosom heaved in a tremor of nervousness. 
+It was easy for him to be very calm.
+
+"It is you who introduce these astonishing suggestions,
+not I," he replied coldly.  "It is you who couple
+your name with his--somewhat to my surprise, I admit--
+but let me suggest that we drop the subject.  You are
+excited just now, and you might say things that you
+would prefer to leave unsaid.  It would surely be better
+for all concerned to say no more about it."
+
+Alice, staring across the table at him with knitted brows,
+emitted a sharp little snort of indignation. 
+"Well, I never!  Theron, I wouldn't have thought it of you!"
+
+"There are so many things you wouldn't have thought,
+on such a variety of subjects," he observed, with a
+show of resuming his breakfast.  "But why continue? 
+We are only angering each other."
+
+"Never mind that," she replied, with more control
+over her speech.  "I guess things have come to a pass
+where a little anger won't do any harm.  I have a right
+to insist on knowing what you mean by your insinuations."
+
+Theron sighed.  "Why will you keep harping on the thing?"
+he asked wearily.  "I have displayed no curiosity. 
+I don't ask for any explanations.  I think I mentioned
+that the man had behaved insultingly to me--but that
+doesn't matter.  I don't bring it up as a grievance. 
+I am very well able to take care of myself I have no
+wish to recur to the incident in any way.  So far as I
+am concerned, the topic is dismissed."
+
+"Listen to me!" broke in Alice, with eager gravity. 
+She hesitated, as he looked up with a nod of attention,
+and reflected as well as she was able among her thoughts
+for a minute or two.  "This is what I want to say
+to you.  Ever since we came to this hateful Octavius,
+you and I have been drifting apart--or no, that doesn't
+express it--simply rushing away from each other. 
+It only began last spring, and now the space between us
+is so wide that we are worse than complete strangers. 
+For strangers at least don't hate each other, and I've had
+a good many occasions lately to see that you positively do
+hate me--"
+
+"What grotesque absurdity" interposed Theron, impatiently.
+
+"No, it isn't absurdity; it's gospel truth," retorted Alice. 
+"And--don't interrupt me--there have been times, too,
+when I have had to ask myself if I wasn't getting almost
+to hate you in return.  I tell you this frankly."
+
+"Yes, you are undoubtedly frank," commented the husband,
+toying with his teaspoon.  "A hypercritical person
+might consider, almost too frank."
+
+Alice scanned his face closely while he spoke, and held her
+breath as if in expectant suspense.  Her countenance clouded
+once more.  "You don't realize, Theron," she said gravely;
+"your voice when you speak to me, your look, your manner,
+they have all changed.  You are like another man--
+some man who never loved me, and doesn't even know me,
+much less like me.  I want to know what the end of it
+is to be.  Up to the time of your sickness last summer,
+until after the Soulsbys went away, I didn't let myself
+get downright discouraged.  It seemed too monstrous for
+belief that you should go away out of my life like that. 
+It didn't seem possible that God could allow such a thing. 
+It came to me that I had been lax in my Christian life,
+especially in my position as a minister's wife,
+and that this was my punishment.  I went to the altar,
+to intercede with Him, and to try to loose my burden
+at His feet.  But nothing has come of it.  I got no help
+from you."
+
+"Really, Alice," broke in Theron, "I explained over and
+over again to you how preoccupied I was--with the book--
+and affairs generally."
+
+"I got no assistance from Heaven either," she went on,
+declining the diversion he offered.  "I don't want to
+talk impiously, but if there is a God, he has forgotten me,
+his poor heart-broken hand-maiden."
+
+"You are talking impiously, Alice," observed her husband. 
+"And you are doing me cruel injustice, into the bargain."
+
+"I only wish I were!" she replied; "I only wish to God
+I were!"
+
+"Well, then, accept my complete assurance that you ARE--
+that your whole conception of me, and of what you are pleased
+to describe as my change toward you, is an entire and
+utter mistake.  Of course, the married state is no more exempt
+from the universal law of growth, development, alteration,
+than any other human institution.  On its spiritual side,
+of course, viewed either as a sacrament, or as--"
+
+"Don't let us go into that," interposed Alice, abruptly. 
+"In fact, there is no good in talking any more at all. 
+It is as if we didn't speak the same language. 
+You don't understand what I say; it makes no impression
+upon your mind."
+
+"Quite to the contrary," he assured her; "I have been
+deeply interested and concerned in all you have said. 
+I think you are laboring under a great delusion,
+and I have tried my best to convince you of it;
+but I have never heard you speak more intelligibly or,
+I might say, effectively."
+
+A little gleam of softness stole over Alice's face. 
+"If you only gave me a little more credit for intelligence,"
+she said, "you would find that I am not such a blockhead
+as you think I am."
+
+"Come, come!" he said, with a smiling show of impatience. 
+"You really mustn't impute things to me wholesale,
+like that."
+
+She was glad to answer the smile in kind.  "No; but truly,"
+she pleaded, "you don't realize it, but you have grown
+into a way of treating me as if I had absolutely no mind
+at all."
+
+"You have a very admirable mind," he responded,
+and took up his teaspoon again.  She reached for his cup,
+and poured out hot coffee for him.  An almost cheerful
+spirit had suddenly descended upon the breakfast table.
+
+"And now let me say the thing I have been aching to say
+for months," she began in less burdened voice.
+
+He lifted his brows.  "Haven't things been discussed
+pretty fully already?" he asked.
+
+The doubtful, harassed expression clouded upon her face
+at his words, and she paused.  "No," she said resolutely,
+after an instant's reflection; "it is my duty to
+discuss this, too.  It is a misunderstanding all round. 
+You remember that I told you Mr. Gorringe had given me
+some plants, which he got from some garden or other?"
+
+"If you really wish to go on with the subject--yes I
+have a recollection of that particular falsehood of his."
+
+"He did it with the kindest and friendliest motives in
+the world!" protested Alice.  "He saw how down-in-the-mouth
+and moping I was here, among these strangers--
+and I really was getting quite peaked and run-down--
+and he said I stayed indoors too much and it would do me
+all sorts of good to work in the garden, and he would
+send me some plants.  The next I knew, here they were,
+with a book about mixing soils and planting, and so on. 
+When I saw him next, and thanked him, I suppose I showed
+some apprehension about his having laid out money on them,
+and he, just to ease my mind, invented the story about his
+getting them for nothing.  When I found out the truth--
+I got it out of that boy, Harvey Semple--he admitted it
+quite frankly--said he was wrong to deceive me."
+
+"This was in the fine first fervor of his term of probation,
+I suppose," put in Theron.  He made no effort to dissemble
+the sneer in his voice.
+
+"Well," answered Alice, with a touch of acerbity,
+"I have told you now, and it is off my mind.  There never
+would have been the slightest concealment about it,
+if you hadn't begun by keeping me at arm's length,
+and making it next door to impossible to speak to you
+at all, and if--"
+
+"And if he hadn't lied."  Theron, as he finished her
+sentence for her, rose from the table.  Dallying for a
+brief moment by his chair, there seemed the magnetic
+premonition in the air of some further and kindlier word. 
+Then he turned and walked sedately into the next room,
+and closed the door behind him.  The talk was finished;
+and Alice, left alone, passed the knuckle of her thumb
+over one swimming eye and then the other, and bit her lips
+and swallowed down the sob that rose in her throat.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+It was early afternoon when Theron walked out of his yard,
+bestowing no glance upon the withered and tarnished
+show of the garden, and started with a definite step
+down the street.  The tendency to ruminative loitering,
+which those who saw him abroad always associated
+with his tall, spare figure, was not suggested today. 
+He moved forward like a man with a purpose.
+
+All the forenoon in the seclusion of the sitting-room,
+with a book opened before him, he had been thinking hard. 
+It was not the talk with Alice that occupied his thoughts. 
+That rose in his mind from time to time, only as a
+disagreeable blur, and he refused to dwell upon it. 
+It was nothing to him, he said to himself, what Gorringe's
+motives in lying had been.  As for Alice, he hardened
+his heart against her.  Just now it was her mood to try
+and make up to him.  But it had been something different
+yesterday, and who could say what it would be tomorrow? 
+He really had passed the limit of patience with her shifting
+emotional vagaries, now lurching in this direction,
+now in that.  She had had her chance to maintain a hold
+upon his interest and imagination, and had let it slip. 
+These were the accidents of life, the inevitable harsh
+happenings in the great tragedy of Nature.  They could not
+be helped, and there was nothing more to be said.
+
+He had bestowed much more attention upon what the priest
+had said the previous evening.  He passed in review all
+the glowing tributes Father Forbes had paid to Celia. 
+They warmed his senses as he recalled them, but they also,
+in a curious, indefinite way, caused him uneasiness. 
+There had been a personal fervor about them which was
+something more than priestly.  He remembered how the
+priest had turned pale and faltered when the question
+whether Celia would escape the general doom of her family
+came up.  It was not a merely pastoral agitation that,
+he felt sure.
+
+A hundred obscure hints, doubts, stray little suspicions,
+crowded upward together in his thoughts.  It became apparent
+to him now that from the outset he had been conscious
+of something queer--yes, from that very first day when he
+saw the priest and Celia together, and noted their glance
+of recognition inside the house of death.  He realized now,
+upon reflection, that the tone of other people, his own
+parishioners and his casual acquaintances in Octavius alike,
+had always had a certain note of reservation in it when
+it touched upon Miss Madden.  Her running in and out
+of the pastorate at all hours, the way the priest patted
+her on the shoulder before others, the obvious dislike
+the priest's ugly old housekeeper bore her, the astonishing
+freedom of their talk with each other--these dark
+memories loomed forth out of a mass of sinister conjecture.
+
+He could bear the uncertainty no longer.  Was it indeed
+not entirely his own fault that it had existed thus long? 
+No man with the spirit of a mouse would have shilly-shallied
+in this preposterous fashion, week after week, with the fever
+of a beautiful woman's kiss in his blood, and the woman
+herself living only round the corner.  The whole world
+had been as good as offered to him--a bewildering world
+of wealth and beauty and spiritual exaltation and love--
+and he, like a weak fool, had waited for it to be brought
+to him on a salver, as it were, and actually forced upon
+his acceptance!  "That is my failing," he reflected;
+"these miserable ecclesiastical bandages of mine have dwarfed
+my manly side.  The meanest of Thurston's clerks would
+have shown a more adventurous spirit and a bolder nerve. 
+If I do not act at once, with courage and resolution,
+everything will be lost.  Already she must think me
+unworthy of the honor it was in her sweet will to bestow." 
+Then he remembered that she was now always at home. 
+"Not another hour of foolish indecision!" he whispered
+to himself.  "I will put my destiny to the test.  I will see
+her today!
+
+A middle-aged, plain-faced servant answered his ring at the
+door-bell of the Madden mansion.  She was palpably Irish,
+and looked at him with a saddened preoccupation in her
+gray eyes, holding the door only a little ajar.
+
+Theron had got out one of his cards.  "I wish to make
+inquiry about young Mr. Madden--Mr. Michael Madden,"
+he said, holding the card forth tentatively.  "I have only
+just heard of his illness, and it has been a great grief
+to me."
+
+"He is no better," answered the woman, briefly.
+
+"I am the Rev. Mr. Ware," he went on, "and you may say that,
+if he is well enough, I should be glad to see him."
+
+The servant peered out at him with a suddenly altered
+expression, then shook her head.  "I don't think he would
+be wishing to see YOU," she replied.  It was evident
+from her tone that she suspected the visitor's intentions.
+
+Theron smiled in spite of himself.  "I have not come
+as a clergyman," he explained, "but as a friend of
+the family.  If you will tell Miss Madden that I am here,
+it will do just as well.  Yes, we won't bother him. 
+If you will kindly hand my card to his sister."
+
+When the domestic turned at this and went in, Theron felt
+like throwing his hat in the air, there where he stood. 
+The woman's churlish sectarian prejudices had played
+ideally into his hands.  In no other imaginable
+way could he have asked for Celia so naturally. 
+He wondered a little that a servant at such a grand house
+as this should leave callers standing on the doorstep. 
+Still more he wondered what he should say to the lady
+of his dream when he came into her presence.
+
+"Will you please to walk this way?"  The woman had returned. 
+She closed the door noiselessly behind him, and led the way,
+not up the sumptuous staircase, as Theron had expected,
+but along through the broad hall, past several large doors,
+to a small curtained archway at the end.  She pushed
+aside this curtain, and Theron found himself in a sort
+of conservatory, full of the hot, vague light of sunshine
+falling through ground-glass. The air was moist and close,
+and heavy with the smell of verdure and wet earth. 
+A tall bank of palms, with ferns sprawling at their base,
+reared itself directly in front of him.  The floor was of mosaic,
+and he saw now that there were rugs upon it, and that there
+were chairs and sofas, and other signs of habitation. 
+It was, indeed, only half a greenhouse, for the lower part
+of it was in rosewood panels, with floral paintings on them,
+like a room.
+
+Moving to one side of the barrier of palms, he discovered,
+to his great surprise, the figure of Michael, sitting propped
+up with pillows in a huge easy-chair. The sick man was
+looking at him with big, gravely intent eyes.  His face did
+not show as much change as Theron had in fancy pictured. 
+It had seemed almost as bony and cadaverous on the day
+of the picnic.  The hands spread out on the chair-arms
+were very white and thin, though, and the gaze in the blue
+eyes had a spectral quality which disturbed him.
+
+Michael raised his right hand, and Theron, stepping forward,
+took it limply in his for an instant.  Then he laid it
+down again.  The touch of people about to die had always
+been repugnant to him.  He could feel on his own warm
+palm the very damp of the grave.
+
+"I only heard from Father Forbes last evening of your--
+your ill-health," he said, somewhat hesitatingly.  He seated
+himself on a bench beneath the palms, facing the invalid,
+but still holding his hat.  "I hope very sincerely that you
+will soon be all right again."
+
+"My sister is lying down in her room," answered Michael. 
+He had not once taken his sombre and embarrassing gaze
+from the other's face.  The voice in which he uttered this
+uncalled-for remark was thin in fibre, cold and impassive. 
+It fell upon Theron's ears with a suggestion of hidden meaning. 
+He looked uneasily into Michael's eyes, and then away again. 
+They seemed to be looking straight through him, and there
+was no shirking the sensation that they saw and comprehended
+things with an unnatural prescience.
+
+"I hope she is feeling better," Theron found himself saying. 
+"Father Forbes mentioned that she was a little under
+the weather.  I dined with him last night."
+
+"I am glad that you came," said Michael, after a little pause. 
+His earnest, unblinking eyes seemed to supplement his
+tongue with speech of their own.  "I do be thinking a
+great deal about you.  I have matters to speak of to you,
+now that you are here."
+
+Theron bowed his head gently, in token of grateful attention. 
+He tried the experiment of looking away from Michael,
+but his glance went back again irresistibly, and fastened
+itself upon the sick man's gaze, and clung there.
+
+"I am next door to a dead man," he went on, paying no heed
+to the other's deprecatory gesture.  "It is not years
+or months with me, but weeks.  Then I go away to stand up
+for judgment on my sins, and if it is His merciful will,
+I shall see God.  So I say my good-byes now, and so you
+will let me speak plainly, and not think ill of what I say. 
+You are much changed, Mr. Ware, since you came to Octavius,
+and it is not a change for the good."
+
+Theron lifted his brows in unaffected surprise, and put
+inquiry into his glance.
+
+"I don't know if Protestants will be saved, in God's
+good time, or not," continued Michael.  "I find there
+are different opinions among the clergy about that,
+and of course it is not for me, only a plain mechanic,
+to be sure where learned and pious scholars are in doubt. 
+But I am sure about one thing.  Those Protestants,
+and others too, mind you, who profess and preach good deeds,
+and themselves do bad deeds--they will never be saved. 
+They will have no chance at all to escape hell-fire."
+
+"I think we are all agreed upon that, Mr. Madden,"
+said Theron, with surface suavity.
+
+"Then I say to you, Mr. Ware, you are yourself in a bad path. 
+Take the warning of a dying man, sir, and turn from it!"
+
+The impulse to smile tugged at Theron's facial muscles. 
+This was really too droll.  He looked up at the ceiling,
+the while he forced his countenance into a polite composure,
+then turned again to Michael, with some conciliatory
+commonplace ready for utterance.  But he said nothing,
+and all suggestion of levity left his mind, under the searching
+inspection bent upon him by the young man's hollow eyes. 
+What did Michael suspect?  What did he know?  What was he
+hinting at, in this strange talk of his?
+
+"I saw you often on the street when first you came here,"
+continued Michael.  "I knew the man who was here before you--
+that is, by sight--and he was not a good man.  But your face,
+when you came, pleased me.  I liked to look at you. 
+I was tormented just then, do you see, that so many decent,
+kindly people, old school-mates and friends and neighbors
+of mine--and, for that matter, others all over the country
+must lose their souls because they were Protestants. 
+At my boyhood and young manhood, that thought took the joy
+out of me.  Sometimes I usen't to sleep a whole night long,
+for thinking that some lad I had been playing with,
+perhaps in his own house, that very day, would be taken
+when he died, and his mother too, when she died, and thrown
+into the flames of hell for all eternity.  It made me
+so unhappy that finally I wouldn't go to any Protestant
+boy's house, and have his mother be nice to me, and give me
+cake and apples--and me thinking all the while that they
+were bound to be damned, no matter how good they were
+to me."
+
+The primitive humanity of this touched Theron, and he
+nodded approbation with a tender smile in his eyes,
+forgetting for the moment that a personal application
+of the monologue had been hinted at.
+
+"But then later, as I grew up," the sick man went on,
+"I learned that it was not altogether certain.  Some of
+the authorities, I found, maintained that it was doubtful,
+and some said openly that there must be salvation possible
+for good people who lived in ignorance of the truth
+through no fault of their own.  Then I had hope one day,
+and no hope the next, and as I did my work I thought
+it over, and in the evenings my father and I talked
+it over, and we settled nothing of it at all.  Of course,
+how could we?"
+
+"Did you ever discuss the question with your sister?"
+it occurred suddenly to Theron to interpose.  He was
+conscious of some daring in doing so, and he fancied
+that Michael's drawn face clouded a little at his words.
+
+"My sister is no theologian," he answered briefly. 
+"Women have no call to meddle with such matters. 
+But I was saying--it was in the middle of these doubtings
+of mine that you came here to Octavius, and I noticed
+you on the streets, and once in the evening--I made
+no secret of it to my people--I sat in the back of your
+church and heard you preach.  As I say, I liked you. 
+It was your face, and what I thought it showed of the man
+underneath it, that helped settle my mind more than
+anything else.  I said to myself:  "Here is a young man,
+only about my own age, and he has education and talents,
+and he does not seek to make money for himself,
+or a great name, but he is content to live humbly on
+the salary of a book-keeper, and devote all his time to
+prayer and the meditation of his religion, and preaching,
+and visiting the sick and the poor, and comforting them. 
+His very face is a pleasure and a help for those in suffering
+and trouble to look at.  The very sight of it makes one
+believe in pure thoughts and merciful deeds.  I will not
+credit it that God intends damning such a man as that,
+or any like him!"
+
+Theron bowed, with a slow, hesitating gravity of manner,
+and deep, not wholly complacent, attention on his face. 
+Evidently all this was by way of preparation for
+something unpleasant.
+
+"That was only last spring," said Michael.  His tired
+voice sank for a sentence or two into a meditative
+half-whisper. "And it was MY last spring of all.  I shall
+not be growing weak any more, or drawing hard breaths,
+when the first warm weather comes.  It will be one season
+to me hereafter, always the same."  He lifted his voice
+with perceptible effort.  "I am talking too much. 
+The rest I can say in a word.  Only half a year has
+gone by, and you have another face on you entirely. 
+I had noticed the small changes before, one by one.  I saw
+the great change, all of a sudden, the day of the picnic. 
+I see it a hundred times more now, as you sit there. 
+If it seemed to me like the face of a saint before,
+it is more like the face of a bar-keeper now!"
+
+This was quite too much.  Theron rose, flushed to the temples,
+and scowled down at the helpless man in the chair. 
+He swallowed the sharp words which came uppermost,
+and bit and moistened his lips as he forced himself to
+remember that this was a dying man, and Celia's brother,
+to whom she was devoted, and whom he himself felt he
+wanted to be very fond of.  He got the shadow of a smile
+on to his countenance.
+
+"I fear you HAVE tired yourself unduly," he said,
+in as non-contentious a tone as he could manage. 
+He even contrived a little deprecatory laugh.  I am
+afraid your real quarrel is with the air of Octavius. 
+It agrees with me so wonderfully--I am getting as fat
+as a seal.  But I do hope I am not paying for it by such
+a wholesale deterioration inside.  If my own opinion could
+be of any value, I should assure you that I feel myself
+an infinitely better and broader and stronger man than I
+was when I came here."
+
+Michael shook his head dogmatically.  "That is the greatest
+pity of all," he said, with renewed earnestness.  "You are
+entirely deceived about yourself.  You do not at all realize
+how you have altered your direction, or where you are going. 
+It was a great misfortune for you, sir, that you did not keep
+among your own people.  That poor half-brother of mine,
+though the drink was in him when he said that same to you,
+never spoke a truer word.  Keep among your own people,
+Mr. Ware!  When you go among others--you know what I mean--
+you have no proper understanding of what their sayings
+and doings really mean.  You do not realize that they are
+held up by the power of the true Church, as a little child
+learning to walk is held up with a belt by its nurse. 
+They can say and do things, and no harm at all come to them,
+which would mean destruction to you, because they have help,
+and you are walking alone.  And so be said by me, Mr. Ware! 
+Go back to the way you were brought up in, and leave
+alone the people whose ways are different from yours. 
+You are a married man, and you are the preacher of
+a religion, such as it is.  There can be nothing better
+for you than to go and strive to be a good husband,
+and to set a good example to the people of your Church,
+who look up to you--and mix yourself up no more with outside
+people and outside notions that only do you mischief. 
+And that is what I wanted to say to you."
+
+Theron took up his hat.  "I take in all kindness what you
+have felt it your duty to say to me, Mr. Madden," he said. 
+"I am not sure that I have altogether followed you, but I
+am very sure you mean it well."
+
+"I mean well by you," replied Michael, wearily moving
+his head on the pillow, and speaking in an undertone
+of languor and pain, "and I mean well by others, that are
+nearer to me, and that I have a right to care more about. 
+When a man lies by the site of his open grave, he does
+not be meaning ill to any human soul."
+
+"Yes--thanks--quite so!" faltered Theron.  He dallied
+for an instant with the temptation to seek some further
+explanation, but the sight of Michael's half-closed
+eyes and worn-out expression decided him against it. 
+It did not seem to be expected, either, that he should
+shake hands, and with a few perfunctory words of hope
+for the invalid's recovery, which fell with a jarring note
+of falsehood upon his own ears, he turned and left the room. 
+As he did so, Michael touched a bell on the table beside him.
+
+Theron drew a long breath in the hall, as the curtain
+fell behind him.  It was an immense relief to escape
+from the oppressive humidity and heat of the flower-room,
+and from that ridiculous bore of a Michael as well.
+
+The middle-aged, grave-faced servant, warned by the bell,
+stood waiting to conduct him to the door.
+
+"I am sorry to have missed Miss Madden," he said to her. 
+"She must be quite worn out.  Perhaps later in the day--"
+
+"She will not be seeing anybody today," returned the woman. 
+"She is going to New York this evening, and she is taking
+some rest against the journey."
+
+"Will she be away long?" he asked mechanically. 
+The servant's answer, "I have no idea," hardly penetrated
+his consciousness at all.
+
+He moved down the steps, and along the gravel to the street,
+in a maze of mental confusion.  When he reached the sidewalk,
+under the familiar elms, he paused, and made a definite
+effort to pull his thoughts together, and take stock
+of what had happened, of what was going to happen;
+but the thing baffled him.  It was as if some drug had
+stupefied his faculties.
+
+He began to walk, and gradually saw that what he was
+thinking about was the fact of Celia's departure for New
+York that evening.  He stared at this fact, at first in
+its nakedness, then clothed with reassuring suggestions
+that this was no doubt a trip she very often made. 
+There was a blind sense of comfort in this idea, and he
+rested himself upon it.  Yes, of course, she travelled
+a great deal.  New York must be as familiar to her
+as Octavius was to him.  Her going there now was quite
+a matter of course--the most natural thing in the world.
+
+Then there burst suddenly uppermost in his mind the
+other fact--that Father Forbes was also going to New
+York that evening.  The two things spindled upward,
+side by side, yet separately, in his mental vision;
+then they twisted and twined themselves together. 
+He followed their convolutions miserably, walking as if
+his eyes were shut.
+
+In slow fashion matters defined and arranged themselves
+before him.  The process of tracing their sequence was
+all torture, but there was no possibility, no notion,
+of shirking any detail of the pain.  The priest had spoken
+of his efforts to persuade Celia to go away for a few days,
+for rest and change of air and scene.  He must have known
+only too well that she was going, but of that he had been
+careful to drop no hint.  The possibility of accident
+was too slight to be worth considering.  People on such
+intimate terms as Celia and the priest--people with such
+facilities for seeing each other whenever they desired--
+did not find themselves on the same train of cars,
+with the same long journey in view, by mere chance.
+
+Theron walked until dusk began to close in upon the
+autumn day.  It grew colder, as he turned his face homeward. 
+He wondered if it would freeze again over-night, and then
+remembered the shrivelled flowers in his wife's garden. 
+For a moment they shaped themselves in a picture before his
+mind's eye; he saw their blackened foliage, their sicklied,
+drooping stalks, and wilted blooms, and as he looked,
+they restored themselves to the vigor and grace and richness
+of color of summer-time, as vividly as if they had been
+painted on a canvas.  Or no, the picture he stared at
+was not on canvas, but on the glossy, varnished panel
+of a luxurious sleeping-car. He shook his head angrily and
+blinked his eyes again and again, to prevent their seeing,
+seated together in the open window above this panel,
+the two people he knew were there, gloved and habited
+for the night's journey, waiting for the train to start.
+
+
+
+"Very much to my surprise," he found himself saying to Alice,
+watching her nervously as she laid the supper-table, "I
+find I must go to Albany tonight.  That is, it isn't
+absolutely necessary, for that matter, but I think it
+may easily turn out to be greatly to my advantage to go. 
+Something has arisen--I can't speak about it as yet--
+but the sooner I see the Bishop about it the better. 
+Things like that occur in a man's life, where boldly
+striking out a line of action, and following it up without
+an instant's delay, may make all the difference in the world
+to him.  Tomorrow it might be too late; and, besides, I can
+be home the sooner again."
+
+Alice's face showed surprise, but no trace of suspicion. 
+She spoke with studied amiability during the meal,
+and deferred with such unexpected tact to his implied
+desire not to be questioned as to the mysterious motives
+of the journey, that his mood instinctively softened and
+warmed toward her, as they finished supper.
+
+He smiled a little.  "I do hope I shan't have to go
+on tomorrow to New York; but these Bishops of ours are
+such gad-abouts one never knows where to catch them. 
+As like as not Sanderson may be down in New York,
+on Book-Concern business or something; and if he is,
+I shall have to chase him up.  But, after all, perhaps the
+trip will do me good--the change of air and scene,
+you know."
+
+"I'm sure I hope so," said Alice, honestly enough. 
+"If you do go on to New York, I suppose you'll go by the
+river-boat. Everybody talks so much of that beautiful
+sail down the Hudson."
+
+"That's an idea!" exclaimed Theron, welcoming it
+with enthusiasm.  "It hadn't occurred to me.  If I
+do have to go, and it is as lovely as they make out,
+the next time I promise I won't go without you, my girl. 
+I HAVE been rather out of sorts lately," he continued. 
+"When I come back, I daresay I shall be feeling better,
+more like my old self.  Then I'm going to try, Alice, to be
+nicer to you than I have been of late.  I'm afraid there
+was only too much truth in what you said this morning."
+
+"Never mind what I said this morning--or any other time,"
+broke in Alice, softly.  "Don't ever remember it again,
+Theron, if only--only--"
+
+He rose as she spoke, moved round the table to where
+she sat, and, bending over her, stopped the faltering
+sentence with a kiss.  When was it, he wondered,
+that he had last kissed her?  It seemed years, ages, ago.
+
+An hour later, with hat and overcoat on, and his valise
+in his hand, he stood on the doorstep of the parsonage,
+and kissed her once more before he turned and descended
+into the darkness.  He felt like whistling as his feet
+sounded firmly on the plank sidewalk beyond the gate. 
+It seemed as if he had never been in such capital good
+spirits before in his life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+The train was at a standstill somewhere, and the dull,
+ashen beginnings of daylight had made a first feeble start
+toward effacing the lamps in the car-roof, when the new day
+opened for Theron.  A man who had just come in stopped
+at the seat upon which he had been stretched through
+the night, and, tapping him brusquely on the knee, said,
+"I'm afraid I must trouble you, sir."  After a moment
+of sleep-burdened confusion, he sat up, and the man
+took the other half of the seat and opened a newspaper,
+still damp from the press.  It was morning, then.
+
+Theron rubbed a clear space upon the clouded window
+with his thumb, and looked out.  There was nothing to
+be seen but a broad stretch of tracks, and beyond this
+the shadowed outlines of wagons and machinery in a yard,
+with a background of factory buildings.
+
+The atmosphere in the car was vile beyond belief. 
+He thought of opening the window, but feared that the
+peremptory-looking man with the paper, who had wakened him
+and made him sit up, might object.  They were the only people
+in the car who were sitting up.  Backwards and forwards,
+on either side of the narrow aisle, the dim light disclosed
+recumbent forms, curled uncomfortably into corners,
+or sprawling at difficult angles which involved the least
+interference with one another.  Here and there an upturned
+face gave a livid patch of surface for the mingled play
+of the gray dawn and the yellow lamp-light. A ceaseless
+noise of snoring was in the air.
+
+He got up and walked to the tank of ice-water at the end
+of the aisle, and took a drink from the most inaccessible
+portion of the common tin-cup's rim.  The happy idea of going
+out on the platform struck him, and he acted upon it. 
+The morning air was deliciously cool and fresh by contrast,
+and he filled his lungs with it again and again. 
+Standing here, he could discern beyond the buildings to the
+right the faint purplish outlines of great rounded hills. 
+Some workmen, one of them bearing a torch, were crouching
+along under the side of the train, pounding upon
+the resonant wheels with small hammers.  He recalled
+having heard the same sound in the watches of the night,
+during a prolonged halt.  Some one had said it was Albany. 
+He smiled in spite of himself at the thought that Bishop
+Sanderson would never know about the visit he had missed.
+
+Swinging himself to the ground, he bent sidewise and looked
+forward down the long train.  There were five, six,
+perhaps more, sleeping-cars on in front.  Which one of them,
+he wondered--and then there came the sharp "All aboard!"
+from the other side, and he bundled up the steps again,
+and entered the car as the train slowly resumed its progress.
+
+He was wide-awake now, and quite at his ease.  He took
+his seat, and diverted himself by winking gravely at
+a little child facing him on the next seat but one. 
+There were four other children in the family party,
+encamped about the tired and still sleeping mother whose back
+was turned to Theron.  He recalled now having noticed this
+poor woman last night, in the first stage of his journey--
+how she fed her brood from one of the numerous baskets
+piled under their feet, and brought water in a tin dish
+of her own from the tank to use in washing their faces
+with a rag, and loosened their clothes to dispose
+them for the night's sleep.  The face of the woman,
+her manner and slatternly aspect, and the general effect
+of her belongings, bespoke squalid ignorance and poverty. 
+Watching her, Theron had felt curiously interested
+in the performance.  In one sense, it was scarcely more
+human than the spectacle of a cat licking her kittens,
+or a cow giving suck to her calf.  Yet, in another,
+was there anything more human?
+
+The child who had wakened before the rest regarded him
+with placidity, declining to be amused by his winkings,
+but exhibiting no other emotion.  She had been playing by
+herself with a couple of buttons tied on a string, and after
+giving a civil amount of attention to Theron's grimaces,
+she turned again to the superior attractions of this toy. 
+Her self-possession, her capacity for self-entertainment,
+the care she took not to arouse the others, all impressed
+him very much.  He felt in his pocket for a small coin,
+and, reaching forward, offered it to her.  She took
+it calmly, bestowed a tranquil gaze upon him for a moment,
+and went back to the buttons.  Her indifference produced
+an unpleasant sensation upon him somehow, and he rubbed
+the steaming window clear again, and stared out of it.
+
+The wide river lay before him, flanked by a precipitous wall
+of cliffs which he knew instantly must be the Palisades. 
+There was an advertisement painted on them which he
+tried in vain to read.  He was surprised to find they
+interested him so slightly.  He had heard all his life
+of the Hudson, and especially of it just at this point. 
+The reality seemed to him almost commonplace.  His failure
+to be thrilled depressed him for the moment.
+
+"I suppose those ARE the Palisades?" he asked his neighbor.
+
+The man glanced up from his paper, nodded, and made
+as if to resume his reading.  But his eye had caught
+something in the prospect through the window which
+arrested his attention.  "By George!" he exclaimed,
+and lifted himself to get a clearer view.
+
+"What is it?" asked Theron, peering forth as well.
+
+"Nothing; only Barclay Wendover's yacht is still there. 
+There's been a hitch of some sort.  They were to have
+left yesterday."
+
+"Is that it--that long black thing?" queried Theron. 
+"That can't be a yacht, can it?"
+
+"What do you think it is?" answered the other. 
+They were looking at a slim, narrow hull, lying at anchor,
+silent and motionless on the drab expanse of water. 
+"If that ain't a yacht, they haven't begun building any yet. 
+They're taking her over to the Mediterranean for a cruise,
+you know--around India and Japan for the winter, and home
+by the South Sea islands.  Friend o' mine's in the party. 
+Wouldn't mind the trip myself."
+
+"But do you mean to say," asked Theron, "that that little
+shell of a thing can sail across the ocean?  Why, how many
+people would she hold?"
+
+The man laughed.  "Well," he said, "there's room for two
+sets of quadrilles in the chief saloon, if the rest keep
+their legs well up on the sofas.  But there's only ten
+or a dozen in the party this time.  More than that rather
+get in one another's way, especially with so many ladies
+on board."
+
+Theron asked no more questions, but bent his head to see
+the last of this wonderful craft.  The sight of it,
+and what he had heard about it, suddenly gave point
+and focus to his thoughts.  He knew at last what it was
+that had lurked, formless and undesignated, these many
+days in the background of his dreams.  The picture rose
+in his mind now of Celia as the mistress of a yacht. 
+He could see her reclining in a low easy-chair upon
+the polished deck, with the big white sails billowing
+behind her, and the sun shining upon the deep blue waves,
+and glistening through the splash of spray in the air,
+and weaving a halo of glowing gold about her fair head. 
+Ah, how the tender visions crowded now upon him! 
+Eternal summer basked round this enchanted yacht of his fancy--
+summer sought now in Scottish firths or Norwegian fiords,
+now in quaint old Southern harbors, ablaze with the hues
+of strange costumes and half-tropical flowers and fruits,
+now in far-away Oriental bays and lagoons, or among
+the coral reefs and palm-trees of the luxurious Pacific. 
+He dwelt upon these new imaginings with the fervent longing
+of an inland-born boy.  Every vague yearning he had ever felt
+toward salt-water stirred again in his blood at the thought
+of the sea--with Celia.
+
+Why not?  She had never visited any foreign land. 
+"Sometime," she had said, "sometime, no doubt I will." 
+He could hear again the wistful, musing tone of her voice. 
+The thought had fascinations for her, it was clear. 
+How irresistibly would it not appeal to her, presented with
+the added charm of a roving, vagrant independence on
+the high seas, free to speed in her snow-winged chariot
+wherever she willed over the deep, loitering in this place,
+or up-helm-and-away to another, with no more care or weight
+of responsibility than the gulls tossing through the air in
+her wake!
+
+Theron felt, rather than phrased to himself, that there
+would not be "ten or a dozen in the party" on that yacht. 
+Without defining anything in his mind, he breathed in
+fancy the same bold ocean breeze which filled the sails,
+and toyed with Celia's hair; he looked with her as she
+sat by the rail, and saw the same waves racing past,
+the same vast dome of cloud and ether that were mirrored
+in her brown eyes, and there was no one else anywhere
+near them.  Even the men in sailors' clothes, who would
+be pulling at ropes, or climbing up tarred ladders,
+kept themselves considerately outside the picture. 
+Only Celia sat there, and at her feet, gazing up again
+into her face as in the forest, the man whose whole
+being had been consecrated to her service, her worship,
+by the kiss.
+
+"You've passed it now.  I was trying to point out the
+Jumel house to you--where Aaron Burr lived, you know."
+
+Theron roused himself from his day-dream, and nodded with
+a confused smile at his neighbor.  "Thanks," he faltered;
+"I didn't hear you.  The train makes such a noise, and I
+must have been dozing."
+
+He looked about him.  The night aspect, as of a tramps'
+lodging-house, had quite disappeared from the car. 
+Everybody was sitting up; and the more impatient
+were beginning to collect their bundles and hand-bags
+from the racks and floor.  An expressman came through,
+jangling a huge bunch of brass checks on leathern thongs
+over his arm, and held parley with passengers along
+the aisle.  Outside, citified streets, with stores
+and factories, were alternating in the moving panorama
+with open fields; and, even as he looked, these vacant
+spaces ceased altogether, and successive regular lines
+of pavement, between two tall rows of houses all alike,
+began to stretch out, wheel to the right, and swing
+off out of view, for all the world like the avenues of
+hop-poles he remembered as a boy.  Then was a long tunnel,
+its darkness broken at stated intervals by brief bursts
+of daylight from overhead, and out of this all at
+once the train drew up its full length in some vast,
+vaguely lighted enclosure, and stopped.
+
+"Yes, this is New York," said the man, folding up his paper,
+and springing to his feet.  The narrow aisle was filled with
+many others who had been prompter still; and Theron stood,
+bag in hand, waiting till this energetic throng should
+have pushed itself bodily past him forth from the car. 
+Then he himself made his way out, drifting with a sense
+of helplessness in their resolute wake.  There rose in his
+mind the sudden conviction that he would be too late. 
+All the passengers in the forward sleepers would be gone
+before he could get there.  Yet even this terror gave him
+no new power to get ahead of anybody else in the tightly
+packed throng.
+
+Once on the broad platform, the others started off briskly;
+they all seemed to know just where they wanted to go,
+and to feel that no instant of time was to be lost
+in getting there.  Theron himself caught some of this
+urgent spirit, and hurled himself along in the throng
+with reckless haste, knocking his bag against peoples'
+legs, but never pausing for apology or comment until
+he found himself abreast of the locomotive at the head
+of the train.  He drew aside from the main current here,
+and began searching the platform, far and near, for those
+he had travelled so far to find.
+
+The platform emptied itself.  Theron lingered on in
+puzzled hesitation, and looked about him.  In the whole
+immense station, with its acres of tracks and footways,
+and its incessantly shifting processions of people,
+there was visible nobody else who seemed also in doubt,
+or who appeared capable of sympathizing with indecision
+in any form.  Another train came in, some way over to
+the right, and before it had fairly stopped, swarms of
+eager men began boiling out of each end of each car,
+literally precipitating themselves over one another,
+it seemed to Theron, in their excited dash down the steps. 
+As they caught their footing below, they started racing
+pell-mell down the platform to its end; there he saw them,
+looking more than ever like clustered bees in the distance,
+struggling vehemently in a dense mass up a staircase in the
+remote corner of the building.
+
+"What are those folks running for?  Is there a fire?"
+he asked an amiable-faced young mulatto, in the uniform
+of the sleeping-car service, who passed him with some light
+hand-bags.
+
+"No; they's Harlem people, I guess--jes' catchin' the Elevated--
+that's all, sir," he answered obligingly.
+
+At the moment some passengers emerged slowly from one
+of the sleeping-cars, and came loitering toward him.
+
+"Why, are there people still in these cars?" he asked eagerly. 
+"Haven't they all gone?"
+
+"Some has; some ain't," the porter replied.  "They most
+generally take their time about it.  They ain't no hurry,
+so long's they get out 'fore we're drawn round to the drill-yard."
+
+There was still hope, then.  Theron took up his bag
+and walked forward, intent upon finding some place from
+which he could watch unobserved the belated stragglers
+issuing from the sleeping-cars. He started back all at once,
+confronted by a semi-circle of violent men with whips
+and badges, who stunned his hearing by a sudden vociferous
+outburst of shouts and yells.  They made furious gestures
+at him with their whips and fists, to enforce the
+incoherent babel of their voices; and in these gestures,
+as in their faces and cries, there seemed a great deal
+of menace and very little invitation.  There was a big
+policeman sauntering near by, and Theron got the idea
+that it was his presence alone which protected him from
+open violence at the hands of these savage hackmen. 
+He tightened his clutch on his valise, and, turning his back
+on them and their uproar, tried to brave it out and stand
+where he was.  But the policeman came lounging slowly
+toward him, with such authority in his swaying gait,
+and such urban omniscience written all over his broad,
+sandy face, that he lost heart, and beat an abrupt retreat
+off to the right, where there were a number of doorways,
+near which other people had ventured to put down baggage
+on the floor.
+
+Here, somewhat screened from observation, he stood
+for a long time, watching at odd moments the ceaselessly
+varying phases of the strange scene about him, but always
+keeping an eye on the train he had himself arrived in. 
+It was slow and dispiriting work.  A dozen times his heart
+failed him, and he said to himself mournfully that he
+had had his journey for nothing.  Then some new figure
+would appear, alighting from the steps of a sleeper,
+and hope revived in his breast.
+
+At last, when over half an hour of expectancy had been
+marked off by the big clock overhead, his suspense came
+to an end.  He saw Father Forbes' erect and substantial
+form, standing on the car platform nearest of all,
+balancing himself with his white hands on the rails,
+waiting for something.  Then after a little he came down,
+followed by a black porter, whose arms were burdened
+by numerous bags and parcels.  The two stood a minute
+or so more in hesitation at the side of the steps. 
+Then Celia descended, and the three advanced.
+
+The importance of not being discovered was uppermost
+in Theron's mind, now that he saw them actually coming
+toward him.  He had avoided this the previous evening,
+in the Octavius depot, with some skill, he flattered himself. 
+It gave him a pleasurable sense of being a man of affairs,
+almost a detective, to be confronted by the necessity
+now of baffling observation once again.  He was still
+rather without plans for keeping them in view, once they
+left the station.  He had supposed that he would be able
+to hear what hotel they directed their driver to take
+them to, and, failing that, he had fostered a notion,
+based upon a story he had read when a boy, of throwing
+himself into another carriage, and bidding his driver
+to pursue them in hot haste, and on his life not fail
+to track them down.  These devices seemed somewhat empty,
+now that the urgent moment was at hand; and as he drew
+back behind some other loiterers, out of view, he sharply
+racked his wits for some way of coping with this most
+pressing problem.
+
+It turned out, however, that there was no difficulty
+at all.  Father Forbes and Celia seemed to have no use for
+the hackmen, but moved straight forward toward the street,
+through the doorway next to that in which Theron cowered. 
+He stole round, and followed them at a safe distance,
+making Celia's hat, and the portmanteau perched on
+the shoulder of the porter behind her, his guides. 
+To his surprise, they still kept on their course when they
+had reached the sidewalk, and went over the pavement
+across an open square which spread itself directly in
+front of the station.  Hanging as far behind as he dared,
+he saw them pass to the other sidewalk diagonally opposite,
+proceed for a block or so along this, and then separate at
+a corner.  Celia and the negro lad went down a side street,
+and entered the door of a vast, tall red-brick building
+which occupied the whole block.  The priest, turning on
+his heel, came back again and went boldly up the broad
+steps of the front entrance to this same structure,
+which Theron now discovered to be the Murray Hill Hotel.
+
+Fortune had indeed favored him.  He not only knew where
+they were, but he had been himself a witness to the furtive
+way in which they entered the house by different doors. 
+Nothing in his own limited experience of hotels helped him
+to comprehend the notion of a separate entrance for ladies
+and their luggage.  He did not feel quite sure about the
+significance of what he had observed, in his own mind. 
+But it was apparent to him that there was something
+underhanded about it.
+
+After lingering awhile on the steps of the hotel,
+and satisfying himself by peeps through the glass
+doors that the coast was clear, he ventured inside. 
+The great corridor contained many people, coming, going,
+or standing about, but none of them paid any attention to him. 
+At last he made up his mind, and beckoned a colored boy
+to him from a group gathered in the shadows of the big
+central staircase.  Explaining that he did not at that moment
+wish a room, but desired to leave his bag, the boy took
+him to a cloak-room, and got him a check for the thing. 
+With this in his pocket he felt himself more at his ease,
+and turned to walk away.  Then suddenly he wheeled, and,
+bending his body over the counter of the cloak-room,
+astonished the attendant inside by the eagerness with
+which he scrutinized the piled rows of portmanteaus,
+trunks, overcoats, and bundles in the little enclosure.
+
+"What is it you want?  Here's your bag, if you're looking
+for that," this man said to him.
+
+"No, thanks; it's nothing," replied Theron,
+straightening himself again.  He had had a narrow escape. 
+Father Forbes and Celia, walking side by side, had come
+down the small passage in which he stood, and had passed him
+so closely that he had felt her dress brush against him. 
+Fortunately he had seen them in time, and by throwing himself
+half into the cloak-room, had rendered recognition impossible.
+
+He walked now in the direction they had taken, till he came
+to the polite colored man at an open door on the left,
+who was bowing people into the breakfast room. 
+Standing in the doorway, he looked about him till his eye
+lighted upon his two friends, seated at a small table
+by a distant window, with a black waiter, card in hand,
+bending over in consultation with them.
+
+Returning to the corridor, he made bold now to march
+up to the desk and examine the register.  The priest's
+name was not there.  He found only the brief entry,
+"Miss Madden, Octavius," written, not by her, but by
+Father Forbes.  On the line were two numbers in pencil,
+with an "and" between them.  An indirect question to one
+of the clerks helped him to an explanation of this. 
+When there were two numbers, it meant that the guest in
+question had a parlor as well as a bedroom.
+
+Here he drew a long, satisfied breath, and turned away. 
+The first half of his quest stood completed--and that
+much more fully and easily than he had dared to hope. 
+He could not but feel a certain new respect for himself
+as a man of resource and energy.  He had demonstrated
+that people could not fool with him with impunity.
+
+It remained to decide what he would do with his discovery,
+now that it had been so satisfactorily made. 
+As yet, he had given this hardly a thought.  Even now,
+it did not thrust itself forward as a thing demanding
+instant attention.  It was much more important, first of all,
+to get a good breakfast.  He had learned that there was
+another and less formal eating-place, downstairs in the
+basement by the bar, with an entrance from the street. 
+He walked down by the inner stairway instead,
+feeling himself already at home in the big hotel. 
+He ordered an ample breakfast, and came out while it
+was being served to wash and have his boots blacked,
+and he gave the man a quarter of a dollar.  His pockets
+were filled with silver quarters, half-dollars, and dollars
+almost to a burdensome point, and in his valise was a bag
+full of smaller change, including many rolls of copper
+cents which Alice always counted and packed up on Mondays. 
+In the hurry of leaving he had brought with him the church
+collections for the past two weeks.  It occurred to him
+that he must keep a strict account of his expenditure. 
+Meanwhile he gave ten cents to another man in a silk-sleeved
+cardigan jacket, who had merely stood by and looked at him
+while his boots were being polished.  There was a sense
+of metropolitan affluence in the very atmosphere.
+
+The little table in the adjoining room, on which Theron
+found his meal in waiting for him, seemed a vision of
+delicate napery and refined appointments in his eyes. 
+He was wolfishly hungry, and the dishes he looked upon
+gave him back assurances by sight and smell that he
+was very happy as well.  The servant in attendance
+had an extremely white apron and a kindly black face. 
+He bowed when Theron looked at him, with the air of a
+lifelong admirer and humble friend.
+
+"I suppose you'll have claret with your breakfast, sir?"
+he remarked, as if it were a matter of course.
+
+"Why, certainly," answered Theron, stretching his legs
+contentedly under the table, and tucking the corner
+of his napkin in his neckband.--"Certainly, my good man."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+At ten o'clock Theron, loitering near the bookstall
+in the corridor, saw Father Forbes come downstairs,
+pass out through the big front doors, get into a carriage,
+and drive away.
+
+This relieved him of a certain sense of responsibility,
+and he retired to a corner sofa and sat down. 
+The detective side of him being off duty, so to speak,
+there was leisure at last for reflection upon the other
+aspects of his mission.  Yes; it was high time for him
+to consider what he should do next.
+
+It was easier to recognize this fact, however, than to act
+upon it.  His mind was full of tricksy devices for eluding
+this task of serious thought which he sought to impose
+upon it.  It seemed so much pleasanter not to think at all--
+but just to drift.  He found himself watching with envy
+the men who, as they came out from their breakfast,
+walked over to the bookstall, and bought cigars from the
+row of boxes nestling there among the newspaper piles. 
+They had such evident delight in the work of selection;
+they took off the ends of the cigars so carefully,
+and lighted them with such meditative attention,--
+he could see that he was wofully handicapped by not
+knowing how to smoke.  He had had the most wonderful
+breakfast of his life, but even in the consciousness
+of comfortable repletion which pervaded his being,
+there was an obstinate sense of something lacking. 
+No doubt a good cigar was the thing needed to round out
+the perfection of such a breakfast.  He half rose once,
+fired by a sudden resolution to go over and get one. 
+But of course that was nonsense; it would only make
+him sick.  He sat down, and determinedly set himself
+to thinking.
+
+The effort finally brought fruit--and of a kind which
+gave him a very unhappy quarter of an hour.  The lover
+part of him was uppermost now, insistently exposing all
+its raw surfaces to the stings and scalds of jealousy. 
+Up to this moment, his brain had always evaded the direct
+question of how he and the priest relatively stood in
+Celia's estimation.  It forced itself remorselessly upon
+him now; and his thoughts, so far from shirking the subject,
+seemed to rise up to meet it.  It was extremely unpleasant,
+all this.
+
+But then a calmer view asserted itself.  Why go out of
+his way to invent anguish for himself?  The relations
+between Celia and the priest, whatever they might be,
+were certainly of old standing.  They had begun before
+his time.  His own romance was a more recent affair, and must
+take its place, of course, subject to existing conditions.
+
+It was all right for him to come to New York, and satisfy
+his legitimate curiosity as to the exact character and scope
+of these conditions.  But it was foolish to pretend to be
+amazed or dismayed at the discovery of their existence. 
+They were a part of the situation which he, with his
+eyes wide open, had accepted.  It was his function
+to triumph over them, to supplant them, to rear the
+edifice of his own victorious passion upon their ruins. 
+It was to this that Celia's kiss had invited him. 
+It was for this that he had come to New York.  To let
+his purpose be hampered or thwarted now by childish
+doubts and jealousies would be ridiculous.
+
+He rose, and holding himself very erect, walked with measured
+deliberation across the corridor and up the broad staircase. 
+There was an elevator near at hand, he had noticed,
+but he preferred the stairs.  One or two of the colored
+boys clustered about the foot of the stairs looked at him,
+and he had a moment of dreadful apprehension lest they
+should stop his progress.  Nothing was said, and he went on. 
+The numbers on the first floor were not what he wanted,
+and after some wandering about he ascended to the next,
+and then to the third.  Every now and then he encountered
+attendants, but intuitively he bore himself with an air of
+knowing what he was about which protected him from inquiry.
+
+Finally he came upon the hall-way he sought.  Passing along,
+he found the doors bearing the numbers he had memorized
+so well.  They were quite close together, and there was
+nothing to help him guess which belonged to the parlor. 
+He hesitated, gazing wistfully from one to the other. 
+In the instant of indecision, even while his alert ear
+caught the sound of feet coming along toward the passage
+in which he stood, a thought came to quicken his resolve. 
+It became apparent to him that his discovery gave him
+a certain new measure of freedom with Celia, a sort of
+right to take things more for granted than heretofore. 
+He chose a door at random, and rapped distinctly on
+the panel.
+
+"Come!"
+
+The voice he knew for Celia's. The single word, however,
+recalled the usage of Father Forbes, which he had noted
+more than once at the pastorate, when Maggie had knocked.
+
+He straightened his shoulders, took his hat off, and pushed
+open the door.  It WAS the parlor--a room of sofas,
+pianos, big easy-chairs, and luxurious bric-a-brac. A tall
+woman was walking up and down in it, with bowed head. 
+Her back was at the moment toward him; and he looked at her,
+saying to himself that this was the lady of his dreams,
+the enchantress of the kiss, the woman who loved him--
+but somehow it did not seem to his senses to be Celia.
+
+She turned, and moved a step or two in his direction before
+she mechanically lifted her eyes and saw who was standing
+in her doorway.  She stopped short, and regarded him. 
+Her face was in the shadow, and he could make out nothing
+of its expression, save that there was a general effect
+of gravity about it.
+
+"I cannot receive you," she said.  "You must go away. 
+You have no business to come like this without sending up
+your card."
+
+Theron smiled at her.  The notion of taking in earnest
+her inhospitable words did not at all occur to him. 
+He could see now that her face had vexed and saddened lines
+upon it, and the sharpness of her tone remained in his ears. 
+But he smiled again gently, to reassure her.
+
+"I ought to have sent up my name, I know," he said,
+"but I couldn't bear to wait.  I just saw your name
+on the register and--you WILL forgive me, won't you?--
+I ran to you at once.  I know you won't have the heart
+to send me away!"
+
+She stood where she had halted, her arms behind her,
+looking him fixedly in the face.  He had made a movement
+to advance, and offer his hand in greeting, but her
+posture checked the impulse.  His courage began to falter
+under her inspection.
+
+"Must I really go down again?" he pleaded.  "It's a
+crushing penalty to suffer for such little indiscretion. 
+I was so excited to find you were here--I never stopped
+to think.  Don't send me away; please don't!"
+
+Celia raised her head.  "Well, shut the door, then,"
+she said, "since you are so anxious to stay.  You would
+have done much better, though, very much better indeed,
+to have taken the hint and gone away."
+
+"Will you shake hands with me, Celia?" he asked softly,
+as he came near her.
+
+"Sit there, please!" she made answer, indicating a
+chair in the middle of the room.  He obeyed her,
+but to his surprise, instead of seating herself as well,
+she began walking up and down the length of the floor again. 
+After a turn or two she stopped in front of him, and looked
+him full in the eye.  The light from the windows was on her
+countenance now, and its revelations vaguely troubled him. 
+It was a Celia he had never seen before who confronted him.
+
+"I am much occupied by other matters," she said,
+speaking with cold impassivity, "but still I find myself
+curious to know just what limits you set to your dishonesty."
+
+Theron stared up at her.  His lips quivered, but no speech
+came to them.  If this was all merely fond playfulness,
+it was being carried to a heart-aching point.
+
+"I saw you hiding about in the depot at home last evening,"
+she went on.  "You come up here, pretending to have
+discovered me by accident, but I saw you following me
+from the Grand Central this morning."
+
+"Yes, I did both these things," said Theron, boldly. 
+A fine bravery tingled in his veins all at once. 
+He looked into her face and found the spirit to
+disregard its frowning aspect.  "Yes, I did them,"
+he repeated defiantly.  "That is not the hundredth part,
+or the thousandth part, of what I would do for your sake. 
+I have got way beyond caring for any consequences. 
+Position, reputation, the good opinion of fools--
+what are they?  Life itself--what does it amount to? 
+Nothing at all--with you in the balance!"
+
+"Yes--but I am not in the balance," observed Celia,
+quietly.  "That is where you have made your mistake."
+
+Theron laid aside his hat.  Women were curious creatures,
+he reflected.  Some were susceptible to one line of treatment,
+some to another.  His own reading of Celia had always
+been that she liked opposition, of a smart, rattling,
+almost cheeky, sort.  One got on best with her by saying
+bright things.  He searched his brain now for some clever
+quip that would strike sparks from the adamantine mood
+which for the moment it was her whim to assume.  To cover
+the process, he smiled a little.  Then her beauty, as she
+stood before him, her queenly form clad in a more stiffly
+fashionable dress than he had seen her wearing before,
+appealed afresh and overwhelmingly to him.  He rose to his feet.
+
+"Have you forgotten our talk in the woods?" he murmured
+with a wooing note.  "Have you forgotten the kiss?"
+
+She shook her head calmly.  "I have forgotten nothing."
+
+"Then why play with me so cruelly now?" he went on,
+in a voice of tender deprecation.  "I know you don't
+mean it, but all the same it bruises my heart a little. 
+I build myself so wholly upon you, I have made existence
+itself depend so completely upon your smile, upon a soft
+glance in your eyes, that when they are not there, why,
+I suffer, I don't know how to live at all.  So be kinder
+to me, Celia!"
+
+"I was kinder, as you call it, when you came in,"
+she replied.  "I told you to go away.  That was pure kindness--
+more kindness than you deserved."
+
+Theron looked at his hat, where it stood on the carpet
+by his feet.  He felt tears coming into his eyes. 
+"You tell me that you remember," he said, in depressed tones,
+"and yet you treat me like this!  Perhaps I am wrong. 
+No doubt it is my own fault.  I suppose I ought not to have
+come down here at all."
+
+Celia nodded her head in assent to this view.
+
+"But I swear that I was helpless in the matter,"
+he burst forth.  "I HAD to come!  It would have been
+literally impossible for me to have stayed at home,
+knowing that you were here, and knowing also that--that--"
+
+"Go on!" said Celia, thrusting forth her under-lip a trifle,
+and hardening still further the gleam in her eye,
+as he stumbled over his sentence and left it unfinished. 
+"What was the other thing that you were 'knowing'?"
+
+"Knowing--" he took up the word hesitatingly--"knowing that
+life would be insupportable to me if I could not be near you."
+
+She curled her lip at him.  "You skated over the thin
+spot very well," she commented.  "It was on the tip
+of your tongue to mention the fact that Father Forbes
+came with me.  Oh, I can read you through and through,
+Mr. Ware."
+
+In a misty way Theron felt things slipping from his grasp. 
+The rising moisture blurred his eyes as their gaze clung
+to Celia.
+
+"Then if you do read me," he protested, "you must know
+how utterly my heart and brain are filled with you. 
+No other man in all the world can yield himself so absolutely
+to the woman he worships as I can.  You have taken
+possession of me so wholly, I am not in the least master
+of myself any more.  I don't know what I say or what I do. 
+I am not worthy of you, I know.  No man alive could be that. 
+But no one else will idolize and reverence you as I do. 
+Believe me when I say that, Celia!  And how can you blame me,
+in your heart, for following you?  'Whither thou goest,
+I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people
+shall be my people, and thy God my God; where thou diest,
+will I die, and there will I be buried.  The Lord do
+so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee
+and me!'"
+
+Celia shrugged her shoulders, and moved a few steps away
+from him.  Something like despair seized upon him.
+
+"Surely," he urged with passion, "surely I have a right
+to remind you of the kiss!"
+
+She turned.  "The kiss," she said meditatively.  "Yes, you
+have a right to remind me of it.  Oh, yes, an undoubted right. 
+You have another right too--the right to have the kiss
+explained to you.  It was of the good-bye order.  It signified
+that we weren't to meet again, and that just for one little
+moment I permitted myself to be sorry for you.  That was all."
+
+He held himself erect under the incredible words, and gazed
+blankly at her.  The magnitude of what he confronted
+bewildered him; his mind was incapable of taking it in. 
+"You mean--" he started to say, and then stopped,
+helplessly staring into her face, with a dropped jaw. 
+It was too much to try to think what she meant.
+
+A little side-thought sprouted in the confusion
+of his brain.  It grew until it spread a bitter smile
+over his pale face.  "I know so little about kisses,"
+he said; "I am such a greenhorn at that sort of thing. 
+You should have had pity on my inexperience, and told
+me just what brand of kiss it was I was getting. 
+Probably I ought to have been able to distinguish,
+but you see I was brought up in the country--on a farm. 
+They don't have kisses in assorted varieties there."
+
+She bowed her head slightly.  "Yes, you are entitled
+to say that," she assented.  "I was to blame, and it
+is quite fair that you should tell me so.  You spoke
+of your inexperience, your innocence.  That was why
+I kissed you in saying good-bye. It was in memory
+of that innocence of yours, to which you yourself had
+been busy saying good-bye ever since I first saw you. 
+The idea seemed to me to mean something at the moment. 
+I see now that it was too subtle.  I do not usually err
+on that side."
+
+Theron kept his hold upon her gaze, as if it afforded
+him bodily support.  He felt that he ought to stoop and
+take up his hat, but he dared not look away from her. 
+"Do you not err now, on the side of cruelty?" he asked
+her piteously.
+
+It seemed for the instant as if she were wavering,
+and he swiftly thrust forth other pleas.  "I admit that I
+did wrong to follow you to New York.  I see that now. 
+But it was an offence committed in entire good faith. 
+Think of it, Celia!  I have never seen you since that day--
+that day in the woods.  I have waited--and waited--
+with no sign from you, no chance of seeing you at all. 
+Think what that meant to me!  Everything in the world had been
+altered for me, torn up by the roots.  I was a new being,
+plunged into a new existence.  The kiss had done that. 
+But until saw you again, I could not tell whether this
+vast change in me and my life was for good or for bad--
+whether the kiss had come to me as a blessing or a curse. 
+The suspense was killing me, Celia!  That is why,
+when I learned that you were coming here, I threw
+everything to the winds and followed you.  You blame
+me for it, and I bow my head and accept the blame. 
+But are you justified in punishing me so terribly--
+in going on after I have confessed my error, and cutting
+my heart into little strips, putting me to death by
+torture?"
+
+"Sit down," said Celia, with a softened weariness
+in her voice.  She seated herself in front of him as he
+sank into his chair again.  "I don't want to give you
+unnecessary pain, but you have insisted on forcing yourself
+into a position where there isn't anything else but pain. 
+I warned you to go away, but you wouldn't. No matter how
+gently I may try to explain things to you, you are bound
+to get nothing but suffering out of the explanation. 
+Now shall I still go on?"
+
+He inclined his head in token of assent, and did not
+lift it again, but raised toward her a disconsolate
+gaze from a pallid, drooping face.
+
+"It is all in a single word, Mr. Ware," she proceeded,
+in low tones.  "I speak for others as well as myself,
+mind you--we find that you are a bore."
+
+Theron's stiffened countenance remained immovable. 
+He continued to stare unblinkingly up into her eyes.
+
+"We were disposed to like you very much when we first
+knew you," Celia went on.  "You impressed us as an innocent,
+simple, genuine young character, full of mother's milk. 
+It was like the smell of early spring in the country to come
+in contact with you.  Your honesty of nature, your sincerity
+in that absurd religion of yours, your general NAIVETE of
+mental and spiritual get-up, all pleased us a great deal. 
+We thought you were going to be a real acquisition."
+
+"Just a moment--whom do you mean by 'we'?" He asked
+the question calmly enough, but in a voice with an effect
+of distance in it.
+
+"It may not be necessary to enter into that," she replied. 
+"Let me go on.  But then it became apparent, little by little,
+that we had misjudged you.  We liked you, as I have said,
+because you were unsophisticated and delightfully fresh
+and natural.  Somehow we took it for granted you would
+stay so.  Rut that is just what you didn't do--just what
+you hadn't the sense to try to do.  Instead, we found you
+inflating yourself with all sorts of egotisms and vanities. 
+We found you presuming upon the friendships which had been
+mistakenly extended to you.  Do you want instances? 
+You went to Dr. Ledsmar's house that very day after I
+had been with you to get a piano at Thurston's, and
+tried to inveigle him into talking scandal about me. 
+You came to me with tales about him.  You went to
+Father Forbes, and sought to get him to gossip about
+us both.  Neither of those men will ever ask you inside
+his house again.  But that is only one part of it. 
+Your whole mind became an unpleasant thing to contemplate. 
+You thought it would amuse and impress us to hear you
+ridiculing and reviling the people of your church,
+whose money supports you, and making a mock of the things
+they believe in, and which you for your life wouldn't dare
+let them know you didn't believe in.  You talked to us
+slightingly about your wife.  What were you thinking of,
+not to comprehend that that would disgust us?  You showed
+me once--do you remember?--a life of George Sand that you
+had just bought,--bought because you had just discovered
+that she had an unclean side to her life.  You chuckled
+as you spoke to me about it, and you were for all the
+world like a little nasty boy, giggling over something
+dirty that older people had learned not to notice. 
+These are merely random incidents.  They are just samples,
+picked hap-hazard, of the things in you which have been
+opening our eyes, little by little, to our mistake. 
+I can understand that all the while you really fancied
+that you were expanding, growing, in all directions. 
+What you took to be improvement was degeneration. 
+When you thought that you were impressing us most by your
+smart sayings and doings, you were reminding us most
+of the fable about the donkey trying to play lap-dog.
+And it wasn't even an honest, straightforward donkey
+at that!"
+
+She uttered these last words sorrowfully, her hands
+clasped in her lap, and her eyes sinking to the floor. 
+A silence ensued.  Then Theron reached a groping hand
+out for his hat, and, rising, walked with a lifeless,
+automatic step to the door.
+
+He had it half open, when the impossibility of leaving in
+this way towered suddenly in his path and overwhelmed him. 
+He slammed the door to, and turned as if he had been
+whirled round by some mighty wind.  He came toward her,
+with something almost menacing in the vigor of his movements,
+and in the wild look upon his white, set face. 
+Halting before her, he covered the tailor-clad figure,
+the coiled red hair, the upturned face with its simulated calm,
+the big brown eyes, the rings upon the clasped fingers,
+with a sweeping, comprehensive glare of passion.
+
+"This is what you have done to me, then!"
+
+His voice was unrecognizable in his own ears--
+hoarse and broken, but with a fright-compelling something
+in it which stimulated his rage.  The horrible notion
+of killing her, there where she sat, spread over the
+chaos of his mind with an effect of unearthly light--
+red and abnormally evil.  It was like that first devilish
+radiance ushering in Creation, of which the first-fruit
+was Cain.  Why should he not kill her?  In all ages,
+women had been slain for less.  Yes--and men had
+been hanged.  Something rose and stuck in his dry throat;
+and as he swallowed it down, the sinister flare of
+murderous fascination died suddenly away into darkness. 
+The world was all black again--plunged in the Egyptian
+night which lay upon the face of the deep while the earth
+was yet without form and void.  He was alone on it--
+alone among awful, planetary solitudes which crushed him.
+
+The sight of Celia, sitting motionless only a pace in front
+of him, was plain enough to his eyes.  It was an illusion. 
+She was really a star, many millions of miles away. 
+These things were hard to understand; but they were true,
+none the less.  People seemed to be about him, but in fact
+he was alone.  He recalled that even the little child
+in the car, playing with those two buttons on a string,
+would have nothing to do with him.  Take his money, yes;
+take all he would give her--but not smile at him, not come
+within reach of him!  Men closed the doors of their houses
+against him.  The universe held him at arm's length as
+a nuisance.
+
+He was standing with one knee upon a sofa.  Unconsciously he
+had moved round to the side of Celia; and as he caught
+the effect of her face now in profile, memory-pictures began
+at once building themselves in his brain--pictures of her
+standing in the darkened room of the cottage of death,
+declaiming the CONFITEOR; of her seated at the piano,
+under the pure, mellowed candle-light; of her leaning her
+chin on her hands, and gazing meditatively at the leafy
+background of the woods they were in; of her lying back,
+indolently content, in the deck-chair on the yacht
+of his fancy--that yacht which a few hours before had
+seemed so brilliantly and bewitchingly real to him,
+and now--now--!
+
+He sank in a heap upon the couch, and, burying his face
+among its cushions, wept and groaned aloud.  His collapse
+was absolute.  He sobbed with the abandonment of one who,
+in the veritable presence of death, lets go all sense
+of relation to life.
+
+Presently some one was touching him on the shoulder--
+an incisive, pointed touch--and he checked himself,
+and lifted his face.
+
+"You will have to get up, and present some sort of
+an appearance, and go away at once," Celia said to him
+in low, rapid tones.  "Some gentlemen are at the door,
+whom I have been waiting for."
+
+As he stupidly sat up and tried to collect his faculties,
+Celia had opened the door and admitted two visitors. 
+The foremost was Father Forbes; and he, with some whispered,
+smiling words, presented to her his companion, a tall,
+robust, florid man of middle-age, with a frock-coat
+and a gray mustache, sharply waxed.  The three spoke
+for a moment together.  Then the priest's wandering eye
+suddenly lighted upon the figure on the sofa.  He stared,
+knitted his brows, and then lifted them in inquiry as he
+turned to Celia.
+
+"Poor man!" she said readily, in tones loud enough to
+reach Theron.  "It is our neighbor, Father, the Rev. Mr. Ware. 
+He hit upon my name in the register quite unexpectedly,
+and I had him come up.  He is in sore distress--
+a great and sudden bereavement.  He is going now. 
+Won't you speak to him in the hall--a few words, Father? 
+It would please him.  He is terribly depressed."
+
+The words had drawn Theron to his feet, as by some
+mechanical process.  He took up his hat and moved dumbly
+to the door.  It seemed to him that Celia intended offering
+to shake hands; but he went past her with only some
+confused exchange of glances and a murmured word or two. 
+The tall stranger, who drew aside to let him pass,
+had acted as if he expected to be introduced. 
+Theron, emerging into the hall, leaned against the wall
+and looked dreamily at the priest, who had stepped out with him.
+
+"I am very sorry to learn that you are in trouble, Mr. Ware,"
+Father Forbes said, gently enough, but in hurried tones. 
+"Miss Madden is also in trouble.  I mentioned to you
+that her brother had got into a serious scrape.  I have
+brought my old friend, General Brady, to consult with her
+about the matter.  He knows all the parties concerned,
+and he can set things right if anybody can."
+
+"It's a mistake about me--I 'm not in any trouble at all,"
+said Theron.  "I just dropped in to make a friendly call."
+
+The priest glanced sharply at him, noting with a swift,
+informed scrutiny how he sprawled against the wall,
+and what vacuity his eyes and loosened lips expressed.
+
+"Then you have a talent for the inopportune amounting
+to positive genius," said Father Forbes, with a stormy smile.
+
+"Tell me this, Father Forbes," the other demanded,
+with impulsive suddenness, "is it true that you don't
+want me in your house again?  Is that the truth or not?"
+
+"The truth is always relative, Mr. Ware," replied the priest,
+turning away, and closing the door of the parlor behind
+him with a decisive sound.
+
+Left alone, Theron started to make his way downstairs. 
+He found his legs wavering under him and making zigzag
+movements of their own in a bewildering fashion. 
+He referred this at first, in an outburst of fresh despair,
+to the effects of his great grief.  Then, as he held tight
+to the banister and governed his descent step by step,
+it occurred to him that it must be the wine he had had
+for breakfast.  Upon examination, he was not so unhappy,
+after all.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+At the second peal of the door-bell, Brother Soulsby
+sat up in bed.  It was still pitch-dark, and the memory
+of the first ringing fluttered musically in his awakening
+consciousness as a part of some dream he had been having.
+
+"Who the deuce can that be?" he mused aloud, in querulous
+resentment at the interruption.
+
+"Put your head out of the window, and ask,"
+suggested his wife, drowsily.
+
+The bell-pull scraped violently in its socket,
+and a third outburst of shrill reverberations clamored
+through the silent house.
+
+"Whatever you do, I'd do it before he yanked the whole
+thing to pieces," added the wife, with more decision.
+
+Brother Soulsby was wide awake now.  He sprang to the floor,
+and, groping about in the obscurity, began drawing on some
+of his clothes.  He rapped on the window during the process,
+to show that the house was astir, and a minute afterward
+made his way out of the room and down the stairs,
+the boards creaking under his stockinged feet as he went.
+
+Nearly a quarter of an hour passed before he returned. 
+Sister Soulsby, lying in sleepy quiescence, heard vague
+sounds of voices at the front door, and did not feel
+interested enough to lift her head and listen.  A noise
+of footsteps on the sidewalk followed, first receding
+from the door, then turning toward it, this second
+time marking the presence of more than one person. 
+There seemed in this the implication of a guest, and she
+shook off the dozing impulses which enveloped her faculties,
+and waited to hear more.  There came up, after further
+muttering of male voices, the undeniable chink of coins
+striking against one another.  Then more footsteps,
+the resonant slam of a carriage door out in the street,
+the grinding of wheels turning on the frosty road,
+and the racket of a vehicle and horses going off at
+a smart pace into the night.  Somebody had come, then. 
+She yawned at the thought, but remained well awake,
+tracing idly in her mind, as various slight sounds rose
+from the lower floor, the different things Soulsby
+was probably doing.  Their spare room was down there,
+directly underneath, but curiously enough no one seemed
+to enter it.  The faint murmur of conversation which from
+time to time reached her came from the parlor instead. 
+At last she heard her husband's soft tread coming
+up the staircase, and still there had been no hint
+of employing the guest-chamber. What could he be about?
+she wondered.
+
+Brother Soulsby came in, bearing a small lamp in
+his hand, the reddish light of which, flaring upward,
+revealed an unlooked-for display of amusement on his thin,
+beardless face.  He advanced to the bedside, shading the
+glare from her blinking eyes with his palm, and grinned.
+
+"A thousand guesses, old lady," he said, with a dry
+chuckle, "and you wouldn't have a ghost of a chance. 
+You might guess till Hades froze over seven feet thick,
+and still you wouldn't hit it."
+
+She sat up in turn.  "Good gracious, man," she began,
+"you don't mean--" Here the cheerful gleam in his small eyes
+reassured her, and she sighed relief, then smiled confusedly. 
+"I half thought, just for the minute," she explained,
+"it might be some bounder who'd come East to try and
+blackmail me.  But no, who is it--and what on earth
+have you done with him?"
+
+Brother Soulsby cackled in merriment.  "It's Brother
+Ware of Octavius, out on a little bat, all by himself. 
+He says he's been on the loose only two days; but it looks
+more like a fortnight."
+
+"OUR Brother Ware?" she regarded him with open-eyed surprise.
+
+"Well, yes, I suppose he's OUR Brother Ware--some,"
+returned Soulsby, genially.  "He seems to think so, anyway."
+
+"But tell me about it!" she urged eagerly.  "What's the
+matter with him?  How does he explain it?"
+
+"Well, he explains it pretty badly, if you ask me,"
+said Soulsby, with a droll, joking eye and a mock-serious voice. 
+He seated himself on the side of the bed, facing her,
+and still considerately shielding her from the light
+of the lamp he held.  "But don't think I suggested
+any explanations.  I've been a mother myself. 
+He's merely filled himself up to the neck with rum,
+in the simple, ordinary, good old-fashioned way. 
+That's all.  What is there to explain about that?"
+
+She looked meditatively at him for a time, shaking her head. 
+"No, Soulsby," she said gravely, at last.  "This isn't
+any laughing matter.  You may be sure something bad
+has happened, to set him off like that.  I'm going to get
+up and dress right now.  What time is it?"
+
+"Now don't you do anything of the sort," he urged persuasively. 
+"It isn't five o'clock; it'll be dark for nearly an hour yet. 
+Just you turn over, and have another nap.  He's all right. 
+I put him on the sofa, with the buffalo robe round him. 
+You'll find him there, safe and sound, when it's time
+for white folks to get up.  You know how it breaks you up
+all day, not to get your full sleep."
+
+"I don't care if it makes me look as old as the everlasting hills,"
+she said.  "Can't you understand, Soulsby?  The thing
+worries me--gets on my nerves.  I couldn't close an eye,
+if I tried.  I took a great fancy to that young man. 
+I told you so at the time."
+
+Soulsby nodded, and turned down the wick of his lamp
+a trifle.  "Yes, I know you did," he remarked in placidly
+non-contentious tones.  "I can't say I saw much in him myself,
+but I daresay you're right."  There followed a moment's silence,
+during which he experimented in turning the wick up again. 
+"But, anyway," he went on, "there isn't anything you
+can do.  He'll sleep it off, and the longer he's left
+alone the better.  It isn't as if we had a hired girl,
+who'd come down and find him there, and give the whole
+thing away.  He's fixed up there perfectly comfortable;
+and when he's had his sleep out, and wakes up on his
+own account, he'll be feeling a heap better."
+
+The argument might have carried conviction, but on the instant
+the sound of footsteps came to them from the room below. 
+The subdued noise rose regularly, as of one pacing to and fro.
+
+"No, Soulsby, YOU come back to bed, and get YOUR sleep out. 
+I'm going downstairs.  It's no good talking; I'm going."
+
+Brother Soulsby offered no further opposition, either by
+talk or demeanor, but returned contentedly to bed,
+pulling the comforter over his ears, and falling into
+the slow, measured respiration of tranquil slumber
+before his wife was ready to leave the room.
+
+The dim, cold gray of twilight was sifting furtively through
+the lace curtains of the front windows when Mrs. Soulsby,
+lamp in hand, entered the parlor.  She confronted a figure
+she would have hardly recognized.  The man seemed to have
+been submerged in a bath of disgrace.  From the crown
+of his head to the soles of his feet, everything about him
+was altered, distorted, smeared with an intangible effect
+of shame.  In the vague gloom of the middle distance,
+between lamp and window, she noticed that his shoulders
+were crouched, like those of some shambling tramp. 
+The frowsy shadows of a stubble beard lay on his jaw
+and throat.  His clothes were crumpled and hung awry;
+his boots were stained with mud.  The silk hat on the piano
+told its battered story with dumb eloquence.
+
+Lifting the lamp, she moved forward a step, and threw its
+light upon his face.  A little groan sounded involuntarily
+upon her lips.  Out of a mask of unpleasant features,
+swollen with drink and weighted by the physical craving
+for rest and sleep, there stared at her two bloodshot eyes,
+shining with the wild light of hysteria.  The effect
+of dishevelled hair, relaxed muscles, and rough,
+half-bearded lower face lent to these eyes, as she caught
+their first glance, an unnatural glare.  The lamp shook
+in her hand for an instant.  Then, ashamed of herself,
+she held out her other hand fearlessly to him.
+
+"Tell me all about it, Theron," she said calmly,
+and with a soothing, motherly intonation in her voice.
+
+He did not take the hand she offered, but suddenly,
+with a wailing moan, cast himself on his knees at her feet. 
+He was so tall a man that the movement could have no grace. 
+He abased his head awkwardly, to bury it among the folds
+of the skirts at her ankles.  She stood still for a moment,
+looking down upon him.  Then, blowing out the light,
+she reached over and set the smoking lamp on the piano
+near by.  The daylight made things distinguishable in a wan,
+uncertain way, throughout the room.
+
+"I have come out of hell, for the sake of hearing some
+human being speak to me like that!"
+
+The thick utterance proceeded in a muffled fashion from
+where his face grovelled against her dress.  Its despairing
+accents appealed to her, but even more was she touched
+by the ungainly figure he made, sprawling on the carpet.
+
+"Well, since you are out, stay out," she answered,
+as reassuringly as she could.  "But get up and take
+a seat here beside me, like a sensible man, and tell
+me all about it.  Come!  I insist!"
+
+In obedience to her tone, and the sharp tug at his shoulder
+with which she emphasized it, he got slowly to his feet,
+and listlessly seated himself on the sofa to which
+she pointed.  He hung his head, and began catching
+his breath with a periodical gasp, half hiccough, half sob.
+
+"First of all," she said, in her brisk, matter-of-fact manner,
+"don't you want to lie down there again, and have me tuck
+you up snug with the buffalo robe, and go to sleep? 
+That would be the best thing you could do."
+
+He shook his head disconsolately, from side to side. 
+"I can't!" he groaned, with a swifter recurrence of the
+sob-like convulsions.  "I'm dying for sleep, but I'm too--
+too frightened!"
+
+"Come, I'll sit beside you till you drop off," she said,
+with masterful decision.  He suffered himself to be pushed
+into recumbency on the couch, and put his head with
+docility on the pillow she brought from the spare room. 
+When she had spread the fur over him, and pushed her
+chair close to the sofa, she stood by it for a little,
+looking down in meditation at his demoralized face. 
+Under the painful surface-blur of wretchedness and
+fatigued debauchery, she traced reflectively the lineaments
+of the younger and cleanlier countenance she had seen a few
+months before.  Nothing essential had been taken away. 
+There was only this pestiferous overlaying of shame and
+cowardice to be removed.  The face underneath was still
+all right.
+
+With a soft, maternal touch, she smoothed the hair from
+his forehead into order.  Then she seated herself, and,
+when he got his hand out from under the robe and thrust
+it forth timidly, she took it in hers and held it in
+a warm, sympathetic grasp.  He closed his eyes at this,
+and gradually the paroxysmal catch in his breathing lapsed. 
+The daylight strengthened, until at last tiny flecks
+of sunshine twinkled in the meshes of the further
+curtains at the window.  She fancied him asleep,
+and gently sought to disengage her hand, but his fingers
+clutched at it with vehemence, and his eyes were wide open.
+
+"I can't sleep at all," he murmured.  "I want to talk."
+
+"There 's nothing in the world to hinder you,"
+she commented smilingly.
+
+"I tell you the solemn truth," he said, lifting his
+voice in dogged assertion:  "the best sermon I ever
+preached in my life, I preached only three weeks ago,
+at the camp-meeting. It was admitted by everybody to be far
+and away my finest effort!  They will tell you the same!"
+
+"It's quite likely," assented Sister Soulsby.  "I quite
+believe it."
+
+"Then how can anybody say that I've degenerated, that I've
+become a fool?" he demanded.
+
+"I haven't heard anybody hint at such a thing,"
+she answered quietly.
+
+"No, of course, YOU haven't heard them!" he cried. 
+"I heard them, though!"  Then, forcing himself to a
+sitting posture, against the restraint of her hand,
+he flung back the covering.  "I'm burning hot already! 
+Yes, those were the identical words:  I haven't improved;
+I've degenerated.  People hate me; they won't have me
+in their houses.  They say I'm a nuisance and a bore. 
+I'm like a little nasty boy.  That's what they say. 
+Even a young man who was dying--lying right on the edge
+of his open grave--told me solemnly that I reminded him
+of a saint once, but I was only fit for a barkeeper now. 
+They say I really don't know anything at all.  And I'm
+not only a fool, they say, I'm a dishonest fool into
+the bargain!"
+
+"But who says such twaddle as that?" she returned consolingly. 
+The violence of his emotion disturbed her.  "You mustn't
+imagine such things.  You are among friends here. 
+Other people are your friends, too.  They have the very
+highest opinion of you."
+
+"I haven't a friend on earth but you!" he declared solemnly. 
+His eyes glowed fiercely, and his voice sank into a grave
+intensity of tone.  "I was going to kill myself.  I went
+on to the big bridge to throw myself off, and a policeman
+saw me trying to climb over the railing, and he grabbed me
+and marched me away.  Then he threw me out at the entrance,
+and said he would club my head off if I came there again. 
+And then I went and stood and let the cable-cars pass close
+by me, and twenty times I thought I had the nerve to throw
+myself under the next one, and then I waited for the next--
+and I was afraid!  And then I was in a crowd somewhere,
+and the warning came to me that I was going to die. 
+The fool needn't go kill himself:  God would take care
+of that.  It was my heart, you know.  I've had that terrible
+fluttering once before.  It seized me this time, and I
+fell down in the crowd, and some people walked over me,
+but some one else helped me up, and let me sit down
+in a big lighted hallway, the entrance to some theatre,
+and some one brought me some brandy, but somebody else said
+I was drunk, and they took it away again, and put me out. 
+They could see I was a fool, that I hadn't a friend
+on earth.  And when I went out, there was a big picture
+of a woman in tights, and the word 'Amazons' overhead--
+and then I remembered you.  I knew you were my friend--
+the only one I have on earth."
+
+"It is very flattering--to be remembered like that,"
+said Sister Soulsby, gently.  The disposition to laugh
+was smothered by a pained perception of the suffering he
+was undergoing.  His face had grown drawn and haggard
+under the burden of his memories as he rambled on.
+
+"So I came straight to you," he began again. 
+"I had just money enough left to pay my fare.  The rest
+is in my valise at the hotel--the Murray Hill Hotel. 
+It belongs to the church.  I stole it from the church. 
+When I am dead they can get it back again!"
+
+Sister Soulsby forced a smile to her lips.  "What nonsense
+you talk--about dying!" she exclaimed.  "Why, man alive,
+you'll sleep this all off like a top, if you'll only lie
+down and give yourself a chance.  Come, now, you must do
+as you're told."
+
+With a resolute hand, she made him lie down again,
+and once more covered him with the fur.  He submitted,
+and did not even offer to put out his arm this time,
+but looked in piteous dumbness at her for a long time. 
+While she sat thus in silence, the sound of Brother Soulsby
+moving about upstairs became audible.
+
+Theron heard it, and the importance of hurrying on
+some further disclosure seemed to suggest itself. 
+"I can see you think I'm just drunk," he said, in low,
+sombre tones.  "Of course that's what HE thought. 
+The hackman thought so, and so did the conductor,
+and everybody.  But I hoped you would know better.  I was
+sure you would see that it was something worse than that. 
+See here, I'll tell you.  Then you'll understand. 
+I've been drinking for two days and one whole night,
+on my feet all the while, wandering alone in that big
+strange New York, going through places where they murdered
+men for ten cents, mixing myself up with the worst
+people in low bar-rooms and dance-houses, and they saw I
+had money in my pocket, too, and yet nobody touched me,
+or offered to lay a finger on me.  Do you know why? 
+They understood that I wanted to get drunk, and couldn't.
+The Indians won't harm an idiot, or lunatic, you know. 
+Well, it was the same with these vilest of the vile. 
+They saw that I was a fool whom God had taken hold of,
+to break his heart first, and then to craze his brain,
+and then to fling him on a dunghill to die like a dog. 
+They believe in God, those people.  They're the only ones
+who do, it seems to me.  And they wouldn't interfere
+when they saw what He was doing to me.  But I tell you I
+wasn't drunk.  I haven't been drunk.  I'm only heart-broken,
+and crushed out of shape and life--that's all.  And I've
+crawled here just to have a friend by me when--when I come
+to the end."
+
+"You're not talking very sensibly, or very bravely either,
+Theron Ware," remarked his companion.  "It's cowardly
+to give way to notions like that."
+
+"Oh, I 'm not afraid to die; don't think that,"
+he remonstrated wearily.  "If there is a Judgment,
+it has hit me as hard as it can already.  There can't
+be any hell worse than that I've gone through. 
+Here I am talking about hell," he continued, with a
+pained contraction of the muscles about his mouth--
+a stillborn, malformed smile--as if I believed in one! 
+I've got way through all my beliefs, you know.  I tell
+you that frankly."
+
+"It's none of my business," she reassured him.  "I'm not
+your Bishop, or your confessor.  I'm just your friend,
+your pal, that's all."
+
+"Look here!" he broke in, with some animation and a new
+intensity of glance and voice.  "If I was going to live,
+I'd have some funny things to tell.  Six months ago I was
+a good man.  I not only seemed to be good, to others and
+to myself, but I was good.  I had a soul; I had a conscience. 
+I was going along doing my duty, and I was happy in it. 
+We were poor, Alice and I, and people behaved rather hard
+toward us, and sometimes we were a little down in the
+mouth about it; but that was all.  We really were happy;
+and I--I really was a good man.  Here's the kind
+of joke God plays!  You see me here six months after. 
+Look at me!  I haven't got an honest hair in my head. 
+I'm a bad man through and through, that's what I am. 
+I look all around at myself, and there isn't an atom left
+anywhere of the good man I used to be.  And, mind you,
+I never lifted a finger to prevent the change.  I didn't
+resist once; I didn't make any fight.  I just walked
+deliberately down-hill, with my eyes wide open.  I told
+myself all the while that I was climbing uphill instead,
+but I knew in my heart that it was a lie.  Everything about
+me was a lie.  I wouldn't be telling the truth,
+even now, if--if I hadn't come to the end of my rope. 
+Now, how do you explain that?  How can it be explained? 
+Was I really rotten to the core all the time, years ago,
+when I seemed to everybody, myself and the rest, to be good
+and straight and sincere?  Was it all a sham, or does God
+take a good man and turn him into an out-and-out bad one,
+in just a few months--in the time that it takes an ear
+of corn to form and ripen and go off with the mildew? 
+Or isn't there any God at all--but only men who live
+and die like animals?  And that would explain my case,
+wouldn't it?  I got bitten and went vicious and crazy,
+and they've had to chase me out and hunt me to my death
+like a mad dog!  Yes, that makes it all very simple. 
+It isn't worth while to discuss me at all as if I
+had a soul, is it?  I'm just one more mongrel cur
+that's gone mad, and must be put out of the way. 
+That's all."
+
+"See here," said Sister Soulsby, alertly, "I half believe
+that a good cuffing is what you really stand in need of. 
+Now you stop all this nonsense, and lie quiet and keep still! 
+Do you hear me?"
+
+The jocose sternness which she assumed, in words
+and manner, seemed to soothe him.  He almost smiled
+up at her in a melancholy way, and sighed profoundly.
+
+"I've told you MY religion before," she went on with gentleness. 
+"The sheep and the goats are to be separated on Judgment Day,
+but not a minute sooner.  In other words, as long as human
+life lasts, good, bad, and indifferent are all braided up
+together in every man's nature, and every woman's too. 
+You weren't altogether good a year ago, any more than
+you're altogether bad now.  You were some of both then;
+you're some of both now.  If you've been making an extra
+sort of fool of yourself lately, why, now that you
+recognize it, the only thing to do is to slow steam,
+pull up, and back engine in the other direction. 
+In that way you'll find things will even themselves up. 
+It's a see-saw with all of us, Theron Ware--sometimes up;
+sometimes down.  But nobody is rotten clear to the core."
+
+He closed his eyes, and lay in silence for a time.
+
+"This is what day of the week?" he asked, at last.
+
+"Friday, the nineteenth."
+
+"Wednesday--that would be the seventeenth.  That was
+the day ordained for my slaughter.  On that morning,
+I was the happiest man in the world.  No king could
+have been so proud and confident as I was.  A wonderful
+romance had come to me.  The most beautiful young woman
+in the world, the most talented too, was waiting for me. 
+An express train was carrying me to her, and it
+couldn't go fast enough to keep up with my eagerness. 
+She was very rich, and she loved me, and we were to
+live in eternal summer, wherever we liked, on a big,
+beautiful yacht.  No one else had such a life before
+him as that.  It seemed almost too good for me, but I
+thought I had grown and developed so much that perhaps
+I would be worthy of it.  Oh, how happy I was!  I tell
+you this because--because YOU are not like the others. 
+You will understand."
+
+"Yes, I understand," she said patiently.  "Well--you
+were being so happy."
+
+"That was in the morning--Wednesday the seventeenth--
+early in the morning.  There was a little girl
+in the car, playing with some buttons, and when I
+tried to make friends with her, she looked at me,
+and she saw, right at a glance, that I was a fool. 
+"Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings," you know. 
+She was the first to find it out.  It began like that,
+early in the morning.  But then after that everybody
+knew it.  They had only to look at me and they said: 
+'Why, this is a fool--like a little nasty boy; we won't
+let him into our houses; we find him a bore.'  That is
+what they said."
+
+"Did SHE say it?"  Sister Soulsby permitted herself to ask.
+
+For answer Theron bit his lips, and drew his chin under
+the fur, and pushed his scowling face into the pillow. 
+The spasmodic, sob-like gasps began to shake him again. 
+She laid a compassionate hand upon his hot brow.
+
+"That is why I made my way here to you," he groaned piteously. 
+"I knew you would sympathize; I could tell it all to you. 
+And it was so awful, to die there alone in the strange city--
+I couldn't do it--with nobody near me who liked me,
+or thought well of me.  Alice would hate me. 
+There was no one but you.  I wanted to be with you--
+at the last."
+
+His quavering voice broke off in a gust of weeping,
+and his face frankly surrendered itself to the distortions
+of a crying child's countenance, wide-mouthed and tragically
+grotesque in its abandonment of control.
+
+Sister Soulsby, as her husband's boots were heard
+descending the stairs, rose, and drew the robe up to half
+cover his agonized visage.  She patted the sufferer
+softly on the head, and then went to the stair-door.
+
+"I think he'll go to sleep now," she said, lifting her voice
+to the new-comer, and with a backward nod toward the couch. 
+"Come out into the kitchen while I get breakfast, or into
+the sitting-room, or somewhere, so as not to disturb him. 
+He's promised me to lie perfectly quiet, and try to sleep."
+
+When they had passed together out of the room, she turned. 
+"Soulsby," she said with half-playful asperity,
+"I'm disappointed in you.  For a man who's knocked
+about as much as you have, I must say you've picked
+up an astonishingly small outfit of gumption. 
+That poor creature in there is no more drunk than I am. 
+He's been drinking--yes, drinking like a fish; but it
+wasn't able to make him drunk.  He's past being drunk;
+he's grief-crazy. It's a case of 'woman.'  Some girl has
+made a fool of him, and decoyed him up in a balloon,
+and let him drop.  He's been hurt bad, too."
+
+"We have all been hurt in our day and generation,"
+responded Brother Soulsby, genially.  "Don't you worry;
+he'll sleep that off too.  It takes longer than drink,
+and it doesn't begin to be so pleasant, but it can be
+slept off.  Take my word for it, he'll be a different man
+by noon."
+
+When noon came, however, Brother Soulsby was on his way
+to summon one of the village doctors.  Toward nightfall,
+he went out again to telegraph for Alice.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+Spring fell early upon the pleasant southern slopes of
+the Susquehanna country.  The snow went off as by magic. 
+The trees budded and leaved before their time.  The birds
+came and set up their chorus in the elms, while winter
+seemed still a thing of yesterday.
+
+Alice, clad gravely in black, stood again upon a kitchen-stoop,
+and looked across an intervening space of back-yards and
+fences to where the tall boughs, fresh in their new verdure,
+were silhouetted against the pure blue sky.  The prospect
+recalled to her irresistibly another sunlit morning,
+a year ago, when she had stood in the doorway of her
+own kitchen, and surveyed a scene not unlike this;
+it might have been with the same carolling robins,
+the same trees, the same azure segment of the tranquil,
+speckless dome.  Then she was looking out upon surroundings
+novel and strange to her, among which she must make herself
+at home as best she could.  But at least the ground
+was secure under her feet; at least she had a home,
+and a word from her lips could summon her husband out,
+to stand beside her with his arm about her, and share
+her buoyant, hopeful joy in the promises of spring.
+
+To think that that was only one little year ago--the mere
+revolution of four brief seasons!  And now--!
+
+Sister Soulsby, wiping her hands on her apron, came briskly
+out upon the stoop.  Some cheerful commonplace was on
+her tongue, but a glance at Alice's wistful face kept
+it back.  She passed an arm around her waist instead,
+and stood in silence, looking at the elms.
+
+"It brings back memories to me--all this," said Alice,
+nodding her head, and not seeking to dissemble the tears
+which sprang to her eyes.
+
+"The men will be down in a minute, dear," the other
+reminded her.  "They'd nearly finished packing before I
+put the biscuits in the oven.  "We mustn't wear long
+faces before folks, you know."
+
+"Yes, I know," murmured Alice.  Then, with a sudden
+impulse, she turned to her companion.  "Candace," she
+said fervently, "we're alone here for the moment;
+I must tell you that if I don't talk gratitude to you,
+it's simply and solely because I don't know where to begin,
+or what to say.  I'm just dumfounded at your goodness. 
+It takes my speech away.  I only know this, Candace: 
+God will be very good to you."
+
+"Tut! tut!" replied Sister Soulsby, "that's all right,
+you dear thing.  I know just how you feel.  Don't dream
+of being under obligation to explain it to me, or to thank
+us at all.  We've had all sorts of comfort out of the thing--
+Soulsby and I. We used to get downright lonesome, here all
+by ourselves, and we've simply had a winter of pleasant
+company instead, that s all.  Besides, there's solid
+satisfaction in knowing that at last, for once in our lives
+we've had a chance to be of some real use to somebody
+who truly needed it.  You can't imagine how stuck up
+that makes us in our own conceit.  We feel as if we were
+George Peabody and Lady Burdett-Coutts, and several other
+philanthropists thrown in.  No, seriously, don't think
+of it again.  We're glad to have been able to do it all;
+and if you only go ahead now, and prosper and be happy,
+why, that will be the only reward we want."
+
+"I hope we shall do well," said Alice.  "Only tell
+me this, Candace.  You do think I was right, don't you,
+in insisting on Theron's leaving the ministry altogether? 
+He seems convinced enough now that it was the right thing
+to do; but I grow nervous sometimes lest he should find
+it harder than he thought to get along in business,
+and regret the change--and blame me."
+
+"I think you may rest easy in your mind about that,"
+the other responded.  "Whatever else he does, he will
+never want to come within gunshot of a pulpit again. 
+It came too near murdering him for that."
+
+Alice looked at her doubtfully.  "Something came near
+murdering him, I know.  But it doesn't seem to me
+that I would say it was the ministry.  And I guess you
+know pretty well yourself what it was.  Of course,
+I've never asked any questions, and I've hushed up
+everybody at Octavius who tried to quiz me about it--
+his disappearance and my packing up and leaving, and all that--
+and I've never discussed the question with you--but--"
+
+"No, and there's no good going into it now," put in
+Sister Soulsby, with amiable decisiveness.  "It's all
+past and gone.  In fact, I hardly remember much about it
+now myself.  He simply got into deep water, poor soul,
+and we've floated him out again, safe and sound. 
+That's all.  But all the same, I was right in what I said. 
+He was a mistake in the ministry."
+
+"But if you'd known him in previous years," urged Alice,
+plaintively, "before we were sent to that awful Octavius. 
+He was the very ideal of all a young minister should be. 
+People used to simply worship him, he was such a perfect preacher,
+and so pure-minded and friendly with everybody, and threw
+himself into his work so.  It was all that miserable,
+contemptible Octavius that did the mischief."
+
+Sister Soulsby slowly shook her head.  "If there
+hadn't been a screw loose somewhere," she said gently,
+"Octavius wouldn't have hurt him.  No, take my word
+for it, he never was the right man for the place. 
+He seemed to be, no doubt, but he wasn't. When pressure
+was put on him, it found out his weak spot like a shot,
+and pushed on it, and--well, it came near smashing him,
+that's all."
+
+"And do you think he'll always be a--a back-slider,"
+mourned Alice.
+
+"For mercy's sake, don't ever try to have him pretend
+to be anything else!" exclaimed the other.  "The last
+state of that man would be worse than the first. 
+You must make up your mind to that.  And you mustn't show
+that you're nervous about it.  You mustn't get nervous! 
+You mustn't be afraid of things.  Just you keep a stiff
+upper lip, and say you WILL get along, you WILL be happy. 
+That's your only chance, Alice.  He isn't going to be
+an angel of light, or a saint, or anything of that sort,
+and it's no good expecting it.  But he'll be just an
+average kind of man--a little sore about some things,
+a little wiser than he was about some others.  You can get
+along perfectly with him, if you only keep your courage up,
+and don't show the white feather."
+
+"Yes, I know; but I've had it pretty well taken out of me,"
+commented Alice.  "It used to come easy to me to be cheerful
+and resolute and all that; but it's different now."
+
+Sister Soulsby stole a swift glance at the unsuspecting
+face of her companion which was not all admiration,
+but her voice remained patiently affectionate. 
+"Oh, that'll all come back to you, right enough. 
+You'll have your hands full, you know, finding a house,
+and unpacking all your old furniture, and buying new things,
+and getting your home settled.  It'll keep you so busy you
+won't have time to feel strange or lonesome, one bit. 
+You'll see how it'll tone you up.  In a year's time you won't
+know yourself in the looking-glass."
+
+"Oh, my health is good enough," said Alice; "but I can't
+help thinking, suppose Theron should be taken sick again,
+away out there among strangers.  You know he's never
+appeared to me to have quite got his strength back. 
+These long illnesses, you know, they always leave a mark
+on a man."
+
+"Nonsense!  He's strong as an ox," insisted Sister Soulsby. 
+"You mark my word, he'll thrive in Seattle like a green bay-tree."
+
+"Seattle!" echoed Alice, meditatively.  "It sounds
+like the other end of the world, doesn't it?"
+
+The noise of feet in the house broke upon the colloquy,
+and the women went indoors, to join the breakfast party. 
+During the meal, it was Brother Soulsby who bore the
+burden of the conversation.  He was full of the future
+of Seattle and the magnificent impending development
+of that Pacific section.  He had been out there,
+years ago, when it was next door to uninhabited. 
+He had visited the district twice since, and the changes
+discoverable each new time were more wonderful than
+anything Aladdin's lamp ever wrought.  He had secured
+for Theron, through some of his friends in Portland,
+the superintendency of a land and real estate company,
+which had its headquarters in Seattle, but ambitiously linked
+its affairs with the future of all Washington Territory. 
+In an hour's time the hack would come to take the Wares
+and their baggage to the depot, the first stage in their
+long journey across the continent to their new home. 
+Brother Soulsby amiably filled the interval with reminiscences
+of the Oregon of twenty years back, with instructive
+dissertations upon the soil, climate, and seasons of Puget
+Sound and the Columbia valley, and, above all, with helpful
+characterizations of the social life which had begun to take
+form in this remotest West.  He had nothing but confidence,
+to all appearances, in the success of his young friend,
+now embarking on this new career.  He seemed so sanguine
+about it that the whole atmosphere of the breakfast room
+lightened up, and the parting meal, surrounded by so many
+temptations to distraught broodings and silences as it was,
+became almost jovial in its spirit.
+
+At last, it was time to look for the carriage.  The trunks
+and hand-bags were ready in the hall, and Sister Soulsby
+was tying up a package of sandwiches for Alice to keep
+by her in the train.
+
+Theron, with hat in hand, and overcoat on arm, loitered restlessly
+into the kitchen, and watched this proceeding for a moment. 
+Then he sauntered out upon the stoop, and, lifting his head
+and drawing as long a breath as he could, looked over at the elms.
+
+Perhaps the face was older and graver; it was hard to tell. 
+The long winter's illness, with its recurring crises and
+sustained confinement, had bleached his skin and reduced
+his figure to gauntness, but there was none the less
+an air of restored and secure good health about him. 
+Only in the eyes themselves, as they rested briefly upon
+the prospect, did a substantial change suggest itself. 
+They did not dwell fondly upon the picture of the lofty,
+spreading boughs, with their waves of sap-green leafage
+stirring against the blue.  They did not soften and glow
+this time, at the thought of how wholly one felt sure
+of God's goodness in these wonderful new mornings
+of spring.
+
+They looked instead straight through the fairest
+and most moving spectacle in nature's processional,
+and saw afar off, in conjectural vision, a formless
+sort of place which was Seattle.  They surveyed
+its impalpable outlines, its undefined dimensions,
+with a certain cool glitter of hard-and-fast resolve. 
+There rose before his fancy, out of the chaos of these
+shapeless imaginings, some faces of men, then more behind
+them, then a great concourse of uplifted countenances,
+crowded close together as far as the eye could reach. 
+They were attentive faces all, rapt, eager, credulous to
+a degree.  Their eyes were admiringly bent upon a common
+object of excited interest.  They were looking at HIM;
+they strained their ears to miss no cadence of his voice. 
+Involuntarily he straightened himself, stretched forth
+his hand with the pale, thin fingers gracefully disposed,
+and passed it slowly before him from side to side,
+in a comprehensive, stately gesture.  The audience rose at him,
+as he dropped his hand, and filled his day-dream with a
+mighty roar of applause, in volume like an ocean tempest,
+yet pitched for his hearing alone.
+
+He smiled, shook himself with a little delighted tremor,
+and turned on the stoop to the open door.
+
+"What Soulsby said about politics out there interested
+me enormously," he remarked to the two women.  "I shouldn't
+be surprised if I found myself doing something in that line. 
+I can speak, you know, if I can't do anything else. 
+Talk is what tells, these days.  Who knows?  I may turn
+up in Washington a full-blown senator before I'm forty. 
+Stranger things have happened than that, out West!"
+
+"We'll come down and visit you then, Soulsby and I,"
+said Sister Soulsby, cheerfully.  "You shall take us to
+the White House, Alice, and introduce us."
+
+"Oh, it isn't likely I would come East," said Alice, pensively. 
+"Most probably I'd be left to amuse myself in Seattle. 
+But there--I think that's the carriage driving up to the door."
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of The Damnation of Theron Ware
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg's The Damnation of Theron Ware, by Harold Frederic
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Damnation of Theron Ware
+
+Author: Harold Frederic
+
+Release Date: March 8, 2006 [EBook #133]
+Last Updated: March 14, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAMNATION OF THERON WARE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Meredith Ricker, John Hamm and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DAMNATION OF THERON WARE
+
+
+by Harold Frederic
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+No such throng had ever before been seen in the building during all its
+eight years of existence. People were wedged together most uncomfortably
+upon the seats; they stood packed in the aisles and overflowed the
+galleries; at the back, in the shadows underneath these galleries, they
+formed broad, dense masses about the doors, through which it would be
+hopeless to attempt a passage.
+
+The light, given out from numerous tin-lined circles of flaring gas-jets
+arranged on the ceiling, fell full upon a thousand uplifted faces--some
+framed in bonnets or juvenile curls, others bearded or crowned with
+shining baldness--but all alike under the spell of a dominant emotion
+which held features in abstracted suspense and focussed every eye upon a
+common objective point.
+
+The excitement of expectancy reigned upon each row of countenances, was
+visible in every attitude--nay, seemed a part of the close, overheated
+atmosphere itself.
+
+An observer, looking over these compact lines of faces and noting the
+uniform concentration of eagerness they exhibited, might have guessed
+that they were watching for either the jury's verdict in some peculiarly
+absorbing criminal trial, or the announcement of the lucky numbers in
+a great lottery. These two expressions seemed to alternate, and even to
+mingle vaguely, upon the upturned lineaments of the waiting throng--the
+hope of some unnamed stroke of fortune and the dread of some adverse
+decree.
+
+But a glance forward at the object of this universal gaze would have
+sufficed to shatter both hypotheses. Here was neither a court of justice
+nor a tombola. It was instead the closing session of the annual Nedahma
+Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Bishop was about
+to read out the list of ministerial appointments for the coming year.
+This list was evidently written in a hand strange to him, and the slow,
+near-sighted old gentleman, having at last sufficiently rubbed the
+glasses of his spectacles, and then adjusted them over his nose
+with annoying deliberation, was now silently rehearsing his task to
+himself--the while the clergymen round about ground their teeth and
+restlessly shuffled their feet in impatience.
+
+Upon a closer inspection of the assemblage, there were a great many
+of these clergymen. A dozen or more dignified, and for the most part
+elderly, brethren sat grouped about the Bishop in the pulpit. As many
+others, not quite so staid in mien, and indeed with here and there
+almost a suggestion of frivolity in their postures, were seated on the
+steps leading down from this platform. A score of their fellows sat
+facing the audience, on chairs tightly wedged into the space railed off
+round the pulpit; and then came five or six rows of pews, stretching
+across the whole breadth of the church, and almost solidly filled with
+preachers of the Word.
+
+There were very old men among these--bent and decrepit veterans who
+had known Lorenzo Dow, and had been ordained by elders who remembered
+Francis Asbury and even Whitefield. They sat now in front places,
+leaning forward with trembling and misshapen hands behind their hairy
+ears, waiting to hear their names read out on the superannuated list, it
+might be for the last time.
+
+The sight of these venerable Fathers in Israel was good to the eyes,
+conjuring up, as it did, pictures of a time when a plain and homely
+people had been served by a fervent and devoted clergy--by preachers
+who lacked in learning and polish, no doubt, but who gave their lives
+without dream of earthly reward to poverty and to the danger and wearing
+toil of itinerant missions through the rude frontier settlements. These
+pictures had for their primitive accessories log-huts, rough household
+implements, coarse clothes, and patched old saddles which told of weary
+years of journeying; but to even the least sympathetic vision there
+shone upon them the glorified light of the Cross and Crown. Reverend
+survivors of the heroic times, their very presence there--sitting
+meekly at the altar-rail to hear again the published record of their
+uselessness and of their dependence upon church charity--was in the
+nature of a benediction.
+
+The large majority of those surrounding these patriarchs were
+middle-aged men, generally of a robust type, with burly shoulders, and
+bushing beards framing shaven upper lips, and who looked for the most
+part like honest and prosperous farmers attired in their Sunday clothes.
+As exceptions to this rule, there were scattered stray specimens of
+a more urban class, worthies with neatly trimmed whiskers, white
+neckcloths, and even indications of hair-oil--all eloquent of citified
+charges; and now and again the eye singled out a striking and scholarly
+face, at once strong and simple, and instinctively referred it to the
+faculty of one of the several theological seminaries belonging to the
+Conference.
+
+The effect of these faces as a whole was toward goodness, candor,
+and imperturbable self-complacency rather than learning or mental
+astuteness; and curiously enough it wore its pleasantest aspect on
+the countenances of the older men. The impress of zeal and moral worth
+seemed to diminish by regular gradations as one passed to younger faces;
+and among the very beginners, who had been ordained only within the past
+day or two, this decline was peculiarly marked. It was almost a relief
+to note the relative smallness of their number, so plainly was it to be
+seen that they were not the men their forbears had been.
+
+And if those aged, worn-out preachers facing the pulpit had gazed
+instead backward over the congregation, it may be that here too their
+old eyes would have detected a difference--what at least they would have
+deemed a decline.
+
+But nothing was further from the minds of the members of the First M. E.
+Church of Tecumseh than the suggestion that they were not an improvement
+on those who had gone before them. They were undoubtedly the smartest
+and most important congregation within the limits of the Nedahma
+Conference, and this new church edifice of theirs represented alike
+a scale of outlay and a standard of progressive taste in devotional
+architecture unique in the Methodism of that whole section of the State.
+They had a right to be proud of themselves, too. They belonged to the
+substantial order of the community, with perhaps not so many very rich
+men as the Presbyterians had, but on the other hand with far fewer
+extremely poor folk than the Baptists were encumbered with. The pews
+in the first four rows of their church rented for one hundred dollars
+apiece--quite up to the Presbyterian highwater mark--and they now had
+almost abolished free pews altogether. The oyster suppers given by their
+Ladies' Aid Society in the basement of the church during the winter
+had established rank among the fashionable events in Tecumseh's social
+calendar.
+
+A comprehensive and satisfied perception of these advantages was
+uppermost in the minds of this local audience, as they waited for the
+Bishop to begin his reading. They had entertained this Bishop and his
+Presiding Elders, and the rank and file of common preachers, in a style
+which could not have been remotely approached by any other congregation
+in the Conference. Where else, one would like to know, could the
+Bishop have been domiciled in a Methodist house where he might have a
+sitting-room all to himself, with his bedroom leading out of it? Every
+clergyman present had been provided for in a private residence--even
+down to the Licensed Exhorters, who were not really ministers at all
+when you came to think of it, and who might well thank their stars
+that the Conference had assembled among such open-handed people. There
+existed a dim feeling that these Licensed Exhorters--an uncouth crew,
+with country store-keepers and lumbermen and even a horse-doctor among
+their number--had taken rather too much for granted, and were not
+exhibiting quite the proper degree of gratitude over their reception.
+
+But a more important issue hung now imminent in the balance--was
+Tecumseh to be fairly and honorably rewarded for her hospitality by
+being given the pastor of her choice?
+
+All were agreed--at least among those who paid pew-rents--upon the great
+importance of a change in the pulpit of the First M. E. Church. A change
+in persons must of course take place, for their present pastor had
+exhausted the three-year maximum of the itinerant system, but there was
+needed much more than that. For a handsome and expensive church building
+like this, and with such a modern and go-ahead congregation, it was
+simply a vital necessity to secure an attractive and fashionable
+preacher. They had held their own against the Presbyterians these past
+few years only by the most strenuous efforts, and under the depressing
+disadvantage of a minister who preached dreary out-of-date sermons, and
+who lacked even the most rudimentary sense of social distinctions. The
+Presbyterians had captured the new cashier of the Adams County Bank, who
+had always gone to the Methodist Church in the town he came from, but
+now was lost solely because of this tiresome old fossil of theirs; and
+there were numerous other instances of the same sort, scarcely less
+grievous. That this state of things must be altered was clear.
+
+The unusually large local attendance upon the sessions of the Conference
+had given some of the more guileless of visiting brethren a high notion
+of Tecumseh's piety; and perhaps even the most sophisticated stranger
+never quite realized how strictly it was to be explained by the anxiety
+to pick out a suitable champion for the fierce Presbyterian competition.
+Big gatherings assembled evening after evening to hear the sermons of
+those selected to preach, and the church had been almost impossibly
+crowded at each of the three Sunday services. Opinions had naturally
+differed a good deal during the earlier stages of this scrutiny, but
+after last night's sermon there could be but one feeling. The man for
+Tecumseh was the Reverend Theron Ware.
+
+The choice was an admirable one, from points of view much more exalted
+than those of the local congregation.
+
+You could see Mr. Ware sitting there at the end of the row inside the
+altar-rail--the tall, slender young man with the broad white brow,
+thoughtful eyes, and features moulded into that regularity of strength
+which used to characterize the American Senatorial type in those
+far-away days of clean-shaven faces and moderate incomes before the War.
+The bright-faced, comely, and vivacious young woman in the second side
+pew was his wife--and Tecumseh noted with approbation that she knew
+how to dress. There were really no two better or worthier people in the
+building than this young couple, who sat waiting along with the rest to
+hear their fate. But unhappily they had come to know of the effort being
+made to bring them to Tecumseh; and their simple pride in the triumph of
+the husband's fine sermon had become swallowed up in a terribly anxious
+conflict of hope and fear. Neither of them could maintain a satisfactory
+show of composure as the decisive moment approached. The vision of
+translation from poverty and obscurity to such a splendid post as
+this--truly it was too dazzling for tranquil nerves.
+
+The tedious Bishop had at last begun to call his roll of names, and the
+good people of Tecumseh mentally ticked them off, one by one, as the
+list expanded. They felt that it was like this Bishop--an unimportant
+and commonplace figure in Methodism, not to be mentioned in the same
+breath with Simpson and Janes and Kingsley--that he should begin with
+the backwoods counties, and thrust all these remote and pitifully rustic
+stations ahead of their own metropolitan charge. To these they listened
+but listlessly--indifferent alike to the joy and to the dismay which he
+was scattering among the divines before him.
+
+The announcements were being doled out with stumbling hesitation. After
+each one a little half-rustling movement through the crowded rows of
+clergymen passed mute judgment upon the cruel blow this brother had
+received, the reward justly given to this other, the favoritism by which
+a third had profited. The Presiding Elders, whose work all this was,
+stared with gloomy and impersonal abstraction down upon the rows of
+blackcoated humanity spread before them. The ministers returned this
+fixed and perfunctory gaze with pale, set faces, only feebly masking the
+emotions which each new name stirred somewhere among them. The Bishop
+droned on laboriously, mispronouncing words and repeating himself as if
+he were reading a catalogue of unfamiliar seeds.
+
+“First church of Tecumseh--Brother Abram G. Tisdale!”
+
+There was no doubt about it! These were actually the words that had been
+uttered. After all this outlay, all this lavish hospitality, all this
+sacrifice of time and patience in sitting through those sermons, to draw
+from the grab-bag nothing better than--a Tisdale!
+
+A hum of outraged astonishment--half groan, half wrathful snort bounded
+along from pew to pew throughout the body of the church. An echo of it
+reached the Bishop, and so confused him that he haltingly repeated the
+obnoxious line. Every local eye turned as by intuition to where the
+calamitous Tisdale sat, and fastened malignantly upon him.
+
+Could anything be worse? This Brother Tisdale was past fifty--a
+spindling, rickety, gaunt old man, with a long horse-like head and
+vacantly solemn face, who kept one or the other of his hands continually
+fumbling his bony jaw. He had been withdrawn from routine service for a
+number of years, doing a little insurance canvassing on his own account,
+and also travelling for the Book Concern. Now that he wished to return
+to parochial work, the richest prize in the whole list, Tecumseh, was
+given to him--to him who had never been asked to preach at a Conference,
+and whose archaic nasal singing of “Greenland's Icy Mountains” had made
+even the Licensed Exhorters grin! It was too intolerably dreadful to
+think of!
+
+An embittered whisper to the effect that Tisdale was the Bishop's cousin
+ran round from pew to pew. This did not happen to be true, but indignant
+Tecumseh gave it entire credit. The throngs about the doors dwindled as
+by magic, and the aisles cleared. Local interest was dead; and even some
+of the pewholders rose and made their way out. One of these murmured
+audibly to his neighbors as he departed that HIS pew could be had now
+for sixty dollars.
+
+So it happened that when, a little later on, the appointment of Theron
+Ware to Octavius was read out, none of the people of Tecumseh either
+noted or cared. They had been deeply interested in him so long as
+it seemed likely that he was to come to them--before their clearly
+expressed desire for him had been so monstrously ignored. But now what
+became of him was no earthly concern of theirs.
+
+After the Doxology had been sung and the Conference formally declared
+ended, the Wares would fain have escaped from the flood of handshakings
+and boisterous farewells which spread over the front part of the church.
+But the clergymen were unusually insistent upon demonstrations of
+cordiality among themselves--the more, perhaps, because it was evident
+that the friendliness of their local hosts had suddenly evaporated--and,
+of all men in the world, the present incumbent of the Octavius pulpit
+now bore down upon them with noisy effusiveness, and defied evasion.
+
+“Brother Ware--we have never been interduced--but let me clasp your
+hand! And--Sister Ware, I presume--yours too!”
+
+He was a portly man, who held his head back so that his face seemed all
+jowl and mouth and sandy chin-whisker. He smiled broadly upon them with
+half-closed eyes, and shook hands again.
+
+“I said to 'em,” he went on with loud pretence of heartiness, “the
+minute I heerd your name called out for our dear Octavius, 'I must go
+over an' interduce myself.' It will be a heavy cross to part with those
+dear people, Brother Ware, but if anything could wean me to the notion,
+so to speak, it would be the knowledge that you are to take up my labors
+in their midst. Perhaps--ah--perhaps they ARE jest a trifle close in
+money matters, but they come out strong on revivals. They'll need a good
+deal o' stirrin' up about parsonage expenses, but, oh! such seasons
+of grace as we've experienced there together!” He shook his head, and
+closed his eyes altogether, as if transported by his memories.
+
+Brother Ware smiled faintly in decorous response, and bowed in silence;
+but his wife resented the unctuous beaming of content on the other's
+wide countenance, and could not restrain her tongue.
+
+“You seem to bear up tolerably well under this heavy cross, as you call
+it,” she said sharply.
+
+“The will o' the Lord, Sister Ware--the will o' the Lord!” he responded,
+disposed for the instant to put on his pompous manner with her, and then
+deciding to smile again as he moved off. The circumstance that he was to
+get an additional three hundred dollars yearly in his new place was not
+mentioned between them.
+
+By a mutual impulse the young couple, when they had at last gained the
+cool open air, crossed the street to the side where over-hanging trees
+shaded the infrequent lamps, and they might be comparatively alone. The
+wife had taken her husband's arm, and pressed closely upon it as they
+walked. For a time no word passed, but finally he said, in a grave
+voice,--
+
+“It is hard upon you, poor girl.”
+
+Then she stopped short, buried her face against his shoulder, and fell
+to sobbing.
+
+He strove with gentle, whispered remonstrance to win her from this mood,
+and after a few moments she lifted her head and they resumed their walk,
+she wiping her eyes as they went.
+
+“I couldn't keep it in a minute longer!” she said, catching her breath
+between phrases. “Oh, WHY do they behave so badly to us, Theron?”
+
+He smiled down momentarily upon her as they moved along, and patted her
+hand.
+
+“Somebody must have the poor places, Alice,” he said consolingly. “I am
+a young man yet, remember. We must take our turn, and be patient. For
+'we know that all things work together for good.'”
+
+“And your sermon was so head-and-shoulders above all the others!” she
+went on breathlessly. “Everybody said so! And Mrs. Parshall heard it so
+DIRECT that you were to be sent here, and I know she told everybody how
+much I was lotting on it--I wish we could go right off tonight without
+going to her house--I shall be ashamed to look her in the face--and
+of course she knows we're poked off to that miserable Octavius.--Why,
+Theron, they tell me it's a worse place even than we've got now!”
+
+“Oh, not at all,” he put in reassuringly. “It has grown to be a large
+town--oh, quite twice the size of Tyre. It's a great Irish place, I've
+heard. Our own church seems to be a good deal run down there. We must
+build it up again; and the salary is better--a little.”
+
+But he too was depressed, and they walked on toward their temporary
+lodging in a silence full of mutual grief. It was not until they had
+come within sight of this goal that he prefaced by a little sigh of
+resignation these further words,--
+
+“Come--let us make the best of it, my girl! After all, we are in the
+hands of the Lord.”
+
+“Oh, don't, Theron!” she said hastily. “Don't talk to me about the Lord
+tonight; I can't bear it!”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+“Theron! Come out here! This is the funniest thing we have heard yet!”
+
+Mrs. Ware stood on the platform of her new kitchen stoop. The bright
+flood of May-morning sunshine completely enveloped her girlish form,
+clad in a simple, fresh-starched calico gown, and shone in golden
+patches upon her light-brown hair. She had a smile on her face, as she
+looked down at the milk boy standing on the bottom step--a smile of a
+doubtful sort, stormily mirthful.
+
+“Come out a minute, Theron!” she called again; and in obedience to the
+summons the tall lank figure of her husband appeared in the open doorway
+behind her. A long loose, open dressing-gown dangled to his knees,
+and his sallow, clean-shaven, thoughtful face wore a morning undress
+expression of youthful good-nature. He leaned against the door-sill,
+crossed his large carpet slippers, and looked up into the sky, drawing a
+long satisfied breath.
+
+“What a beautiful morning!” he exclaimed. “The elms over there are full
+of robins. We must get up earlier these mornings, and take some walks.”
+
+His wife indicated the boy with the milk-pail on his arm, by a wave of
+her hand.
+
+“Guess what he tells me!” she said. “It wasn't a mistake at all, our
+getting no milk yesterday or the Sunday before. It seems that that's the
+custom here, at least so far as the parsonage is concerned.”
+
+“What's the matter, boy?” asked the young minister, drawling his words
+a little, and putting a sense of placid irony into them. “Don't the cows
+give milk on Sunday, then?”
+
+The boy was not going to be chaffed. “Oh, I'll bring you milk fast
+enough on Sundays, if you give me the word,” he said with nonchalance.
+“Only it won't last long.”
+
+“How do you mean--'won't last long'?”, asked Mrs. Ware, briskly.
+
+The boy liked her--both for herself, and for the doughnuts fried with
+her own hands, which she gave him on his morning round. He dropped his
+half-defiant tone.
+
+“The thing of it's this,” he explained. “Every new minister starts in
+saying we can deliver to this house on Sundays, an' then gives us notice
+to stop before the month's out. It's the trustees that does it.”
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware uncrossed his feet and moved out on to the stoop
+beside his wife. “What's that you say?” he interjected. “Don't THEY take
+milk on Sundays?”
+
+“Nope!” answered the boy.
+
+The young couple looked each other in the face for a puzzled moment,
+then broke into a laugh.
+
+“Well, we'll try it, anyway,” said the preacher. “You can go on bringing
+it Sundays till--till--”
+
+“Till you cave in an' tell me to stop,” put in the boy. “All right!” and
+he was off on the instant, the dipper jangling loud incredulity in his
+pail as he went.
+
+The Wares exchanged another glance as he disappeared round the corner
+of the house, and another mutual laugh seemed imminent. Then the wife's
+face clouded over, and she thrust her under-lip a trifle forward out of
+its place in the straight and gently firm profile.
+
+“It's just what Wendell Phillips said,” she declared. “'The Puritan's
+idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.'”
+
+The young minister stroked his chin thoughtfully, and let his gaze
+wander over the backyard in silence. The garden parts had not been
+spaded up, but lay, a useless stretch of muddy earth, broken only by
+last year's cabbage-stumps and the general litter of dead roots and
+vegetation. The door of the tenantless chicken-coop hung wide open.
+Before it was a great heap of ashes and cinders, soaked into grimy
+hardness by the recent spring rains, and nearer still an ancient
+chopping-block, round which were scattered old weather-beaten
+hardwood knots which had defied the axe, parts of broken barrels and
+packing-boxes, and a nameless debris of tin cans, clam-shells, and
+general rubbish. It was pleasanter to lift the eyes, and look across the
+neighbors' fences to the green, waving tops of the elms on the street
+beyond. How lofty and beautiful they were in the morning sunlight, and
+with what matchless charm came the song of the robins, freshly installed
+in their haunts among the new pale-green leaves! Above them, in the
+fresh, scented air, glowed the great blue dome, radiant with light and
+the purification of spring.
+
+Theron lifted his thin, long-fingered hand, and passed it in a slow arch
+of movement to comprehend this glorious upper picture.
+
+“What matter anyone's ideas of hell,” he said, in soft, grave tones,
+“when we have that to look at, and listen to, and fill our lungs with?
+It seems to me that we never FEEL quite so sure of God's goodness at
+other times as we do in these wonderful new mornings of spring.”
+
+The wife followed his gesture, and her eyes rested for a brief moment,
+with pleased interest, upon the trees and the sky. Then they reverted,
+with a harsher scrutiny, to the immediate foreground.
+
+“Those Van Sizers ought to be downright ashamed of themselves,” she
+said, “to leave everything in such a muss as this. You MUST see about
+getting a man to clean up the yard, Theron. It's no use your thinking of
+doing it yourself. In the first place, it wouldn't look quite the thing,
+and, second, you'd never get at it in all your born days. Or if a man
+would cost too much, we might get a boy. I daresay Harvey would come
+around, after he'd finished with his milk-route in the forenoon. We
+could give him his dinner, you know, and I'd bake him some cookies. He's
+got the greatest sweet-tooth you ever heard of. And then perhaps if we
+gave him a quarter, or say half a dollar, he'd be quite satisfied. I'll
+speak to him in the morning. We can save a dollar or so that way.”
+
+“I suppose every little does help,” commented Mr. Ware, with a doleful
+lack of conviction. Then his face brightened. “I tell you what let's
+do!” he exclaimed. “Get on your street dress, and we'll take a long
+walk, way out into the country. You've never seen the basin, where they
+float the log-rafts in, or the big sawmills. The hills beyond give
+you almost mountain effects, they are so steep; and they say there's a
+sulphur spring among the slate on the hill-side, somewhere, with trees
+all about it; and we could take some sandwiches with us--”
+
+“You forget,” put in Mrs. Ware,--“those trustees are coming at eleven.”
+
+“So they are!” assented the young minister, with something like a sigh.
+He cast another reluctant, lingering glance at the sunlit elm boughs,
+and, turning, went indoors.
+
+He loitered for an aimless minute in the kitchen, where his wife, her
+sleeves rolled to the elbow, now resumed the interrupted washing of the
+breakfast dishes--perhaps with vague visions of that ever-receding
+time to come when they might have a hired girl to do such work. Then
+he wandered off into the room beyond, which served them alike as
+living-room and study, and let his eye run along the two rows of books
+that constituted his library. He saw nothing which he wanted to read.
+Finally he did take down “Paley's Evidences,” and seated himself in
+the big armchair--that costly and oversized anomaly among his humble
+house-hold gods; but the book lay unopened on his knee, and his eyelids
+half closed themselves in sign of revery.
+
+This was his third charge--this Octavius which they both knew they were
+going to dislike so much.
+
+The first had been in the pleasant dairy and hop country many miles to
+the south, on another watershed and among a different kind of people.
+Perhaps, in truth, the grinding labor, the poverty of ideas, the
+systematic selfishness of later rural experience, had not been lacking
+there; but they played no part in the memories which now he passed in
+tender review. He recalled instead the warm sunshine on the fertile
+expanse of fields; the sleek, well-fed herds of “milkers” coming
+lowing down the road under the maples; the prosperous and hospitable
+farmhouses, with their orchards in blossom and their spacious red barns;
+the bountiful boiled dinners which cheery housewives served up with
+their own skilled hands. Of course, he admitted to himself, it would
+not be the same if he were to go back there again. He was conscious of
+having moved along--was it, after all, an advance?--to a point where it
+was unpleasant to sit at table with the unfragrant hired man, and still
+worse to encounter the bucolic confusion between the functions of
+knives and forks. But in those happy days--young, zealous, himself
+farm-bred--these trifles had been invisible to him, and life there
+among those kindly husbandmen had seemed, by contrast with the gaunt
+surroundings and gloomy rule of the theological seminary, luxuriously
+abundant and free.
+
+It was there too that the crowning blessedness of his youth--nay, should
+he not say of all his days?--had come to him. There he had first seen
+Alice Hastings,--the bright-eyed, frank-faced, serenely self-reliant
+girl, who now, less than four years thereafter, could be heard washing
+the dishes out in the parsonage kitchen.
+
+How wonderful she had seemed to him then! How beautiful and
+all-beneficent the miracle still appeared! Though herself the daughter
+of a farmer, her presence on a visit within the borders of his remote
+country charge had seemed to make everything, there a hundred times
+more countrified than it had ever been before. She was fresh from the
+refinements of a town seminary: she read books; it was known that
+she could play upon the piano. Her clothes, her manners, her way of
+speaking, the readiness of her thoughts and sprightly tongue--not
+least, perhaps, the imposing current understanding as to her father's
+wealth--placed her on a glorified pinnacle far away from the girls of
+the neighborhood. These honest and good-hearted creatures indeed
+called ceaseless attention to her superiority by their deference and
+open-mouthed admiration, and treated it as the most natural thing in the
+world that their young minister should be visibly “taken” with her.
+
+Theron Ware, in truth, left this first pastorate of his the following
+spring, in a transfiguring halo of romance. His new appointment was
+to Tyre--a somewhat distant village of traditional local pride and
+substance--and he was to be married only a day or so before entering
+upon his pastoral duties there. The good people among whom he had begun
+his ministry took kindly credit to themselves that he had met his bride
+while she was “visiting round” their countryside. In part by jocose
+inquiries addressed to the expectant groom, in part by the confidences
+of the postmaster at the corners concerning the bulk and frequency of
+the correspondence passing between Theron and the now remote Alice--they
+had followed the progress of the courtship through the autumn and
+winter with friendly zest. When he returned from the Conference, to say
+good-bye and confess the happiness that awaited him, they gave him a
+“donation”--quite as if he were a married pastor with a home of his
+own, instead of a shy young bachelor, who received his guests and their
+contributions in the house where he boarded.
+
+He went away with tears of mingled regret and proud joy in his eyes,
+thinking a good deal upon their predictions of a distinguished career
+before him, feeling infinitely strengthened and upborne by the hearty
+fervor of their God-speed, and taking with him nearly two wagon-loads of
+vegetables, apples, canned preserves, assorted furniture, glass dishes,
+cheeses, pieced bedquilts, honey, feathers, and kitchen utensils.
+
+Of the three years' term in Tyre, it was pleasantest to dwell upon the
+beginning.
+
+The young couple--after being married out at Alice's home in an
+adjoining county, under the depressing conditions of a hopelessly
+bedridden mother, and a father and brothers whose perceptions were
+obviously closed to the advantages of a matrimonial connection with
+Methodism--came straight to the house which their new congregation
+rented as a parsonage. The impulse of reaction from the rather grim
+cheerlessness of their wedding lent fresh gayety to their lighthearted,
+whimsical start at housekeeping. They had never laughed so much in all
+their lives as they did now in these first months--over their weird
+ignorance of domestic details; with its mishaps, mistakes, and
+entertaining discoveries; over the comical super-abundances and
+shortcomings of their “donation” outfit; over the thousand and one
+quaint experiences of their novel relation to each other, to the
+congregation, and to the world of Tyre at large.
+
+Theron, indeed, might be said never to have laughed before. Up to that
+time no friendly student of his character, cataloguing his admirable
+qualities, would have thought of including among them a sense of humor,
+much less a bent toward levity. Neither his early strenuous battle to
+get away from the farm and achieve such education as should serve
+to open to him the gates of professional life, nor the later wave of
+religious enthusiasm which caught him up as he stood on the border-land
+of manhood, and swept him off into a veritable new world of views and
+aspirations, had been a likely school of merriment. People had prized
+him for his innocent candor and guileless mind, for his good heart, his
+pious zeal, his modesty about gifts notably above the average, but it
+had occurred to none to suspect in him a latent funny side.
+
+But who could be solemn where Alice was?--Alice in a quandary over the
+complications of her cooking stove; Alice boiling her potatoes all day,
+and her eggs for half an hour; Alice ordering twenty pounds of steak and
+half a pound of sugar, and striving to extract a breakfast beverage from
+the unground coffee-bean? Clearly not so tenderly fond and sympathetic a
+husband as Theron. He began by laughing because she laughed, and grew by
+swift stages to comprehend, then frankly to share, her amusement. From
+this it seemed only a step to the development of a humor of his own,
+doubling, as it were, their sportive resources. He found himself
+discovering a new droll aspect in men and things; his phraseology took
+on a dryly playful form, fittingly to present conceits which danced up,
+unabashed, quite into the presence of lofty and majestic truths. He
+got from this nothing but satisfaction; it obviously involved increased
+claims to popularity among his parishioners, and consequently magnified
+powers of usefulness, and it made life so much more a joy and a thing to
+be thankful for. Often, in the midst of the exchange of merry quip
+and whimsical suggestion, bright blossoms on that tree of strength and
+knowledge which he felt expanding now with a mighty outward pushing
+in all directions, he would lapse into deep gravity, and ponder with a
+swelling heart the vast unspeakable marvel of his blessedness, in being
+thus enriched and humanized by daily communion with the most worshipful
+of womankind.
+
+This happy and good young couple took the affections of Tyre by storm.
+The Methodist Church there had at no time held its head very high among
+the denominations, and for some years back had been in a deplorably
+sinking state, owing first to the secession of the Free Methodists and
+then to the incumbency of a pastor who scandalized the community by
+marrying a black man to a white woman. But the Wares changed all this.
+Within a month the report of Theron's charm and force in the pulpit was
+crowding the church building to its utmost capacity--and that, too,
+with some of Tyre's best people. Equally winning was the atmosphere of
+jollity and juvenile high spirits which pervaded the parsonage under
+these new conditions, and which Theron and Alice seemed to diffuse
+wherever they went.
+
+Thus swimmingly their first year sped, amid universal acclaim. Mrs. Ware
+had a recognized social place, quite outside the restricted limits of
+Methodism, and shone in it with an unflagging brilliancy altogether
+beyond the traditions of Tyre. Delightful as she was in other people's
+houses, she was still more naively fascinating in her own quaint and
+somewhat harum-scarum domicile; and the drab, two-storied, tin-roofed
+little parsonage might well have rattled its clapboards to see if it
+was not in dreamland--so gay was the company, so light were the hearts,
+which it sheltered in these new days. As for Theron, the period was one
+of incredible fructification and output. He scarcely recognized for his
+own the mind which now was reaching out on all sides with the arms of
+an octopus, exploring unsuspected mines of thought, bringing in rich
+treasures of deduction, assimilating, building, propounding as if by
+some force quite independent of him. He could not look without blinking
+timidity at the radiance of the path stretched out before him, leading
+upward to dazzling heights of greatness.
+
+At the end of this first year the Wares suddenly discovered that they
+were eight hundred dollars in debt.
+
+The second year was spent in arriving, by slow stages and with a cruel
+wealth of pathetic detail, at a realization of what being eight hundred
+dollars in debt meant.
+
+It was not in their elastic and buoyant natures to grasp the full
+significance of the thing at once, or easily. Their position in the
+social structure, too, was all against clear-sightedness in material
+matters. A general, for example, uniformed and in the saddle, advancing
+through the streets with his staff in the proud wake of his division's
+massed walls of bayonets, cannot be imagined as quailing at the glance
+thrown at him by his tailor on the sidewalk. Similarly, a man invested
+with sacerdotal authority, who baptizes, marries, and buries, who
+delivers judgments from the pulpit which may not be questioned in his
+hearing, and who receives from all his fellow-men a special deference of
+manner and speech, is in the nature of things prone to see the grocer's
+book and the butcher's bill through the little end of the telescope.
+
+The Wares at the outset had thought it right to trade as exclusively as
+possible with members of their own church society. This loyalty became
+a principal element of martyrdom. Theron had his creditors seated in
+serried rows before him, Sunday after Sunday. Alice had her critics
+consolidated among those whom it was her chief duty to visit and profess
+friendship for. These situations now began, by regular gradations, to
+unfold their terrors. At the first intimation of discontent, the Wares
+made what seemed to them a sweeping reduction in expenditure. When
+they heard that Brother Potter had spoken of them as “poor pay,” they
+dismissed their hired girl. A little later, Theron brought himself
+to drop a laboriously casual suggestion as to a possible increase of
+salary, and saw with sinking spirits the faces of the stewards freeze
+with dumb disapprobation. Then Alice paid a visit to her parents, only
+to find her brothers doggedly hostile to the notion of her being helped,
+and her father so much under their influence that the paltry sum he
+dared offer barely covered the expenses of her journey. With another
+turn of the screw, they sold the piano she had brought with her from
+home, and cut themselves down to the bare necessities of life, neither
+receiving company nor going out. They never laughed now, and even smiles
+grew rare.
+
+By this time Theron's sermons, preached under that stony glare of
+people to whom he owed money, had degenerated to a pitiful level of
+commonplace. As a consequence, the attendance became once more
+confined to the insufficient membership of the church, and the trustees
+complained of grievously diminished receipts. When the Wares, grown
+desperate, ventured upon the experiment of trading outside the bounds of
+the congregation, the trustees complained again, this time peremptorily.
+
+Thus the second year dragged itself miserably to an end. Nor was
+relief possible, because the Presiding Elder knew something of the
+circumstances, and felt it his duty to send Theron back for a third
+year, to pay his debts, and drain the cup of disciplinary medicine to
+its dregs.
+
+The worst has been told. Beginning in utter blackness, this third year,
+in the second month, brought a change as welcome as it was unlooked for.
+An elderly and important citizen of Tyre, by name Abram Beekman, whom
+Theron knew slightly, and had on occasions seen sitting in one of
+the back pews near the door, called one morning at the parsonage, and
+electrified its inhabitants by expressing a desire to wipe off all their
+old scores for them, and give them a fresh start in life. As he put the
+suggestion, they could find no excuse for rejecting it. He had watched
+them, and heard a good deal about them, and took a fatherly sort of
+interest in them. He did not deprecate their regarding the aid he
+proffered them in the nature of a loan, but they were to make themselves
+perfectly easy about it, and never return it at all unless they could
+spare it sometime with entire convenience, and felt that they wanted to
+do so. As this amazing windfall finally took shape, it enabled the Wares
+to live respectably through the year, and to leave Tyre with something
+over one hundred dollars in hand.
+
+It enabled them, too, to revive in a chastened form their old dream of
+ultimate success and distinction for Theron. He had demonstrated clearly
+enough to himself, during that brief season of unrestrained effulgence,
+that he had within him the making of a great pulpit orator. He set
+to work now, with resolute purpose, to puzzle out and master all the
+principles which underlie this art, and all the tricks that adorn its
+superstructure. He studied it, fastened his thoughts upon it, talked
+daily with Alice about it. In the pulpit, addressing those people who
+had so darkened his life and crushed the first happiness out of his
+home, he withheld himself from any oratorical display which could afford
+them gratification. He put aside, as well; the thought of attracting
+once more the non-Methodists of Tyre, whose early enthusiasm had
+spread such pitfalls for his unwary feet. He practised effects now
+by piecemeal, with an alert ear, and calculation in every tone. An
+ambition, at once embittered and tearfully solicitous, possessed him.
+
+He reflected now, this morning, with a certain incredulous interest,
+upon that unworthy epoch in his life history, which seemed so far behind
+him, and yet had come to a close only a few weeks ago. The opportunity
+had been given him, there at the Tecumseh Conference, to reveal his
+quality. He had risen to its full limit of possibilities, and preached
+a great sermon in a manner which he at least knew was unapproachable. He
+had made his most powerful bid for the prize place, had trebly deserved
+success--and had been banished instead to Octavius!
+
+The curious thing was that he did not resent his failure. Alice had
+taken it hard, but he himself was conscious of a sense of spiritual
+gain. The influence of the Conference, with its songs and seasons of
+prayer and high pressure of emotional excitement, was still strong upon
+him. It seemed years and years since the religious side of him had been
+so stirred into motion. He felt, as he lay back in the chair, and folded
+his hands over the book on his knee, that he had indeed come forth
+from the fire purified and strengthened. The ministry to souls diseased
+beckoned him with a new and urgent significance. He smiled to remember
+that Mr. Beekman, speaking in his shrewd and pointed way, had asked him
+whether, looking it all over, he didn't think it would be better for
+him to study law, with a view to sliding out of the ministry when a good
+chance offered. It amazed him now to recall that he had taken this
+hint seriously, and even gone to the length of finding out what books
+law-students began upon.
+
+Thank God! all that was past and gone now. The Call sounded, resonant
+and imperative, in his ears, and there was no impulse of his heart, no
+fibre of his being, which did not stir in devout response. He closed his
+eyes, to be the more wholly alone with the Spirit, that moved him.
+
+The jangling of a bell in the hallway broke sharply upon his
+meditations, and on the instant his wife thrust in her head from the
+kitchen.
+
+“You'll have to go to the door, Theron!” she warned him, in a loud,
+swift whisper. “I'm not fit to be seen. It is the trustees.”
+
+“All right,” he said, and rose slowly from sprawling recumbency to his
+feet. “I'll go.”
+
+“And don't forget,” she added strenuously; “I believe in Levi Gorringe!
+I've seen him go past here with his rod and fish-basket twice in eight
+days, and that's a good sign. He's got a soft side somewhere. And just
+keep a stiff upper lip about the gas, and don't you let them jew you
+down a solitary cent on that sidewalk.”
+
+“All right,” said Theron, again, and moved reluctantly toward the hall
+door.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+When the three trustees had been shown in by the Rev. Mr. Ware, and had
+taken seats, an awkward little pause ensued. The young minister looked
+doubtingly from one face to another, the while they glanced with
+inquiring interest about the room, noting the pictures and appraising
+the furniture in their minds.
+
+The obvious leader of the party, Loren Pierce, a rich quarryman, was an
+old man of medium size and mean attire, with a square, beardless face as
+hard and impassive in expression as one of his blocks of limestone. The
+irregular, thin-lipped mouth, slightly sunken, and shut with vice-like
+firmness, the short snub nose, and the little eyes squinting from
+half-closed lids beneath slightly marked brows, seemed scarcely to
+attain to the dignity of features, but evaded attention instead, as if
+feeling that they were only there at all from plain necessity, and ought
+not to be taken into account. Mr. Pierce's face did not know how to
+smile--what was the use of smiles?--but its whole surface radiated
+secretiveness. Portrayed on canvas by a master brush, with a ruff or a
+red robe for masquerade, generations of imaginative amateurs would
+have seen in it vast reaching plots, the skeletons of a dozen dynastic
+cupboards, the guarded mysteries of half a century's international
+diplomacy. The amateurs would have been wrong again. There was nothing
+behind Mr. Pierce's juiceless countenance more weighty than a general
+determination to exact seven per cent for his money, and some specific
+notions about capturing certain brickyards which were interfering with
+his quarry-sales. But Octavius watched him shamble along its sidewalks
+quite as the Vienna of dead and forgotten yesterday might have watched
+Metternich.
+
+Erastus Winch was of a breezier sort--a florid, stout, and sandy man,
+who spent most of his life driving over evil country roads in a buggy,
+securing orders for dairy furniture and certain allied lines of farm
+utensils. This practice had given him a loud voice and a deceptively
+hearty manner, to which the other avocation of cheese-buyer, which he
+pursued at the Board of Trade meetings every Monday afternoon, had added
+a considerable command of persuasive yet non-committal language. To
+look at him, still more to hear him, one would have sworn he was a good
+fellow, a trifle rough and noisy, perhaps, but all right at bottom.
+But the County Clerk of Dearborn County could have told you of
+agriculturists who knew Erastus from long and unhappy experience, and
+who held him to be even a tighter man than Loren Pierce in the matter of
+a mortgage.
+
+The third trustee, Levi Gorringe, set one wondering at the very first
+glance what on earth he was doing in that company. Those who had known
+him longest had the least notion; but it may be added that no one knew
+him well. He was a lawyer, and had lived in Octavius for upwards of ten
+years; that is to say, since early manhood. He had an office on the main
+street, just under the principal photograph gallery. Doubtless he was
+sometimes in this office; but his fellow-townsmen saw him more often
+in the street doorway, with the stairs behind him, and the flaring
+show-cases of the photographer on either side, standing with his hands
+in his pockets and an unlighted cigar in his mouth, looking at nothing
+in particular. About every other day he went off after breakfast into
+the country roundabout, sometimes with a rod, sometimes with a gun, but
+always alone. He was a bachelor, and slept in a room at the back of
+his office, cooking some of his meals himself, getting others at a
+restaurant close by. Though he had little visible practice, he was
+understood to be well-to-do and even more, and people tacitly inferred
+that he “shaved notes.” The Methodists of Octavius looked upon him as
+a queer fish, and through nearly a dozen years had never quite outgrown
+their hebdomadal tendency to surprise at seeing him enter their church.
+He had never, it is true, professed religion, but they had elected him
+as a trustee now for a number of terms, all the same--partly because he
+was their only lawyer, partly because he, like both his colleagues, held
+a mortgage on the church edifice and lot. In person, Mr. Gorringe was a
+slender man, with a skin of a clear, uniform citron tint, black waving
+hair, and dark gray eyes, and a thin, high-featured face. He wore
+a mustache and pointed chin-tuft; and, though he was of New England
+parentage and had never been further south than Ocean Grove, he
+presented a general effect of old Mississippian traditions and tastes
+startlingly at variance with the standards of Dearborn County Methodism.
+Nothing could convince some of the elder sisters that he was not a
+drinking man.
+
+The three visitors had completed their survey of the room now; and Loren
+Pierce emitted a dry, harsh little cough, as a signal that business
+was about to begin. At this sound, Winch drew up his feet, and Gorringe
+untied a parcel of account-books and papers that he held on his knee.
+Theron felt that his countenance must be exhibiting to the assembled
+brethren an unfortunate sense of helplessness in their hands. He tried
+to look more resolute, and forced his lips into a smile.
+
+“Brother Gorringe allus acts as Seckertary,” said Erastus Winch, beaming
+broadly upon the minister, as if the mere mention of the fact promoted
+jollity. “That's it, Brother Gorringe,--take your seat at Brother Ware's
+desk. Mind the Dominie's pen don't play tricks on you, an' start off
+writin' out sermons instid of figgers.” The humorist turned to Theron
+as the lawyer walked over to the desk at the window. “I allus have to
+caution him about that,” he remarked with great joviality. “An' do YOU
+look out afterwards, Brother Ware, or else you'll catch that pen o'
+yours scribblin' lawyer's lingo in place o' the Word.”
+
+Theron felt bound to exhibit a grin in acknowledgment of this
+pleasantry. The lawyer's change of position had involved some shifting
+of the others' chairs, and the young minister found himself directly
+confronted by Brother Pierce's hard and colorless old visage. Its little
+eyes were watching him, as through a mask, and under their influence
+the smile of politeness fled from his lips. The lawyer on his right, the
+cheese-buyer to the left, seemed to recede into distance as he for the
+moment returned the gaze of the quarryman. He waited now for him to
+speak, as if the others were of no importance.
+
+“We are a plain sort o' folks up in these parts,” said Brother Pierce,
+after a slight further pause. His voice was as dry and rasping as his
+cough, and its intonations were those of authority. “We walk here,” he
+went on, eying the minister with a sour regard, “in a meek an' humble
+spirit, in the straight an' narrow way which leadeth unto life. We ain't
+gone traipsin' after strange gods, like some people that call themselves
+Methodists in other places. We stick by the Discipline an' the ways of
+our fathers in Israel. No new-fangled notions can go down here. Your
+wife'd better take them flowers out of her bunnit afore next Sunday.”
+
+Silence possessed the room for a few moments, the while Theron,
+pale-faced and with brows knit, studied the pattern of the ingrain
+carpet. Then he lifted his head, and nodded it in assent. “Yes,”
+ he said; “we will do nothing by which our 'brother stumbleth, or is
+offended, or is made weak.'”
+
+Brother Pierce's parchment face showed no sign of surprise or pleasure
+at this easy submission. “Another thing: We don't want no book-learnin'
+or dictionary words in our pulpit,” he went on coldly. “Some folks may
+stomach 'em; we won't. Them two sermons o' yours, p'r'aps they'd do down
+in some city place; but they're like your wife's bunnit here, they're
+too flowery to suit us. What we want to hear is the plain, old-fashioned
+Word of God, without any palaver or 'hems and ha's. They tell me
+there's some parts where hell's treated as played-out--where our
+ministers don't like to talk much about it because people don't want to
+hear about it. Such preachers ought to be put out. They ain't Methodists
+at all. What we want here, sir, is straight-out, flat-footed hell--the
+burnin' lake o' fire an' brim-stone. Pour it into 'em, hot an' strong.
+We can't have too much of it. Work in them awful deathbeds of Voltaire
+an' Tom Paine, with the Devil right there in the room, reachin' for
+'em, an' they yellin' for fright; that's what fills the anxious seat an'
+brings in souls hand over fist.”
+
+Theron's tongue dallied for an instant with the temptation to comment
+upon these old-wife fables, which were so dear to the rural religious
+heart when he and I were boys. But it seemed wiser to only nod again,
+and let his mentor go on.
+
+“We ain't had no trouble with the Free Methodists here,” continued
+Brother Pierce, “jest because we kept to the old paths, an' seek for
+salvation in the good old way. Everybody can shout 'Amen!' as loud
+and as long as the Spirit moves him, with us. Some one was sayin' you
+thought we ought to have a choir and an organ. No, sirree! No such
+tom-foolery for us! You'll only stir up feelin' agin yourself by hintin'
+at such things. And then, too, our folks don't take no stock in all that
+pack o' nonsense about science, such as tellin' the age of the earth by
+crackin' up stones. I've b'en in the quarry line all my life, an' I know
+it's all humbug! Why, they say some folks are goin' round now preachin'
+that our grandfathers were all monkeys. That comes from departin'
+from the ways of our forefathers, an puttin' in organs an' choirs, an'
+deckin' our women-folks out with gewgaws, an' apin' the fashions of the
+worldly. I shouldn't wonder if them kind did have some monkey blood in
+'em. You'll find we're a different sort here.”
+
+The young minister preserved silence for a little, until it became
+apparent that the old trustee had had his say out. Even then he raised
+his head slowly, and at last made answer in a hesitating and irresolute
+way.
+
+“You have been very frank,” he said. “I am obliged to you. A clergyman
+coming to a new charge cannot be better served than by having
+laid before him a clear statement of the views and--and spiritual
+tendencies--of his new flock, quite at the outset. I feel it to be
+of especial value in this case, because I am young in years and in my
+ministry, and am conscious of a great weakness of the flesh. I can
+see how daily contact with a people so attached to the old, simple,
+primitive Methodism of Wesley and Asbury may be a source of much
+strength to me. I may take it,” he added upon second thought, with an
+inquiring glance at Mr. Winch, “that Brother Pierce's description of our
+charge, and its tastes and needs, meets with your approval?”
+
+Erastus Winch nodded his head and smiled expansively. “Whatever Brother
+Pierce says, goes!” he declared. The lawyer, sitting behind at the desk
+by the window, said nothing.
+
+“The place is jest overrun with Irish,” Brother Pierce began again.
+“They've got two Catholic churches here now to our one, and they do jest
+as they blamed please at the Charter elections. It'd be a good idee to
+pitch into Catholics in general whenever you can. You could make a hit
+that way. I say the State ought to make 'em pay taxes on their church
+property. They've no right to be exempted, because they ain't Christians
+at all. They're idolaters, that's what they are! I know 'em! I've had
+'em in my quarries for years, an' they ain't got no idee of decency or
+fair dealin'. Every time the price of stone went up, every man of 'em
+would jine to screw more wages out o' me. Why, they used to keep account
+o' the amount o' business I done, an' figger up my profits, an' have
+the face to come an' talk to me about 'em, as if that had anything to do
+with wages. It's my belief their priests put 'em up to it. People
+don't begin to reelize--that church of idolatry 'll be the ruin o' this
+country, if it ain't checked in time. Jest you go at 'em hammer 'n'
+tongs! I've got Eyetalians in the quarries now. They're sensible
+fellows: they know when they're well off--a dollar a day, an' they're
+satisfied, an' everything goes smooth.”
+
+“But they're Catholics, the same as the Irish,” suddenly interjected the
+lawyer, from his place by the window. Theron pricked up his ears at the
+sound of his voice. There was an anti-Pierce note in it, so to speak,
+which it did him good to hear. The consciousness of sympathy began on
+the instant to inspire him with courage.
+
+“I know some people SAY they are,” Brother Pierce guardedly retorted
+“but I've summered an' wintered both kinds, an' I hold to it they're
+different. I grant ye, the Eyetalians ARE some given to jabbin' knives
+into each other, but they never git up strikes, an' they don't grumble
+about wages. Why, look at the way they live--jest some weeds an' yarbs
+dug up on the roadside, an' stewed in a kettle with a piece o' fat the
+size o' your finger, an' a loaf o' bread, an' they're happy as a king.
+There's some sense in THAT; but the Irish, they've got to have meat an'
+potatoes an' butter jest as if--as if--”
+
+“As if they'd b'en used to 'em at home,” put in Mr. Winch, to help his
+colleague out.
+
+The lawyer ostentatiously drew up his chair to the desk, and began
+turning over the leaves of his biggest book. “It's getting on toward
+noon, gentlemen,” he said, in an impatient voice.
+
+The business meeting which followed was for a considerable time confined
+to hearing extracts from the books and papers read in a swift and formal
+fashion by Mr. Gorringe. If this was intended to inform the new pastor
+of the exact financial situation in Octavius, it lamentably failed of
+its purpose. Theron had little knowledge of figures; and though he
+tried hard to listen, and to assume an air of comprehension, he did not
+understand much of what he heard. In a general way he gathered that the
+church property was put down at $12,000, on which there was a debt of
+$4,800. The annual expenses were $2,250, of which the principal items
+were $800 for his salary, $170 for the rent of the parsonage, and $319
+for interest on the debt. It seemed that last year the receipts had
+fallen just under $2,000, and they now confronted the necessity of
+making good this deficit during the coming year, as well as increasing
+the regular revenues. Without much discussion, it was agreed that they
+should endeavor to secure the services of a celebrated “debt-raiser,”
+ early in the autumn, and utilize him in the closing days of a revival.
+
+Theron knew this “debt-raiser,” and had seen him at work--a burly,
+bustling, vulgar man who took possession of the pulpit as if it were an
+auctioneer's block, and pursued the task of exciting liberality in the
+bosoms of the congregation by alternating prayer, anecdote, song,
+and cheap buffoonery in a manner truly sickening. Would it not be
+preferable, he feebly suggested, to raise the money by a festival, or
+fair, or some other form of entertainment which the ladies could manage?
+
+Brother Pierce shook his head with contemptuous emphasis. “Our
+women-folks ain't that kind,” he said. “They did try to hold a sociable
+once, but nobody came, and we didn't raise more 'n three or four
+dollars. It ain't their line. They lack the worldly arts. As the
+Discipline commands, they avoid the evil of putting on gold and costly
+apparel, and taking such diversions as cannot be used in the name of the
+Lord Jesus.”
+
+“Well--of course--if you prefer the 'debt-raiser'--” Theron began, and
+took the itemized account from Gorringe's knee as an excuse for not
+finishing the hateful sentence.
+
+He looked down the foolscap sheet, line by line, with no special sense
+of what it signified, until his eye caught upon this little section of
+the report, bracketed by itself in the Secretary's neat hand:
+
+     INTEREST CHARGE.
+
+     First mortgage (1873) .. $1,000 ... (E. Winch)    @7.. $ 70
+     Second mortgage (1776)..  1,700 ... (L. Gorringe) @6..  102
+     Third mortgage (1878)...  2,100 ... (L. Pierce)   @7..  147
+     -------                       -----
+     $4,800                        $319
+
+It was no news to him that the three mortgages on the church property
+were held by the three trustees. But as he looked once more, another
+feature of the thing struck him as curious.
+
+“I notice that the rates of interest vary,” he remarked without
+thinking, and then wished the words unsaid, for the two trustees in view
+moved uneasily on their seats.
+
+“Oh, that's nothing,” exclaimed Erastus Winch, with a boisterous display
+of jollity. “It's only Brother Gorringe's pleasant little way of making
+a contribution to our funds. You will notice that, at the date of all
+these mortgages, the State rate of interest was seven per cent. Since
+then it's b'en lowered to six. Well, when that happened, you see,
+Brother Gorringe, not being a professin' member, and so not bound by our
+rules, he could just as well as not let his interest down a cent. But
+Brother Pierce an' me, we talked it over, an' we made up our minds
+we were tied hand an' foot by our contract. You know how strong the
+Discipline lays it down that we must be bound to the letter of our
+agreements. That bein' so, we seen it in the light of duty not to change
+what we'd set our hands to. That's how it is, Brother Ware.”
+
+“I understand,” said Theron, with an effort at polite calmness of tone.
+“And--is there anything else?”
+
+“There's this,” broke in Brother Pierce: “we're commanded to be
+law-abiding people, an' seven per cent WAS the law an' would be now if
+them ragamuffins in the Legislation--”
+
+“Surely we needn't go further into that,” interrupted the minister,
+conscious of a growing stiffness in his moral spine. “Have we any other
+business before us?”
+
+Brother Pierce's little eyes snapped, and the wrinkles in his forehead
+deepened angrily. “Business?” he demanded. “Yes, plenty of it. We've
+got to reduce expenses. We're nigh onto $300 behind-hand this minute.
+Besides your house-rent, you get $800 free an' clear--that is $15.38
+every week, an' only you an' your wife to keep out of it. Why, when
+I was your age, young man, and after that too, I was glad to get $4 a
+week.”
+
+“I don't think my salary is under discussion, Mr. Pierce--”
+
+“BROTHER Pierce!” suggested Winch, in a half-shuckling undertone.
+
+“Brother Pierce, then!” echoed Theron, impatiently. “The Quarterly
+Conference and the Estimating Committee deal with that. The trustees
+have no more to do with it than the man in the moon.”
+
+“Come, come, Brother Ware,” put in Erastus Winch, “we mustn't have no
+hard feelin's. Brotherly love is what we're all lookin' after. Brother
+Pierce's meanin' wasn't agin your drawin' your full salary, every cent
+of it, only--only there are certain little things connected with the
+parsonage here that we feel you ought to bear. F'r instance, there's the
+new sidewalk we had to lay in front of the house here only a month ago.
+Of course, if the treasury was flush we wouldn't say a word about it.
+An' then there's the gas bill here. Seein' as you get your rent for
+nothin', it don't seem much to ask that you should see to lightin' the
+place yourself.”
+
+“No, I don't think that either is a proper charge upon me,” interposed
+Theron. “I decline to pay them.”
+
+“We can have the gas shut off,” remarked Brother Pierce, coldly.
+
+“As soon as you like,” responded the minister, sitting erect and tapping
+the carpet nervously with his foot. “Only you must understand that I will
+take the whole matter to the Quarterly Conference in July. I already see
+a good many other interesting questions about the financial management
+of this church which might be appropriately discussed there.”
+
+“Oh, come, Brother Ware!” broke in Trustee Winch, with a somewhat
+agitated assumption of good-feeling. “Surely these are matters we ought
+to settle amongst ourselves. We never yet asked outsiders to meddle with
+our business here. It's our motto, Brother Ware. I say, if you've got a
+motto, stand by it.”
+
+“Well, my motto,” said Theron, “is to be behaved decently to by those
+with whom I have to deal; and I also propose to stand by it.”
+
+Brother Pierce rose gingerly to his feet, with the hesitation of an old
+man not sure about his knees. When he had straightened himself, he put
+on his hat, and eyed the minister sternly from beneath its brim.
+
+“The Lord gives us crosses grievous to our natur',” he said, “an' we're
+told to bear 'em cheerfully as long as they're on our backs; but there
+ain't nothin' said agin our unloadin' 'em in the ditch the minute we git
+the chance. I guess you won't last here more 'n a twelvemonth.”
+
+He pulled his soft and discolored old hat down over his brows with a
+significantly hostile nod, and, turning, stumped toward the hall-door
+without offering to shake hands.
+
+The other trustees had risen likewise, in tacit recognition that the
+meeting was over. Winch clasped the minister's hand in his own broad,
+hard palm, and squeezed it in an exuberant grip. “Don't mind his little
+ways, Brother Ware,” he urged in a loud, unctuous whisper, with a
+grinning backward nod: “he's a trifle skittish sometimes when you don't
+give him free rein; but he's all wool an' a yard wide when it comes to
+right-down hard-pan religion. My love to Sister Ware;” and he followed
+the senior trustee into the hall.
+
+Mr. Gorringe had been tying up his books and papers. He came now with
+the bulky parcel under his arm, and his hat and stick in the other hand.
+He could give little but his thumb to Theron to shake. His face wore
+a grave expression, and not a line relaxed as, catching the minister's
+look, he slowly covered his left eye in a deliberate wink.
+
+
+
+“Well?--and how did it go off?” asked Alice, from where she knelt by the
+oven door, a few minutes later.
+
+For answer, Theron threw himself wearily into the big old farm
+rocking-chair on the other side of the stove, and shook his head with a
+lengthened sigh.
+
+“If it wasn't for that man Gorringe of yours,” he said dejectedly, “I
+think I should feel like going off--and learning a trade.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+On the following Sunday, young Mrs. Ware sat alone in the preacher's pew
+through the morning service, and everybody noted that the roses had
+been taken from her bonnet. In the evening she was absent, and after
+the doxology and benediction several people, under the pretence of
+solicitude for her health, tried to pump her husband as to the reason.
+He answered their inquiries civilly enough, but with brevity: she
+had stayed at home because she did not feel like coming out--this and
+nothing more.
+
+The congregation dispersed under a gossip-laden cloud of consciousness
+that there must be something queer about Sister Ware. There was a
+tolerably general agreement, however, that the two sermons of the day
+had been excellent. Not even Loren Pierce's railing commentary on the
+pastor's introduction of an outlandish word like “epitome”--clearly
+forbidden by the Discipline's injunction to plain language understood of
+the people--availed to sap the satisfaction of the majority.
+
+Theron himself comprehended that he had pleased the bulk of his
+auditors; the knowledge left him curiously hot and cold. On the one
+hand, there was joy in the apparent prospect that the congregation would
+back him up in a stand against the trustees, if worst came to worst.
+But, on the other hand, the bonnet episode entered his soul. It had
+been a source of bitter humiliation to him to see his wife sitting there
+beneath the pulpit, shorn by despotic order of the adornments natural
+to her pretty head. But he had even greater pain in contemplating the
+effect it had produced on Alice herself. She had said not a word on the
+subject, but her every glance and gesture seemed to him eloquent of deep
+feeling about it. He made sure that she blamed him for having defended
+his own gas and sidewalk rights with successful vigor, but permitted
+the sacrifice of her poor little inoffensive roses without a protest. In
+this view of the matter, indeed, he blamed himself. Was it too late to
+make the error good? He ventured a hint on this Sunday evening, when he
+returned to the parsonage and found her reading an old weekly newspaper
+by the light of the kitchen lamp, to the effect that he fancied there
+would be no great danger in putting those roses back into her bonnet.
+Without lifting her eyes from the paper, she answered that she had
+no earthly desire to wear roses in her bonnet, and went on with her
+reading.
+
+At breakfast the next morning Theron found himself in command of an
+unusual fund of humorous good spirits, and was at pains to make the
+most of it, passing whimsical comments on subjects which the opening
+day suggested, recalling quaint and comical memories of the past, and
+striving his best to force Alice into a laugh. Formerly her merry temper
+had always ignited at the merest spark of gayety. Now she gave his jokes
+only a dutiful half-smile, and uttered scarcely a word in response to
+his running fire of talk. When the meal was finished, she went silently
+to work to clear away the dishes.
+
+Theron turned over in his mind the project of offering to help her, as
+he had done so often in those dear old days when they laughingly began
+life together. Something decided this project in the negative for him,
+and after lingering moments he put on his hat and went out for a walk.
+
+Not even the most doleful and trying hour of his bitter experience in
+Tyre had depressed him like this. Looking back upon these past troubles,
+he persuaded himself that he had borne them all with a light and
+cheerful heart, simply because Alice had been one with him in every
+thought and emotion. How perfect, how ideally complete, their sympathy
+had always been! With what absolute unity of mind and soul they had
+trod that difficult path together! And now--henceforth--was it to be
+different? The mere suggestion of such a thing chilled his veins. He
+said aloud to himself as he walked that life would be an intolerable
+curse if Alice were to cease sharing it with him in every conceivable
+phase.
+
+He had made his way out of town, and tramped along the country hill-road
+for a considerable distance, before a merciful light began to lessen the
+shadows in the picture of gloom with which his mind tortured itself.
+All at once he stopped short, lifted his head, and looked about him. The
+broad valley lay warm and tranquil in the May sunshine at his feet. In
+the thicket up the side-hill above him a gray squirrel was chattering
+shrilly, and the birds sang in a tireless choral confusion. Theron
+smiled, and drew a long breath. The gay clamor of the woodland
+songsters, the placid radiance of the landscape, were suddenly taken in
+and made a part of his new mood. He listened, smiled once more, and then
+started in a leisurely way back toward Octavius.
+
+How could he have been so ridiculous as to fancy that Alice--his
+Alice--had been changed into someone else? He marvelled now at his own
+perverse folly. She was overworked--tired out--that was all. The task of
+moving in, of setting the new household to rights, had been too much for
+her. She must have a rest. They must get in a hired girl.
+
+Once this decision about a servant fixed itself in the young minister's
+mind, it drove out the last vestage of discomfort. He strode along now
+in great content, revolving idly a dozen different plans for gilding and
+beautifying this new life of leisure into which his sanguine thoughts
+projected Alice. One of these particularly pleased him, and waxed in
+definiteness as he turned it over and over. He would get another piano
+for her, in place of that which had been sacrificed in Tyre. That
+beneficient modern invention, the instalment plan, made this quite
+feasible--so easy, in fact, that it almost seemed as if he should find
+his wife playing on the new instrument when he got home. He would stop
+in at the music store and see about it that very day.
+
+Of course, now that these important resolutions had been taken, it would
+be a good thing if he could do something to bring in some extra money.
+This was by no means a new notion. He had mused over the possibility in
+a formless way ever since that memorable discovery of indebtedness in
+Tyre, and had long ago recognized the hopelessness of endeavor in every
+channel save that of literature. Latterly his fancy had been stimulated
+by reading an account of the profits which Canon Farrar had derived from
+his “Life of Christ.” If such a book could command such a bewildering
+multitude of readers, Theron felt there ought to be a chance for him.
+So clear did constant rumination render this assumption that the young
+pastor in time had come to regard this prospective book of his as a
+substantial asset, which could be realized without trouble whenever he
+got around to it.
+
+He had not, it is true, gone to the length of seriously considering what
+should be the subject of his book. That had not seemed to him to matter
+much, so long as it was scriptural. Familiarity with the process of
+extracting a fixed amount of spiritual and intellectual meat from any
+casual text, week after week, had given him an idea that any one of
+many subjects would do, when the time came for him to make a choice.
+He realized now that the time for a selection had arrived, and almost
+simultaneously found himself with a ready-made decision in his mind. The
+book should be about Abraham!
+
+Theron Ware was extremely interested in the mechanism of his own brain,
+and followed its workings with a lively curiosity. Nothing could be more
+remarkable, he thought, than to thus discover that, on the instant of
+his formulating a desire to know what he should write upon, lo, and
+behold! there his mind, quite on its own initiative, had the answer
+waiting for him! When he had gone a little further, and the powerful
+range of possibilities in the son's revolt against the idolatry of his
+father, the image-maker, in the exodus from the unholy city of Ur, and
+in the influence of the new nomadic life upon the little deistic family
+group, had begun to unfold itself before him, he felt that the hand of
+Providence was plainly discernible in the matter. The book was to be
+blessed from its very inception.
+
+Walking homeward briskly now, with his eyes on the sidewalk and his mind
+all aglow with crowding suggestions for the new work, and impatience to
+be at it, he came abruptly upon a group of men and boys who occupied the
+whole path, and were moving forward so noiselessly that he had not heard
+them coming. He almost ran into the leader of this little procession,
+and began a stammering apology, the final words of which were left
+unspoken, so solemnly heedless of him and his talk were all the faces he
+saw.
+
+In the centre of the group were four working-men, bearing between them
+an extemporized litter of two poles and a blanket hastily secured across
+them with spikes. Most of what this litter held was covered by another
+blanket, rounded in coarse folds over a shapeless bulk. From beneath
+its farther end protruded a big broom-like black beard, thrown upward at
+such an angle as to hide everything beyond to those in front. The tall
+young minister, stepping aside and standing tip-toe, could see sloping
+downward behind this hedge of beard a pinched and chalk-like face, with
+wide-open, staring eyes. Its lips, of a dull lilac hue, were moving
+ceaselessly, and made a dry, clicking sound.
+
+Theron instinctively joined himself to those who followed the litter--a
+motley dozen of street idlers, chiefly boys. One of these in whispers
+explained to him that the man was one of Jerry Madden's workmen in the
+wagon-shops, who had been deployed to trim an elm-tree in front of his
+employer's house, and, being unused to such work, had fallen from the
+top and broken all his bones. They would have cared for him at Madden's
+house, but he had insisted upon being taken home. His name was MacEvoy,
+and he was Joey MacEvoy's father, and likewise Jim's and Hughey's and
+Martin's. After a pause the lad, a bright-eyed, freckled, barefooted wee
+Irishman, volunteered the further information that his big brother had
+run to bring “Father Forbess,” on the chance that he might be in time to
+administer “extry munction.”
+
+The way of the silent little procession led through back streets--where
+women hanging up clothes in the yards hurried to the gates, their aprons
+full of clothes-pins, to stare open-mouthed at the passers-by--and came
+to a halt at last in an irregular and muddy lane, before one of a half
+dozen shanties reared among the ash-heaps and debris of the town's most
+bedraggled outskirts.
+
+A stout, middle-aged, red-armed woman, already warned by some messenger
+of calamity, stood waiting on the roadside bank. There were whimpering
+children clinging to her skirts, and a surrounding cluster of women of
+the neighborhood, some of the more elderly of whom, shrivelled little
+crones in tidy caps, and with their aprons to their eyes, were beginning
+in a low-murmured minor the wail which presently should rise into the
+keen of death. Mrs. MacEvoy herself made no moan, and her broad ruddy
+face was stern in expression rather than sorrowful. When the litter
+stopped beside her, she laid a hand for an instant on her husband's wet
+brow, and looked--one could have sworn impassively--into his staring
+eyes. Then, still without a word, she waved the bearers toward the door,
+and led the way herself.
+
+Theron, somewhat wonderingly, found himself, a minute later, inside a
+dark and ill-smelling room, the air of which was humid with the steam
+from a boiler of clothes on the stove, and not in other ways improved by
+the presence of a jostling score of women, all straining their gaze upon
+the open door of the only other apartment--the bed-chamber. Through
+this they could see the workmen laying MacEvoy on the bed, and standing
+awkwardly about thereafter, getting in the way of the wife and old
+Maggie Quirk as they strove to remove the garments from his crushed
+limbs. As the neighbors watched what could be seen of these proceedings,
+they whispered among themselves eulogies of the injured man's industry
+and good temper, his habit of bringing his money home to his wife, and
+the way he kept his Father Mathew pledge and attended to his religious
+duties. They admitted freely that, by the light of his example, their
+own husbands and sons left much to be desired, and from this wandered
+easily off into domestic digressions of their own. But all the while
+their eyes were bent upon the bedroom door; and Theron made out, after
+he had grown accustomed to the gloom and the smell, that many of them
+were telling their beads even while they kept the muttered conversation
+alive. None of them paid any attention to him, or seemed to regard his
+presence there as unusual.
+
+Presently he saw enter through the sunlit street doorway a person of
+a different class. The bright light shone for a passing instant upon a
+fashionable, flowered hat, and upon some remarkably brilliant shade of
+red hair beneath it. In another moment there had edged along through the
+throng, to almost within touch of him, a tall young woman, the owner of
+this hat and wonderful hair. She was clad in light and pleasing spring
+attire, and carried a parasol with a long oxidized silver handle of a
+quaint pattern. She looked at him, and he saw that her face was of a
+lengthened oval, with a luminous rose-tinted skin, full red lips, and
+big brown, frank eyes with heavy auburn lashes. She made a grave little
+inclination of her head toward him, and he bowed in response. Since her
+arrival, he noted, the chattering of the others had entirely ceased.
+
+“I followed the others in, in the hope that I might be of some
+assistance,” he ventured to explain to her in a low murmur, feeling that
+at last here was some one to whom an explanation of his presence in this
+Romish house was due. “I hope they won't feel that I have intruded.”
+
+She nodded her head as if she quite understood. “They'll take the will
+for the deed,” she whispered back. “Father Forbes will be here in a
+minute. Do you know is it too late?”
+
+Even as she spoke, the outer doorway was darkened by the commanding bulk
+of a newcomer's figure. The flash of a silk hat, and the deferential way
+in which the assembled neighbors fell back to clear a passage, made his
+identity clear. Theron felt his blood tingle in an unaccustomed way
+as this priest of a strange church advanced across the room--a
+broad-shouldered, portly man of more than middle height, with a shapely,
+strong-lined face of almost waxen pallor, and a firm, commanding tread.
+He carried in his hands, besides his hat, a small leather-bound case. To
+this and to him the women courtesied and bowed their heads as he passed.
+
+“Come with me,” whispered the tall girl with the parasol to Theron; and
+he found himself pushing along in her wake until they intercepted the
+priest just outside the bedroom door. She touched Father Forbes on the
+arm.
+
+“Just to tell you that I am here,” she said. The priest nodded with
+a grave face, and passed into the other room. In a minute or two the
+workmen, Mrs. MacEvoy, and her helper came out, and the door was shut
+behind them.
+
+“He is making his confession,” explained the young lady. “Stay here for
+a minute.”
+
+She moved over to where the woman of the house stood, glum-faced and
+tearless, and whispered something to her. A confused movement among the
+crowd followed, and out of it presently resulted a small table, covered
+with a white cloth, and bearing on it two unlighted candles, a basin of
+water, and a spoon, which was brought forward and placed in readiness
+before the closed door. Some of those nearest this cleared space were
+kneeling now, and murmuring a low buzz of prayer to the click of beads
+on their rosaries.
+
+The door opened, and Theron saw the priest standing in the doorway with
+an uplifted hand. He wore now a surplice, with a purple band over his
+shoulders, and on his pale face there shone a tranquil and tender light.
+
+One of the workmen fetched from the stove a brand, lighted the two
+candles, and bore the table with its contents into the bedroom. The
+young woman plucked Theron's sleeve, and he dumbly followed her into
+the chamber of death, making one of the group of a dozen, headed by Mrs.
+MacEvoy and her children, which filled the little room, and overflowed
+now outward to the street door. He found himself bowing with the others
+to receive the sprinkled holy water from the priest's white fingers;
+kneeling with the others for the prayers; following in impressed silence
+with the others the strange ceremonial by which the priest traced
+crosses of holy oil with his thumb upon the eyes, ears, nostrils, lips,
+hands, and feet of the dying man, wiping off the oil with a piece
+of cotton-batting each time after he had repeated the invocation to
+forgiveness for that particular sense. But most of all he was moved by
+the rich, novel sound of the Latin as the priest rolled it forth in the
+ASPERGES ME, DOMINE, and MISEREATUR VESTRI OMNIPOTENS DEUS, with its
+soft Continental vowels and liquid R's. It seemed to him that he had
+never really heard Latin before. Then the astonishing young woman with
+the red hair declaimed the CONFITEOR, vigorously and with a resonant
+distinctness of enunciation. It was a different Latin, harsher and more
+sonorous; and while it still dominated the murmured undertone of the
+other's prayers, the last moment came.
+
+Theron had stood face to face with death at many other bedsides; no
+other final scene had stirred him like this. It must have been
+the girl's Latin chant, with its clanging reiteration of the great
+names--BEATUM MICHAELEM ARCHANGELUM, BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, SANCTOS
+APOSTOLOS PETRUM ET PAULUM--invoked with such proud confidence in this
+squalid little shanty, which so strangely affected him.
+
+He came out with the others at last--the candles and the folded hands
+over the crucifix left behind--and walked as one in a dream. Even by
+the time that he had gained the outer doorway, and stood blinking at
+the bright light and filling his lungs with honest air once more, it had
+begun to seem incredible to him that he had seen and done all this.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+While Mr. Ware stood thus on the doorstep, through a minute of
+formless musing, the priest and the girl came out, and, somewhat to his
+confusion, made him one of their party. He felt himself flushing under
+the idea that they would think he had waited for them--was thrusting
+himself upon them. The notion prompted him to bow frigidly in response
+to Father Forbes' pleasant “I am glad to meet you, sir,” and his
+outstretched hand.
+
+“I dropped in by the--the merest accident,” Theron said. “I met them
+bringing the poor man home, and--and quite without thinking, I obeyed
+the impulse to follow them in, and didn't realize--”
+
+He stopped short, annoyed by the reflection that this was his second
+apology. The girl smiled placidly at him, the while she put up her
+parasol.
+
+“It did me good to see you there,” she said, quite as if she had known
+him all her life. “And so it did the rest of us.”
+
+Father Forbes permitted himself a soft little chuckle, approving rather
+than mirthful, and patted her on the shoulder with the air of being
+fifty years her senior instead of fifteen. To the minister's relief, he
+changed the subject as the three started together toward the road.
+
+“Then, again, no doctor was sent for!” he exclaimed, as if resuming a
+familiar subject with the girl. Then he turned to Theron. “I dare-say
+you have no such trouble; but with our poorer people it is very
+vexing. They will not call in a physician, but hurry off first for the
+clergyman. I don't know that it is altogether to avoid doctor's bills,
+but it amounts to that in effect. Of course in this case it made no
+difference; but I have had to make it a rule not to go out at night
+unless they bring me a physician's card with his assurance that it is a
+genuine affair. Why, only last winter, I was routed up after midnight,
+and brought off in the mud and pelting rain up one of the new streets
+on the hillside there, simply because a factory girl who was laced too
+tight had fainted at a dance. I slipped and fell into a puddle in the
+darkness, ruined a new overcoat, and got drenched to the skin; and when
+I arrived the girl had recovered and was dancing away again, thirteen
+to the dozen. It was then that I made the rule. I hope, Mr. Ware, that
+Octavius is producing a pleasant impression upon you so far?”
+
+“I scarcely know yet,” answered Theron. The genial talk of the priest,
+with its whimsical anecdote, had in truth passed over his head. His
+mind still had room for nothing but that novel death-bed scene, with
+the winged captain of the angelic host, the Baptist, the glorified
+Fisherman and the Preacher, all being summoned down in the pomp of
+liturgical Latin to help MacEvoy to die. “If you don't mind my saying
+so,” he added hesitatingly, “what I have just seen in there DID make a
+very powerful impression upon me.”
+
+“It is a very ancient ceremony,” said the priest; “probably Persian,
+like the baptismal form, although, for that matter, we can never dig
+deep enough for the roots of these things. They all turn up Turanian if
+we probe far enough. Our ways separate here, I'm afraid. I am delighted
+to have made your acquaintance, Mr. Ware. Pray look in upon me, if you
+can as well as not. We are near neighbors, you know.”
+
+Father Forbes had shaken hands, and moved off up another street some
+distance, before the voice of the girl recalled Theron to himself.
+
+“Of course you knew HIM by name,” she was saying, “and he knew you
+by sight, and had talked of you; but MY poor inferior sex has to be
+introduced. I am Celia Madden. My father has the wagon-shops, and I--I
+play the organ at the church.”
+
+“I--I am delighted to make your acquaintance,” said Theron, conscious
+as he spoke that he had slavishly echoed the formula of the priest. He
+could think of nothing better to add than, “Unfortunately, we have no
+organ in our church.”
+
+The girl laughed, as they resumed their walk down the street. “I'm
+afraid I couldn't undertake two,” she said, and laughed again. Then she
+spoke more seriously. “That ceremony must have interested you a good
+deal, never having seen it before. I saw that it was all new to you, and
+so I made bold to take you under my wing, so to speak.”
+
+“You were very kind,” said the young minister. “It was really a great
+experience for me. May--may I ask, is it a part of your functions, in
+the church, I mean, to attend these last rites?”
+
+“Mercy, no!” replied the girl, spinning the parasol on her shoulder and
+smiling at the thought. “No; it was only because MacEvoy was one of our
+workmen, and really came by his death through father sending him up to
+trim a tree. Ann MacEvoy will never forgive us that, the longest day she
+lives. Did you notice her? She wouldn't speak to me. After you came out,
+I tried to tell her that we would look out for her and the children; but
+all she would say to me was: 'An' fwat would a wheelwright, an' him the
+father of a family, be doin' up a tree?'”
+
+They had come now upon the main street of the village, with its
+flagstone sidewalk overhung by a lofty canopy of elm-boughs. Here, for
+the space of a block, was concentrated such fashionable elegance of
+mansions and ornamental lawns as Octavius had to offer; and it was
+presented with the irregularity so characteristic of our restless
+civilization. Two or three of the houses survived untouched from the
+earlier days--prim, decorous structures, each with its gabled centre
+and lower wings, each with its row of fluted columns supporting the
+classical roof of a piazza across its whole front, each vying with the
+others in the whiteness of those wooden walls enveloping its bright
+green blinds. One had to look over picket fences to see these houses,
+and in doing so caught the notion that they thus railed themselves
+off in pride at being able to remember before the railroad came to the
+village, or the wagon-works were thought of.
+
+Before the neighboring properties the fences had been swept away, so
+that one might stroll from the sidewalk straight across the well-trimmed
+sward to any one of a dozen elaborately modern doorways. Some of the
+residences, thus frankly proffering friendship to the passer-by, were of
+wood painted in drabs and dusky reds, with bulging windows which marked
+the native yearning for the mediaeval, and shingles that strove to be
+accounted tiles. Others--a prouder, less pretentious sort--were of brick
+or stone, with terra-cotta mouldings set into the walls, and with real
+slates covering the riot of turrets and peaks and dormer peepholes
+overhead.
+
+Celia Madden stopped in front of the largest and most important-looking
+of these new edifices, and said, holding out her hand: “Here I am, once
+more. Good-morning, Mr. Ware.”
+
+Theron hoped that his manner did not betray the flash of surprise he
+felt in discovering that his new acquaintance lived in the biggest house
+in Octavius. He remembered now that some one had pointed it out as the
+abode of the owner of the wagon factories; but it had not occurred to
+him before to associate this girl with that village magnate. It was
+stupid of him, of course, because she had herself mentioned her father.
+He looked at her again with an awkward smile, as he formally shook
+the gloved hand she gave him, and lifted his soft hat. The strong noon
+sunlight, forcing its way down between the elms, and beating upon her
+parasol of lace-edged, creamy silk, made a halo about her hair and face
+at once brilliant and tender. He had not seen before how beautiful she
+was. She nodded in recognition of his salute, and moved up the lawn
+walk, spinning the sunshade on her shoulder.
+
+Though the parsonage was only three blocks away, the young minister had
+time to think about a good many things before he reached home.
+
+First of all, he had to revise in part the arrangement of his notions
+about the Irish. Save for an occasional isolated and taciturn figure
+among the nomadic portion of the hired help in the farm country, Theron
+had scarcely ever spoken to a person of this curiously alien race
+before. He remembered now that there had been some dozen or more Irish
+families in Tyre, quartered in the outskirts among the brickyards,
+but he had never come in contact with any of them, or given to their
+existence even a passing thought. So far as personal acquaintance went,
+the Irish had been to him only a name.
+
+But what a sinister and repellent name! His views on this general
+subject were merely those common to his communion and his environment.
+He took it for granted, for example, that in the large cities most of
+the poverty and all the drunkenness, crime, and political corruption
+were due to the perverse qualities of this foreign people--qualities
+accentuated and emphasized in every evil direction by the baleful
+influence of a false and idolatrous religion. It is hardly too much to
+say that he had never encountered a dissenting opinion on this point.
+His boyhood had been spent in those bitter days when social, political,
+and blood prejudices were fused at white heat in the public crucible
+together. When he went to the Church Seminary, it was a matter of course
+that every member of the faculty was a Republican, and that every one of
+his classmates had come from a Republican household. When, later on, he
+entered the ministry, the rule was still incredulous of exceptions. One
+might as well have looked in the Nedahma Conference for a divergence
+of opinion on the Trinity as for a difference in political conviction.
+Indeed, even among the laity, Theron could not feel sure that he had
+ever known a Democrat; that is, at all closely. He understood very
+little about politics, it is true. If he had been driven into a corner,
+and forced to attempt an explanation of this tremendous partisan unity
+in which he had a share, he would probably have first mentioned
+the War--the last shots of which were fired while he was still in
+petticoats. Certainly his second reason, however, would have been that
+the Irish were on the other side.
+
+He had never before had occasion to formulate, even in his own thoughts,
+this tacit race and religious aversion in which he had been bred. It
+rose now suddenly in front of him, as he sauntered from patch to patch
+of sunlight under the elms, like some huge, shadowy, and symbolic
+monument. He looked at it with wondering curiosity, as at something
+he had heard of all his life, but never seen before--an abhorrent
+spectacle, truly! The foundations upon which its dark bulk reared itself
+were ignorance, squalor, brutality and vice. Pigs wallowed in the mire
+before its base, and burrowing into this base were a myriad of narrow
+doors, each bearing the hateful sign of a saloon, and giving forth
+from its recesses of night the sounds of screams and curses. Above were
+sculptured rows of lowering, ape-like faces from Nast's and Keppler's
+cartoons, and out of these sprang into the vague upper gloom--on the one
+side, lamp-posts from which negroes hung by the neck, and on the other
+gibbets for dynamiters and Molly Maguires, and between the two glowed a
+spectral picture of some black-robed tonsured men, with leering satanic
+masks, making a bonfire of the Bible in the public schools.
+
+Theron stared this phantasm hard in the face, and recognized it for a
+very tolerable embodiment of what he had heretofore supposed he thought
+about the Irish. For an instant, the sight of it made him shiver, as if
+the sunny May had of a sudden lapsed back into bleak December. Then he
+smiled, and the bad vision went off into space. He saw instead Father
+Forbes, in the white and purple vestments, standing by poor MacEvoy's
+bedside, with his pale, chiselled, luminous, uplifted face, and he
+heard only the proud, confident clanging of the girl's recital,--BEATUM
+MICHAELEM ARCHANGELUM, BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, PETRUM ET
+PAULUM--EM!--AM!--UM!--like strokes on a great resonant alarm-bell,
+attuned for the hearing of heaven. He caught himself on the very verge
+of feeling that heaven must have heard.
+
+Then he smiled again, and laid the matter aside, with a parting
+admission that it had been undoubtedly picturesque and impressive, and
+that it had been a valuable experience to him to see it. At least the
+Irish, with all their faults, must have a poetic strain, or they would
+not have clung so tenaciously to those curious and ancient forms. He
+recalled having heard somewhere, or read, it might be, that they were
+a people much given to songs and music. And the young lady, that very
+handsome and friendly Miss Madden, had told him that she was a musician!
+He had a new pleasure in turning this over in his mind. Of all the
+closed doors which his choice of a career had left along his pathway, no
+other had for him such a magical fascination as that on which was graven
+the lute of Orpheus. He knew not even the alphabet of music, and his
+conceptions of its possibilities ran but little beyond the best of the
+hymn-singing he had heard at Conferences, yet none the less the longing
+for it raised on occasion such mutiny in his soul that more than once he
+had specifically prayed against it as a temptation.
+
+Dangerous though some of its tendencies might be, there was no
+gainsaying the fact that a love for music was in the main an uplifting
+influence--an attribute of cultivation. The world was the sweeter and
+more gentle for it. And this brought him to musing upon the odd chance
+that the two people of Octavius who had given him the first notion of
+polish and intellectual culture in the town should be Irish. The Romish
+priest must have been vastly surprised at his intrusion, yet had been
+at the greatest pains to act as if it were quite the usual thing to have
+Methodist ministers assist at Extreme Unction. And the young woman--how
+gracefully, with what delicacy, had she comprehended his position and
+robbed it of all its possible embarrassments! It occurred to him that
+they must have passed, there in front of her home, the very tree from
+which the luckless wheelwright had fallen some hours before; and the
+fact that she had forborne to point it out to him took form in his mind
+as an added proof of her refinement of nature.
+
+The midday dinner was a little more than ready when Theron reached home,
+and let himself in by the front door. On Mondays, owing to the moisture
+and “clutter” of the weekly washing in the kitchen, the table was laid
+in the sitting-room, and as he entered from the hall the partner of
+his joys bustled in by the other door, bearing the steaming platter of
+corned beef, dumplings, cabbages, and carrots, with arms bared to the
+elbows, and a red face. It gave him great comfort, however, to note that
+there were no signs of the morning's displeasure remaining on this face;
+and he immediately remembered again those interrupted projects of his
+about the piano and the hired girl.
+
+“Well! I'd just about begun to reckon that I was a widow,” said Alice,
+putting down her fragrant burden. There was such an obvious suggestion
+of propitiation in her tone that Theron went around and kissed her. He
+thought of saying something about keeping out of the way because it was
+“Blue Monday,” but held it back lest it should sound like a reproach.
+
+“Well, what kind of a washerwoman does THIS one turn out to be?” he
+asked, after they were seated, and he had invoked a blessing and was
+cutting vigorously into the meat.
+
+“Oh, so-so,” replied Alice; “she seems to be particular, but she's
+mortal slow. If I hadn't stood right over her, we shouldn't have had the
+clothes out till goodness knows when. And of course she's Irish!”
+
+“Well, what of THAT?” asked the minister, with a fine unconcern.
+
+Alice looked up from her plate, with knife and fork suspended in air.
+“Why, you know we were talking only the other day of what a pity it was
+that none of our own people went out washing,” she said. “That Welsh
+woman we heard of couldn't come, after all; and they say, too, that she
+presumes dreadfully upon the acquaintance, being a church member, you
+know. So we simply had to fall back on the Irish. And even if they do
+go and tell their priest everything they see and hear, why, there's one
+comfort, they can tell about US and welcome. Of course I see to it she
+doesn't snoop around in here.”
+
+Theron smiled. “That's all nonsense about their telling such things to
+their priests,” he said with easy confidence.
+
+“Why, you told me so yourself,” replied Alice, briskly. “And I've always
+understood so, too; they're bound to tell EVERYTHING in confession.
+That's what gives the Catholic Church such a tremendous hold. You've
+spoken of it often.”
+
+“It must have been by way of a figure of speech,” remarked Theron,
+not with entire directness. “Women are great hands to separate one's
+observations from their context, and so give them meanings quite
+unintended. They are also great hands,” he added genially, “or at least
+one of them is, at making the most delicious dumplings in the world. I
+believe these are the best even you ever made.”
+
+Alice was not unmindful of the compliment, but her thoughts were on
+other things. “I shouldn't like that woman's priest, for example,” she
+said, “to know that we had no piano.”
+
+“But if he comes and stands outside our house every night and
+listens--as of course he will,” said Theron, with mock gravity, “it is
+only a question of time when he must reach that conclusion for himself.
+Our only chance, however, is that there are some sixteen hundred other
+houses for him to watch, so that he may not get around to us for quite a
+spell. Why, seriously, Alice, what on earth do you suppose Father Forbes
+knows or cares about our poor little affairs, or those of any other
+Protestant household in this whole village? He has his work to do, just
+as I have mine--only his is ten times as exacting in everything except
+sermons--and you may be sure he is only too glad when it is over each
+day, without bothering about things that are none of his business.”
+
+“All the same I'm afraid of them,” said Alice, as if argument were
+exhausted.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+On the following morning young Mr. Ware anticipated events by inscribing
+in his diary for the day, immediately after breakfast, these remarks:
+“Arranged about piano. Began work upon book.”
+
+The date indeed deserved to be distinguished from its fellows. Theron
+was so conscious of its importance that he not only prophesied in the
+little morocco-bound diary which Alice had given him for Christmas, but
+returned after he had got out upon the front steps of the parsonage to
+have his hat brushed afresh by her.
+
+“Wonders will never cease,” she said jocosely. “With you getting
+particular about your clothes, there isn't anything in this wide world
+that can't happen now!”
+
+“One doesn't go out to bring home a piano every day,” he made answer.
+“Besides, I want to make such an impression upon the man that he will
+deal gently with that first cash payment down. Do you know,” he added,
+watching her turn the felt brim under the wisp-broom's strokes, “I'm
+thinking some of getting me a regular silk stove-pipe hat.”
+
+“Why don't you, then?” she rejoined, but without any ring of glad
+acquiescence in her tone. He fancied that her face lengthened a little,
+and he instantly ascribed it to recollections of the way in which the
+roses had been bullied out of her own headgear.
+
+“You are quite sure, now, pet,” he made haste to change the subject,
+“that the hired girl can wait just as well as not until fall?”
+
+“Oh, MY, yes!” Alice replied, putting the hat on his head, and smoothing
+back his hair behind his ears. “She'd only be in the way now. You see,
+with hot weather coming on, there won't be much cooking. We'll take all
+our meals out here, and that saves so much work that really what remains
+is hardly more than taking care of a bird-cage. And, besides, not having
+her will almost half pay for the piano.”
+
+“But when cold weather comes, you're sure you'll consent?” he urged.
+
+“Like a shot!” she assured him, and, after a happy little caress, he
+started out again on his momentous mission.
+
+“Thurston's” was a place concerning which opinions differed in Octavius.
+That it typified progress, and helped more than any other feature of the
+village to bring it up to date, no one indeed disputed. One might move
+about a great deal, in truth, and hear no other view expressed. But then
+again one might stumble into conversation with one small storekeeper
+after another, and learn that they united in resenting the existence of
+“Thurston's,” as rival farmers might join to curse a protracted drought.
+Each had his special flaming grievance. The little dry-goods dealers
+asked mournfully how they could be expected to compete with an
+establishment which could buy bankrupt stocks at a hundred different
+points, and make a profit if only one-third of the articles were sold
+for more than they would cost from the jobber? The little boot and
+shoe dealers, clothiers, hatters, and furriers, the small merchants in
+carpets, crockery, and furniture, the venders of hardware and household
+utensils, of leathern goods and picture-frames, of wall-paper, musical
+instruments, and even toys--all had the same pathetically unanswerable
+question to propound. But mostly they put it to themselves, because the
+others were at “Thurston's.”
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware had entertained rather strong views on this
+subject, and that only a week or two ago. One of his first acquaintances
+in Octavius had been the owner of the principal book-store in the
+place--a gentle and bald old man who produced the complete impression of
+a bibliophile upon what the slightest investigation showed to be only a
+meagre acquaintance with publishers' circulars. But at least he had the
+air of loving his business, and the young minister had enjoyed a long
+talk with, or rather, at him. Out of this talk had come the information
+that the store was losing money. Not even the stationery department now
+showed a profit worth mentioning. When Octavius had contained only five
+thousand inhabitants, it boasted four book-stores, two of them good
+ones. Now, with a population more than doubled, only these latter two
+survived, and they must soon go to the wall. The reason? It was in a
+nutshell. A book which sold at retail for one dollar and a half cost the
+bookseller ninety cents. If it was at all a popular book, “Thurston's”
+ advertised it at eighty-nine cents--and in any case at a profit of only
+two or three cents. Of course it was done to widen the establishment's
+patronage--to bring people into the store. Equally of course, it was
+destroying the book business and debauching the reading tastes of the
+community. Without the profits from the light and ephemeral popular
+literature of the season, the book-store proper could not keep up its
+stock of more solid works, and indeed could not long keep open at all.
+On the other hand, “Thurston's” dealt with nothing save the demand of
+the moment, and offered only the books which were the talk of the week.
+Thus, in plain words, the book trade was going to the dogs, and it was
+the same with pretty nearly every other trade.
+
+Theron was indignant at this, and on his return home told Alice that
+he desired her to make no purchases whatever at “Thurston's.” He
+even resolved to preach a sermon on the subject of the modern idea of
+admiring the great for crushing the small, and sketched out some notes
+for it which he thought solved the problem of flaying the local abuse
+without mentioning it by name. They had lain on his desk now for ten
+days or more, and on only the previous Friday he had speculated upon
+using them that coming Sunday.
+
+On this bright and cheerful Tuesday morning he walked with a blithe step
+unhesitatingly down the main street to “Thurston's,” and entered without
+any show of repugnance the door next to the window wherein, flanked
+by dangling banjos and key-bugles built in pyramids, was displayed the
+sign, “Pianos on the Instalment Plan.”
+
+He was recognized by some responsible persons, and treated with
+distinguished deference. They were charmed with the intelligence that he
+desired a piano, and fascinated by his wish to pay for it only a little
+at a time. They had special terms for clergymen, and made him feel as
+if these were being extended to him on a silver charger by kneeling
+admirers.
+
+It was so easy to buy things here that he was a trifle disturbed to find
+his flowing course interrupted by his own entire ignorance as to what
+kind of piano he wanted. He looked at all they had in stock, and heard
+them played upon. They differed greatly in price, and, so he fancied,
+almost as much in tone. It discouraged him to note, however, that
+several of those he thought the finest in tone were among the very
+cheapest in the lot. Pondering this, and staring in hopeless puzzlement
+from one to another of the big black shiny monsters, he suddenly thought
+of something.
+
+“I would rather not decide for myself,” he said, “I know so little about
+it. If you don't mind, I will have a friend of mine, a skilled musician,
+step in and make a selection. I have so much confidence in--in her
+judgment.” He added hurriedly, “It will involve only a day or two's
+delay.”
+
+The next moment he was sorry he had spoken. What would they think when
+they saw the organist of the Catholic church come to pick out a piano
+for the Methodist parsonage? And how could he decorously prefer the
+request to her to undertake this task? He might not meet her again for
+ages, and to his provincial notions writing would have seemed out of the
+question. And would it not be disagreeable to have her know that he was
+buying a piano by part payments? Poor Alice's dread of the washerwoman's
+gossip occurred to him, at this, and he smiled in spite of himself. Then
+all at once the difficulty vanished. Of course it would come all right
+somehow. Everything did.
+
+He was on firmer ground, buying the materials for the new book, over
+on the stationery side. His original intention had been to bestow this
+patronage upon the old bookseller, but these suavely smart people in
+“Thurston's” had had the effect of putting him on his honor when
+they asked, “Would there be anything else?” and he had followed them
+unresistingly.
+
+He indulged to the full his whim that everything entering into the
+construction of “Abraham” should be spick-and-span. He watched with his
+own eyes a whole ream of broad glazed white paper being sliced down by
+the cutter into single sheets, and thrilled with a novel ecstasy as he
+laid his hand upon the spotless bulk, so wooingly did it invite him to
+begin. He tried a score of pens before the right one came to hand.
+When a box of these had been laid aside, with ink and pen-holders and a
+little bronze inkstand, he made a sign that the outfit was complete.
+Or no--there must be some blotting-paper. He had always used those
+blotting-pads given away by insurance companies--his congregations never
+failed to contain one or more agents, who had these to bestow by the
+armful--but the book deserved a virgin blotter.
+
+Theron stood by while all these things were being tied up together in a
+parcel. The suggestion that they should be sent almost hurt him. Oh,
+no, he would carry them home himself. So strongly did they appeal to his
+sanguine imagination that he could not forbear hinting to the man who
+had shown him the pianos and was now accompanying him to the door that
+this package under his arm represented potentially the price of the
+piano he was going to have. He did it in a roundabout way, with one of
+his droll, hesitating smiles. The man did not understand at all, and
+Theron had not the temerity to repeat the remark. He strode home with
+the precious bundle as fast as he could.
+
+“I thought it best, after all, not to commit myself to a selection,” he
+explained about the piano at dinner-time. “In such a matter as this,
+the opinion of an expert is everything. I am going to have one of the
+principal musicians of the town go and try them all, and tell me which
+we ought to have.”
+
+“And while he's about it,” said Alice, “you might ask him to make a
+little list of some of the new music. I've got way behind the times,
+being without a piano so long. Tell him not any VERY difficult pieces,
+you know.”
+
+“Yes, I know,” put in Theron, almost hastily, and began talking of other
+things. His conversation was of the most rambling and desultory sort,
+because all the while the two lobes of his brain, as it were, kept up a
+dispute as to whether Alice ought to have been told that this “principal
+musician” was of her own sex. It would certainly have been better, at
+the outset, he decided; but to mention it now would be to invest the
+fact with undue importance. Yes, that was quite clear; only the clearer
+it became, from one point of view, the shadier it waxed from the other.
+The problem really disturbed the young minister's mind throughout
+the meal, and his abstraction became so marked at last that his wife
+commented upon it.
+
+“A penny for your thoughts!” she said, with cheerful briskness. This
+ancient formula of the farm-land had always rather jarred on Theron. It
+presented itself now to his mind as a peculiarly aggravating banality.
+
+“I am going to begin my book this afternoon,” he remarked impressively.
+“There is a great deal to think about.”
+
+It turned out that there was even more to think about than he had
+imagined. After hours of solitary musing at his desk, or of pacing up
+and down before his open book-shelves, Theron found the first shadows of
+a May-day twilight beginning to fall upon that beautiful pile of white
+paper, still unstained by ink. He saw the book he wanted to write before
+him, in his mental vision, much more distinctly than ever, but the idea
+of beginning it impetuously, and hurling it off hot and glowing week by
+week, had faded away like a dream.
+
+This long afternoon, spent face to face with a project born of his own
+brain but yesterday, yet already so much bigger than himself, was really
+a most fruitful time for the young clergyman. The lessons which cut
+most deeply into our consciousness are those we learn from our children.
+Theron, in this first day's contact with the offspring of his fancy,
+found revealed to him an unsuspected and staggering truth. It was that
+he was an extremely ignorant and rudely untrained young man, whose
+pretensions to intellectual authority among any educated people would be
+laughed at with deserved contempt.
+
+Strangely enough, after he had weathered the first shock, this discovery
+did not dismay Theron Ware. The very completeness of the conviction it
+carried with it, saturated his mind with a feeling as if the fact had
+really been known to him all along. And there came, too, after a little,
+an almost pleasurable sense of the importance of the revelation. He had
+been merely drifting in fatuous and conceited blindness. Now all at once
+his eyes were open; he knew what he had to do. Ignorance was a thing to
+be remedied, and he would forthwith bend all his energies to cultivating
+his mind till it should blossom like a garden. In this mood, Theron
+mentally measured himself against the more conspicuous of his colleagues
+in the Conference. They also were ignorant, clownishly ignorant: the
+difference was that they were doomed by native incapacity to go on all
+their lives without ever finding it out. It was obvious to him that his
+case was better. There was bright promise in the very fact that he had
+discovered his shortcomings.
+
+He had begun the afternoon by taking down from their places the various
+works in his meagre library which bore more or less relation to the task
+in hand. The threescore books which constituted his printed possessions
+were almost wholly from the press of the Book Concern; the few
+exceptions were volumes which, though published elsewhere, had come to
+him through that giant circulating agency of the General Conference,
+and wore the stamp of its approval. Perhaps it was the sight of these
+half-filled shelves which started this day's great revolution in
+Theron's opinions of himself. He had never thought much before about
+owning books. He had been too poor to buy many, and the conditions of
+canvassing about among one's parishioners which the thrifty Book Concern
+imposes upon those who would have without buying, had always repelled
+him. Now, suddenly, as he moved along the two shelves, he felt ashamed
+at their beggarly showing.
+
+“The Land and the Book,” in three portly volumes, was the most
+pretentious of the aids which he finally culled from his collection.
+Beside it he laid out “Bible Lands,” “Rivers and Lakes of Scripture,”
+ “Bible Manners and Customs,” the “Genesis and Exodus” volume of Whedon's
+Commentary, some old numbers of the “Methodist Quarterly Review,” and a
+copy of “Josephus” which had belonged to his grandmother, and had
+seen him through many a weary Sunday afternoon in boyhood. He glanced
+casually through these, one by one, as he took them down, and began to
+fear that they were not going to be of so much use as he had thought.
+Then, seating himself, he read carefully through the thirteen chapters
+of Genesis which chronicle the story of the founder of Israel.
+
+Of course he had known this story from his earliest years. In almost
+every chapter he came now upon a phrase or an incident which had served
+him as the basis for a sermon. He had preached about Hagar in the
+wilderness, about Lot's wife, about the visit of the angels, about the
+intended sacrifice of Isaac, about a dozen other things suggested by the
+ancient narrative. Somehow this time it all seemed different to him.
+The people he read about were altered to his vision. Heretofore a poetic
+light had shone about them, where indeed they had not glowed in a halo
+of sanctification. Now, by some chance, this light was gone, and he saw
+them instead as untutored and unwashed barbarians, filled with animal
+lusts and ferocities, struggling by violence and foul chicanery to
+secure a foothold in a country which did not belong to them--all rude
+tramps and robbers of the uncivilized plain.
+
+The apparent fact that Abram was a Chaldean struck him with peculiar
+force. How was it, he wondered, that this had never occurred to him
+before? Examining himself, he found that he had supposed vaguely that
+there had been Jews from the beginning, or at least, say, from the
+flood. But, no, Abram was introduced simply as a citizen of the Chaldean
+town of Ur, and there was no hint of any difference in race between him
+and his neighbors. It was specially mentioned that his brother, Lot's
+father, died in Ur, the city of his nativity. Evidently the family
+belonged there, and were Chaldeans like the rest.
+
+I do not cite this as at all a striking discovery, but it did have a
+curious effect upon Theron Ware. Up to that very afternoon, his notion
+of the kind of book he wanted to write had been founded upon a popular
+book called “Ruth the Moabitess,” written by a clergyman he knew very
+well, the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin. This model performance troubled itself
+not at all with difficult points, but went swimmingly along through
+scented summer seas of pretty rhetoric, teaching nothing, it is true,
+but pleasing a good deal and selling like hot cakes. Now, all at once
+Theron felt that he hated that sort of book. HIS work should be of a
+vastly different order. He might fairly assume, he thought, that if the
+fact that Abram was a Chaldean was new to him, it would fall upon the
+world in general as a novelty. Very well, then, there was his chance.
+He would write a learned book, showing who the Chaldeans were, and how
+their manners and beliefs differed from, and influenced--
+
+It was at this psychological instant that the wave of self-condemnation
+suddenly burst upon and submerged the young clergyman. It passed again,
+leaving him staring fixedly at the pile of books he had taken down from
+the shelves, and gasping a little, as if for breath. Then the humorous
+side of the thing, perversely enough, appealed to him, and he grinned
+feebly to himself at the joke of his having imagined that he could write
+learnedly about the Chaldeans, or anything else. But, no, it shouldn't
+remain a joke! His long mobile face grew serious under the new resolve.
+He would learn what there was to be learned about the Chaldeans. He rose
+and walked up and down the room, gathering fresh strength of purpose
+as this inviting field of research spread out its vistas before him.
+Perhaps--yes, he would incidentally explore the mysteries of the
+Moabitic past as well, and thus put the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin to confusion
+on his own subject. That would in itself be a useful thing, because
+Mifflin wore kid gloves at the Conference, and affected an intolerable
+superiority of dress and demeanor, and there would be general
+satisfaction among the plainer and worthier brethren at seeing him taken
+down a peg.
+
+Now for the first time there rose distinctly in Theron's mind that
+casual allusion which Father Forbes had made to the Turanians. He
+recalled, too, his momentary feeling of mortification at not knowing who
+the Turanians were, at the time. Possibly, if he had probed this matter
+more deeply, now as he walked and pondered in the little living-room,
+he might have traced the whole of the afternoon's mental experiences to
+that chance remark of the Romish priest. But this speculation did not
+detain him. He mused instead upon the splendid library Father Forbes
+must have.
+
+“Well, how does the book come on? Have you got to 'my Lady Keturah'
+yet?'”
+
+It was Alice who spoke, opening the door from the kitchen, and putting
+in her head with a pretence of great and solemn caution, but with a
+correcting twinkle in her eyes.
+
+“I haven't got to anybody yet,” answered Theron, absently. “These big
+things must be approached slowly.”
+
+“Come out to supper, then, while the beans are hot,” said Alice.
+
+The young minister sat through this other meal, again in deep
+abstraction. His wife pursued her little pleasantry about Keturah,
+the second wife, urging him with mock gravity to scold her roundly for
+daring to usurp Sarah's place, but Theron scarcely heard her, and said
+next to nothing. He ate sparingly, and fidgeted in his seat, waiting
+with obvious impatience for the finish of the meal. At last he rose
+abruptly.
+
+“I've got a call to make--something with reference to the book,” he
+said. “I'll run out now, I think, before it gets dark.”
+
+He put on his hat, and strode out of the house as if his errand was of
+the utmost urgency. Once upon the street, however, his pace slackened.
+There was still a good deal of daylight outside, and he loitered
+aimlessly about, walking with bowed head and hands clasped behind him,
+until dusk fell. Then he squared his shoulders, and started straight as
+the crow flies toward the residence of Father Forbes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The new Catholic church was the largest and most imposing public
+building in Octavius. Even in its unfinished condition, with a bald
+roofing of weather-beaten boards marking on the stunted tower the place
+where a spire was to begin later on, it dwarfed every other edifice of
+the sort in the town, just as it put them all to shame in the matter of
+the throngs it drew, rain or shine, to its services.
+
+These facts had not heretofore been a source of satisfaction to the Rev.
+Theron Ware. He had even alluded to the subject in terms which gave his
+wife the impression that he actively deplored the strength and size of
+the Catholic denomination in this new home of theirs, and was troubled
+in his mind about Rome generally. But this evening he walked along
+the extended side of the big structure, which occupied nearly half the
+block, and then, turning the corner, passed in review its wide-doored,
+looming front, without any hostile emotions whatever. In the gathering
+dusk it seemed more massive than ever before, but he found himself only
+passively considering the odd statement he had heard that all Catholic
+Church property was deeded absolutely in the name of the Bishop of the
+diocese.
+
+Only a narrow passage-way separated the church from the pastorate--a
+fine new brick residence standing flush upon the street. Theron mounted
+the steps, and looked about for a bell-pull. Search revealed instead a
+little ivory button set in a ring of metal work. He picked at this for
+a time with his finger-nail, before he made out the injunction, printed
+across it, to push. Of course! how stupid of him! This was one of those
+electric bells he had heard so much of, but which had not as yet made
+their way to the class of homes he knew. For custodians of a mediaeval
+superstition and fanaticism, the Catholic clergy seemed very much up to
+date. This bell made him feel rather more a countryman than ever.
+
+The door was opened by a tall gaunt woman, who stood in black relief
+against the radiance of the hall-way while Theron, choosing his words
+with some diffidence, asked if the Rev. Mr. Forbes was in.
+
+“He is” came the hush-voiced answer. “He's at dinner, though.”
+
+It took the young minister a second or two to bring into association in
+his mind this evening hour and this midday meal. Then he began to say
+that he would call again--it was nothing special--but the woman suddenly
+cut him short by throwing the door wide open.
+
+“It's Mr. Ware, is it not?” she asked, in a greatly altered tone. “Sure,
+he'd not have you go away. Come inside--do, sir!--I'll tell him.”
+
+Theron, with a dumb show of reluctance, crossed the threshold. He noted
+now that the woman, who had bustled down the hall on her errand, was
+gray-haired and incredibly ugly, with a dark sour face, glowering black
+eyes, and a twisted mouth. Then he saw that he was not alone in the
+hall-way. Three men and two women, all poorly clad and obviously working
+people, were seated in meek silence on a bench beyond the hat-rack. They
+glanced up at him for an instant, then resumed their patient study of
+the linoleum pattern on the floor at their feet.
+
+“And will you kindly step in, sir?” the elderly Gorgon had returned to
+ask. She led Mr. Ware along the hall-way to a door near the end, and
+opened it for him to pass before her.
+
+He entered a room in which for the moment he could see nothing but a
+central glare of dazzling light beating down from a great shaded
+lamp upon a circular patch of white table linen. Inside this ring of
+illumination points of fire sparkled from silver and porcelain, and two
+bars of burning crimson tracked across the cloth in reflection from tall
+glasses filled with wine. The rest of the room was vague darkness; but
+the gloom seemed saturated with novel aromatic odors, the appetizing
+scent of which bore clear relation to what Theron's blinking eyes rested
+upon.
+
+He was able now to discern two figures at the table, outside the glowing
+circle of the lamp. They had both risen, and one came toward him with
+cordial celerity, holding out a white plump hand in greeting. He took
+this proffered hand rather limply, not wholly sure in the half-light
+that this really was Father Forbes, and began once more that everlasting
+apology to which he seemed doomed in the presence of the priest. It was
+broken abruptly off by the other's protesting laughter.
+
+“My dear Mr. Ware, I beg of you,” the priest urged, chuckling with
+hospitable mirth, “don't, don't apologize! I give you my word, nothing
+in the world could have pleased us better than your joining us here
+tonight. It was quite dramatic, your coming in as you did. We were
+speaking of you at that very moment. Oh, I forgot--let me make you
+acquainted with my friend--my very particular friend, Dr. Ledsmar. Let
+me take your hat; pray draw up a chair. Maggie will have a place laid
+for you in a minute.”
+
+“Oh, I assure you--I couldn't think of it--I've just eaten
+my--my--dinner,” expostulated Theron. He murmured more inarticulate
+remonstrances a moment later, when the grim old domestic appeared with
+plates, serviette, and tableware for his use, but she went on spreading
+them before him as if she heard nothing. Thus committed against a decent
+show of resistance, the young minister did eat a little here and there
+of what was set before him, and was human enough to regret frankly
+that he could not eat more. It seemed to him very remarkable cookery,
+transfiguring so simple a thing as a steak, for example, quite out of
+recognition, and investing the humble potato with a charm he had never
+dreamed of. He wondered from time to time if it would be polite to ask
+how the potatoes were cooked, so that he might tell Alice.
+
+The conversation at the table was not continuous, or even enlivened.
+After the lapses into silence became marked, Theron began to suspect
+that his refusal to drink wine had annoyed them--the more so as he had
+drenched a large section of table-cloth in his efforts to manipulate a
+siphon instead. He was greatly relieved, therefore, when Father Forbes
+explained in an incidental way that Dr. Ledsmar and he customarily ate
+their meals almost without a word.
+
+“It's a philosophic fad of his,” the priest went on smilingly, “and I
+have fallen in with it for the sake of a quiet life; so that when we do
+have company--that is to say, once in a blue moon--we display no manners
+to speak of.”
+
+“I had always supposed--that is, I've always heard--that it was more
+healthful to talk at meals,” said Theron. “Of course--what I mean--I
+took it for granted all physicians thought so.”
+
+Dr. Ledsmar laughed. “That depends so much upon the quality of the
+meals!” he remarked, holding his glass up to the light.
+
+He seemed a man of middle age and an equable disposition. Theron,
+stealing stray glances at him around the lampshade, saw most distinctly
+of all a broad, impressive dome of skull, which, though obviously the
+result of baldness, gave the effect of quite belonging to the face.
+There were gold-rimmed spectacles, through which shone now and again the
+vivid sparkle of sharp, alert eyes, and there was a nose of some sort
+not easy to classify, at once long and thick. The rest was thin hair and
+short round beard, mouse-colored where the light caught them, but losing
+their outlines in the shadows of the background. Theron had not heard of
+him among the physicians of Octavius. He wondered if he might not be a
+doctor of something else than medicine, and decided upon venturing the
+question.
+
+“Oh, yes, it is medicine,” replied Ledsmar. “I am a doctor three or four
+times over, so far as parchments can make one. In some other respects,
+though, I should think I am probably less of a doctor than anybody else
+now living. I haven't practised--that is, regularly--for many years, and
+I take no interest whatever in keeping abreast of what the profession
+regards as its progress. I know nothing beyond what was being taught in
+the sixties, and that I am glad to say I have mostly forgotten.”
+
+“Dear me!” said Theron. “I had always supposed that Science was the most
+engrossing of pursuits--that once a man took it up he never left it.”
+
+“But that would imply a connection between Science and Medicine!”
+ commented the doctor. “My dear sir, they are not even on speaking
+terms.”
+
+“Shall we go upstairs?” put in the priest, rising from his chair. “It
+will be more comfortable to have our coffee there--unless indeed, Mr.
+Ware, tobacco is unpleasant to you?”
+
+“Oh, my, no!” the young minister exclaimed, eager to free himself from
+the suggestion of being a kill-joy. “I don't smoke myself; but I am very
+fond of the odor, I assure you.”
+
+Father Forbes led the way out. It could be seen now that he wore a long
+house-gown of black silk, skilfully moulded to his erect, shapely, and
+rounded form. Though he carried this with the natural grace of a proud
+and beautiful belle, there was no hint of the feminine in his bearing,
+or in the contour of his pale, firm-set, handsome face. As he moved
+through the hall-way, the five people whom Theron had seen waiting rose
+from their bench, and two of the women began in humble murmurs, “If you
+please, Father,” and “Good-evening to your Riverence;” but the priest
+merely nodded and passed on up the staircase, followed by his guests.
+The people sat down on their bench again.
+
+A few minutes later, reclining at his ease in a huge low chair, and
+feeling himself unaccountably at home in the most luxuriously appointed
+and delightful little room he had ever seen, the Rev. Theron Ware sipped
+his unaccustomed coffee and embarked upon an explanation of his errand.
+Somehow the very profusion of scholarly symbols about him--the great
+dark rows of encased and crowded book-shelves rising to the ceiling,
+the classical engravings upon the wall, the revolving book-case, the
+reading-stand, the mass of littered magazines, reviews, and papers at
+either end of the costly and elaborate writing-desk--seemed to make
+it the easier for him to explain without reproach that he needed
+information about Abram. He told them quite in detail the story of his
+book.
+
+The two others sat watching him through a faint haze of scented smoke,
+with polite encouragement on their faces. Father Forbes took the added
+trouble to nod understandingly at the various points of the narrative,
+and when it was finished gave one of his little approving chuckles.
+
+“This skirts very closely upon sorcery,” he said smilingly. “Do
+you know, there is perhaps not another man in the country who knows
+Assyriology so thoroughly as our friend here, Dr. Ledsmar.”
+
+“That's putting it too strong,” remarked the Doctor. “I only follow at
+a distance--a year or two behind. But I daresay I can help you. You are
+quite welcome to anything I have: my books cover the ground pretty well
+up to last year. Delitzsch is very interesting; but Baudissin's 'Studien
+zur Semitischen Religionsgeschichte' would come closer to what you need.
+There are several other important Germans--Schrader, Bunsen, Duncker,
+Hommel, and so on.”
+
+“Unluckily I--I don't read German readily,” Theron explained with
+diffidence.
+
+“That's a pity,” said the doctor, “because they do the best work--not
+only in this field, but in most others. And they do so much that the
+mass defies translation. Well, the best thing outside of German of
+course is Sayce. I daresay you know him, though.”
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head mournfully. “I don't seem to know any
+one,” he murmured.
+
+The others exchanged glances.
+
+“But if I may ask, Mr. Ware,” pursued the doctor, regarding their guest
+with interest through his spectacles, “why do you specially hit upon
+Abraham? He is full of difficulties--enough, just now, at any rate, to
+warn off the bravest scholar. Why not take something easier?”
+
+Theron had recovered something of his confidence. “Oh, no,” he said,
+“that is just what attracts me to Abraham. I like the complexities and
+contradictions in his character. Take for instance all that strange
+and picturesque episode of Hagar: see the splendid contrast between the
+craft and commercial guile of his dealings in Egypt and with Abimelech,
+and the simple, straightforward godliness of his later years. No, all
+those difficulties only attract me. Do you happen to know--of course
+you would know--do those German books, or the others, give anywhere any
+additional details of the man himself and his sayings and doings--little
+things which help, you know, to round out one's conception of the
+individual?”
+
+Again the priest and the doctor stole a furtive glance across the young
+minister's head. It was Father Forbes who replied.
+
+“I fear that you are taking our friend Abraham too literally, Mr. Ware,”
+ he said, in that gentle semblance of paternal tones which seemed to go
+so well with his gown. “Modern research, you know, quite wipes him out
+of existence as an individual. The word 'Abram' is merely an eponym--it
+means 'exalted father.' Practically all the names in the Genesis
+chronologies are what we call eponymous. Abram is not a person at all:
+he is a tribe, a sept, a clan. In the same way, Shem is not intended for
+a man; it is the name of a great division of the human race. Heber is
+simply the throwing back into allegorical substance, so to speak, of the
+Hebrews; Heth of the Hittites; Asshur of Assyria.”
+
+“But this is something very new, this theory, isn't it?” queried Theron.
+
+The priest smiled and shook his head. “Bless you, no! My dear sir, there
+is nothing new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian
+theory more than two thousand years ago. As for this eponym thing, why
+Saint Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago. In
+his 'De Civitate Dei,' he expressly says of these genealogical names,
+'GENTES NON HOMINES;' that is, 'peoples, not persons.' It was as obvious
+to him--as much a commonplace of knowledge--as it was to Ezekiel eight
+hundred years before him.”
+
+“It seems passing strange that we should not know it now, then,”
+ commented Theron; “I mean, that everybody shouldn't know it.”
+
+Father Forbes gave a little purring chuckle. “Ah, there we get upon
+contentious ground,” he remarked. “Why should 'everybody' be supposed
+to know anything at all? What business is it of 'everybody's' to know
+things? The earth was just as round in the days when people supposed it
+to be flat, as it is now. So the truth remains always the truth, even
+though you give a charter to ten hundred thousand separate numskulls to
+examine it by the light of their private judgment, and report that it is
+as many different varieties of something else. But of course that whole
+question of private judgment versus authority is No-Man's-Land for us.
+We were speaking of eponyms.”
+
+“Yes,” said Theron; “it is very interesting.”
+
+“There is a curious phase of the subject which hasn't been worked out
+much,” continued the priest. “Probably the Germans will get at that too,
+sometime. They are doing the best Irish work in other fields, as it is.
+I spoke of Heber and Heth, in Genesis, as meaning the Hebrews and the
+Hittites. Now my own people, the Irish, have far more ancient legends
+and traditions than any other nation west of Athens; and you find in
+their myth of the Milesian invasion and conquest two principal leaders
+called Heber and Ith, or Heth. That is supposed to be comparatively
+modern--about the time of Solomon's Temple. But these independent Irish
+myths go back to the fall of the Tower of Babel, and they have there an
+ancestor, grandson of Japhet, named Fenius Farsa, and they ascribe
+to him the invention of the alphabet. They took their ancient name of
+Feine, the modern Fenian, from him. Oddly enough, that is the name which
+the Romans knew the Phoenicians by, and to them also is ascribed the
+invention of the alphabet. The Irish have a holy salmon of knowledge,
+just like the Chaldean man-fish. The Druids' tree-worship is identical
+with that of the Chaldeans--those pagan groves, you know, which the Jews
+were always being punished for building. You see, there is nothing new.
+Everything is built on the ruins of something else. Just as the material
+earth is made up of countless billions of dead men's bones, so the
+mental world is all alive with the ghosts of dead men's thoughts and
+beliefs, the wraiths of dead races' faiths and imaginings.”
+
+Father Forbes paused, then added with a twinkle in his eye: “That
+peroration is from an old sermon of mine, in the days when I used to
+preach. I remember rather liking it, at the time.”
+
+“But you still preach?” asked the Rev. Mr. Ware, with lifted brows.
+
+“No! no more! I only talk now and again,” answered the priest, with what
+seemed a suggestion of curtness. He made haste to take the conversation
+back again. “The names of these dead-and-gone things are singularly
+pertinacious, though. They survive indefinitely. Take the modern name
+Marmaduke, for example. It strikes one as peculiarly modern, up-to-date,
+doesn't it? Well, it is the oldest name on earth--thousands of years
+older than Adam. It is the ancient Chaldean Meridug, or Merodach. He was
+the young god who interceded continually between the angry, omnipotent
+Ea, his father, and the humble and unhappy Damkina, or Earth, who was
+his mother. This is interesting from another point of view, because
+this Merodach or Marmaduke is, so far as we can see now, the original
+prototype of our 'divine intermediary' idea. I daresay, though, that if
+we could go back still other scores of centuries, we should find whole
+receding series of types of this Christ-myth of ours.”
+
+Theron Ware sat upright at the fall of these words, and flung a
+swift, startled look about the room--the instinctive glance of a man
+unexpectedly confronted with peril, and casting desperately about for
+means of defence and escape. For the instant his mind was aflame with
+this vivid impression--that he was among sinister enemies, at the mercy
+of criminals. He half rose under the impelling stress of this feeling,
+with the sweat standing on his brow, and his jaw dropped in a scared and
+bewildered stare.
+
+Then, quite as suddenly, the sense of shock was gone; and it was as if
+nothing at all had happened. He drew a long breath, took another sip of
+his coffee, and found himself all at once reflecting almost pleasurably
+upon the charm of contact with really educated people. He leaned back in
+the big chair again, and smiled to show these men of the world how much
+at his ease he was. It required an effort, he discovered, but he made it
+bravely, and hoped he was succeeding.
+
+“It hasn't been in my power to at all lay hold of what the world keeps
+on learning nowadays about its babyhood,” he said. “All I have done is
+to try to preserve an open mind, and to maintain my faith that the more
+we know, the nearer we shall approach the Throne.”
+
+Dr. Ledsmar abruptly scuffled his feet on the floor, and took out his
+watch. “I'm afraid--” he began.
+
+“No, no! There's plenty of time,” remarked the priest, with his soft
+half-smile and purring tones. “You finish your cigar here with Mr. Ware,
+and excuse me while I run down and get rid of the people in the hall.”
+
+Father Forbes tossed his cigar-end into the fender. Then he took from
+the mantel a strange three-cornered black-velvet cap, with a dangling
+silk tassel at the side, put it on his head, and went out.
+
+Theron, being left alone with the doctor, hardly knew what to do or say.
+He took up a paper from the floor beside him, but realized that it would
+be impolite to go farther, and laid it on his knee. Some trace of that
+earlier momentary feeling that he was in hostile hands came back, and
+worried him. He lifted himself upright in the chair, and then became
+conscious that what really disturbed him was the fact that Dr. Ledsmar
+had turned in his seat, crossed his legs, and was contemplating him with
+a gravely concentrated scrutiny through his spectacles.
+
+This uncomfortable gaze kept itself up a long way beyond the point of
+good manners; but the doctor seemed not to mind that at all.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+When Dr. Ledsmar finally spoke, it was in a kindlier tone than the
+young minister had looked for. “I had half a notion of going to hear
+you preach the other evening,” he said; “but at the last minute I backed
+out. I daresay I shall pluck up the courage, sooner or later, and really
+go. It must be fully twenty years since I last heard a sermon, and I had
+supposed that that would suffice for the rest of my life. But they
+tell me that you are worth while; and, for some reason or other, I find
+myself curious on the subject.”
+
+Involved and dubious though the compliment might be, Theron felt himself
+flushing with satisfaction. He nodded his acknowledgment, and changed
+the topic.
+
+“I was surprised to hear Father Forbes say that he did not preach,” he
+remarked.
+
+“Why should he?” asked the doctor, indifferently. “I suppose he hasn't
+more than fifteen parishioners in a thousand who would understand him
+if he did, and of these probably twelve would join in a complaint to his
+Bishop about the heterodox tone of his sermon. There is no point in his
+going to all that pains, merely to incur that risk. Nobody wants him to
+preach, and he has reached an age where personal vanity no longer tempts
+him to do so. What IS wanted of him is that he should be the paternal,
+ceremonial, authoritative head and centre of his flock, adviser,
+monitor, overseer, elder brother, friend, patron, seigneur--whatever you
+like--everything except a bore. They draw the line at that. You see how
+diametrically opposed this Catholic point of view is to the Protestant.”
+
+“The difference does seem extremely curious to me,” said Theron. “Now,
+those people in the hall--”
+
+“Go on,” put in the doctor, as the other faltered hesitatingly. “I know
+what you were going to say. It struck you as odd that he should let them
+wait on the bench there, while he came up here to smoke.”
+
+Theron smiled faintly. “I WAS thinking that my--my parishioners wouldn't
+have taken it so quietly. But of course--it is all so different!”
+
+“As chalk from cheese!” said Dr. Ledsmar, lighting a fresh cigar. “I
+daresay every one you saw there had come either to take the pledge, or
+see to it that one of the others took it. That is the chief industry
+in the hall, so far as I have observed. Now discipline is an important
+element in the machinery here. Coming to take the pledge implies that
+you have been drunk and are now ashamed. Both states have their values,
+but they are opposed. Sitting on that bench tends to develop penitence
+to the prejudice of alcoholism. But at no stage would it ever occur to
+the occupant of the bench that he was the best judge of how long he was
+to sit there, or that his priest should interrupt his dinner or general
+personal routine, in order to administer that pledge. Now, I daresay you
+have no people at all coming to 'swear off.'”
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head. “No; if a man with us got as bad as
+all that, he wouldn't come near the church at all. He'd simply drop out,
+and there would be an end to it.”
+
+“Quite so,” interjected the doctor. “That is the voluntary system. But
+these fellows can't drop out. There's no bottom to the Catholic Church.
+Everything that's in, stays in. If you don't mind my saying so--of
+course I view you all impartially from the outside--but it seems logical
+to me that a church should exist for those who need its help, and not
+for those who by their own profession are so good already that it is
+they who help the church. Now, you turn a man out of your church who
+behaves badly: that must be on the theory that his remaining in would
+injure the church, and that in turn involves the idea that it is the
+excellent character of the parishioners which imparts virtue to the
+church. The Catholics' conception, you see, is quite the converse. Such
+virtue as they keep in stock is on tap, so to speak, here in the church
+itself, and the parishioners come and get some for themselves according
+to their need for it. Some come every day, some only once a year, some
+perhaps never between their baptism and their funeral. But they all
+have a right here, the professional burglar every whit as much as the
+speckless saint. The only stipulation is that they oughtn't to come
+under false pretences: the burglar is in honor bound not to pass himself
+off to his priest as the saint. But that is merely a moral obligation,
+established in the burglar's own interest. It does him no good to come
+unless he feels that he is playing the rules of the game, and one of
+these is confession. If he cheats there, he knows that he is cheating
+nobody but himself, and might much better have stopped away altogether.”
+
+Theron nodded his head comprehendingly. He had a great many views about
+the Romanish rite of confession which did not at all square with this
+statement of the case, but this did not seem a specially fit time for
+bringing them forth. There was indeed a sense of languid repletion in
+his mind, as if it had been overfed and wanted to lie down for awhile.
+He contented himself with nodding again, and murmuring reflectively,
+“Yes, it is all strangely different.”
+
+His tone was an invitation to silence; and the doctor turned his
+attention to the cigar, studying its ash for a minute with an air
+of deep meditation, and then solemnly blowing out a slow series of
+smoke-rings. Theron watched him with an indolent, placid eye, wondering
+lazily if it was, after all, so very pleasant to smoke.
+
+There fell upon this silence--with a softness so delicate that it came
+almost like a progression in the hush--the sound of sweet music. For a
+little, strain and source were alike indefinite--an impalpable setting
+to harmony of the mellowed light, the perfumed opalescence of the air,
+the luxury and charm of the room. Then it rose as by a sweeping curve of
+beauty, into a firm, calm, severe melody, delicious to the ear, but as
+cold in the mind's vision as moonlit sculpture. It went on upward with
+stately collectedness of power, till the atmosphere seemed all alive
+with the trembling consciousness of the presence of lofty souls, sternly
+pure and pitilessly great.
+
+Theron found himself moved as he had never been before. He almost
+resented the discovery, when it was presented to him by the prosaic,
+mechanical side of his brain, that he was listening to organ-music, and
+that it came through the open window from the church close by. He would
+fain have reclined in his chair and closed his eyes, and saturated
+himself with the uttermost fulness of the sensation. Yet, in absurd
+despite of himself, he rose and moved over to the window.
+
+Only a narrow alley separated the pastorate from the church; Mr. Ware
+could have touched with a walking-stick the opposite wall. Indirectly
+facing him was the arched and mullioned top of a great window. A dim
+light from within shone through the more translucent portions of the
+glass below, throwing out faint little bars of party-colored radiance
+upon the blackness of the deep passage-way. He could vaguely trace by
+these the outlines of some sort of picture on the window. There were
+human figures in it, and--yes--up here in the centre, nearest him, was a
+woman's head. There was a halo about it, engirdling rich, flowing waves
+of reddish hair, the lights in which glowed like flame. The face itself
+was barely distinguishable, but its half-suggested form raised a curious
+sense of resemblance to some other face. He looked at it closely,
+blankly, the noble music throbbing through his brain meanwhile.
+
+“It's that Madden girl!” he suddenly heard a voice say by his side. Dr.
+Ledsmar had followed him to the window, and was close at his shoulder.
+
+Theron's thoughts were upon the puzzling shadowed lineaments on the
+stained glass. He saw now in a flash the resemblance which had baffled
+him. “It IS like her, of course,” he said.
+
+“Yes, unfortunately, it IS just like her,” replied the doctor, with a
+hostile note in his voice. “Whenever I am dining here, she always goes
+in and kicks up that racket. She knows I hate it.”
+
+“Oh, you mean that it is she who is playing,” remarked Theron. “I
+thought you referred to--at least--I was thinking of--”
+
+His sentence died off in inconsequence. He had a feeling that he did not
+want to talk with the doctor about the stained-glass likeness. The music
+had sunk away now into fragmentary and unconnected passages, broken here
+and there by abrupt stops. Dr. Ledsmar stretched an arm out past him and
+shut the window. “Let's hear as little of the row as we can,” he said,
+and the two went back to their chairs.
+
+“Pardon me for the question,” the Rev. Mr. Ware said, after a pause
+which began to affect him as constrained, “but something you said about
+dining--you don't live here, then? In the house, I mean?”
+
+The doctor laughed--a characteristically abrupt, dry little laugh, which
+struck Theron at once as bearing a sort of black-sheep relationship
+to the priest's habitual chuckle. “That must have been puzzling you no
+end,” he said--“that notion that the pastorate kept a devil's advocate
+on the premises. No, Mr. Ware, I don't live here. I inhabit a house
+of my own--you may have seen it--an old-fashioned place up beyond the
+race-course, with a sort of tower at the back, and a big garden. But I
+dine here three or four times a week. It is an old arrangement of ours.
+Vincent and I have been friends for many years now. We are quite alone
+in the world, we two--much to our mutual satisfaction. You must come
+up and see me some time; come up and have a look over the books we were
+speaking of.”
+
+“I am much obliged,” said Theron, without enthusiasm. The thought of the
+doctor by himself did not attract him greatly.
+
+The reservation in his tone seemed to interest the doctor. “I suppose
+you are the first man I have asked in a dozen years,” he remarked,
+frankly willing that the young minister should appreciate the favor
+extended him. “It must be fully that since anybody but Vincent Forbes
+has been under my roof; that is, of my own species, I mean.”
+
+“You live there quite alone,” commented Theron.
+
+“Quite--with my dogs and cats and lizards--and my Chinaman. I mustn't
+forget him.” The doctor noted the inquiry in the other's lifted brows,
+and smilingly explained. “He is my solitary servant. Possibly he
+might not appeal to you much; but I can assure you he used to interest
+Octavius a great deal when I first brought him here, ten years ago or
+so. He afforded occupation for all the idle boys in the village for a
+twelve-month at least. They used to lie in wait for him all day long,
+with stones or horse-chestnuts or snowballs, according to the season.
+The Irishmen from the wagon-works nearly killed him once or twice, but
+he patiently lived it all down. The Chinaman has the patience to live
+everything down--the Caucasian races included. He will see us all to
+bed, will that gentleman with the pigtail!”
+
+The music over in the church had lifted itself again into form and
+sequence, and defied the closed window. If anything, it was louder than
+before, and the sonorous roar of the bass-pedals seemed to be shaking
+the very walls. It was something with a big-lunged, exultant, triumphing
+swing in it--something which ought to have been sung on the battlefield
+at the close of day by the whole jubilant army of victors. It was
+impossible to pretend not to be listening to it; but the doctor
+submitted with an obvious scowl, and bit off the tip of his third cigar
+with an annoyed air.
+
+“You don't seem to care much for music,” suggested Mr. Ware, when a lull
+came.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar looked up, lighted match in hand. “Say musicians!” he
+growled. “Has it ever occurred to you,” he went on, between puffs at the
+flame, “that the only animals who make the noises we call music are of
+the bird family--a debased offshoot of the reptilian creation--the
+very lowest types of the vertebrata now in existence? I insist upon
+the parallel among humans. I have in my time, sir, had considerable
+opportunities for studying close at hand the various orders of mammalia
+who devote themselves to what they describe as the arts. It may sound
+a harsh judgement, but I am convinced that musicians stand on the very
+bottom rung of the ladder in the sub-cellar of human intelligence, even
+lower than painters and actors.”
+
+This seemed such unqualified nonsense to the Rev. Mr. Ware that he
+offered no comment whatever upon it. He tried instead to divert his
+thoughts to the stormy strains which rolled in through the vibrating
+brickwork, and to picture to himself the large, capable figure of Miss
+Madden seated in the half-light at the organ-board, swaying to and fro
+in a splendid ecstasy of power as she evoked at will this superb and
+ordered uproar. But the doctor broke insistently in upon his musings.
+
+“All art, so-called, is decay,” he said, raising his voice. “When a race
+begins to brood on the beautiful--so-called--it is a sign of rot, of
+getting ready to fall from the tree. Take the Jews--those marvellous old
+fellows--who were never more than a handful, yet have imposed the rule
+of their ideas and their gods upon us for fifteen hundred years. Why?
+They were forbidden by their most fundamental law to make sculptures or
+pictures. That was at a time when the Egyptians, when the Assyrians, and
+other Semites, were running to artistic riot. Every great museum in
+the world now has whole floors devoted to statues from the Nile, and
+marvellous carvings from the palaces of Sargon and Assurbanipal. You
+can get the artistic remains of the Jews during that whole period into
+a child's wheelbarrow. They had the sense and strength to penalize art;
+they alone survived. They saw the Egyptians go, the Assyrians go, the
+Greeks go, the late Romans go, the Moors in Spain go--all the artistic
+peoples perish. They remained triumphing over all. Now at last their
+long-belated apogee is here; their decline is at hand. I am told that in
+this present generation in Europe the Jews are producing a great lot of
+young painters and sculptors and actors, just as for a century they have
+been producing famous composers and musicians. That means the end of the
+Jews!”
+
+“What! have you only got as far as that?” came the welcome interruption
+of a cheery voice. Father Forbes had entered the room, and stood looking
+down with a whimsical twinkle in his eye from one to the other of his
+guests.
+
+“You must have been taken over the ground at a very slow pace, Mr.
+Ware,” he continued, chuckling softly, “to have arrived merely at the
+collapse of the New Jerusalem. I fancied I had given him time enough to
+bring you straight up to the end of all of us, with that Chinaman of
+his gently slapping our graves with his pigtail. That's where the doctor
+always winds up, if he's allowed to run his course.”
+
+“It has all been very interesting, extremely so, I assure you,” faltered
+Theron. It had become suddenly apparent to him that he desired nothing
+so much as to make his escape--that he had indeed only been waiting for
+the host's return to do so.
+
+He rose at this, and explained that he must be going. No special effort
+being put forth to restrain him, he presently made his way out, Father
+Forbes hospitably following him down to the door, and putting a very
+gracious cordiality into his adieux.
+
+The night was warm and black. Theron stood still in it the moment the
+pastorate door had closed; the sudden darkness was so thick that it
+was as if he had closed his eyes. His dominant sensation was of a deep
+relief and rest after some undue fatigue. It crossed his mind that
+drunken men probably felt like that as they leaned against things on
+their way home. He was affected himself, he saw, by the weariness and
+half-nausea following a mental intoxication. The conceit pleased him,
+and he smiled to himself as he turned and took the first homeward steps.
+It must be growing late, he thought. Alice would be wondering as she
+waited.
+
+There was a street lamp at the corner, and as he walked toward it he
+noted all at once that his feet were keeping step to the movement of
+the music proceeding from the organ within the church--a vaguely
+processional air, marked enough in measure, but still with a dreamy
+effect. It became a pleasure to identify his progress with the quaint
+rhythm of sound as he sauntered along. He discovered, as he neared
+the light, that he was instinctively stepping over the seams in the
+flagstone sidewalk as he had done as a boy. He smiled again at this.
+There was something exceptionally juvenile and buoyant about his mood,
+now that he examined it. He set it down as a reaction from that doctor's
+extravagant and incendiary talk. One thing was certain--he would never
+be caught up at that house beyond the race-course, with its reptiles and
+its Chinaman. Should he ever even go to the pastorate again? He decided
+not to quite definitely answer THAT in the negative, but as he felt now,
+the chances were all against it.
+
+Turning the corner, and walking off into the shadows along the side
+of the huge church building, Theron noted, almost at the end of the
+edifice, a small door--the entrance to a porch coming out to the
+sidewalk--which stood wide open. A thin, pale, vertical line of light
+showed that the inner door, too, was ajar.
+
+Through this wee aperture the organ-music, reduced and mellowed by
+distance, came to him again with that same curious, intimate, personal
+relation which had so moved him at the start, before the doctor closed
+the window. It was as if it was being played for him alone.
+
+He paused for a doubting minute or two, with bowed head, listening to
+the exquisite harmony which floated out to caress and soothe and enfold
+him. There was no spiritual, or at least pious, effect in it now.
+He fancied that it must be secular music, or, if not, then something
+adapted to marriage ceremonies--rich, vivid, passionate, a celebration
+of beauty and the glory of possession, with its ruling note of joy only
+heightened by soft, wooing interludes, and here and there the tremor of
+a fond, timid little sob.
+
+Theron turned away irresolutely, half frightened at the undreamt-of
+impression this music was making upon him. Then, all at once, he wheeled
+and stepped boldly into the porch, pushing the inner door open and
+hearing it rustle against its leathern frame as it swung to behind him.
+
+He had never been inside a Catholic church before.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Jeremiah Madden was supposed to be probably the richest man in Octavius.
+There was no doubt at all about his being its least pretentious citizen.
+
+The huge and ornate modern mansion which he had built, putting to shame
+every other house in the place, gave an effect of ostentation to the
+Maddens as a family; it seemed only to accentuate the air of humility
+which enveloped Jeremiah as with a garment. Everybody knew some version
+of the many tales afloat which, in a kindly spirit, illustrated the
+incongruity between him and his splendid habitation. Some had it that he
+slept in the shed. Others told whimsical stories of his sitting alone in
+the kitchen evenings, smoking his old clay pipe, and sorrowing because
+the second Mrs. Madden would not suffer the pigs and chickens to come
+in and bear him company. But no matter how comic the exaggeration,
+these legends were invariably amiable. It lay in no man's mouth to speak
+harshly of Jeremiah Madden.
+
+He had been born a Connemara peasant, and he would die one. When he
+was ten years old he had seen some of his own family, and most of his
+neighbors, starve to death. He could remember looking at the stiffened
+figure of a woman stretched on the stones by the roadside, with the
+green stain of nettles on her white lips. A girl five years or so
+older than himself, also a Madden and distantly related, had started
+in despair off across the mountains to the town where it was said the
+poor-law officers were dealing out food. He could recall her coming back
+next day, wild-eyed with hunger and the fever; the officers had refused
+her relief because her bare legs were not wholly shrunken to the bone.
+“While there's a calf on the shank, there's no starvation,” they had
+explained to her. The girl died without profiting by this official
+apothegm. The boy found it burned ineffaceably upon his brain. Now,
+after a lapse of more than forty years, it seemed the thing that he
+remembered best about Ireland.
+
+He had drifted westward as an unconsidered, unresisting item in that
+vast flight of the famine years. Others whom he rubbed against in that
+melancholy exodus, and deemed of much greater promise than himself, had
+done badly. Somehow he did well. He learned the wheelwright's trade,
+and really that seemed all there was to tell. The rest had been calm
+and sequent progression--steady employment as a journeyman first; then
+marriage and a house and lot; the modest start as a master; the move to
+Octavius and cheap lumber; the growth of his business, always marked of
+late years stupendous--all following naturally, easily, one thing out of
+another. Jeremiah encountered the idea among his fellows, now and again,
+that he was entitled to feel proud of all this. He smiled to himself at
+the thought, and then sent a sigh after the smile. What was it all but
+empty and transient vanity? The score of other Connemara boys he had
+known--none very fortunate, several broken tragically in prison or the
+gutter, nearly all now gone the way of flesh--were as good as he. He
+could not have it in his heart to take credit for his success; it would
+have been like sneering over their poor graves.
+
+Jeremiah Madden was now fifty-three--a little man of a reddened,
+weather-worn skin and a meditative, almost saddened, aspect. He had blue
+eyes, but his scanty iron-gray hair showed raven black in its shadows.
+The width and prominence of his cheek-bones dominated all one's
+recollections of his face. The long vertical upper-lip and irregular
+teeth made, in repose, an unshapely mouth; its smile, though, sweetened
+the whole countenance. He wore a fringe of stiff, steel-colored beard,
+passing from ear to ear under his chin. His week-day clothes were as
+simple as his workaday manners, fitting his short black pipe and his
+steadfast devotion to his business. On Sundays he dressed with a certain
+rigor of respectability, all in black, and laid aside tobacco, at least
+to the public view. He never missed going to the early Low Mass, quite
+alone. His family always came later, at the ten o'clock High Mass.
+
+There had been, at one time or another, a good many members of this
+family. Two wives had borne Jeremiah Madden a total of over a dozen
+children. Of these there survived now only two of the first Mrs.
+Madden's offspring--Michael and Celia--and a son of the present wife,
+who had been baptized Terence, but called himself Theodore. This
+minority of the family inhabited the great new house on Main Street.
+Jeremiah went every Sunday afternoon by himself to kneel in the presence
+of the majority, there where they lay in Saint Agnes' consecrated
+ground. If the weather was good, he generally extended his walk through
+the fields to an old deserted Catholic burial-field, which had been used
+only in the first years after the famine invasion, and now was clean
+forgotten. The old wagon-maker liked to look over the primitive,
+neglected stones which marked the graves of these earlier exiles. Fully
+half of the inscriptions mentioned his County Galway--there were two
+naming the very parish adjoining his. The latest date on any stone was
+of the remoter 'fifties. They had all been stricken down, here in this
+strange land with its bitter winters, while the memory of their own
+soft, humid, gentle west-coast air was fresh within them. Musing upon
+the clumsy sculpture, with its “R.I.P.,” or “Pray for the Soul of,” half
+to be guessed under the stain and moss of a generation, there would seem
+to him but a step from this present to that heart-rending, awful past.
+What had happened between was a meaningless vision--as impersonal as the
+passing of the planets overhead. He rarely had an impulse to tears
+in the new cemetery, where his ten children were. He never left this
+weed-grown, forsaken old God's-acre dry-eyed.
+
+One must not construct from all this the image of a melancholy man, as
+his fellows met and knew him. Mr. Madden kept his griefs, racial and
+individual, for his own use. To the men about him in the offices and
+the shops he presented day after day, year after year, an imperturbable
+cheeriness of demeanor. He had been always fortunate in the selection of
+lieutenants and chief helpers. Two of these had grown now into partners,
+and were almost as much a part of the big enterprise as Jeremiah
+himself. They spoke often of their inability to remember any unjust or
+petulant word of his--much less any unworthy deed. Once they had seen
+him in a great rage, all the more impressive because he said next to
+nothing. A thoughtless fellow told a dirty story in the presence of
+some apprentices; and Madden, listening to this, drove the offender
+implacably from his employ. It was years now since any one who knew him
+had ventured upon lewd pleasantries in his hearing. Jokes of the sort
+which women might hear he was very fond of though he had not much humor
+of his own. Of books he knew nothing whatever, and he made only the most
+perfunctory pretence now and again of reading the newspapers.
+
+The elder son Michael was very like his father--diligent, unassuming,
+kindly, and simple--a plain, tall, thin red man of nearly thirty, who
+toiled in paper cap and rolled-up shirt-sleeves as the superintendent in
+the saw-mill, and put on no airs whatever as the son of the master.
+If there was surprise felt at his not being taken into the firm as a
+partner, he gave no hint of sharing it. He attended to his religious
+duties with great zeal, and was President of the Sodality as a matter
+of course. This was regarded as his blind side; and young employees
+who cultivated it, and made broad their phylacteries under his notice,
+certainly had an added chance of getting on well in the works. To some
+few whom he knew specially well, Michael would confess that if he
+had had the brains for it, he should have wished to be a priest. He
+displayed no inclination to marry.
+
+The other son, Terence, was some eight years younger, and seemed the
+product of a wholly different race. The contrast between Michael's sandy
+skin and long gaunt visage and this dark boy's handsome, rounded face,
+with its prettily curling black hair, large, heavily fringed brown
+eyes, and delicately modelled features, was not more obvious than their
+temperamental separation. This second lad had been away for years at
+school,--indeed, at a good many schools, for no one seemed to manage
+to keep him long. He had been with the Jesuits at Georgetown, with the
+Christian Brothers at Manhattan; the sectarian Mt. St. Mary's and the
+severely secular Annapolis had both been tried, and proved misfits.
+The young man was home again now, and save that his name had become
+Theodore, he appeared in no wise changed from the beautiful, wilful,
+bold, and showy boy who had gone away in his teens. He was still rather
+small for his years, but so gracefully moulded in form, and so perfectly
+tailored, that the fact seemed rather an advantage than otherwise.
+He never dreamed of going near the wagon-works, but he did go a good
+deal--in fact, most of the time--to the Nedahma Club. His mother spoke
+often to her friends about her fears for his health. He never spoke to
+his friends about his mother at all.
+
+The second Mrs. Madden did not, indeed, appeal strongly to the family
+pride. She had been a Miss Foley, a dress-maker, and an old maid.
+Jeremiah had married her after a brief widowerhood, principally
+because she was the sister of his parish priest, and had a considerable
+reputation for piety. It was at a time when the expansion of his
+business was promising certain wealth, and suggesting the removal to
+Octavius. He was conscious of a notion that his obligations to social
+respectability were increasing; it was certain that the embarrassments
+of a motherless family were. Miss Foley had shown a good deal of
+attention to his little children. She was not ill-looking; she bore
+herself with modesty; she was the priest's sister--the niece once
+removed of a vicar-general. And so it came about.
+
+Although those most concerned did not say so, everybody could see from
+the outset the pity of its ever having come about at all. The pious
+and stiffly respectable priest's sister had been harmless enough as
+a spinster. It made the heart ache to contemplate her as a wife.
+Incredibly narrow-minded, ignorant, suspicious, vain, and sour-tempered,
+she must have driven a less equable and well-rooted man than Jeremiah
+Madden to drink or flight. He may have had his temptations, but they
+made no mark on the even record of his life. He only worked the harder,
+concentrating upon his business those extra hours which another sort of
+home-life would have claimed instead. The end of twenty years found him
+a rich man, but still toiling pertinaciously day by day, as if he had
+his wage to earn. In the great house which had been built to please, or
+rather placate, his wife, he kept to himself as much as possible. The
+popular story of his smoking alone in the kitchen was more or less
+true; only Michael as a rule sat with him, too weak-lunged for tobacco
+himself, but reading stray scraps from the papers to the lonely old man,
+and talking with him about the works, the while Jeremiah meditatively
+sucked his clay pipe. One or two evenings in the week the twain spent up
+in Celia's part of the house, listening with the awe of simple, honest
+mechanics to the music she played for them.
+
+Celia was to them something indefinably less, indescribably more, than
+a daughter and sister. They could not think there had ever been anything
+like her before in the world; the notion of criticising any deed or word
+of hers would have appeared to them monstrous and unnatural.
+
+She seemed to have come up to this radiant and wise and marvellously
+talented womanhood of hers, to their minds, quite spontaneously. There
+had been a little Celia--a red-headed, sulky, mutinous slip of a girl,
+always at war with her step-mother, and affording no special comfort or
+hope to the rest of the family. Then there was a long gap, during which
+the father, four times a year, handed Michael a letter he had received
+from the superioress of a distant convent, referring with cold formality
+to the studies and discipline by which Miss Madden might profit more if
+she had been better brought up, and enclosing a large bill. Then all at
+once they beheld a big Celia, whom they spoke of as being home again,
+but who really seemed never to have been there before--a tall, handsome,
+confident young woman, swift of tongue and apprehension, appearing to
+know everything there was to be known by the most learned, able to paint
+pictures, carve wood, speak in divers languages, and make music for the
+gods, yet with it all a very proud lady, one might say a queen.
+
+The miracle of such a Celia as this impressed itself even upon the
+step-mother. Mrs. Madden had looked forward with a certain grim
+tightening of her combative jaws to the home-coming of the “red-head.”
+ She felt herself much more the fine lady now than she had been when the
+girl went away. She had her carriage now, and the magnificent new house
+was nearly finished, and she had a greater number of ailments, and
+spent far more money on doctor's bills, than any other lady in the
+whole section. The flush of pride in her greatest achievement up to
+date--having the most celebrated of New York physicians brought up to
+Octavius by special train--still prickled in her blood. It was in
+all the papers, and the admiration of the flatterers and
+“soft-sawdherers”--wives of Irish merchants and smaller professional men
+who formed her social circle--was raising visions in her poor head of
+going next year with Theodore to Saratoga, and fastening the attention
+of the whole fashionable republic upon the variety and resources of her
+invalidism. Mrs. Madden's fancy did not run to the length of seeing her
+step-daughter also at Saratoga; it pictured her still as the sullen
+and hated “red-head,” moping defiantly in corners, or courting by
+her insolence the punishments which leaped against their leash in the
+step-mother's mind to get at her.
+
+The real Celia, when she came, fairly took Mrs. Madden's breath away.
+The peevish little plans for annoyance and tyranny, the resolutions born
+of ignorant and jealous egotism, found themselves swept out of sight by
+the very first swirl of Celia's dress-train, when she came down from her
+room robed in peacock blue. The step-mother could only stare.
+
+Now, after two years of it, Mrs. Madden still viewed her step-daughter
+with round-eyed uncertainty, not unmixed with wrathful fear. She still
+drove about behind two magnificent horses; the new house had become
+almost tiresome by familiarity; her pre-eminence in the interested minds
+of the Dearborn County Medical Society was as towering as ever, but
+somehow it was all different. There was a note of unreality nowadays
+in Mrs. Donnelly's professions of wonder at her bearing up under
+her multiplied maladies; there was almost a leer of mockery in the
+sympathetic smirk with which the Misses Mangan listened to her symptoms.
+Even the doctors, though they kept their faces turned toward her,
+obviously did not pay much attention; the people in the street seemed no
+longer to look at her and her equipage at all. Worst of all, something
+of the meaning of this managed to penetrate her own mind. She caught now
+and again a dim glimpse of herself as others must have been seeing her
+for years--as a stupid, ugly, boastful, and bad-tempered old nuisance.
+And it was always as if she saw this in a mirror held up by Celia.
+
+Of open discord there had been next to none. Celia would not permit it,
+and showed this so clearly from the start that there was scarcely need
+for her saying it. It seemed hardly necessary for her to put into words
+any of her desires, for that matter. All existing arrangements in the
+Madden household seemed to shrink automatically and make room for her,
+whichever way she walked. A whole quarter of the unfinished house set
+itself apart for her. Partitions altered themselves; door-ways moved
+across to opposite sides; a recess opened itself, tall and deep, for it
+knew not what statue--simply because, it seemed, the Lady Celia willed
+it so.
+
+When the family moved into this mansion, it was with a consciousness
+that the only one who really belonged there was Celia. She alone could
+behave like one perfectly at home. It seemed entirely natural to the
+others that she should do just what she liked, shut them off from her
+portion of the house, take her meals there if she felt disposed, and
+keep such hours as pleased her instant whim. If she awakened them at
+midnight by her piano, or deferred her breakfast to the late afternoon,
+they felt that it must be all right, since Celia did it. She had one
+room furnished with only divans and huge, soft cushions, its walls
+covered with large copies of statuary not too strictly clothed, which
+she would suffer no one, not even the servants, to enter. Michael
+fancied sometimes, when he passed the draped entrance to this sacred
+chamber, that the portiere smelt of tobacco, but he would not have
+spoken of it, even had he been sure. Old Jeremiah, whose established
+habit it was to audit minutely the expenses of his household, covered
+over round sums to Celia's separate banking account, upon the mere
+playful hint of her holding her check-book up, without a dream of
+questioning her.
+
+That the step-mother had joy, or indeed anything but gall and wormwood,
+out of all this is not to be pretended. There lingered along in the
+recollection of the family some vague memories of her having tried to
+assert an authority over Celia's comings and goings at the outset, but
+they grouped themselves as only parts of the general disorder of moving
+and settling, which a fort-night or so quite righted. Mrs. Madden
+still permitted herself a certain license of hostile comment when her
+step-daughter was not present, and listened with gratification to what
+the women of her acquaintance ventured upon saying in the same spirit;
+but actual interference or remonstrance she never offered nowadays.
+The two rarely met, for that matter, and exchanged only the baldest and
+curtest forms of speech.
+
+Celia Madden interested all Octavius deeply. This she must have done
+in any case, if only because she was the only daughter of its richest
+citizen. But the bold, luxuriant quality of her beauty, the original
+and piquant freedom of her manners, the stories told in gossip about
+her lawlessness at home, her intellectual attainments, and artistic
+vagaries--these were even more exciting. The unlikelihood of her
+marrying any one--at least any Octavian--was felt to add a certain
+romantic zest to the image she made on the local perceptions. There was
+no visible young Irishman at all approaching the social and financial
+standard of the Maddens; it was taken for granted that a mixed marriage
+was quite out of the question in this case. She seemed to have more
+business about the church than even the priest. She was always playing
+the organ, or drilling the choir, or decorating the altars with flowers,
+or looking over the robes of the acolytes for rents and stains, or going
+in or out of the pastorate. Clearly this was not the sort of girl to
+take a Protestant husband.
+
+The gossip of the town concerning her was, however, exclusively
+Protestant. The Irish spoke of her, even among themselves, but seldom.
+There was no occasion for them to pretend to like her: they did not know
+her, except in the most distant and formal fashion. Even the members of
+the choir, of both sexes, had the sense of being held away from her
+at haughty arm's length. No single parishioner dreamed of calling her
+friend. But when they referred to her, it was always with a cautious and
+respectful reticence. For one thing, she was the daughter of their chief
+man, the man they most esteemed and loved. For another, reservations
+they may have had in their souls about her touched close upon a
+delicately sore spot. It could not escape their notice that their
+Protestant neighbors were watching her with vigilant curiosity, and with
+a certain tendency to wink when her name came into conversation along
+with that of Father Forbes. It had never yet got beyond a tendency--the
+barest fluttering suggestion of a tempted eyelid--but the whole Irish
+population of the place felt themselves to be waiting, with clenched
+fists but sinking hearts, for the wink itself.
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware had not caught even the faintest hint of these
+overtures to suspicion.
+
+When he had entered the huge, dark, cool vault of the church, he could
+see nothing at first but a faint light up over the gallery, far at the
+other end. Then, little by little, his surroundings shaped themselves
+out of the gloom. To his right was a rail and some broad steps rising
+toward a softly confused mass of little gray vertical bars and the pale
+twinkle of tiny spots of gilded reflection, which he made out in the
+dusk to be the candles and trappings of the altar. Overhead the great
+arches faded away from foundations of dimly discernible capitals
+into utter blackness. There was a strange medicinal odor--as of cubeb
+cigarettes--in the air.
+
+After a little pause, he tiptoed noiselessly up the side aisle toward
+the end of the church--toward the light above the gallery. This radiance
+from a single gas-jet expanded as he advanced, and spread itself upward
+over a burnished row of monster metal pipes, which went towering into
+the darkness like giants. They were roaring at him now--a sonorous,
+deafening, angry bellow, which made everything about him vibrate. The
+gallery balustrade hid the keyboard and the organist from view. There
+were only these jostling brazen tubes, as big round as trees and as
+tall, trembling with their own furious thunder. It was for all the world
+as if he had wandered into some vast tragical, enchanted cave, and was
+being drawn against his will--like fascinated bird and python--toward
+fate at the savage hands of these swollen and enraged genii.
+
+He stumbled in the obscure light over a kneeling-bench, making a
+considerable racket. On the instant the noise from the organ ceased, and
+he saw the black figure of a woman rise above the gallery-rail and look
+down.
+
+“Who is it?” the indubitable voice of Miss Madden demanded sharply.
+
+Theron had a sudden sheepish notion of turning and running. With the
+best grace he could summon, he called out an explanation instead.
+
+“Wait a minute. I'm through now. I'm coming down,” she returned. He
+thought there was a note of amusement in her tone.
+
+She came to him a moment later, accompanied by a thin, tall man, whom
+Theron could barely see in the dark, now that the organ-light too was
+gone. This man lighted a match or two to enable them to make their way
+out.
+
+When they were on the sidewalk, Celia spoke: “Walk on ahead, Michael!”
+ she said. “I have some matters to speak of with Mr. Ware.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+“Well, what did you think of Dr. Ledsmar?”
+
+The girl's abrupt question came as a relief to Theron. They were walking
+along in a darkness so nearly complete that he could see next to nothing
+of his companion. For some reason, this seemed to suggest a sort of
+impropriety. He had listened to the footsteps of the man ahead--whom
+he guessed to be a servant--and pictured him as intent upon getting up
+early next morning to tell everybody that the Methodist minister had
+stolen into the Catholic church at night to walk home with Miss Madden.
+That was going to be very awkward--yes, worse than awkward! It might
+mean ruin itself. She had mentioned aloud that she had matters to talk
+over with him: that of course implied confidences, and the man might
+put heaven only knew what construction on that. It was notorious that
+servants did ascribe the very worst motives to those they worked for.
+The bare thought of the delight an Irish servant would have in also
+dragging a Protestant clergyman into the thing was sickening. And what
+could she want to talk to him about, anyway? The minute of silence
+stretched itself out upon his nerves into an interminable period of
+anxious unhappiness. Her mention of the doctor at last somehow, seemed
+to lighten the situation.
+
+“Oh, I thought he was very smart.” he made haste to answer. “Wouldn't
+it be better--to--keep close to your man? He--may--think we've gone some
+other way.”
+
+“It wouldn't matter if he did,” remarked Celia. She appeared to
+comprehend his nervousness and take pity on it, for she added, “It is
+my brother Michael, as good a soul as ever lived. He is quite used to my
+ways.”
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware drew a long comforting breath. “Oh, I see! He went
+with you to--bring you home.”
+
+“To blow the organ,” said the girl in the dark, correctingly. “But about
+that doctor; did you like him?”
+
+“Well,” Theron began, “'like' is rather a strong word for so short
+an acquaintance. He talked very well; that is, fluently. But he is so
+different from any other man I have come into contact with that--”
+
+“What I wanted you to say was that you hated him,” put in Celia, firmly.
+
+“I don't make a practice of saying that of anybody,” returned Theron, so
+much at his ease again that he put an effect of gentle, smiling reproof
+into the words. “And why specially should I make an exception for him?”
+
+“Because he's a beast!”
+
+Theron fancied that he understood. “I noticed that he seemed not to have
+much of an ear for music,” he commented, with a little laugh. “He shut
+down the window when you began to play. His doing so annoyed me, because
+I--I wanted very much to hear it all. I never heard such music before.
+I--I came into the church to hear more of it; but then you stopped!”
+
+“I will play for you some other time,” Celia said, answering the
+reproach in his tone. “But tonight I wanted to talk with you instead.”
+
+She kept silent, in spite of this, so long now that Theron was on the
+point of jestingly asking when the talk was to begin. Then she put a
+question abruptly--
+
+“It is a conventional way of putting it, but are you fond of poetry, Mr.
+Ware?”
+
+“Well, yes, I suppose I am,” replied Theron, much mystified. “I can't
+say that I am any great judge; but I like the things that I like--and--”
+
+“Meredith,” interposed Celia, “makes one of his women, Emilia in
+England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in
+cages, always going to one end and back again. Does it impress you that
+way?”
+
+“I don't know that it does,” said he, dubiously. It seemed, however,
+to be her whim to talk literature, and he went on: “I've hardly read
+Meredith at all. I once borrowed his 'Lucile,' but somehow I never got
+interested in it. I heard a recitation of his once, though--a piece
+about a dead wife, and the husband and another man quarrelling as to
+whose portrait was in the locket on her neck, and of their going up to
+settle the dispute, and finding that it was the likeness of a third man,
+a young priest--and though it was very striking, it didn't give me a
+thirst to know his other poems. I fancied I shouldn't like them. But
+I daresay I was wrong. As I get older, I find that I take less narrow
+views of literature--that is, of course, of light literature--and
+that--that--”
+
+Celia mercifully stopped him. “The reason I asked you was--” she began,
+and then herself paused. “Or no,--never mind that--tell me something
+else. Are you fond of pictures, statuary, the beautiful things of the
+world? Do great works of art, the big achievements of the big artists,
+appeal to you, stir you up?”
+
+“Alas! that is something I can only guess at myself,” answered Theron,
+humbly. “I have always lived in little places. I suppose, from your
+point of view, I have never seen a good painting in my life. I can only
+say this, though--that it has always weighed on my mind as a great and
+sore deprivation, this being shut out from knowing what others mean when
+they talk and write about art. Perhaps that may help you to get at what
+you are after. If I ever went to New York, I feel that one of the first
+things I should do would be to see all the picture galleries; is that
+what you meant? And--would you mind telling me--why you--?”
+
+“Why I asked you?” Celia supplied his halting question. “No, I DON'T
+mind. I have a reason for wanting to know--to satisfy myself whether I
+had guessed rightly or not--about the kind of man you are. I mean in the
+matter of temperament and bent of mind and tastes.”
+
+The girl seemed to be speaking seriously, and without intent to offend.
+Theron did not find any comment ready, but walked along by her side,
+wondering much what it was all about.
+
+“I daresay you think me 'too familiar on short acquaintance,'” she
+continued, after a little.
+
+“My dear Miss Madden!” he protested perfunctorily.
+
+“No; it is a matter of a good deal of importance,” she went on. “I can
+see that you are going to be thrown into friendship, close contact, with
+Father Forbes. He likes you, and you can't help liking him. There is
+nobody else in this raw, overgrown, empty-headed place for you and him
+TO like, nobody except that man, that Dr. Ledsmar. And if you like HIM,
+I shall hate you! He has done mischief enough already. I am counting on
+you to help undo it, and to choke him off from doing more. It would be
+different if you were an ordinary Orthodox minister, all encased like
+a terrapin in prejudices and nonsense. Of course, if you had been THAT
+kind, we should never have got to know you at all. But when I saw you in
+MacEvoy's cottage there, it was plain that you were one of US--I mean a
+MAN, and not a marionette or a mummy. I am talking very frankly to you,
+you see. I want you on my side, against that doctor and his heartless,
+bloodless science.”
+
+“I feel myself very heartily on your side,” replied Theron. She had set
+their progress at a slower pace, now that the lights of the main
+street were drawing near, as if to prolong their talk. All his earlier
+reservations had fled. It was almost as if she were a parishioner of
+his own. “I need hardly tell you that the doctor's whole attitude
+toward--toward revelation--was deeply repugnant to me. It doesn't make
+it any the less hateful to call it science. I am afraid, though,” he
+went on hesitatingly, “that there are difficulties in the way of my
+helping, as you call it. You see, the very fact of my being a Methodist
+minister, and his being a Catholic priest, rather puts my interference
+out of the question.”
+
+“No; that doesn't matter a button,” said Celia, lightly. “None of us
+think of that at all.”
+
+“There is the other embarrassment, then,” pursued Theron, diffidently,
+“that Father Forbes is a vastly broader and deeper scholar--in all these
+matters--than I am. How could I possibly hope to influence him by my
+poor arguments? I don't know even the alphabet of the language he thinks
+in--on these subjects, I mean.”
+
+“Of course you don't!” interposed the girl, with a confidence which the
+other, for all his meekness, rather winced under. “That wasn't what
+I meant at all. We don't want arguments from our friends: we want
+sympathies, sensibilities, emotional bonds. The right person's silence
+is worth more for companionship than the wisest talk in the world from
+anybody else. It isn't your mind that is needed here, or what you know;
+it is your heart, and what you feel. You are full of poetry, of ideals,
+of generous, unselfish impulses. You see the human, the warm-blooded
+side of things. THAT is what is really valuable. THAT is how you can
+help!”
+
+“You overestimate me sadly,” protested Theron, though with considerable
+tolerance for her error in his tone. “But you ought to tell me something
+about this Dr. Ledsmar. He spoke of being an old friend of the pr--of
+Father Forbes.”
+
+“Oh, yes, they've always known each other; that is, for many years. They
+were professors together in a college once, heaven only knows how long
+ago. Then they separated, I fancy they quarrelled, too, before they
+parted. The doctor came here, where some relative had left him the
+place he lives in. Then in time the Bishop chanced to send Father Forbes
+here--that was about three years ago,--and the two men after a while
+renewed their old relations. They dine together; that is the doctor's
+stronghold. He knows more about eating than any other man alive, I
+believe. He studies it as you would study a language. He has taught
+old Maggie, at the pastorate there, to cook like the mother of all
+the Delmonicos. And while they sit and stuff themselves, or loll about
+afterward like gorged snakes, they think it is smart to laugh at all the
+sweet and beautiful things in life, and to sneer at people who believe
+in ideals, and to talk about mankind being merely a fortuitous product
+of fermentation, and twaddle of that sort. It makes me sick!”
+
+“I can readily see,” said Theron, with sympathy, “how such a cold,
+material, and infidel influence as that must shock and revolt an
+essentially religious temperament like yours.”
+
+Miss Madden looked up at him. They had turned into the main street, and
+there was light enough for him to detect something startlingly like a
+grin on her beautiful face.
+
+“But I'm not religious at all, you know,” he heard her say. “I'm as
+Pagan as--anything! Of course there are forms to be observed, and so on;
+I rather like them than otherwise. I can make them serve very well for
+my own system; for I am myself, you know, an out-an-out Greek.”
+
+“Why, I had supposed that you were full blooded Irish,” the Rev. Mr.
+Ware found himself remarking, and then on the instant was overwhelmed by
+the consciousness that he had said a foolish thing. Precisely where the
+folly lay he did not know, but it was impossible to mistake the gesture
+of annoyance which his companion had instinctively made at his words.
+She had widened the distance between them now, and quickened her step.
+They went on in silence till they were within a block of her house.
+Several people had passed them who Theron felt sure must have recognized
+them both.
+
+“What I meant was,” the girl all at once began, drawing nearer again,
+and speaking with patient slowness, “that I find myself much more in
+sympathy with the Greek thought, the Greek theology of the beautiful
+and the strong, the Greek philosophy of life, and all that, than what is
+taught nowadays. Personally, I take much more stock in Plato than I
+do in Peter. But of course it is a wholly personal affair; I had no
+business to bother you with it. And for that matter, I oughtn't to have
+troubled you with any of our--”
+
+“I assure you, Miss Madden!” the young minister began, with fervor.
+
+“No,” she broke in, in a resigned and even downcast tone; “let it all be
+as if I hadn't spoken. Don't mind anything I have said. If it is to be,
+it will be. You can't say more than that, can you?”
+
+She looked into his face again, and her large eyes produced an
+impression of deep melancholy, which Theron found himself somehow
+impelled to share. Things seemed all at once to have become very sad
+indeed.
+
+“It is one of my unhappy nights,” she explained, in gloomy confidence.
+“I get them every once in a while--as if some vicious planet or other
+was crossing in front of my good star--and then I'm a caution to snakes.
+I shut myself up--that's the only thing to do--and have it out with
+myself I didn't know but the organ-music would calm me down, but it
+hasn't. I shan't sleep a wink tonight, but just rage around from one
+room to another, piling all the cushions from the divans on to the
+floor, and then kicking them away again. Do YOU ever have fits like
+that?”
+
+Theron was able to reply with a good conscience in the negative. It
+occurred to him to add, with jocose intent: “I am curious to know,
+do these fits, as you call them, occupy a prominent part in Grecian
+philosophy as a general rule?”
+
+Celia gave a little snort, which might have signified amusement, but did
+not speak until they were upon her own sidewalk. “There is my brother,
+waiting at the gate,” she said then, briefly.
+
+“Well, then, I will bid you good-night here, I think,” Theron remarked,
+coming to a halt, and offering his hand. “It must be getting very
+late, and my--that is--I have to be up particularly early tomorrow. So
+good-night; I hope you will be feeling ever so much better in spirits in
+the morning.”
+
+“Oh, that doesn't matter,” replied the girl, listlessly. “It's a very
+paltry little affair, this life of ours, at the best of it. Luckily it's
+soon done with--like a bad dream.”
+
+“Tut! Tut! I won't have you talk like that!” interrupted Theron, with a
+swift and smart assumption of authority. “Such talk isn't sensible, and
+it isn't good. I have no patience with it!”
+
+“Well, try and have a little patience with ME, anyway, just for
+tonight,” said Celia, taking the reproof with gentlest humility, rather
+to her censor's surprise. “I really am unhappy tonight, Mr. Ware, very
+unhappy. It seems as if all at once the world had swelled out in size
+a thousandfold, and that poor me had dwindled down to the merest wee
+little red-headed atom--the most helpless and forlorn and lonesome of
+atoms at that.” She seemed to force a sorrowful smile on her face as she
+added: “But all the same it has done me good to be with you--I am sure
+it has--and I daresay that by tomorrow I shall be quite out of the
+blues. Good-night, Mr. Ware. Forgive my making such an exhibition of
+myself I WAS going to be such a fine early Greek, you know, and I have
+turned out only a late Milesian--quite of the decadence. I shall do
+better next time. And good-night again, and ever so many thanks.”
+
+She was walking briskly away toward the gate now, where the shadowy
+Michael still patiently stood. Theron strode off in the opposite
+direction, taking long, deliberate steps, and bowing his head in
+thought. He had his hands behind his back, as was his wont, and the
+sense of their recent contact with her firm, ungloved hands was,
+curiously enough, the thing which pushed itself uppermost in his mind.
+There had been a frank, almost manly vigor in her grasp; he said
+to himself that of course that came from her playing so much on the
+keyboard; the exercise naturally would give her large, robust hands.
+
+Suddenly he remembered about the piano; he had quite forgotten to
+solicit her aid in selecting it. He turned, upon the impulse, to go
+back. She had not entered the gate as yet, but stood, shiningly visible
+under the street lamp, on the sidewalk, and she was looking in his
+direction. He turned again like a shot, and started homeward.
+
+The front door of the parsonage was unlocked, and he made his way on
+tiptoe through the unlighted hall to the living-room. The stuffy air
+here was almost suffocating with the evil smell of a kerosene
+lamp turned down too low. Alice sat asleep in her old farmhouse
+rocking-chair, with an inelegant darning-basket on the table by her
+side. The whole effect of the room was as bare and squalid to Theron's
+newly informed eye as the atmosphere was offensive to his nostrils. He
+coughed sharply, and his wife sat up and looked at the clock. It was
+after eleven.
+
+“Where on earth have you been?” she asked, with a yawn, turning up the
+wick of her sewing-lamp again.
+
+“You ought never to turn down a light like that,” said Theron, with a
+complaining note in his voice. “It smells up the whole place. I never
+dreamed of your sitting up for me like this. You ought to have gone to
+bed.”
+
+“But how could I guess that you were going to be so late?,” she
+retorted. “And you haven't told me where you were. Is this book of yours
+going to keep you up like this right along?”
+
+The episode of the book was buried in the young minister's mind beneath
+such a mass of subsequent experiences that it required an effort for him
+to grasp what she was talking about. It seemed as if months had elapsed
+since he was in earnest about that book; and yet he had left the house
+full of it only a few hours before. He shook his wits together, and made
+answer--
+
+“Oh, bless you, no! Only there arose a very curious question. You have
+no idea, literally no conception, of the interesting and important
+problems which are raised by the mere fact of Abraham leaving the city
+of Ur. It's amazing, I assure you. I hadn't realized it myself.”
+
+“Well,” remarked Alice, rising--and with good-humor and petulance
+struggling sleepily ill her tone--“all I've got to say is, that if
+Abraham hasn't anything better to do than to keep young ministers of the
+gospel out, goodness knows where, till all hours of the night, I wish to
+gracious he'd stayed in the city of Ur right straight along.”
+
+“You have no idea what a scholarly man Dr. Ledsmar is,” Theron suddenly
+found himself inspired to volunteer. “He has the most marvellous
+collection of books--a whole library devoted to this very subject--and
+he has put them all quite freely at my disposal. Extremely kind of him,
+isn't it?”
+
+“Ledsmar? Ledsmar?” queried Alice. “I don't seem to remember the name.
+He isn't the little man with the birthmark, who sits in the pew behind
+the Lovejoys, is he? I think some one said he was a doctor.”
+
+“Yes, a horse doctor!” said Theron, with a sniff. “No; you haven't seen
+this Dr. Ledsmar at all. I--I don't know that he attends any church
+regularly. I scraped his acquaintance quite by accident. He is really a
+character. He lives in the big house, just beyond the race-course, you
+know--the one with the tower at the back--”
+
+“No, I don't know. How should I? I've hardly poked my nose outside of
+the yard since I have been here.”
+
+“Well, you shall go,” said the husband, consolingly. “You HAVE been
+cooped up here too much, poor girl. I must take you out more, really.
+I don't know that I could take you to the doctor's place--without an
+invitation, I mean. He is very queer about some things. He lives there
+all alone, for instance, with only a Chinaman for a servant. He told
+me I was almost the only man he had asked under his roof for years. He
+isn't a practising physician at all, you know. He is a scientist; he
+makes experiments with lizards--and things.”
+
+“Theron,” the wife said, pausing lamp in hand on her way to the bedroom,
+“do you be careful, now! For all you know this doctor may be a loose
+man, or pretty near an infidel. You've got to be mighty particular in
+such matters, you know, or you'll have the trustees down on you like a
+'thousand of bricks.'”
+
+“I will thank the trustees to mind their own business,” said Theron,
+stiffly, and the subject dropped.
+
+The bedroom window upstairs was open, and upon the fresh night air
+was borne in the shrill, jangling sound of a piano, being played off
+somewhere in the distance, but so vehemently that the noise imposed
+itself upon the silence far and wide. Theron listened to this as he
+undressed. It proceeded from the direction of the main street, and he
+knew, as by instinct, that it was the Madden girl who was playing. The
+incongruity of the hour escaped his notice. He mused instead upon the
+wild and tropical tangle of moods, emotions, passions, which had grown
+up in that strange temperament. He found something very pathetic in
+that picture she had drawn of herself in forecast, roaming disconsolate
+through her rooms the livelong night, unable to sleep. The woful moan of
+insomnia seemed to make itself heard in every strain from her piano.
+
+Alice heard it also, but being unillumined, she missed the romantic
+pathos. “I call it disgraceful,” she muttered from her pillow, “for
+folks to be banging away on a piano at this time of night. There ought
+to be a law to prevent it.”
+
+“It may be some distressed soul,” said Theron, gently, “seeking relief
+from the curse of sleeplessness.”
+
+The wife laughed, almost contemptuously. “Distressed fiddlesticks!” was
+her only other comment.
+
+The music went on for a long time--rising now to strident heights, now
+sinking off to the merest tinkling murmur, and broken ever and again by
+intervals of utter hush. It did not prevent Alice from at once falling
+sound asleep; but Theron lay awake, it seemed to him, for hours,
+listening tranquilly, and letting his mind wander at will through the
+pleasant antechambers of Sleep, where are more unreal fantasies than
+Dreamland itself affords.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+For some weeks the Rev. Theron Ware saw nothing of either the priest or
+the doctor, or the interesting Miss Madden.
+
+There were, indeed, more urgent matters to think about. June had come;
+and every succeeding day brought closer to hand the ordeal of his first
+Quarterly Conference in Octavius. The waters grew distinctly rougher as
+his pastoral bark neared this difficult passage.
+
+He would have approached the great event with an easier mind if he could
+have made out just how he stood with his congregation. Unfortunately
+nothing in his previous experiences helped him in the least to measure
+or guess at the feelings of these curious Octavians. Their Methodism
+seemed to be sound enough, and to stick quite to the letter of the
+Discipline, so long as it was expressed in formulae. It was its spirit
+which he felt to be complicated by all sorts of conditions wholly novel
+to him.
+
+The existence of a line of street-cars in the town, for example, would
+not impress the casual thinker as likely to prove a rock in the path of
+peaceful religion. Theron, in his simplicity, had even thought, when he
+first saw these bobtailed cars bumping along the rails in the middle of
+the main street, that they must be a great convenience to people living
+in the outskirts, who wished to get in to church of a Sunday morning. He
+was imprudent enough to mention this in conversation with one of his new
+parishioners. Then he learned, to his considerable chagrin, that when
+this line was built, some years before, a bitter war of words had been
+fought upon the question of its being worked on the Sabbath day. The
+then occupant of the Methodist pulpit had so distinguished himself
+above the rest by the solemnity and fervor of his protests against this
+insolent desecration of God's day that the Methodists of Octavius
+still felt themselves peculiarly bound to hold this horse-car line, its
+management, and everything connected with it, in unbending aversion. At
+least once a year they were accustomed to expect a sermon denouncing it
+and all its impious Sunday patrons. Theron made a mental resolve that
+this year they should be disappointed.
+
+Another burning problem, which he had not been called upon before to
+confront, he found now entangled with the mysterious line which divided
+a circus from a menagerie. Those itinerant tent-shows had never come his
+way heretofore, and he knew nothing of that fine balancing proportion
+between ladies in tights on horseback and cages full of deeply
+educational animals, which, even as the impartial rain, was designed
+to embrace alike the just and the unjust. There had arisen inside the
+Methodist society of Octavius some painful episodes, connected with
+members who took their children “just to see the animals,” and were
+convicted of having also watched the Rose-Queen of the Arena, in her
+unequalled flying leap through eight hoops, with an ardent and unashamed
+eye. One of these cases still remained on the censorial docket of the
+church; and Theron understood that he was expected to name a committee
+of five to examine and try it. This he neglected to do.
+
+He was no longer at all certain that the congregation as a whole liked
+his sermons. The truth was, no doubt, that he had learned enough to
+cease regarding the congregation as a whole. He could still rely upon
+carrying along with him in his discourses from the pulpit a large
+majority of interested and approving faces. But here, unhappily, was a
+case where the majority did not rule. The minority, relatively small in
+numbers, was prodigious in virile force.
+
+More than twenty years had now elapsed since that minor schism in the
+Methodist Episcopal Church, the result of which was the independent body
+known as Free Methodists, had relieved the parent flock of its principal
+disturbing element. The rupture came fittingly at that time when all the
+“isms” of the argumentative fifties were hurled violently together into
+the melting-pot of civil war. The great Methodist Church, South, had
+broken bodily off on the question of State Rights. The smaller and
+domestic fraction of Free Methodism separated itself upon an issue
+which may be most readily described as one of civilization. The seceders
+resented growth in material prosperity; they repudiated the introduction
+of written sermons and organ-music; they deplored the increasing laxity
+in meddlesome piety, the introduction of polite manners in the pulpit
+and classroom, and the development of even a rudimentary desire among
+the younger people of the church to be like others outside in dress and
+speech and deportment. They did battle as long as they could, inside
+the fold, to restore it to the severely straight and narrow path of
+primitive Methodism. When the adverse odds became too strong for them,
+they quitted the church and set up a Bethel for themselves.
+
+Octavius chanced to be one of the places where they were able to hold
+their own within the church organization. The Methodism of the town had
+gone along without any local secession. It still held in full fellowship
+the radicals who elsewhere had followed their unbridled bent into the
+strongest emotional vagaries--where excited brethren worked themselves
+up into epileptic fits, and women whirled themselves about in weird
+religious ecstasies, like dervishes of the Orient, till they
+fell headlong in a state of trance. Octavian Methodism was spared
+extravagances of this sort, it is true, but it paid a price for the
+immunity. The people whom an open split would have taken away remained
+to leaven and dominate the whole lump. This small advanced section, with
+its men of a type all the more aggressive from its narrowness, and women
+who went about solemnly in plain gray garments, with tight-fitting,
+unadorned, mouse-colored sunbonnets, had not been able wholly to
+enforce its views upon the social life of the church members, but of its
+controlling influence upon their official and public actions there could
+be no doubt.
+
+The situation had begun to unfold itself to Theron from the outset.
+He had recognized the episodes of the forbidden Sunday milk and of the
+flowers in poor Alice's bonnet as typical of much more that was to
+come. No week followed without bringing some new fulfilment of this
+foreboding. Now, at the end of two months, he knew well enough that
+the hitherto dominant minority was hostile to him and his ministry, and
+would do whatever it could against him.
+
+Though Theron at once decided to show fight, and did not at all waver
+in that resolve, his courage was in the main of a despondent sort.
+Sometimes it would flutter up to the point of confidence, or at
+least hopefulness, when he met with substantial men of the church who
+obviously liked him, and whom he found himself mentally ranging on his
+side, in the struggle which was to come. But more often it was blankly
+apparent to him that, the moment flags were flying and drums on the
+roll, these amiable fair-weather friends would probably take to their
+heels.
+
+Still, such as they were, his sole hope lay in their support. He must
+make the best of them. He set himself doggedly to the task of gathering
+together all those who were not his enemies into what, when the proper
+time came, should be known as the pastor's party. There was plenty of
+apostolic warrant for this. If there had not been, Theron felt that the
+mere elementary demands of self-defence would have justified his use of
+strategy.
+
+The institution of pastoral calling, particularly that inquisitorial
+form of it laid down in the Discipline, had never attracted Theron.
+He and Alice had gone about among their previous flocks in quite a
+haphazard fashion, without thought of system, much less of deliberate
+purpose. Theron made lists now, and devoted thought and examination to
+the personal tastes and characteristics of the people to be cultivated.
+There were some, for example, who would expect him to talk pretty much
+as the Discipline ordained--that is, to ask if they had family prayer,
+to inquire after their souls, and generally to minister grace to his
+hearers--and these in turn subdivided themselves into classes, ranging
+from those who would wish nothing else to those who needed only a mild
+spiritual flavor. There were others whom he would please much better by
+not talking shop at all. Although he could ill afford it, he subscribed
+now for a daily paper that he might have a perpetually renewed source of
+good conversational topics for these more worldly calls. He also bought
+several pounds of candy, pleasing in color, but warranted to be entirely
+harmless, and he made a large mysterious mark on the inside of his new
+silk hat to remind him not to go out calling without some of this in his
+pocket for the children.
+
+Alice, he felt, was not helping him in this matter as effectively as he
+could have wished. Her attitude toward the church in Octavius might best
+be described by the word “sulky.” Great allowance was to be made, he
+realized, for her humiliation over the flowers in her bonnet. That might
+justify her, fairly enough, in being kept away from meeting now and
+again by headaches, or undefined megrims. But it ought not to prevent
+her from going about and making friends among the kindlier parishioners
+who would welcome such a thing, and whom he from time to time indicated
+to her. She did go to some extent, it is true, but she produced,
+in doing so, an effect of performing a duty. He did not find traces
+anywhere of her having created a brilliant social impression. When they
+went out together, he was peculiarly conscious of having to do the work
+unaided.
+
+This was not at all like the Alice of former years, of other charges.
+Why, she had been, beyond comparison, the most popular young woman in
+Tyre. What possessed her to mope like this in Octavius?
+
+Theron looked at her attentively nowadays, when she was unaware of his
+gaze, to try if her face offered any answer to the riddle. It could not
+be suggested that she was ill. Never in her life had she been looking so
+well. She had thrown herself, all at once, and with what was to him
+an unaccountable energy, into the creation and management of a
+flower-garden. She was out the better part of every day, rain or shine,
+digging, transplanting, pruning, pottering generally about among her
+plants and shrubs. This work in the open air had given her an aspect of
+physical well-being which it was impossible to be mistaken about.
+
+Her husband was glad, of course, that she had found some occupation
+which at once pleased her and so obviously conduced to health. This was
+so much a matter of course, in fact, that he said to himself over and
+over again that he was glad. Only--only, sometimes the thought WOULD
+force itself upon his attention that if she did not spend so much of her
+time in her own garden, she would have more time to devote to winning
+friends for them in the Garden of the Lord--friends whom they were going
+to need badly.
+
+The young minister, in taking anxious stock of the chances for and
+against him, turned over often in his mind the fact that he had already
+won rank as a pulpit orator. His sermons had attracted almost universal
+attention at Tyre, and his achievement before the Conference at
+Tecumseh, if it did fail to receive practical reward, had admittedly
+distanced all the other preaching there. It was a part of the evil luck
+pursuing him that here in this perversely enigmatic Octavius his special
+gift seemed to be of no use whatever. There were times, indeed, when he
+was tempted to think that bad preaching was what Octavius wanted.
+
+Somewhere he had heard of a Presbyterian minister, in charge of a big
+city church, who managed to keep well in with a watchfully Orthodox
+congregation, and at the same time establish himself in the affections
+of the community at large, by simply preaching two kinds of sermons. In
+the morning, when almost all who attended were his own communicants,
+he gave them very cautious and edifying doctrinal discourses, treading
+loyally in the path of the Westminster Confession. To the evening
+assemblages, made up for the larger part of outsiders, he addressed
+broadly liberal sermons, literary in form, and full of respectful
+allusions to modern science and the philosophy of the day. Thus he
+filled the church at both services, and put money in its treasury and
+his own fame before the world. There was of course the obvious danger
+that the pious elders who in the forenoon heard infant damnation
+vigorously proclaimed, would revolt when they heard after supper that
+there was some doubt about even adults being damned at all. But either
+because the same people did not attend both services, or because the
+minister's perfect regularity in the morning was each week regarded as a
+retraction of his latest vagaries of an evening, no trouble ever came.
+
+Theron had somewhat tentatively tried this on in Octavius. It was no
+good. His parishioners were of the sort who would have come to church
+eight times a day on Sunday, instead of two, if occasion offered. The
+hope that even a portion of them would stop away, and that their places
+would be taken in the evening by less prejudiced strangers who wished
+for intellectual rather than theological food, fell by the wayside. The
+yearned-for strangers did not come; the familiar faces of the morning
+service all turned up in their accustomed places every evening. They
+were faces which confused and disheartened Theron in the daytime.
+Under the gaslight they seemed even harder and more unsympathetic. He
+timorously experimented with them for an evening or two, then abandoned
+the effort.
+
+Once there had seemed the beginning of a chance. The richest banker in
+Octavius--a fat, sensual, hog-faced old bachelor--surprised everybody
+one evening by entering the church and taking a seat. Theron happened
+to know who he was; even if he had not known, the suppressed excitement
+visible in the congregation, the way the sisters turned round to
+look, the way the more important brethren put their heads together and
+exchanged furtive whispers--would have warned him that big game was in
+view. He recalled afterward with something like self-disgust the eager,
+almost tremulous pains he himself took to please this banker. There was
+a part of the sermon, as it had been written out, which might easily
+give offence to a single man of wealth and free notions of life. With
+the alertness of a mental gymnast, Theron ran ahead, excised this
+portion, and had ready when the gap was reached some very pretty general
+remarks, all the more effective and eloquent, he felt, for having
+been extemporized. People said it was a good sermon; and after
+the benediction and dispersion some of the officials and principal
+pew-holders remained to talk over the likelihood of a capture having
+been effected. Theron did not get away without having this mentioned
+to him, and he was conscious of sharing deeply the hope of the
+brethren--with the added reflection that it would be a personal triumph
+for himself into the bargain. He was ashamed of this feeling a little
+later, and of his trick with the sermon. But this chastening product
+of introspection was all the fruit which the incident bore. The banker
+never came again.
+
+Theron returned one afternoon, a little earlier than usual, from a group
+of pastoral calls. Alice, who was plucking weeds in a border at the
+shady side of the house, heard his step, and rose from her labors. He
+was walking slowly, and seemed weary. He took off his high hat, as
+he saw her, and wiped his brow. The broiling June sun was still high
+overhead. Doubtless it was its insufferable heat which was accountable
+for the worn lines in his face and the spiritless air which the wife's
+eye detected. She went to the gate, and kissed him as he entered.
+
+“I believe if I were you,” she said, “I'd carry an umbrella such
+scorching days as this. Nobody'd think anything of it. I don't see why a
+minister shouldn't carry one as much as a woman carries a parasol.”
+
+Theron gave her a rueful, meditative sort of smile. “I suppose people
+really do think of us as a kind of hybrid female,” he remarked. Then,
+holding his hat in his hand, he drew a long breath of relief at finding
+himself in the shade, and looked about him.
+
+“Why, you've got more posies here, on this one side of the house alone,
+than mother had in her whole yard,” he said, after a little. “Let's
+see--I know that one: that's columbine, isn't it? And that's London
+pride, and that's ragged robin. I don't know any of the others.”
+
+Alice recited various unfamiliar names, as she pointed out the several
+plants which bore them, and he listened with a kindly semblance of
+interest.
+
+They strolled thus to the rear of the house, where thick clumps of
+fragrant pinks lined both sides of the path. She picked some of these
+for him, and gave him more names with which to label the considerable
+number of other plants he saw about him.
+
+“I had no idea we were so well provided as all this,” he commented at
+last. “Those Van Sizers must have been tremendous hands for flowers. You
+were lucky in following such people.”
+
+“Van Sizers!” echoed Alice, with contempt. “All they left was old tomato
+cans and clamshells. Why, I've put in every blessed one of these myself,
+all except those peonies, there, and one brier on the side wall.”
+
+“Good for you!” exclaimed Theron, approvingly. Then it occurred to him
+to ask, “But where did you get them all? Around among our friends?”
+
+“Some few,” responded Alice, with a note of hesitation in her voice.
+“Sister Bult gave me the verbenas, there, and the white pinks were
+a present from Miss Stevens. But most of them Levi Gorringe was good
+enough to send me--from his garden.”
+
+“I didn't know that Gorringe had a garden,” said Theron. “I thought he
+lived over his law-office, in the brick block, there.”
+
+“Well, I don't know that it's exactly HIS,” explained Alice; “but it's a
+big garden somewhere outside, where he can have anything he likes.” She
+went on with a little laugh: “I didn't like to question him too closely,
+for fear he'd think I was looking a gift horse in the mouth--or else
+hinting for more. It was quite his own offer, you know. He picked them
+all out for me, and brought them here, and lent me a book telling me
+just what to do with each one. And in a few days, now, I am to have
+another big batch of plants--dahlias and zinnias and asters and so on;
+I'm almost ashamed to take them. But it's such a change to find some one
+in this Octavius who isn't all self!”
+
+“Yes, Gorringe is a good fellow,” said Theron. “I wish he was a
+professing member.” Then some new thought struck him. “Alice,” he
+exclaimed, “I believe I'll go and see him this very afternoon. I don't
+know why it hasn't occurred to me before: he's just the man whose advice
+I need most. He knows these people here; he can tell me what to do.”
+
+“Aren't you too tired now?” suggested Alice, as Theron put on his hat.
+
+“No, the sooner the better,” he replied, moving now toward the gate.
+
+“Well,” she began, “if I were you, I wouldn't say too much about--that
+is, I--but never mind.”
+
+“What is it?” asked her husband.
+
+“Nothing whatever,” replied Alice, positively. “It was only some
+nonsense of mine;” and Theron, placidly accepting the feminine whim,
+went off down the street again.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware found Levi Gorringe's law-office readily enough, but
+its owner was not in. He probably would be back again, though, in a
+quarter of an hour or so, the boy said, and the minister at once decided
+to wait.
+
+Theron was interested in finding that this office-boy was no other than
+Harvey--the lad who brought milk to the parsonage every morning. He
+remembered now that he had heard good things of this urchin, as to the
+hard work he did to help his mother, the Widow Semple, in her struggle
+to keep a roof over her head; and also bad things, in that he did
+not come regularly either to church or Sunday-school. The clergyman
+recalled, too, that Harvey had impressed him as a character.
+
+“Well, sonny, are you going to be a lawyer?” he asked, as he seated
+himself by the window, and looked about him, first at the dusty litter
+of old papers, pamphlets, and tape-bound documents in bundles which
+crowded the stuffy chamber, and then at the boy himself.
+
+Harvey was busy at a big box--a rough pine dry-goods box which bore the
+flaring label of an express company, and also of a well-known seed firm
+in a Western city, and which the boy had apparently just opened. He was
+lifting from it, and placing on the table after he had shaken off the
+sawdust and moss in which they were packed, small parcels of what looked
+in the fading light to be half-dried plants.
+
+“Well, I don't know--I rather guess not,” he made answer, as he pursued
+his task. “So far as I can make out, this wouldn't be the place to start
+in at, if I WAS going to be a lawyer. A boy can learn here first-rate
+how to load cartridges and clean a gun, and braid trout-flies on to
+leaders, but I don't see much law laying around loose. Anyway,” he went
+on, “I couldn't afford to read law, and not be getting any wages. I have
+to earn money, you know.”
+
+Theron felt that he liked the boy. “Yes,” he said, with a kindly tone;
+“I've heard that you are a good, industrious youngster. I daresay Mr.
+Gorringe will see to it that you get a chance to read law, and get wages
+too.”
+
+“Oh, I can read all there is here and welcome,” the boy explained,
+stepping toward the window to decipher the label on a bundle of roots
+in his hand, “but that's no good unless there's regular practice coming
+into the office all the while. THAT'S how you learn to be a lawyer. But
+Gorringe don't have what I call a practice at all. He just sees men in
+the other room there, with the door shut, and whatever there is to do he
+does it all himself.”
+
+The minister remembered a stray hint somewhere that Mr. Gorringe was
+a money-lender--what was colloquially called a “note-shaver.” To his
+rustic sense, there was something not quite nice about that occupation.
+It would be indecorous, he felt, to encourage further talk about it from
+the boy.
+
+“What are you doing there?” he inquired, to change the subject.
+
+“Sorting out some plants,” replied Harvey. “I don't know what's got
+into Gorringe lately. This is the third big box he's had since I've been
+here--that is, in six weeks--besides two baskets full of rose-bushes.
+I don't know what he does with them. He carries them off himself
+somewhere. I've had kind of half a notion that he's figurin' on getting
+married. I can't think of anything else that would make a man spend
+money like water--just for flowers and bushes. They do get foolish, you
+know, when they've got marriage on the brain.”
+
+Theron found himself only imperfectly following the theories of the
+young philosopher. It was his fact that monopolized the minister's
+attention.
+
+“But as I understand it,” he remarked hesitatingly, “Brother
+Gorringe--or rather Mr. Gorringe--gets all the plants he wants,
+everything he likes, from a big garden somewhere outside. I don't
+know that it is exactly his; but I remember hearing something to that
+effect.”
+
+The boy slapped the last litter off his hands, and, as he came to the
+window, shook his head. “These don't come from no garden outside,” he
+declared. “They come from the dealers', and he pays solid cash for 'em.
+The invoice for this lot alone was thirty-one dollars and sixty cents.
+There it is on the table. You can see it for yourself.”
+
+Mr. Ware did not offer to look. “Very likely these are for the garden I
+was speaking of,” he said. “Of course you can't go on taking plants out
+of a garden indefinitely without putting others in.”
+
+“I don't know anything about any garden that he takes plants out of,”
+ answered Harvey, and looked meditatively for a minute or two out upon
+the street below. Then he turned to the minister. “Your wife's doing a
+good deal of gardening this spring, I notice,” he said casually. “You'd
+hardly think it was the same place, she's fixed it up so. If she wants
+any extra hoeing done, I can always get off Saturday afternoons.”
+
+“I will remember,” said Theron. He also looked out of the window; and
+nothing more was said until, a few moments later, Mr. Gorringe himself
+came in.
+
+The lawyer seemed both surprised and pleased at discovering the
+identity of his visitor, with whom he shook hands in almost an excess of
+cordiality. He spread a large newspaper over the pile of seedling plants
+on the table, pushed the packing-box under the table with his foot, and
+said almost peremptorily to the boy, “You can go now!” Then he turned
+again to Theron.
+
+“Well, Mr. Ware, I'm glad to see you,” he repeated, and drew up a chair
+by the window. “Things are going all right with you, I hope.”
+
+Theron noted again the waving black hair, the dark skin, and the
+carefully trimmed mustache and chin-tuft which gave the lawyer's face
+a combined effect of romance and smartness. No; it was the eyes,
+cool, shrewd, dark-gray eyes, which suggested this latter quality. The
+recollection of having seen one of them wink, in deliberate hostility
+of sarcasm, when those other trustees had their backs turned, came
+mercifully at the moment to recall the young minister to his errand.
+
+“I thought I would drop in and have a chat with you,” he said, getting
+better under way as he went on. “Quarterly Conference is only a
+fortnight off, and I am a good deal at sea about what is going to
+happen.”
+
+“I'm not a church member, you know,” interposed Gorringe. “That shuts me
+out of the Quarterly Conference.”
+
+“Alas, yes!” said Theron. “I wish it didn't. I'm afraid I'm not going to
+have any friends to spare there.”
+
+“What are you afraid of?” asked the lawyer, seeming now to be wholly at
+his ease again “They can't eat you.”
+
+“No, they keep me too lean for that,” responded Theron, with a pensive
+smile. “I WAS going to ask, you know, for an increase of salary, or an
+extra allowance. I don't see how I can go on as it is. The sum fixed by
+the last Quarterly Conference of the old year, and which I am getting
+now, is one hundred dollars less than my predecessor had. That isn't
+fair, and it isn't right. But so far from its looking as if I could get
+an increase, the prospect seems rather that they will make me pay for
+the gas and that sidewalk. I never recovered more than about half of my
+moving expenses, as you know, and--and, frankly, I don't know which way
+to turn. It keeps me miserable all the while.”
+
+“That's where you're wrong,” said Mr. Gorringe. “If you let things
+like that worry you, you'll keep a sore skin all your life. You take
+my advice and just go ahead your own gait, and let other folks do the
+worrying. They ARE pretty close-fisted here, for a fact, but you
+can manage to rub along somehow. If you should get into any real
+difficulties, why, I guess--” the lawyer paused to smile in a
+hesitating, significant way--“I guess some road out can be found all
+right. The main thing is, don't fret, and don't allow your wife to--to
+fret either.”
+
+He stopped abruptly. Theron nodded in recognition of his amiable tone,
+and the found the nod lengthening itself out into almost a bow as the
+thought spread through his mind that this had been nothing more nor less
+than a promise to help him with money if worst came to worst. He looked
+at Levi Gorringe, and said to himself that the intuition of women was
+wonderful. Alice had picked him out as a friend of theirs merely by
+seeing him pass the house.
+
+“Yes,” he said; “I am specially anxious to keep my wife from worrying.
+She was surrounded in her girlhood by a good deal of what, relatively,
+we should call luxury, and that makes it all the harder for her to be a
+poor minister's wife. I had quite decided to get her a hired girl, come
+what might, but she thinks she'd rather get on without one. Her health
+is better, I must admit, than it was when we came here. She works out in
+her garden a great deal, and that seems to agree with her.”
+
+“Octavius is a healthy place--that's generally admitted,” replied the
+lawyer, with indifference. He seemed not to be interested in Mrs. Ware's
+health, but looked intently out through the window at the buildings
+opposite, and drummed with his fingers on the arms of his chair.
+
+Theron made haste to revert to his errand. “Of course, your not being in
+the Quarterly Conference,” he said, “renders certain things impossible.
+But I didn't know but you might have some knowledge of how matters are
+going, what plans the officials of the church had; they seem to have
+agreed to tell me nothing.”
+
+“Well, I HAVE heard this much,” responded Gorringe. “They're figuring on
+getting the Soulsbys here to raise the debt and kind o' shake things up
+generally. I guess that's about as good as settled. Hadn't you heard of
+it?”
+
+“Not a breath!” exclaimed Theron, mournfully. “Well,” he added upon
+reflection, “I'm sorry, downright sorry. The debt-raiser seems to me
+about the lowest-down thing we produce. I've heard of those Soulsbys; I
+think I saw HIM indeed once at Conference, but I believe SHE is the head
+of the firm.”
+
+“Yes; she wears the breeches, I understand,” said Gorringe
+sententiously.
+
+“I HAD hoped,” the young minister began with a rueful sigh, “in fact, I
+felt quite confident at the outset that I could pay off this debt, and
+put the church generally on a new footing, by giving extra attention to
+my pulpit work. It is hardly for me to say it, but in other places where
+I have been, my preaching has been rather--rather a feature in the town
+itself I have always been accustomed to attract to our services a good
+many non-members, and that, as you know, helps tremendously from a money
+point of view. But somehow that has failed here. I doubt if the average
+congregations are a whit larger now than they were when I came in April.
+I know the collections are not.”
+
+“No,” commented the lawyer, slowly; “you'll never do anything in that
+line in Octavius. You might, of course, if you were to stay here and
+work hard at it for five or six years--”
+
+“Heaven forbid!” groaned Mr. Ware.
+
+“Quite so,” put in the other. “The point is that the Methodists here
+are a little set by themselves. I don't know that they like one another
+specially, but I do know that they are not what you might call popular
+with people outside. Now, a new preacher at the Presbyterian church,
+or even the Baptist--he might have a chance to create talk, and make
+a stir. But Methodist--no! People who don't belong won't come near the
+Methodist church here so long as there's any other place with a roof on
+it to go to. Give a dog a bad name, you know. Well, the Methodists here
+have got a bad name; and if you could preach like Henry Ward Beecher
+himself you wouldn't change it, or get folks to come and hear you.”
+
+“I see what you mean,” Theron responded. “I'm not particularly surprised
+myself that Octavius doesn't love us, or look to us for intellectual
+stimulation. I myself leave that pulpit more often than otherwise
+feeling like a wet rag--utterly limp and discouraged. But, if you don't
+mind my speaking of it, YOU don't belong, and yet YOU come.”
+
+It was evident that the lawyer did not mind. He spoke freely in reply.
+“Oh, yes, I've got into the habit of it. I began going when I first came
+here, and--and so it grew to be natural for me to go. Then, of course,
+being the only lawyer you have, a considerable amount of my business is
+mixed up in one way or another with your membership; you see those are
+really the things which settle a man in a rut, and keep him there.”
+
+“I suppose your people were Methodists,” said Theron, to fill in the
+pause, “and that is how you originally started with us.”
+
+Levi Gorringe shook his head. He leaned back, half closed his eyes,
+put his finger-tips together, and almost smiled as if something in
+retrospect pleased and moved him.
+
+“No,” he said; “I went to the church first to see a girl who used to
+go there. It was long before your time. All her family moved away years
+ago. You wouldn't know any of them. I was younger then, and I didn't
+know as much as I do now. I worshipped the very ground that girl walked
+on, and like a fool I never gave her so much as a hint of it. Looking
+back now, I can see that I might have had her if I'd asked her. But
+I went instead and sat around and looked at her at church and
+Sunday-school and prayer-meetings Thursday nights, and class-meetings
+after the sermon. She was devoted to religion and church work; and,
+thinking it would please her, I joined the church on probation. Men can
+fool themselves easier than they can other people. I actually believed
+at the time that I had experienced religion. I felt myself full of all
+sorts of awakenings of the soul and so forth. But it was really that
+girl. You see I'm telling you the thing just as it was. I was very
+happy. I think it was the happiest time of my life. I remember there was
+a love-feast while I was on probation; and I sat down in front, right
+beside her, and we ate the little square chunks of bread and drank the
+water together, and I held one corner of her hymn-book when we stood up
+and sang. That was the nearest I ever got to her, or to full membership
+in the church. That very next week, I think it was, we learned that she
+had got engaged to the minister's son--a young man who had just become
+a minister himself. They got married, and went away--and I--somehow I
+never took up my membership when the six months' probation was over.
+That's how it was.”
+
+“It is very interesting,” remarked Theron, softly, after a little
+silence--“and very full of human nature.”
+
+“Well, now you see,” said the lawyer, “what I mean when I say that there
+hasn't been another minister here since, that I should have felt like
+telling this story to. They wouldn't have understood it at all. They
+would have thought it was blasphemy for me to say straight out that
+what I took for experiencing religion was really a girl. But you are
+different. I felt that at once, the first time I saw you. In a pulpit or
+out of it, what I like in a human being is that he SHOULD be human.”
+
+“It pleases me beyond measure that you should like me, then” returned
+the young minister, with frank gratification shining on his face. “The
+world is made all the sweeter and more lovable by these--these elements
+of romance. I am not one of those who would wish to see them banished or
+frowned upon. I don't mind admitting to you that there is a good deal in
+Methodism--I mean the strict practice of its letter which you find here
+in Octavius--that is personally distasteful to me. I read the other day
+of an English bishop who said boldly, publicly, that no modern nation
+could practise the principles laid down in the Sermon on the Mount and
+survive for twenty-four hours.”
+
+“Ha, ha! That's good!” laughed the lawyer.
+
+“I felt that it was good, too,” pursued Theron. “I am getting to see
+a great many things differently, here in Octavius. Our Methodist
+Discipline is like the Beatitudes--very helpful and beautiful, if
+treated as spiritual suggestion, but more or less of a stumbling-block
+if insisted upon literally. I declare!” he added, sitting up in his
+chair, “I never talked like this to a living soul before in all my life.
+Your confidences were contagious.”
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware rose as he spoke, and took up his hat.
+
+“Must you be going?” asked the lawyer, also rising. “Well, I'm glad I
+haven't shocked you. Come in oftener when you are passing. And if you
+see anything I can help you in, always tell me.”
+
+The two men shook hands, with an emphatic and lingering clasp.
+
+“I am glad,” said Theron, “that you didn't stop coming to church just
+because you lost the girl.”
+
+Levi Gorringe answered the minister's pleasantry with a smile which
+curled his mustache upward, and expanded in little wrinkles at the ends
+of his eyes. “No,” he said jestingly. “I'm death on collecting debts;
+and I reckon that the church still owes me a girl. I'll have one yet.”
+
+So, with merriment the echoes of which pleasantly accompanied Theron
+down the stairway, the two men parted.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+Though time lagged in passing with a slowness which seemed born of
+studied insolence, there did arrive at last a day which had something
+definitive about it to Theron's disturbed and restless mind. It was a
+Thursday, and the prayer-meeting to be held that evening would be the
+last before the Quarterly Conference, now only four days off.
+
+For some reason, the young minister found himself dwelling upon this
+fact, and investing it with importance. But yesterday the Quarterly
+Conference had seemed a long way ahead. Today brought it alarmingly
+close to hand. He had not heretofore regarded the weekly assemblage
+for prayer and song as a thing calling for preparation, or for any
+preliminary thought. Now on this Thursday morning he went to his desk
+after breakfast, which was a sign that he wanted the room to himself,
+quite as if he had the task of a weighty sermon before him. He sat at
+the desk all the forenoon, doing no writing, it is true, but remembering
+every once in a while, when his mind turned aside from the book in his
+hands, that there was that prayer-meeting in the evening.
+
+Sometimes he reached the point of vaguely wondering why this strictly
+commonplace affair should be forcing itself thus upon his attention.
+Then, with a kind of mental shiver at the recollection that this was
+Thursday, and that the great struggle came on Monday, he would go back
+to his book.
+
+There were a half-dozen volumes on the open desk before him. He had
+taken them out from beneath a pile of old “Sunday-School Advocates” and
+church magazines, where they had lain hidden from Alice's view most of
+the week. If there had been a locked drawer in the house, he would have
+used it instead to hold these books, which had come to him in a neat
+parcel, which also contained an amiable note from Dr. Ledsmar, recalling
+a pleasant evening in May, and expressing the hope that the accompanying
+works would be of some service. Theron had glanced at the backs of the
+uppermost two, and discovered that their author was Renan. Then he had
+hastily put the lot in the best place he could think of to escape his
+wife's observation.
+
+He realized now that there had been no need for this secrecy. Of the
+other four books, by Sayce, Budge, Smith, and Lenormant, three indeed
+revealed themselves to be published under religious auspices. As for
+Renan, he might have known that the name would be meaningless to Alice.
+The feeling that he himself was not much wiser in this matter than his
+wife may have led him to pass over the learned text-books on Chaldean
+antiquity, and even the volume of Renan which appeared to be devoted
+to Oriental inscriptions, and take up his other book, entitled in
+the translation, “Recollections of my Youth.” This he rather glanced
+through, at the outset, following with a certain inattention the
+introductory sketches and essays, which dealt with an unfamiliar, and,
+to his notion, somewhat preposterous Breton racial type. Then, little by
+little, it dawned upon him that there was a connected story in all this;
+and suddenly he came upon it, out in the open, as it were. It was
+the story of how a deeply devout young man, trained from his earliest
+boyhood for the sacred office, and desiring passionately nothing but
+to be worthy of it, came to a point where, at infinite cost of pain to
+himself and of anguish to those dearest to him, he had to declare that
+he could no longer believe at all in revealed religion.
+
+Theron Ware read this all with an excited interest which no book had
+ever stirred in him before. Much of it he read over and over again, to
+make sure that he penetrated everywhere the husk of French habits of
+thought and Catholic methods in which the kernel was wrapped. He broke
+off midway in this part of the book to go out to the kitchen to dinner,
+and began the meal in silence. To Alice's questions he replied briefly
+that he was preparing himself for the evening's prayer-meeting. She
+lifted her brows in such frank surprise at this that he made a further
+and somewhat rambling explanation about having again taken up the work
+on his book--the book about Abraham.
+
+“I thought you said you'd given that up altogether,” she remarked.
+
+“Well,” he said, “I WAS discouraged about it for a while. But a man
+never does anything big without getting discouraged over and over again
+while he's doing it. I don't say now that I shall write precisely
+THAT book--I'm merely reading scientific works about the period, just
+now--but if not that, I shall write some other book. Else how will you
+get that piano?” he added, with an attempt at a smile.
+
+“I thought you had given that up, too!” she replied ruefully. Then
+before he could speak, she went on: “Never mind the piano; that can
+wait. What I've got on my mind just now isn't piano; it's potatoes.
+Do you know, I saw some the other day at Rasbach's, splendid
+potatoes--these are some of them--and fifteen cents a bushel cheaper
+than those dried-up old things Brother Barnum keeps, and so I bought two
+bushels. And Sister Barnum met me on the street this morning, and threw
+it in my face that the Discipline commands us to trade with each other.
+Is there any such command?”
+
+“Yes,” said the husband. “It's Section 33. Don't you remember? I looked
+it up in Tyre. We are to 'evidence our desire of salvation by doing
+good, especially to them that are of the household of faith, or groaning
+so to be; by employing them preferably to others; buying one of another;
+helping each other in business'--and so on. Yes, it's all there.”
+
+“Well, I told her I didn't believe it was,” put in Alice, “and I said
+that even if it was, there ought to be another section about selling
+potatoes to their minister for more than they're worth--potatoes that
+turn all green when you boil them, too. I believe I'll read up that old
+Discipline myself, and see if it hasn't got some things that I can talk
+back with.”
+
+“The very section before that, Number 32, enjoins members against
+'uncharitable or unprofitable conversation--particularly speaking evil
+of magistrates or ministers.' You'd have 'em there, I think.” Theron had
+begun cheerfully enough, but the careworn, preoccupied look returned now
+to his face. “I'm sorry if we've fallen out with the Barnums,” he said.
+“His brother-in-law, Davis, the Sunday-school superintendent, is a
+member of the Quarterly Conference, you know, and I've been hoping that
+he was on my side. I've been taking a good deal of pains to make up to
+him.”
+
+He ended with a sigh, the pathos of which impressed Alice. “If you think
+it will do any good,” she volunteered, “I'll go and call on the Davises
+this very afternoon. I'm sure to find her at home,--she's tied hand
+and foot with that brood of hers--and you'd better give me some of that
+candy for them.”
+
+Theron nodded his approval and thanks, and relapsed into silence. When
+the meal was over, he brought out the confectionery to his wife, and
+without a word went back to that remarkable book.
+
+When Alice returned toward the close of day, to prepare the simple tea
+which was always laid a half-hour earlier on Thursdays and Sundays,
+she found her husband where she had left him, still busy with those new
+scientific works. She recounted to him some incidents of her call
+upon Mrs. Davis, as she took off her hat and put on the big kitchen
+apron--how pleased Mrs. Davis seemed to be; how her affection for
+her sister-in-law, the grocer's wife, disclosed itself to be not even
+skin-deep; how the children leaped upon the candy as if they had never
+seen any before; and how, in her belief, Mr. Davis would be heart and
+soul on Theron's side at the Conference.
+
+To her surprise, the young minister seemed not at all interested.
+He hardly looked at her during her narrative, but reclined in the
+easy-chair with his head thrown back, and an abstracted gaze wandering
+aimlessly about the ceiling. When she avowed her faith in the
+Sunday-school superintendent's loyal partisanship, which she did with
+a pardonable pride in having helped to make it secure, her husband even
+closed his eyes, and moved his head with a gesture which plainly bespoke
+indifference.
+
+“I expected you'd be tickled to death,” she remarked, with evident
+disappointment.
+
+“I've a bad headache,” he explained, after a minute's pause.
+
+“No wonder!” Alice rejoined, sympathetically enough, but with a note of
+reproof as well. “What can you expect, staying cooped up in here all day
+long, poring over those books? People are all the while remarking that
+you study too much. I tell them, of course, that you're a great hand for
+reading, and always were; but I think myself it would be better if you
+got out more, and took more exercise, and saw people. You know lots
+and slathers more than THEY do now, or ever will, if you never opened
+another book.”
+
+Theron regarded her with an expression which she had never seen on his
+face before. “You don't realize what you are saying,” he replied slowly.
+He sighed as he added, with increased gravity, “I am the most ignorant
+man alive!”
+
+Alice began a little laugh of wifely incredulity, and then let it die
+away as she recognized that he was really troubled and sad in his mind.
+She bent over to kiss him lightly on the brow, and tiptoed her way out
+into the kitchen.
+
+“I believe I will let you make my excuses at the prayer-meeting this
+evening,” he said all at once, as the supper came to an end. He
+had eaten next to nothing during the meal, and had sat in a sort of
+brown-study from which Alice kindly forbore to arouse him. “I don't
+know--I hardly feel equal to it. They won't take it amiss--for once--if
+you explain to them that I--I am not at all well.”
+
+“Oh, I do hope you're not coming down with anything!” Alice had risen
+too, and was gazing at him with a solicitude the tenderness of which at
+once comforted, and in some obscure way jarred on his nerves. “Is there
+anything I can do--or shall I go for a doctor? We've got mustard in the
+house, and senna--I think there's some senna left--and Jamaica ginger.”
+
+Theron shook his head wearily at her. “Oh, no,--no!” he expostulated.
+“It isn't anything that needs drugs, or doctors either. It's just mental
+worry and fatigue, that's all. An evening's quiet rest in the big chair,
+and early to bed--that will fix me up all right.”
+
+“But you'll read; and that will make your head worse,” said Alice.
+
+“No, I won't read any more,” he promised her, walking slowly into the
+sitting-room, and settling himself in the big chair, the while she
+brought out a pillow from the adjoining best bedroom, and adjusted it
+behind his head. “That's nice! I'll just lie quiet here, and perhaps
+doze a little till you come back. I feel in the mood for the rest; it
+will do me all sorts of good.”
+
+He closed his eyes; and Alice, regarding his upturned face anxiously,
+decided that already it looked more at peace than awhile ago.
+
+“Well, I hope you'll be better when I get back,” she said, as she began
+preparations for the evening service. These consisted in combing
+stiffly back the strands of light-brown hair which, during the day, had
+exuberantly loosened themselves over her temples into something
+almost like curls; in fastening down upon this rebellious hair a plain
+brown-straw bonnet, guiltless of all ornament save a binding ribbon of
+dull umber hue; and in putting on a thin dark-gray shawl and a pair
+of equally subdued lisle-thread gloves. Thus attired, she made a
+mischievous little grimace of dislike at her puritanical image in
+the looking-glass over the mantel, and then turned to announce her
+departure.
+
+“Well, I'm off,” she said. Theron opened his eyes to take in this figure
+of his wife dressed for prayer-meeting, and then closed them again
+abruptly. “All right,” he murmured, and then he heard the door shut
+behind her.
+
+Although he had been alone all day, there seemed to be quite a unique
+value and quality in this present solitude. He stretched out his legs on
+the opposite chair, and looked lazily about him, with the feeling that
+at last he had secured some leisure, and could think undisturbed to his
+heart's content. There were nearly two hours of unbroken quiet before
+him; and the mere fact of his having stepped aside from the routine of
+his duty to procure it; marked it in his thoughts as a special occasion,
+which ought in the nature of things to yield more than the ordinary
+harvest of mental profit.
+
+Theron's musings were broken in upon from time to time by rumbling
+outbursts of hymn-singing from the church next door. Surely, he said to
+himself, there could be no other congregation in the Conference, or in
+all Methodism, which sang so badly as these Octavians did. The noise,
+as it came to him now and again, divided itself familiarly into a main
+strain of hard, high, sharp, and tinny female voices, with three or four
+concurrent and clashing branch strains of part-singing by men who did
+not know how. How well he already knew these voices! Through two wooden
+walls he could detect the conceited and pushing note of Brother Lovejoy,
+who tried always to drown the rest out, and the lifeless, unmeasured
+weight of shrill clamor which Sister Barnum hurled into every chorus,
+half closing her eyes and sticking out her chin as she did so. They
+drawled their hymns too, these people, till Theron thought he understood
+that injunction in the Discipline against singing too slowly. It had
+puzzled him heretofore; now he felt that it must have been meant in
+prophecy for Octavius.
+
+It was impossible not to recall in contrast that other church music
+he had heard, a month before, and the whole atmosphere of that other
+pastoral sitting room, from which he had listened to it. The startled
+and crowded impressions of that strange evening had been lying hidden
+in his mind all this while, driven into a corner by the pressure of more
+ordinary, everyday matters. They came forth now, and passed across
+his brain--no longer confusing and distorted, but in orderly and
+intelligible sequence. Their earlier effect had been one of frightened
+fascination. Now he looked them over calmly as they lifted themselves,
+one by one, and found himself not shrinking at all, or evading anything,
+but dwelling upon each in turn as a natural and welcome part of the most
+important experience of his life.
+
+The young minister had arrived, all at once, at this conclusion. He did
+not question at all the means by which he had reached it. Nothing was
+clearer to his mind than the conclusion itself--that his meeting, with
+the priest and the doctor was the turning-point in his career. They had
+lifted him bodily out of the slough of ignorance, of contact with low
+minds and sordid, narrow things, and put him on solid ground. This book
+he had been reading--this gentle, tender, lovable book, which had as
+much true piety in it as any devotional book he had ever read, and yet,
+unlike all devotional books, put its foot firmly upon everything which
+could not be proved in human reason to be true--must be merely one of a
+thousand which men like Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar knew by heart. The
+very thought that he was on the way now to know them, too, made Theron
+tremble. The prospect wooed him, and he thrilled in response, with the
+wistful and delicate eagerness of a young lover.
+
+Somehow, the fact that the priest and the doctor were not religious men,
+and that this book which had so impressed and stirred him was nothing
+more than Renan's recital of how he, too, ceased to be a religious man,
+did not take a form which Theron could look square in the face. It wore
+the shape, instead, of a vague premise that there were a great many
+different kinds of religions--the past and dead races had multiplied
+these in their time literally into thousands--and that each no doubt had
+its central support of truth somewhere for the good men who were in it,
+and that to call one of these divine and condemn all the others was
+a part fit only for untutored bigots. Renan had formally repudiated
+Catholicism, yet could write in his old age with the deepest filial
+affection of the Mother Church he had quitted. Father Forbes could talk
+coolly about the “Christ-myth” without even ceasing to be a priest,
+and apparently a very active and devoted priest. Evidently there was an
+intellectual world, a world of culture and grace, of lofty thoughts
+and the inspiring communion of real knowledge, where creeds were not of
+importance, and where men asked one another, not “Is your soul saved?”
+ but “Is your mind well furnished?” Theron had the sensation of having
+been invited to become a citizen of this world. The thought so dazzled
+him that his impulses were dragging him forward to take the new oath
+of allegiance before he had had time to reflect upon what it was he was
+abandoning.
+
+The droning of the Doxology from the church outside stirred Theron
+suddenly out of his revery. It had grown quite dark, and he rose and lit
+the gas. “Blest be the Tie that Binds,” they were singing. He paused,
+with hand still in air, to listen. That well-worn phrase arrested his
+attention, and gave itself a new meaning. He was bound to those people,
+it was true, but he could never again harbor the delusion that the tie
+between them was blessed. There was vaguely present in his mind the
+consciousness that other ties were loosening as well. Be that as it
+might, one thing was certain. He had passed definitely beyond pretending
+to himself that there was anything spiritually in common between him and
+the Methodist Church of Octavius. The necessity of his keeping up the
+pretence with others rose on the instant like a looming shadow before
+his mental vision. He turned away from it, and bent his brain to think
+of something else.
+
+The noise of Alice opening the front door came as a pleasant digression.
+A second later it became clear from the sound of voices that she had
+brought some one back with her, and Theron hastily stretched himself out
+again in the armchair, with his head back in the pillow, and his feet
+on the other chair. He had come mighty near forgetting that he was an
+invalid, and he protected himself the further now by assuming an air of
+lassitude verging upon prostration.
+
+“Yes; there's a light burning. It's all right,” he heard Alice say. She
+entered the room, and Theron's head was too bad to permit him to turn
+it, and see who her companion was.
+
+“Theron dear,” Alice began, “I knew you'd be glad to see HER, even if
+you were out of sorts; and I persuaded her just to run in for a minute.
+Let me introduce you to Sister Soulsby. Sister Soulsby--my husband.”
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware sat upright with an energetic start, and fastened upon
+the stranger a look which conveyed anything but the satisfaction his
+wife had been so sure about. It was at the first blush an undisguised
+scowl, and only some fleeting memory of that reflection about needing
+now to dissemble, prevented him from still frowning as he rose to his
+feet, and perfunctorily held out his hand.
+
+“Delighted, I'm sure,” he mumbled. Then, looking up, he discovered that
+Sister Soulsby knew he was not delighted, and that she seemed not to
+mind in the least.
+
+“As your good lady said, I just ran in for a moment,” she remarked,
+shaking his limp hand with a brisk, business-like grasp, and dropping
+it. “I hate bothering sick people, but as we're to be thrown together
+a good deal this next week or so, I thought I'd like to lose no time in
+saying 'howdy.' I won't keep you up now. Your wife has been sweet enough
+to ask me to move my trunk over here in the morning, so that you'll see
+enough of me and to spare.”
+
+Theron looked falteringly into her face, as he strove for words which
+should sufficiently mask the disgust this intelligence stirred within
+him. A debt-raiser in the town was bad enough! A debt-raiser quartered
+in the very parsonage!--he ground his teeth to think of it.
+
+Alice read his hesitation aright. “Sister Soulsby went to the hotel,”
+ she hastily put in; “and Loren Pierce was after her to come and stay at
+his house, and I ventured to tell her that I thought we could make her
+more comfortable here.” She accompanied this by so daring a grimace
+and nod that her husband woke up to the fact that a point in Conference
+politics was involved.
+
+He squeezed a doubtful smile upon his features. “We shall both do our
+best,” he said. It was not easy, but he forced increasing amiability
+into his glance and tone. “Is Brother Soulsby here, too?” he asked.
+
+The debt-raiser shook her head--again the prompt, decisive movement, so
+like a busy man of affairs. “No,” she answered. “He's doing supply
+down on the Hudson this week, but he'll be here in time for the Sunday
+morning love-feast. I always like to come on ahead, and see how the land
+lies. Well, good-night! Your head will be all right in the morning.”
+
+Precisely what she meant by this assurance, Theron did not attempt to
+guess. He received her adieu, noted the masterful manner in which
+she kissed his wife, and watched her pass out into the hall, with the
+feeling uppermost that this was a person who decidedly knew her way
+about. Much as he was prepared to dislike her, and much as he detested
+the vulgar methods her profession typified, he could not deny that she
+seemed a very capable sort of woman.
+
+This mental concession did not prevent his fixing upon Alice, when she
+returned to the room, a glance of obvious disapproval.
+
+“Theron,” she broke forth, to anticipate his reproach, “I did it for the
+best. The Pierces would have got her if I hadn't cut in. I thought it
+would help to have her on our side. And, besides, I like her. She's the
+first sister I've seen since we've been in this hole that's had a kind
+word for me--or--or sympathized with me! And--and--if you're going to be
+offended--I shall cry!”
+
+There were real tears on her lashes, ready to make good the threat.
+“Oh, I guess I wouldn't,” said Theron, with an approach to his old,
+half-playful manner. “If you like her, that's the chief thing.”
+
+Alice shook her tear-drops away. “No,” she replied, with a wistful
+smile; “the chief thing is to have her like you. She's as smart as a
+steel trap--that woman is--and if she took the notion, I believe she
+could help get us a better place.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+The ensuing week went by with a buzz and whirl, circling about Theron
+Ware's dizzy consciousness like some huge, impalpable teetotum sent
+spinning under Sister Soulsby's resolute hands. Whenever his vagrant
+memory recurred to it, in after months, he began by marvelling, and
+ended with a shudder of repulsion.
+
+It was a week crowded with events, which seemed to him to shoot past
+so swiftly that in effect they came all of a heap. He never essayed the
+task, in retrospect, of arranging them in their order of sequence. They
+had, however, a definite and interdependent chronology which it is worth
+the while to trace.
+
+Mrs. Soulsby brought her trunk round to the parsonage bright and early
+on Friday morning, and took up her lodgement in the best bedroom,
+and her headquarters in the house at large, with a cheerful and
+business-like manner. She desired nothing so much, she said, as that
+people should not put themselves out on her account, or allow her to
+get in their way. She appeared to mean this, too, and to have very good
+ideas about securing its realization.
+
+During both Friday and the following day, indeed, Theron saw her only at
+the family meals. There she displayed a hearty relish for all that was
+set before her which quite won Mrs. Ware's heart, and though she talked
+rather more than Theron found himself expecting from a woman, he could
+not deny that her conversation was both seemly and entertaining. She had
+evidently been a great traveller, and referred to things she had seen in
+Savannah or Montreal or Los Angeles in as matter-of-fact fashion as
+he could have spoken of a visit to Tecumseh. Theron asked her many
+questions about these and other far-off cities, and her answers were
+all so pat and showed so keen and clear an eye that he began in spite of
+himself to think of her with a certain admiration.
+
+She in turn plied him with inquiries about the principal pew-holders
+and members of his congregation--their means, their disposition, and the
+measure of their devotion. She put these queries with such intelligence,
+and seemed to assimilate his replies with such an alert understanding,
+that the young minister was spurred to put dashes of character in
+his descriptions, and set forth the idiosyncrasies and distinguishing
+earmarks of his flock with what he felt afterward might have been too
+free a tongue. But at the time her fine air of appreciation led him
+captive. He gossiped about his parishioners as if he enjoyed it. He
+made a specially happy thumb-nail sketch for her of one of his trustees,
+Erastus Winch, the loud-mouthed, ostentatiously jovial, and really
+cold-hearted cheese-buyer. She was particularly interested in hearing
+about this man. The personality of Winch seemed to have impressed her,
+and she brought the talk back to him more than once, and prompted Theron
+to the very threshold of indiscretion in his confidences on the subject.
+
+Save at meal-times, Sister Soulsby spent the two days out around among
+the Methodists of Octavius. She had little or nothing to say about
+what she thus saw and heard, but used it as the basis for still further
+inquiries. She told more than once, however, of how she had been pressed
+here or there to stay to dinner or supper, and how she had excused
+herself. “I've knocked about too much,” she would explain to the Wares,
+“not to fight shy of random country cooking. When I find such a born
+cook as you are--well I know when I'm well off.” Alice flushed with
+pleased pride at this, and Theron himself felt that their visitor showed
+great good sense. By Saturday noon, the two women were calling each
+other by their first names. Theron learned with a certain interest that
+Sister Soulsby's Christian name was Candace.
+
+It was only natural that he should give even more thought to her than to
+her quaint and unfamiliar old Ethiopian name. She was undoubtedly a very
+smart woman. To his surprise she had never introduced in her talk any of
+the stock religious and devotional phrases which official Methodists
+so universally employed in mutual converse. She might have been an
+insurance agent, or a school-teacher, visiting in a purely secular
+household, so little parade of cant was there about her.
+
+He caught himself wondering how old she was. She seemed to have been
+pretty well over the whole American continent, and that must take years
+of time. Perhaps, however, the exertion of so much travel would tend
+to age one in appearance. Her eyes were still youthful--decidedly
+wise eyes, but still juvenile. They had sparkled with almost girlish
+merriment at some of his jokes. She turned them about a good deal when
+she spoke, making their glances fit and illustrate the things she said.
+He had never met any one whose eyes played so constant and prominent a
+part in their owner's conversation. Theron had never seen a play; but
+he had encountered the portraits of famous queens of the drama several
+times in illustrated papers or shop windows, and it occurred to him that
+some of the more marked contortions of Sister Soulsby's eyes--notably
+a trick she had of rolling them swiftly round and plunging them, so to
+speak, into an intent, yearning, one might almost say devouring, gaze
+at the speaker--were probably employed by eminent actresses like Ristori
+and Fanny Davenport.
+
+The rest of Sister Soulsby was undoubtedly subordinated in interest to
+those eyes of hers. Sometimes her face seemed to be reviving temporarily
+a comeliness which had been constant in former days; then again it would
+look decidedly, organically, plain. It was the worn and loose-skinned
+face of a nervous, middle-aged woman, who had had more than her share of
+trouble, and drank too much tea. She wore the collar of her dress rather
+low; and Theron found himself wondering at this, because, though long
+and expansive, her neck certainly showed more cords and cavities than
+consorted with his vague ideal of statuesque beauty. Then he wondered at
+himself for thinking about it, and abruptly reined up his fancy, only to
+find that it was playing with speculations as to whether her yellowish
+complexion was due to that tea-drinking or came to her as a legacy of
+Southern blood.
+
+He knew that she was born in the South because she said so. From the
+same source he learned that her father had been a wealthy planter, who
+was ruined by the war, and sank into a premature grave under the weight
+of his accumulated losses. The large dark rings around her eyes
+grew deeper still in their shadows when she told about this, and her
+ordinarily sharp voice took on a mellow cadence, with a soft, drawling
+accent, turning U's into O's, and having no R's to speak of. Theron had
+imbibed somewhere in early days the conviction that the South was the
+land of romance, of cavaliers and gallants and black eyes flashing
+behind mantillas and outspread fans, and somehow when Sister Soulsby
+used this intonation she suggested all these things.
+
+But almost all her talk was in another key--a brisk, direct, idiomatic
+manner of speech, with an intonation hinting at no section in
+particular. It was merely that of the city-dweller as distinguished from
+the rustic. She was of about Alice's height, perhaps a shade taller.
+It did not escape the attention of the Wares that she wore clothes of a
+more stylish cut and a livelier arrangement of hues than any Alice had
+ever dared own, even in lax-minded Tyre. The two talked of this in their
+room on Friday night; and Theron explained that congregations would
+tolerate things of this sort with a stranger which would be sharply
+resented in the case of local folk whom they controlled. It was on this
+occasion that Alice in turn told Theron she was sure Mrs. Soulsby had
+false teeth--a confidence which she immediately regretted as an act of
+treachery to her sex.
+
+On Saturday afternoon, toward evening, Brother Soulsby arrived, and was
+guided to the parsonage by his wife, who had gone to the depot to meet
+him. They must have talked over the situation pretty thoroughly on the
+way, for by the time the new-comer had washed his face and hands and
+put on a clean collar, Sister Soulsby was ready to announce her plan of
+campaign in detail.
+
+Her husband was a man of small stature and, like herself, of uncertain
+age. He had a gentle, if rather dry, clean-shaven face, and wore his
+dust-colored hair long behind. His little figure was clad in black
+clothes of a distinctively clerical fashion, and he had a white
+neck-cloth neatly tied under his collar. The Wares noted that he looked
+clean and amiable rather than intellectually or spiritually powerful, as
+he took the vacant seat between theirs, and joined them in concentrating
+attention upon Mrs. Soulsby.
+
+This lady, holding herself erect and alert on the edge of the low, big
+easy-chair had the air of presiding over a meeting.
+
+“My idea is,” she began, with an easy implication that no one else's
+idea was needed, “that your Quarterly Conference, when it meets on
+Monday, must be adjourned to Tuesday. We will have the people all out
+tomorrow morning to love-feast, and announcement can be made there, and
+at the morning service afterward, that a series of revival meetings are
+to be begun that same evening. Mr. Soulsby and I can take charge in the
+evening, and we'll see to it that THAT packs the house--fills the church
+to overflowing Monday evening. Then we'll quietly turn the meeting into
+a debt-raising convention, before they know where they are, and we'll
+wipe off the best part of the load. Now, don't you see,” she turned her
+eyes full upon Theron as she spoke, “you want to hold your Quarterly
+Conference AFTER this money's been raised, not before.”
+
+“I see what you mean,” Mr. Ware responded gravely. “But--”
+
+“But what!” Sister Soulsby interjected, with vivacity.
+
+“Well,” said Theron, picking his words, “in the first place, it rests
+with the Presiding Elder to say whether an adjournment can be made until
+Tuesday, not with me.”
+
+“That's all right. Leave that to me,” said the lady.
+
+“In the second place,” Theron went on, still more hesitatingly, “there
+seems a certain--what shall I say?--indirection in--in--”
+
+“In getting them together for a revival, and springing a debt-raising on
+them?” Sister Soulsby put in. “Why, man alive, that's the best part of
+it. You ought to be getting some notion by this time what these Octavius
+folks of yours are like. I've only been here two days, but I've got
+their measure down to an allspice. Supposing you were to announce
+tomorrow that the debt was to be raised Monday. How many men with
+bank-accounts would turn up, do you think? You could put them all in
+your eye, sir--all in your eye!”
+
+“Very possibly you're right,” faltered the young minister.
+
+“Right? Why, of course I'm right,” she said, with placid confidence.
+“You've got to take folks as you find them; and you've got to find them
+the best way you can. One place can be worked, managed, in one way,
+and another needs quite a different way, and both ways would be dead
+frosts--complete failures--in a third.”
+
+Brother Soulsby coughed softly here, and shuffled his feet for an
+instant on the carpet. His wife resumed her remarks with slightly abated
+animation, and at a slower pace.
+
+“My experience,” she said, “has shown me that the Apostle was right.
+To properly serve the cause, one must be all things to all men. I have
+known very queer things indeed turn out to be means of grace. You
+simply CAN'T get along without some of the wisdom of the serpent. We are
+commanded to have it, for that matter. And now, speaking of that, do
+you know when the Presiding Elder arrives in town today, and where he is
+going to eat supper and sleep?”
+
+Theron shook his head. “All I know is he isn't likely to come here,” he
+said, and added sadly, “I'm afraid he's not an admirer of mine.”
+
+“Perhaps that's not all his fault,” commented Sister Soulsby. “I'll tell
+you something. He came in on the same train as my husband, and that old
+trustee Pierce of yours was waiting for him with his buggy, and I saw
+like a flash what was in the wind, and the minute the train stopped I
+caught the Presiding Elder, and invited him in your name to come
+right here and stay; told him you and Alice were just set on his
+coming--wouldn't take no for an answer. Of course he couldn't come--I
+knew well enough he had promised old Pierce--but we got in our
+invitation anyway, and it won't do you any harm. Now, that's what I call
+having some gumption--wisdom of the serpent, and so on.”
+
+“I'm sure,” remarked Alice, “I should have been mortified to death if he
+had come. We lost the extension-leaf to our table in moving, and four is
+all it'll seat decently.”
+
+Sister Soulsby smiled winningly into the wife's honest face. “Don't you
+see, dear,” she explained patiently, “I only asked him because I knew
+he couldn't come. A little butter spreads a long way, if it's only
+intelligently warmed.”
+
+“It was certainly very ingenious of you,” Theron began almost stiffly.
+Then he yielded to the humanities, and with a kindling smile added,
+“And it was as kind as kind could be. I'm afraid you're wrong about
+it's doing me any good, but I can see how well you meant it, and I'm
+grateful.”
+
+“We COULD have sneaked in the kitchen table, perhaps, while he was out
+in the garden, and put on the extra long tablecloth,” interjected Alice,
+musingly.
+
+Sister Soulsby smiled again at Sister Ware, but without any words this
+time; and Alice on the instant rose, with the remark that she must be
+going out to see about supper.
+
+“I'm going to insist on coming out to help you,” Mrs. Soulsby declared,
+“as soon as I've talked over one little matter with your husband. Oh,
+yes, you must let me this time. I insist!”
+
+As the kitchen door closed behind Mrs. Ware, a swift and apparently
+significant glance shot its way across from Sister Soulsby's roving,
+eloquent eyes to the calmer and smaller gray orbs of her husband. He
+rose to his feet, made some little explanation about being a gardener
+himself, and desiring to inspect more closely some rhododendrons he had
+noticed in the garden, and forthwith moved decorously out by the other
+door into the front hall. They heard his footsteps on the gravel beneath
+the window before Mrs. Soulsby spoke again.
+
+“You're right about the Presiding Elder, and you're wrong,” she said.
+“He isn't what one might call precisely in love with you. Oh, I know the
+story--how you got into debt at Tyre, and he stepped in and insisted on
+your being denied Tecumseh and sent here instead.”
+
+“HE was responsible for that, then, was he?” broke in Theron, with
+contracted brows.
+
+“Why, don't you make any effort to find out anything at ALL?” she asked
+pertly enough, but with such obvious good-nature that he could not but
+have pleasure in her speech. “Why, of course he did it! Who else did you
+suppose?”
+
+“Well,” said the young minister, despondently, “if he's as much against
+me as all that, I might as well hang up my fiddle and go home.”
+
+Sister Soulsby gave a little involuntary groan of impatience. She
+bent forward, and, lifting her eyes, rolled them at him in a curve of
+downward motion which suggested to his fancy the image of two eagles in
+a concerted pounce upon a lamb.
+
+“My friend,” she began, with a new note of impressiveness in her voice,
+“if you'll pardon my saying it, you haven't got the spunk of a mouse.
+If you're going to lay down, and let everybody trample over you just as
+they please, you're right! You MIGHT as well go home. But now here, this
+is what I wanted to say to you: Do you just keep your hands off these
+next few days, and leave this whole thing to me. I'll pull it into
+shipshape for you. No--wait a minute--don't interrupt now. I have taken
+a liking to you. You've got brains, and you've got human nature in you,
+and heart. What you lack is SABE--common-sense. You'll get that, too, in
+time, and meanwhile I'm not going to stand by and see you cut up and fed
+to the dogs for want of it. I'll get you through this scrape, and put
+you on your feet again, right-side-up-with care, because, as I said, I
+like you. I like your wife, too, mind. She's a good, honest little soul,
+and she worships the very ground you tread on. Of course, as long as
+people WILL marry in their teens, the wrong people will get yoked up
+together. But that's neither here nor there. She's a kind sweet little
+body, and she's devoted to you, and it isn't every intellectual man
+that gets even that much. But now it's a go, is it? You promise to keep
+quiet, do you, and leave the whole show absolutely to me? Shake hands on
+it.”
+
+Sister Soulsby had risen, and stood now holding out her hand in a frank,
+manly fashion. Theron looked at the hand, and made mental notes that
+there were a good many veins discernible on the small wrist, and that
+the forearm seemed to swell out more than would have been expected in a
+woman producing such a general effect of leanness. He caught the
+shine of a thin bracelet-band of gold under the sleeve. A delicate,
+significant odor just hinted its presence in the air about this
+outstretched arm--something which was not a perfume, yet deserved as
+gracious a name.
+
+He rose to his feet, and took the proffered hand with a deliberate
+gesture, as if he had been cautiously weighing all the possible
+arguments for and against this momentous compact.
+
+“I promise,” he said gravely, and the two palms squeezed themselves
+together in an earnest clasp.
+
+“Right you are,” exclaimed the lady, once more with cheery vivacity.
+“Mind, when it's all over, I'm going to give you a good, serious,
+downright talking to--a regular hoeing-over. I'm not sure I shan't give
+you a sound shaking into the bargain. You need it. And now I'm going out
+to help Alice.”
+
+The Reverend Mr. Ware remained standing after his new friend had
+left the room, and his meditative face wore an even unusual air of
+abstraction. He strolled aimlessly over, after a time, to the desk by
+the window, and stood there looking out at the slight figure of Brother
+Soulsby, who was bending over and attentively regarding some pink
+blossoms on a shrub through what seemed to be a pocket magnifying-glass.
+
+What remained uppermost in his mind was not this interesting woman's
+confident pledge of championship in his material difficulties. He found
+himself dwelling instead upon her remark about the incongruous results
+of early marriages. He wondered idly if the little man in the white
+tie, fussing out there over that rhododendron-bush, had figured in her
+thoughts as an example of these evils. Then he reflected that they had
+been mentioned in clear relation to talk about Alice.
+
+Now that he faced this question, it was as if he had been consciously
+ignoring and putting it aside for a long time. How was it, he asked
+himself now, that Alice, who had once seemed so bright and keen-witted,
+who had in truth started out immeasurably his superior in swiftness of
+apprehension and readiness in humorous quips and conceits, should
+have grown so dull? For she was undoubtedly slow to understand things
+nowadays. Her absurd lugging in of the extension-table problem, when
+the great strategic point of that invitation foisted upon the
+Presiding Elder came up, was only the latest sample of a score of these
+heavy-minded exhibitions that recalled themselves to him. And outsiders
+were apparently beginning to notice it. He knew by intuition what
+those phrases, “good, honest little soul” and “kind, sweet little body”
+ signified, when another woman used them to a husband about his wife. The
+very employment of that word “little” was enough, considering that there
+was scarcely more than a hair's difference between Mrs. Soulsby and
+Alice, and that they were both rather tall than otherwise, as the
+stature of women went.
+
+What she had said about the chronic misfortunes of intellectual men in
+such matters gave added point to those meaning phrases. Nobody could
+deny that geniuses and men of conspicuous talent had as a rule, all
+through history, contracted unfortunate marriages. In almost every case
+where their wives were remembered at all, it was on account of their
+abnormal stupidity, or bad temper, or something of that sort. Take
+Xantippe, for example, and Shakespeare's wife, and--and--well, there was
+Byron, and Bulwer-Lytton, and ever so many others.
+
+Of course there was nothing to be done about it. These things happened,
+and one could only put the best possible face on them, and live one's
+appointed life as patiently and contentedly as might be. And Alice
+undoubtedly merited all the praise which had been so generously bestowed
+upon her. She was good and honest and kindly, and there could be no
+doubt whatever as to her utter devotion to him. These were tangible,
+solid qualities, which must always secure respect for her. It was true
+that she no longer seemed to be very popular among people. He questioned
+whether men, for instance, like Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar would care
+much about her. Visions of the wifeless and academic calm in which
+these men spent their lives--an existence consecrated to literature and
+knowledge and familiarity with all the loftiest and noblest thoughts of
+the past--rose and enveloped him in a cloud of depression. No such
+lot would be his! He must labor along among ignorant and spiteful
+narrow-minded people to the end of his days, pocketing their insults and
+fawning upon the harsh hands of jealous nonentities who happened to
+be his official masters, just to keep a roof over his head--or rather
+Alice's. He must sacrifice everything to this, his ambitions, his
+passionate desires to do real good in the world on a large scale,
+his mental freedom, yes, even his chance of having truly elevating,
+intellectual friendships. For it was plain enough that the men whose
+friendship would be of genuine and stimulating profit to him would not
+like her. Now that he thought of it, she seemed latterly to make no
+friends at all.
+
+Suddenly, as he watched in a blank sort of way Brother Soulsby take
+out a penknife, and lop an offending twig from a rose-bush against the
+fence, something occurred to him. There was a curious exception to
+that rule of Alice's isolation. She had made at least one friend. Levi
+Gorringe seemed to like her extremely.
+
+As if his mind had been a camera, Theron snapped a shutter down upon
+this odd, unbidden idea, and turned away from the window.
+
+The sounds of an active, almost strenuous conversation in female voices
+came from the kitchen. Theron opened the door noiselessly, and put in
+his head, conscious of something furtive in his intention.
+
+“You must dreen every drop of water off the spinach, mind, before you
+put it over, or else--”
+
+It was Sister Soulsby's sharp and penetrating tones which came to him.
+Theron closed the door again, and surrendered himself once more to the
+circling whirl of his thoughts.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+A love-feast at nine in the morning opened the public services of a
+Sunday still memorable in the annals of Octavius Methodism.
+
+This ceremony, which four times a year preceded the sessions of the
+Quarterly Conference, was not necessarily an event of importance. It
+was an occasion upon which the brethren and sisters who clung to the
+old-fashioned, primitive ways of the itinerant circuit-riders, let
+themselves go with emphasized independence, putting up more vehement
+prayers than usual, and adding a special fervor of noise to their
+“Amens!” and other interjections--and that was all.
+
+It was Theron's first love-feast in Octavius, and as the big class-room
+in the church basement began to fill up, and he noted how the men with
+ultra radical views and the women clad in the most ostentatious drabs
+and grays were crowding into the front seats, he felt his spirits
+sinking. He had literally to force himself from sentence to sentence,
+when the time came for him to rise and open the proceedings with an
+exhortation. He had eagerly offered this function to the Presiding
+Elder, the Rev. Aziel P. Larrabee, who sat in severe silence on the
+little platform behind him, but had been informed that the dignitary
+would lead off in giving testimony later on. So Theron, feeling all the
+while the hostile eyes of the Elder burning holes in his back, dragged
+himself somehow through the task. He had never known any such difficulty
+of speech before. The relief was almost overwhelming when he came to
+the customary part where all are adjured to be as brief as possible in
+witnessing for the Lord, because the time belongs to all the people, and
+the Discipline forbids the feast to last more than ninety minutes. He
+delivered this injunction to brevity with marked earnestness, and then
+sat down abruptly.
+
+There was some rather boisterous singing, during which the stewards,
+beginning with the platform, passed plates of bread cut in small
+cubes, and water in big plated pitchers and tumblers, about among
+the congregation, threading their way between the long wooden benches
+ordinarily occupied at this hour by the children of the Sunday-school,
+and helping each brother and sister in turn. They held by the old
+custom, here in Octavius, and all along the seats the sexes alternated,
+as they do at a polite dinner-table.
+
+Theron impassively watched the familiar scene. The early nervousness had
+passed away. He felt now that he was not in the least afraid of these
+people, even with the Presiding Elder thrown in. Folks who sang with
+such unintelligence, and who threw themselves with such undignified
+fervor into this childish business of the bread and water, could not
+be formidable antagonists for a man of intellect. He had never realized
+before what a spectacle the Methodist love-feast probably presented to
+outsiders. What must they think of it!
+
+He had noticed that the Soulsbys sat together, in the centre and toward
+the front. Next to Brother Soulsby sat Alice. He thought she looked pale
+and preoccupied, and set it down in passing to her innate distaste for
+the somber garments she was wearing, and for the company she perforce
+found herself in. Another head was in the way, and for a time Theron did
+not observe who sat beside Alice on the other side. When at last he saw
+that it was Levi Gorringe, his instinct was to wonder what the lawyer
+must be saying to himself about these noisy and shallow enthusiasts. A
+recurring emotion of loyalty to the simple people among whom, after all,
+he had lived his whole life, prompted him to feel that it wasn't wholly
+nice of Gorringe to come and enjoy this revelation of their foolish
+side, as if it were a circus. There was some vague memory in his mind
+which associated Gorringe with other love-feasts, and with a cynical
+attitude toward them. Oh, yes! he had told how he went to one just for
+the sake of sitting beside the girl he admired--and was pursuing.
+
+The stewards had completed their round, and the loud, discordant singing
+came to an end. There ensued a little pause, during which Theron turned
+to the Presiding Elder with a gesture of invitation to take charge
+of the further proceedings. The Elder responded with another gesture,
+calling his attention to something going on in front.
+
+Brother and Sister Soulsby, to the considerable surprise of everybody,
+had risen to their feet, and were standing in their places, quite
+motionless, and with an air of professional self-assurance dimly
+discernible under a large show of humility. They stood thus until
+complete silence had been secured. Then the woman, lifting her head,
+began to sing. The words were “Rock of Ages,” but no one present had
+heard the tune to which she wedded them. Her voice was full and very
+sweet, and had in it tender cadences which all her hearers found
+touching. She knew how to sing, and she put forth the words so that each
+was distinctly intelligible. There came a part where Brother Soulsby,
+lifting his head in turn, took up a tuneful second to her air. Although
+the two did not, as one could hear by listening closely, sing the same
+words at the same time, they produced none the less most moving and
+delightful harmonies of sound.
+
+The experience was so novel and charming that listeners ran ahead in
+their minds to fix the number of verses there were in the hymn, and
+to hope that none would be left out. Toward the end, when some of the
+intolerably self-conceited local singers, fancying they had caught the
+tune, started to join in, they were stopped by an indignant “sh-h!”
+ which rose from all parts of the class-room; and the Soulsbys, with a
+patient and pensive kindliness written on their uplifted faces, gave
+that verse over again.
+
+What followed seemed obviously restrained and modified by the effect of
+this unlooked-for and tranquillizing overture. The Presiding Elder
+was known to enjoy visits to old-fashioned congregations like that
+of Octavius, where he could indulge to the full his inner passion for
+high-pitched passionate invocations and violent spiritual demeanor, but
+this time he spoke temperately, almost soothingly. The most tempestuous
+of the local witnesses for the Lord gave in their testimony in
+relatively pacific tones, under the influence of the spell which good
+music had laid upon the gathering. There was the deepest interest as to
+what the two visitors would do in this way. Brother Soulsby spoke first,
+very briefly and in well rounded and well-chosen, if conventional,
+phrases. His wife, following him, delivered in a melodious monotone some
+equally hackneyed remarks. The assemblage, listening in rapt attention,
+felt the suggestion of reserved power in every sentence she uttered, and
+burst forth, as she dropped into her seat, in a loud chorus of approving
+ejaculations. The Soulsbys had captured Octavius with their first outer
+skirmish line.
+
+Everything seemed to move forward now with a new zest and spontaneity.
+Theron had picked out for the occasion the best of those sermons which
+he had prepared in Tyre, at the time when he was justifying his ambition
+to be accounted a pulpit orator. It was orthodox enough, but had been
+planned as the framework for picturesque and emotional rhetoric rather
+than doctrinal edification. He had never dreamed of trying it on
+Octavius before, and only on the yesterday had quavered at his own
+daring in choosing it now. Nothing but the desire to show Sister Soulsby
+what was in him had held him to the selection.
+
+Something of this same desire no doubt swayed and steadied him now in
+the pulpit. The labored slowness of his beginning seemed to him to be
+due to nervous timidity, until suddenly, looking down into those big
+eyes of Sister Soulsby's, which were bent gravely upon him from where
+she sat beside Alice in the minister's pew, he remembered that it was
+instead the studied deliberation which art had taught him. He went on,
+feeling more and more that the skill and histrionic power of his best
+days were returning to him, were as marked as ever--nay, had never
+triumphed before as they were triumphing now. The congregation watched
+and listened with open, steadfast eyes and parted lips. For the first
+time in all that weary quarter, their faces shone. The sustaining
+sparkle of their gaze lifted him to a peroration unrivalled in his own
+recollection of himself.
+
+He sat down, and bent his head forward upon the open Bible, breathing
+hard, but suffused with a glow of satisfaction. His ears caught the
+music of that sighing rustle through the audience which bespeaks a
+profound impression. He could scarcely keep the fingers of his hands,
+covering his bowed face in a devotional posture as they were, from
+drumming a jubilant tattoo. His pulses did this in every vein, throbbing
+with excited exultation. The insistent whim seized him, as he still
+bent thus before his people, to whisper to his own heart, “At last!--The
+dogs!”
+
+The announcement that in the evening a series of revival meetings was to
+be inaugurated, had been made at the love-feast, and it was repeated
+now from the pulpit, with the added statement that for the once
+the class-meetings usually following this morning service would be
+suspended. Then Theron came down the steps, conscious after a fashion
+that the Presiding Elder had laid a propitiatory hand on his shoulder
+and spoken amiably about the sermon, and that several groups of more or
+less important parishioners were waiting in the aisle and the vestibule
+to shake hands and tell him how much they had enjoyed the sermon. His
+mind perversely kept hold of the thought that all this came too late. He
+politely smiled his way along out, and, overtaking the Soulsbys and his
+wife near the parsonage gate, went in with them.
+
+At the cold, picked-up noonday meal which was the Sunday rule of the
+house, Theron rather expected that his guests would talk about the
+sermon, or at any rate about the events of the morning. A Sabbath chill
+seemed to have settled upon both their tongues. They ate almost in
+silence, and their sparse remarks touched upon topics far removed from
+church affairs. Alice too, seemed strangely disinclined to conversation.
+The husband knew her face and its varying moods so well that he could
+see she was laboring under some very powerful and deep emotion. No doubt
+it was the sermon, the oratorical swing of which still tingled in his
+own blood, that had so affected her. If she had said so, it would have
+pleased him, but she said nothing.
+
+After dinner, Brother Soulsby disappeared in his bedroom, with the
+remark that he guessed he would lie down awhile. Sister Soulsby put
+on her bonnet, and, explaining that she always prepared herself for an
+evening's work by a long solitary walk, quitted the house. Alice, after
+she had put the dinner things away, went upstairs, and stayed there.
+Left to himself, Theron spent the afternoon in the easy-chair, and,
+in the intervals of confused introspection, read “Recollections of my
+Youth” through again from cover to cover.
+
+He went through the remarkable experiences attending the opening of the
+revival, when evening came, as one in a dream. Long before the hour for
+the service arrived, the sexton came in to tell him that the church was
+already nearly full, and that it was going to be impossible to present
+any distinction in the matter of pews. When the party from the parsonage
+went over--after another cold and mostly silent meal--it was to find the
+interior of the church densely packed, and people being turned away from
+the doors.
+
+Theron was supposed to preside over what followed, and he did sit on
+the central chair in the pulpit, between the Presiding Elder and Brother
+Soulsby, and on the several needful occasions did rise and perfunctorily
+make the formal remarks required of him. The Elder preached a short,
+but vigorously phrased sermon. The Soulsbys sang three or four times--on
+each occasion with familiar hymnal words set to novel, concerted
+music--and then separately exhorted the assemblage. The husband's part
+seemed well done. If his speech lacked some of the fire of the divine
+girdings which older Methodists recalled, it still led straight, and
+with kindling fervency, up to a season of power. The wife took up the
+word as he sat down. She had risen from one of the side-seats; and,
+speaking as she walked, she moved forward till she stood within the
+altar-rail, immediately under the pulpit, and from this place, facing
+the listening throng, she delivered her harangue. Those who watched
+her words most intently got the least sense of meaning from them.
+The phrases were all familiar enough--“Jesus a very present help,”
+ “Sprinkled by the Blood,” “Comforted by the Word,” “Sanctified by the
+Spirit,” “Born into the Kingdom,” and a hundred others--but it was as in
+the case of her singing: the words were old; the music was new.
+
+What Sister Soulsby said did not matter. The way she said it--the
+splendid, searching sweep of her great eyes; the vibrating roll of
+her voice, now full of tears, now scornful, now boldly, jubilantly
+triumphant; the sympathetic swaying of her willowy figure under the
+stress of her eloquence--was all wonderful. When she had finished, and
+stood, flushed and panting, beneath the shadow of the pulpit, she
+held up a hand deprecatingly as the resounding “Amens!” and “Bless the
+Lords!” began to well up about her.
+
+“You have heard us sing,” she said, smiling to apologize for her
+shortness of breath. “Now we want to hear you sing!”
+
+Her husband had risen as she spoke, and on the instant, with a far
+greater volume of voice than they had hitherto disclosed, the two began
+“From Greenland's Icy Mountains,” in the old, familiar tune. It did
+not need Sister Soulsby's urgent and dramatic gesture to lift people to
+their feet. The whole assemblage sprang up, and, under the guidance of
+these two powerful leading voices, thundered the hymn out as Octavius
+had never heard it before.
+
+While its echoes were still alive, the woman began speaking again.
+“Don't sit down!” she cried. “You would stand up if the President of the
+United States was going by, even if he was only going fishing. How much
+more should you stand up in honor of living souls passing forward to
+find their Saviour!”
+
+The psychological moment was upon them. Groans and cries arose, and
+a palpable ferment stirred the throng. The exhortation to sinners
+to declare themselves, to come to the altar, was not only on the
+revivalist's lips: it seemed to quiver in the very air, to be borne on
+every inarticulate exclamation in the clamor of the brethren. A young
+woman, with a dazed and startled look in her eyes, rose in the body of
+the church tremblingly hesitated for a moment, and then, with bowed head
+and blushing cheeks, pressed her way out from the end of a crowded
+pew and down the aisle to the rail. A triumphant outburst of welcoming
+ejaculations swelled to the roof as she knelt there, and under its
+impetus others followed her example. With interspersed snatches of song
+and shouted encouragements the excitement reached its height only when
+twoscore people, mostly young, were tightly clustered upon their knees
+about the rail, and in the space opening upon the aisle. Above the
+confusion of penitential sobs and moans, and the hysterical murmurings
+of members whose conviction of entire sanctity kept them in their seats,
+could be heard the voices of the Presiding Elder, the Soulsbys, and
+the elderly deacons of the church, who moved about among the kneeling
+mourners, bending over them and patting their shoulders, and calling
+out to them: “Fasten your thoughts on Jesus!” “Oh, the Precious Blood!”
+ “Blessed be His Name!” “Seek Him, and you shall find Him!” “Cling to
+Jesus, and Him Crucified!”
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware did not, with the others, descend from the pulpit.
+Seated where he could not see Sister Soulsby, he had failed utterly to
+be moved by the wave of enthusiasm she had evoked. What he heard her say
+disappointed him. He had expected from her more originality, more spice
+of her own idiomatic, individual sort. He viewed with a cold sense of
+aloofness the evidences of her success when they began to come forward
+and abase themselves at the altar. The instant resolve that, come what
+might, he would not go down there among them, sprang up ready-made in
+his mind. He saw his two companions pass him and descend the pulpit
+stairs, and their action only hardened his resolution. If an excuse were
+needed, he was presiding, and the place to preside in was the pulpit.
+But he waived in his mind the whole question of an excuse.
+
+After a little, he put his hand over his face, leaning the elbow forward
+on the reading-desk. The scene below would have thrilled him to the
+marrow six months--yes, three months ago. He put a finger across his
+eyes now, to half shut it out. The spectacle of these silly young
+“mourners”--kneeling they knew not why, trembling at they could not tell
+what, pledging themselves frantically to dogmas and mysteries they knew
+nothing of, under the influence of a hubbub of outcries as meaningless
+in their way, and inspiring in much the same way, as the racket of a
+fife and drum corps--the spectacle saddened and humiliated him now.
+He was conscious of a dawning sense of shame at being even tacitly
+responsible for such a thing. His fancy conjured up the idea of Dr.
+Ledsmar coming in and beholding this maudlin and unseemly scene, and he
+felt his face grow hot at the bare thought.
+
+Looking through his fingers, Theron all at once saw something which
+caught at his breath with a sharp clutch. Alice had risen from the
+minister's pew--the most conspicuous one in the church--and was moving
+down the aisle toward the rail, her uplifted face chalk-like in its
+whiteness, and her eyes wide-open, looking straight ahead.
+
+The young pastor could scarcely credit his sight. He thrust aside his
+hand, and bent forward, only to see his wife sink upon her knees among
+the rest, and to hear this notable accession to the “mourners” hailed
+by a tumult of approving shouts. Then, remembering himself, he drew back
+and put up his hand, shutting out the strange scene altogether. To see
+nothing at all was a relief, and under cover he closed his eyes, and bit
+his teeth together.
+
+A fresh outburst of thanksgivings, spreading noisily through the
+congregation, prompted him to peer through his fingers again. Levi
+Gorringe was making his way down the aisle--was at the moment quite in
+front. Theron found himself watching this man with the stern composure
+of a fatalist. The clamant brethren down below were stirred to new
+excitement by the thought that the sceptical lawyer, so long with them,
+yet not of them, had been humbled and won by the outpourings of the
+Spirit. Theron's perceptions were keener. He knew that Gorringe was
+coming forward to kneel beside Alice; The knowledge left him curiously
+undisturbed. He saw the lawyer advance, gently insinuate himself past
+the form of some kneeling mourner who was in his way, and drop on his
+knees close beside the bowed figure of Alice. The two touched shoulders
+as they bent forward beneath Sister Soulsby's outstretched hands, held
+over them as in a blessing. Theron looked fixedly at them, and professed
+to himself that he was barely interested.
+
+A little afterward, he was standing up in his place, and reading aloud
+a list of names which one of the stewards had given him. They were the
+names of those who had asked that evening to be taken into the church
+as members on probation. The sounds of the recent excitement were all
+hushed now, save as two or three enthusiasts in a corner raised their
+voices in abrupt greeting of each name in its turn, but Theron felt
+somehow that this noise had been transferred to the inside of his head.
+A continuous buzzing went on there, so that the sound of his voice was
+far-off and unfamiliar in his ears.
+
+He read through the list--comprising some fifteen items--and pronounced
+the names with great distinctness. It was necessary to take pains with
+this, because the only name his blurred eyes seemed to see anywhere on
+the foolscap sheet was that of Levi Gorringe. When he had finished and
+was taking his seat, some one began speaking to him from the body of the
+church. He saw that this was the steward, who was explaining to him that
+the most important name of the lot--that of Brother Gorringe--had not
+been read out.
+
+Theron smiled and shook his head. Then, when the Presiding Elder touched
+him on the arm, and assured him that he had not mentioned the name in
+question, he replied quite simply, and with another smile, “I thought it
+was the only name I did read out.”
+
+Then he sat down abruptly, and let his head fall to one side. There
+were hurried movements inside the pulpit, and people in the audience had
+begun to stand up wonderingly, when the Presiding Elder, with uplifted
+hands, confronted them.
+
+“We will omit the Doxology, and depart quietly after the benediction,”
+ he said. “Brother Ware seems to have been overcome by the heat.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+When Theron woke next morning, Alice seemed to have dressed and left the
+room--a thing which had never happened before.
+
+This fact connected itself at once in his brain with the recollection
+of her having made an exhibition of herself the previous evening--going
+forward before all eyes to join the unconverted and penitent sinners, as
+if she were some tramp or shady female, instead of an educated lady, a
+professing member from her girlhood, and a minister's wife. It crossed
+his mind that probably she had risen and got away noiselessly, for very
+shame at looking him in the face, after such absurd behavior.
+
+Then he remembered more, and grasped the situation. He had fainted in
+church, and had been brought home and helped to bed. Dim memories of
+unaccustomed faces in the bedroom, of nauseous drugs and hushed voices,
+came to him out of the night-time. Now that he thought of it, he was a
+sick man. Having settled this, he went off to sleep again, a feverish
+and broken sleep, and remained in this state most of the time for the
+following twenty-four hours. In the brief though numerous intervals of
+waking, he found certain things clear in his mind. One was that he was
+annoyed with Alice, but would dissemble his feelings. Another was that
+it was much pleasanter to be ill than to be forced to attend and take
+part in those revival meetings. These two ideas came and went in a lazy,
+drowsy fashion, mixing themselves up with other vagrant fancies, yet
+always remaining on top.
+
+In the evening the singing from the church next door filled his room.
+The Soulsbys' part of it was worth keeping awake for. He turned over and
+deliberately dozed when the congregation sang.
+
+Alice came up a number of times during the day to ask how he felt, and
+to bring him broth or toast-water. On several occasions, when he heard
+her step, the perverse inclination mastered him to shut his eyes, and
+pretend to be asleep, so that she might tip-toe out again. She had a
+depressed and thoughtful air, and spoke to him like one whose mind was
+on something else. Neither of them alluded to what had happened the
+previous evening. Toward the close of the long day, she came to ask him
+whether he would prefer her to remain in the house, instead of attending
+the meeting.
+
+“Go, by all means,” he said almost curtly.
+
+The Presiding Elder and the Sunday-school superintendent called early
+Tuesday morning at the parsonage to make brotherly inquiries, and
+Theron was feeling so much better that he himself suggested their
+coming upstairs to see him. The Elder was in good spirits; he
+smiled approvingly, and even put in a jocose word or two while the
+superintendent sketched for the invalid in a cheerful way the leading
+incidents of the previous evening.
+
+There had been an enormous crowd, even greater than that of Sunday
+night, and everybody had been looking forward to another notable and
+exciting season of grace. These expectations were especially heightened
+when Sister Soulsby ascended the pulpit stairs and took charge of the
+proceedings. She deferred to Paul's views about women preachers on
+Sundays, she said; but on weekdays she had just as much right to snatch
+brands from the burning as Paul, or Peter, or any other man. She went
+on like that, in a breezy, off-hand fashion which tickled the audience
+immensely, and led to the liveliest anticipations of what would happen
+when she began upon the evening's harvest of souls.
+
+But it was something else that happened. At a signal from Sister Soulsby
+the steward got up, and, in an unconcerned sort of way, went through the
+throng to the rear of the church, locked the doors, and put the keys
+in their pockets. The sister dryly explained now to the surprised
+congregation that there was a season for all things, and that on the
+present occasion they would suspend the glorious work of redeeming
+fallen human nature, and take up instead the equally noble task of
+raising some fifteen hundred dollars which the church needed in its
+business. The doors would only be opened again when this had been
+accomplished.
+
+The brethren were much taken aback by this trick, and they permitted
+themselves to exchange a good many scowling and indignant glances, the
+while their professional visitors sang another of their delightfully
+novel sacred duets. Its charm of harmony for once fell upon
+unsympathetic ears. But then Sister Soulsby began another monologue,
+defending this way of collecting money, chaffing the assemblage with
+bright-eyed impudence on their having been trapped, and scoring,
+one after another, neat and jocose little personal points on local
+characteristics, at which everybody but the individual touched grinned
+broadly. She was so droll and cheeky, and withal effective in her talk,
+that she quite won the crowd over. She told a story about a woodchuck
+which fairly brought down the house.
+
+“A man,” she began, with a quizzical twinkle in her eye, “told me once
+about hunting a woodchuck with a pack of dogs, and they chased it so
+hard that it finally escaped only by climbing a butternut-tree. 'But, my
+friend,' I said to him, 'woodchucks can't climb trees--butternut-trees
+or any other kind--and you know it!' All he said in reply to me was:
+'This woodchuck had to climb a tree!' And that's the way with this
+congregation. You think you can't raise $1,500, but you've GOT to.”
+
+So it went on. She set them all laughing; and then, with a twist of the
+eyes and a change of voice, lo, and behold, she had them nearly crying
+in the same breath. Under the pressure of these jumbled emotions,
+brethren began to rise up in their pews and say what they would give.
+The wonderful woman had something smart and apt to say about each fresh
+contribution, and used it to screw up the general interest a notch
+further toward benevolent hysteria. With songs and jokes and impromptu
+exhortations and prayers she kept the thing whirling, until a sort of
+duel of generosity began between two of the most unlikely men--Erastus
+Winch and Levi Gorringe. Everybody had been surprised when Winch gave
+his first $50; but when he rose again, half an hour afterward, and said
+that, owing to the high public position of some of the new members on
+probation, he foresaw a great future for the church, and so felt moved
+to give another $25, there was general amazement. Moved by a common
+instinct, all eyes were turned upon Levi Gorringe, and he, without the
+slightest hesitation, stood up and said he would give $100. There was
+something in his tone which must have annoyed Brother Winch, for he shot
+up like a dart, and called out, “Put me down for fifty more;” and that
+brought Gorringe to his feet with an added $50, and then the two went
+on raising each other till the assemblage was agape with admiring
+stupefaction.
+
+This gladiatorial combat might have been going on till now, the
+Sunday-school superintendent concluded, if Winch hadn't subsided. The
+amount of the contributions hadn't been figured up yet, for Sister
+Soulsby kept the list; but there had been a tremendous lot of money
+raised. Of that there could be no doubt.
+
+The Presiding Elder now told Theron that the Quarterly Conference had
+been adjourned yesterday till today. He and Brother Davis were even now
+on their way to attend the session in the church next door. The Elder
+added, with an obvious kindly significance, that though Theron was too
+ill to attend it, he guessed his absence would do him no harm. Then the
+two men left the room, and Theron went to sleep again.
+
+Another almost blank period ensued, this time lasting for forty-eight
+hours. The young minister was enfolded in the coils of a fever of some
+sort, which Brother Soulsby, who had dabbled considerably in medicine,
+admitted that he was puzzled about. Sometimes he thought that it was
+typhoid, and then again there were symptoms which looked suspiciously
+like brain fever. The Methodists of Octavius counted no physician among
+their numbers, and when, on the second day, Alice grew scared, and
+decided, with Brother Soulsby's assent, to call in professional advice,
+the only doctor's name she could recall was that of Ledsmar. She was
+conscious of an instinctive dislike for the vague image of him her fancy
+had conjured up, but the reflection that he was Theron's friend, and so
+probably would be more moderate in his charges, decided her.
+
+Brother Soulsby showed a most comforting tact and swiftness of
+apprehension when Alice, in mentioning Dr. Ledsmar's name, disclosed by
+her manner a fear that his being sent for would create talk among the
+church people. He volunteered at once to act as messenger himself, and,
+with no better guide than her dim hints at direction, found the doctor
+and brought him back to the parsonage.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar expressly disclaimed to Soulsby all pretence of professional
+skill, and made him understand that he went along solely because
+he liked Mr. Ware, and was interested in him, and in any case would
+probably be of as much use as the wisest of strange physicians--a view
+which the little revivalist received with comprehending nods of tacit
+acquiescence. Ledsmar came, and was taken up to the sick-room. He sat
+on the bedside and talked with Theron awhile, and then went downstairs
+again. To Alice's anxious inquiries, he replied that it seemed to him
+merely a case of over-work and over-worry, about which there was not the
+slightest occasion for alarm.
+
+“But he says the strangest things,” the wife put in. “He has been quite
+delirious at times.”
+
+“That means only that his brain is taking a rest as well as his body,”
+ remarked Ledsmar. “That is Nature's way of securing an equilibrium of
+repose--of recuperation. He will come out of it with his mind all the
+fresher and clearer.”
+
+“I don't believe he knows shucks!” was Alice's comment when she closed
+the street door upon Dr. Ledsmar. “Anybody could have come in and looked
+at a sick man and said, 'Leave him alone.' You expect something more
+from a doctor. It's his business to say what to do. And I suppose he'll
+charge two dollars for just telling me that my husband was resting!”
+
+“No,” said Brother Soulsby, “he said he never practised, and that he
+would come only as a friend.”
+
+“Well, it isn't my idea of a friend--not to prescribe a single thing,”
+ protested Alice.
+
+Yet it seemed that no prescription was needed, after all. The next
+morning Theron woke to find himself feeling quite restored in spirits
+and nerves. He sat up in bed, and after an instant of weakly giddiness,
+recognized that he was all right again. Greatly pleased, he got up,
+and proceeded to dress himself. There were little recurring hints of
+faintness and vertigo, while he was shaving, but he had the sense
+to refer these to the fact that he was very, very hungry. He went
+downstairs, and smiled with the pleased pride of a child at the surprise
+which his appearance at the door created. Alice and the Soulsbys were
+at breakfast. He joined them, and ate voraciously, declaring that it was
+worth a month's illness to have things taste so good once more.
+
+“You still look white as a sheet,” said Alice, warningly. “If I were
+you, I'd be careful in my diet for a spell yet.”
+
+For answer, Theron let Sister Soulsby help him again to ham and eggs.
+He talked exclusively to Sister Soulsby, or rather invited her by
+his manner to talk to him, and listened and watched her with indolent
+content. There was a sort of happy and purified languor in his physical
+and mental being, which needed and appreciated just this--to sit next a
+bright and attractive woman at a good breakfast, and be ministered to by
+her sprightly conversation, by the flash of her informing and inspiring
+eyes, and the nameless sense of support and repose which her near
+proximity exhaled. He felt himself figuratively leaning against Sister
+Soulsby's buoyant personality, and resting.
+
+Brother Soulsby, like the intelligent creature he was, ate his breakfast
+in peace; but Alice would interpose remarks from time to time. Theron
+was conscious of a certain annoyance at this, and knew that he was
+showing it by an exaggerated display of interest in everything Sister
+Soulsby said, and persisted in it. There trembled in the background of
+his thoughts ever and again the recollection of a grievance against
+his wife--an offence which she had committed--but he put it aside as
+something to be grappled and dealt with when he felt again like taking
+up the serious and disagreeable things of life. For the moment, he
+desired only to be amused by Sister Soulsby. Her casual mention of the
+fact that she and her husband were taking their departure that very day,
+appealed to him as an added reason for devoting his entire attention to
+her.
+
+“You mustn't forget that famous talking-to you threatened me with--that
+'regular hoeing-over,' you know,” he reminded her, when he found
+himself alone with her after breakfast. He smiled as he spoke, in frank
+enjoyment of the prospect.
+
+Sister Soulsby nodded, and aided with a roll of her eyes the effect of
+mock-menace in her uplifted forefinger. “Oh, never fear,” she cried.
+“You'll catch it hot and strong. But that'll keep till afternoon.
+Tell me, do you feel strong enough to go in next door and attend the
+trustees' meeting this forenoon? It's rather important that you should
+be there, if you can spur yourself up to it. By the way, you haven't
+asked what happened at the Quarterly Conference yesterday.”
+
+Theron sighed, and made a little grimace of repugnance. “If you knew how
+little I cared!” he said. “I did hope you'd forget all about mentioning
+that--and everything else connected with--the next door. You talk so
+much more interestingly about other things.”
+
+“Here's gratitude for you!” exclaimed Sister Soulsby, with a gay
+simulation of despair. “Why, man alive, do you know what I've done for
+you? I got around on the Presiding Elder's blind side, I captured old
+Pierce, I wound Winch right around my little finger, I worked two or
+three of the class-leaders--all on your account. The result was you
+went through as if you'd had your ears pinned back, and been greased all
+over. You've got an extra hundred dollars added to your salary; do you
+hear? On the sixth question of the order of business the Elder ruled
+that the recommendation of the last conference's estimating committee
+could be revised (between ourselves he was wrong, but that doesn't
+matter), and so you're in clover. And very friendly things were said
+about you, too.”
+
+“It was very kind of you,” said Theron. “I am really extremely grateful
+to you.” He shook her by the hand to make up for what he realized to be
+a lack of fervor in his tones.
+
+“Well, then,” Sister Soulsby replied, “you pull yourself together, and
+take your place as chairman of the trustees' meeting, and see to it
+that, whatever comes up, you side with old Pierce and Winch.”
+
+“Oh, THEY'RE my friends now, are they?” asked Theron, with a faint play
+of irony about his lips.
+
+“Yes, that's your ticket this election,” she answered briskly, “and mind
+you vote it straight. Don't bother about reasons now. Just take it from
+me, as the song says, 'that things have changed since Willie died.'
+That's all. And then come back here, and this afternoon we'll have a
+good old-fashioned jaw.”
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware, walking with ostentatious feebleness, and forcing
+a conventional smile upon his wan face, duly made his unexpected
+appearance at the trustees' meeting in one of the smaller classrooms. He
+received their congratulations gravely, and shook hands with all three.
+It required an effort to do this impartially, because, upon sight of
+Levi Gorringe, there rose up suddenly within him an emotion of fierce
+dislike and enmity. In some enigmatic way his thoughts had kept
+themselves away from Gorringe ever since Sunday evening. Now they
+concentrated with furious energy and swiftness upon him. Theron
+seemed able in a flash of time to coordinate many recollections of
+Gorringe--the early liking Alice had professed for him, the mystery of
+those purchased plants in her garden, the story of the girl he had lost
+in church, his offer to lend him money, the way in which he had sat
+beside Alice at the love-feast and followed her to the altar-rail in
+the evening. These raced abreast through the young minister's brain, yet
+with each its own image, and its relation to the others clearly defined.
+
+He found the nerve, all the same, to take this third trustee by the
+hand, and to thank him for his congratulations, and even to say, with a
+surface smile of welcome, “It is BROTHER Gorringe, now, I remember.”
+
+The work before the meeting was chiefly of a routine kind. In most
+places this would have been transacted by the stewards; but in Octavius
+these minor officials had degenerated into mere ceremonial abstractions,
+who humbly ratified, or by arrangement anticipated, the will of the
+powerful, mortgage-owning trustees. Theron sat languidly at the head
+of the table while these common-place matters passed in their course,
+noting the intonations of Gorringe's voice as he read from his
+secretary's book, and finding his ear displeased by them. No issue arose
+upon any of these trivial affairs, and the minister, feeling faint
+and weary in the heat, wondered why Sister Soulsby had insisted on his
+coming.
+
+All at once he sat up straight, with an instinctive warning in his
+mind that here was the thing. Gorringe had taken up the subject of the
+“debt-raising” evening, and read out its essentials as they had been
+embodied in a report of the stewards. The gross sum obtained, in cash
+and promises, was $1,860. The stewards had collected of this a trifle
+less than half, but hoped to get it all in during the ensuing quarter.
+There were, also, the bill of Mr. and Mrs. Soulsby for $150, and the
+increases of $100 in the pastor's salary and $25 in the apportioned
+contribution of the charge toward the Presiding Elder's maintenance, the
+two latter items of which the Quarterly Conference had sanctioned.
+
+“I want to hear the names of the subscribers and their amounts read
+out,” put in Brother Pierce.
+
+When this was done, it became apparent that much more than half of the
+entire amount had been offered by two men. Levi Gorringe's $450 and
+Erastus Winch's $425 left only $985 to be divided up among some seventy
+or eighty other members of the congregation.
+
+Brother Pierce speedily stopped the reading of these subordinate names.
+“They're of no concern whatever,” he said, despite the fact that his
+own might have been reached in time. “Those first names are what I was
+getting at. Have those two first amounts, the big ones, be'n paid?”
+
+“One has--the other not,” replied Gorringe.
+
+“PRE-cisely,” remarked the senior trustee. “And I'm goin' to move that
+it needn't be paid, either. When Brother Winch, here, began hollerin'
+out those extra twenty-fives and fifties, that evening, it was under a
+complete misapprehension. He'd be'n on the Cheese Board that same Monday
+afternoon, and he'd done what he thought was a mighty big stroke of
+business, and he felt liberal according. I know just what that feelin'
+is myself. If I'd be'n makin' a mint o' money, instead o' losin' all the
+while, as I do, I'd 'a' done just the same. But the next day, lo, and
+behold, Brother Winch found that it was all a mistake--he hadn't made a
+single penny.”
+
+“Fact is, I lost by the whole transaction,” put in Erastus Winch,
+defiantly.
+
+“Just so,” Brother Pierce went on. “He lost money. You have his own word
+for it. Well, then, I say it would be a burning shame for us to consent
+to touch one penny of what he offered to give, in the fullness of his
+heart, while he was laborin' under that delusion. And I move he be not
+asked for it. We've got quite as much as we need, without it. I put my
+motion.”
+
+“That is, YOU don't put it,” suggested Winch, correctingly. “You move
+it, and Brother Ware, whom we're all so glad to see able to come and
+preside--he'll put it.”
+
+There was a moment's silence. “You've heard the motion,” said Theron,
+tentatively, and then paused for possible remarks. He was not going to
+meddle in this thing himself, and Gorringe was the only other who might
+have an opinion to offer. The necessities of the situation forced him
+to glance at the lawyer inquiringly. He did so, and turned his eyes away
+again like a shot. Gorringe was looking him squarely in the face, and
+the look was freighted with satirical contempt.
+
+The young minister spoke between clinched teeth. “All those in favor
+will say aye.”
+
+Brothers Pierce and Winch put up a simultaneous and confident “Aye.”
+
+“No, you don't!” interposed the lawyer, with deliberate, sneering
+emphasis. “I decidedly protest against Winch's voting. He's directly
+interested, and he mustn't vote. Your chairman knows that perfectly
+well.”
+
+“Yes, I think Brother Winch ought not to vote,” decided Theron, with
+great calmness. He saw now what was coming, and underneath his surface
+composure there were sharp flutterings.
+
+“Very well, then,” said Gorringe. “I vote no, and it's a tie. It rests
+with the chairman now to cast the deciding vote, and say whether this
+interesting arrangement shall go through or not.”
+
+“Me?” said Theron, eying the lawyer with a cool self-control which had
+come all at once to him. “Me? Oh, I vote Aye.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+“Well, I did what you told me to do,” Theron Ware remarked to Sister
+Soulsby, when at last they found themselves alone in the sitting-room
+after the midday meal.
+
+It had taken not a little strategic skirmishing to secure the room to
+themselves for the hospitable Alice, much touched by the thought of her
+new friend's departure that very evening had gladly proposed to let all
+the work stand over until night, and devote herself entirely to Sister
+Soulsby. When, finally, Brother Soulsby conceived and deftly executed
+the coup of interesting her in the budding of roses, and then leading
+her off into the garden to see with her own eyes how it was done, Theron
+had a sense of being left alone with a conspirator. The notion impelled
+him to plunge at once into the heart of their mystery.
+
+“I did what you told me to do,” he repeated, looking up from his low
+easy-chair to where she sat by the desk; “and I dare say you won't be
+surprised when I add that I have no respect for myself for doing it.”
+
+“And yet you would go and do it right over again, eh?” the woman
+said, in bright, pert tones, nodding her head, and smiling at him with
+roguish, comprehending eyes. “Yes, that's the way we're built. We spend
+our lives doing that sort of thing.”
+
+“I don't know that you would precisely grasp my meaning,” said the young
+minister, with a polite effort in his words to mask the untoward side of
+the suggestion. “It is a matter of conscience with me; and I am pained
+and shocked at myself.”
+
+Sister Soulsby drummed for an absent moment with her thin, nervous
+fingers on the desk-top. “I guess maybe you'd better go and lie down
+again,” she said gently. “You're a sick man, still, and it's no good
+your worrying your head just now with things of this sort. You'll see
+them differently when you're quite yourself again.”
+
+“No, no,” pleaded Theron. “Do let us have our talk out! I'm all right.
+My mind is clear as a bell. Truly, I've really counted on this talk with
+you.”
+
+“But there's something else to talk about, isn't there, besides--besides
+your conscience?” she asked. Her eyes bent upon him a kindly pressure as
+she spoke, which took all possible harshness from her meaning.
+
+Theron answered the glance rather than her words. “I know that you are
+my friend,” he said simply.
+
+Sister Soulsby straightened herself, and looked down upon him with a new
+intentness. “Well, then,” she began, “let's thrash this thing out right
+now, and be done with it. You say it's hurt your conscience to do
+just one little hundredth part of what there was to be done here. Ask
+yourself what you mean by that. Mind, I'm not quarrelling, and I'm not
+thinking about anything except just your own state of mind. You think
+you soiled your hands by doing what you did. That is to say, you wanted
+ALL the dirty work done by other people. That's it, isn't it?”
+
+“The Rev. Mr. Ware sat up, in turn, and looked doubtingly into his
+companion's face.
+
+“Oh, we were going to be frank, you know,” she added, with a pleasant
+play of mingled mirth and honest liking in her eyes.
+
+“No,” he said, picking his words, “my point would rather be that--that
+there ought not to have been any of what you yourself call this--this
+'dirty work.' THAT is my feeling.”
+
+“Now we're getting at it,” said Sister Soulsby, briskly. “My dear
+friend, you might just as well say that potatoes are unclean and unfit
+to eat because manure is put into the ground they grow in. Just look at
+the case. Your church here was running behind every year. Your people
+had got into a habit of putting in nickels instead of dimes, and letting
+you sweat for the difference. That's a habit, like tobacco, or biting
+your fingernails, or anything else. Either you were all to come to smash
+here, or the people had to be shaken up, stood on their heads, broken
+of their habit. It's my business--mine and Soulsby's--to do that sort
+of thing. We came here and we did it--did it up brown, too. We not
+only raised all the money the church needs, and to spare, but I took a
+personal shine to you, and went out of my way to fix up things for
+you. It isn't only the extra hundred dollars, but the whole tone of
+the congregation is changed toward you now. You'll see that they'll be
+asking to have you back here, next spring. And you're solid with your
+Presiding Elder, too. Well, now, tell me straight--is that worth while,
+or not?”
+
+“I've told you that I am very grateful,” answered the minister, “and I
+say it again, and I shall never be tired of repeating it. But--but it
+was the means I had in mind.”
+
+“Quite so,” rejoined the sister, patiently. “If you saw the way a hotel
+dinner was cooked, you wouldn't be able to stomach it. Did you ever see
+a play? In a theatre, I mean. I supposed not. But you'll understand when
+I say that the performance looks one way from where the audience sit,
+and quite a different way when you are behind the scenes. THERE you see
+that the trees and houses are cloth, and the moon is tissue paper,
+and the flying fairy is a middle-aged woman strung up on a rope.
+That doesn't prove that the play, out in front, isn't beautiful and
+affecting, and all that. It only shows that everything in this world is
+produced by machinery--by organization. The trouble is that you've
+been let in on the stage, behind the scenes, so to speak, and you're so
+green--if you'll pardon me--that you want to sit down and cry because
+the trees ARE cloth, and the moon IS a lantern. And I say, don't be such
+a goose!”
+
+“I see what you mean,” Theron said, with an answering smile. He added,
+more gravely, “All the same, the Winch business seems to me--”
+
+“Now the Winch business is my own affair,” Sister Soulsby broke in
+abruptly. “I take all the responsibility for that. You need know nothing
+about it. You simply voted as you did on the merits of the case as he
+presented them--that's all.”
+
+“But--” Theron began, and then paused. Something had occurred to him,
+and he knitted his brows to follow its course of expansion in his mind.
+Suddenly he raised his head. “Then you arranged with Winch to make those
+bogus offers--just to lead others on?” he demanded.
+
+Sister Soulsby's large eyes beamed down upon him in reply, at first in
+open merriment, then more soberly, till their regard was almost pensive.
+
+“Let us talk of something else,” she said. “All that is past and gone.
+It has nothing to do with you, anyway. I've got some advice to give you
+about keeping up this grip you've got on your people.”
+
+The young minister had risen to his feet while she spoke. He put his
+hands in his pockets, and with rounded shoulders began slowly pacing the
+room. After a turn or two he came to the desk, and leaned against it.
+
+“I doubt if it's worth while going into that,” he said, in the solemn
+tone of one who feels that an irrevocable thing is being uttered. She
+waited to hear more, apparently. “I think I shall go away--give up the
+ministry,” he added.
+
+Sister Soulsby's eyes revealed no such shock of consternation as he,
+unconsciously, had looked for. They remained quite calm; and when she
+spoke, they deepened, to fit her speech, with what he read to be a
+gaze of affectionate melancholy--one might say pity. She shook her head
+slowly.
+
+“No--don't let any one else hear you say that,” she replied. “My poor
+young friend, it's no good to even think it. The real wisdom is to
+school yourself to move along smoothly, and not fret, and get the best
+of what's going. I've known others who felt as you do--of course there
+are times when every young man of brains and high notions feels that
+way--but there's no help for it. Those who tried to get out only broke
+themselves. Those who stayed in, and made the best of it--well, one of
+them will be a bishop in another ten years.”
+
+Theron had started walking again. “But the moral degradation of it!”
+ he snapped out at her over his shoulder. “I'd rather earn the meanest
+living, at an honest trade, and be free from it.”
+
+“That may all be,” responded Sister Soulsby. “But it isn't a question of
+what you'd rather do. It's what you can do. How could you earn a living?
+What trade or business do you suppose you could take up now, and get a
+living out of? Not one, my man, not one.”
+
+Theron stopped and stared at her. This view of his capabilities came
+upon him with the force and effect of a blow.
+
+“I don't discover, myself,” he began stumblingly, “that I'm so
+conspicuously inferior to the men I see about me who do make livings,
+and very good ones, too.”
+
+“Of course you're not,” she replied with easy promptness; “you're
+greatly the other way, or I shouldn't be taking this trouble with you.
+But you're what you are because you're where you are. The moment you try
+on being somewhere else, you're done for. In all this world nobody else
+comes to such unmerciful and universal grief as the unfrocked priest.”
+
+The phrase sent Theron's fancy roving. “I know a Catholic priest,” he
+said irrelevantly, “who doesn't believe an atom in--in things.”
+
+“Very likely,” said Sister Soulsby. “Most of us do. But you don't hear
+him talking about going and earning his living, I'll bet! Or if he
+does, he takes powerful good care not to go, all the same. They've got
+horse-sense, those priests. They're artists, too. They know how to allow
+for the machinery behind the scenes.”
+
+“But it's all so different,” urged the young minister; “the same things
+are not expected of them. Now I sat the other night and watched those
+people you got up around the altar-rail, groaning and shouting and
+crying, and the others jumping up and down with excitement, and Sister
+Lovejoy--did you see her?--coming out of her pew and regularly waltzing
+in the aisle, with her eyes shut, like a whirling dervish--I positively
+believe it was all that made me ill. I couldn't stand it. I can't stand
+it now. I won't go back to it! Nothing shall make me!”
+
+“Oh-h, yes, you will,” she rejoined soothingly. “There's nothing else to
+do. Just put a good face on it, and make up your mind to get through by
+treading on as few corns as possible, and keeping your own toes well in,
+and you'll be surprised how easy it'll all come to be. You were
+speaking of the revival business. Now that exemplifies just what I was
+saying--it's a part of our machinery. Now a church is like everything
+else,--it's got to have a boss, a head, an authority of some sort, that
+people will listen to and mind. The Catholics are different, as you say.
+Their church is chuck-full of authority--all the way from the Pope
+down to the priest--and accordingly they do as they're told. But the
+Protestants--your Methodists most of all--they say 'No, we won't have
+any authority, we won't obey any boss.' Very well, what happens? We
+who are responsible for running the thing, and raising the money and
+so on--we have to put on a spurt every once in a while, and work up a
+general state of excitement; and while it's going, don't you see that
+THAT is the authority, the motive power, whatever you like to call it,
+by which things are done? Other denominations don't need it. We do, and
+that's why we've got it.”
+
+“But the mean dishonesty of it all!” Theron broke forth. He moved about
+again, his bowed face drawn as with bodily suffering. “The low-born
+tricks, the hypocrisies! I feel as if I could never so much as look at
+these people here again without disgust.”
+
+“Oh, now that's where you make your mistake,” Sister Soulsby put in
+placidly. “These people of yours are not a whit worse than other people.
+They've got their good streaks and their bad streaks, just like the rest
+of us. Take them by and large, they're quite on a par with other folks
+the whole country through.”
+
+“I don't believe there's another congregation in the Conference
+where--where this sort of thing would have been needed, or, I might say,
+tolerated,” insisted Theron.
+
+“Perhaps you're right,” the other assented; “but that only shows that
+your people here are different from the others--not that they're worse.
+You don't seem to realize: Octavius, so far as the Methodists are
+concerned, is twenty or thirty years behind the times. Now that has its
+advantages and its disadvantages. The church here is tough and coarse,
+and full of grit, like a grindstone; and it does ministers from other
+more niminy-piminy places all sorts of good to come here once in a while
+and rub themselves up against it. It scours the rust and mildew off from
+their piety, and they go back singing and shouting. But of course
+it's had a different effect with you. You're razor-steel instead of
+scythe-steel, and the grinding's been too rough and violent for you.
+But you see what I mean. These people here really take their primitive
+Methodism seriously. To them the profession of entire sanctification is
+truly a genuine thing. Well, don't you see, when people just know that
+they're saved, it doesn't seem to them to matter so much what they
+do. They feel that ordinary rules may well be bent and twisted in the
+interest of people so supernaturally good as they are. That's pure human
+nature. It's always been like that.”
+
+Theron paused in his walk to look absently at her. “That thought,”
+ he said, in a vague, slow way, “seems to be springing up in my path,
+whichever way I turn. It oppresses me, and yet it fascinates me--this
+idea that the dead men have known more than we know, done more than we
+do; that there is nothing new anywhere; that--”
+
+“Never mind the dead men,” interposed Sister Soulsby. “Just you come
+and sit down here. I hate to have you straddling about the room when I'm
+trying to talk to you.”
+
+Theron obeyed, and as he sank into the low seat, Sister Soulsby drew up
+her chair, and put her hand on his shoulder. Her gaze rested upon his
+with impressive steadiness.
+
+“And now I want to talk seriously to you, as a friend,” she began. “You
+mustn't breathe to any living soul the shadow of a hint of this nonsense
+about leaving the ministry. I could see how you were feeling--I saw the
+book you were reading the first time I entered this room--and that made
+me like you; only I expected to find you mixing up more worldly gumption
+with your Renan. Well, perhaps I like you all the better for not having
+it--for being so delightfully fresh. At any rate, that made me sail in
+and straighten your affairs for you. And now, for God's sake, keep them
+straight. Just put all notions of anything else out of your head. Watch
+your chief men and women, and be friends with them. Keep your eye open
+for what they think you ought to do, and do it. Have your own ideas as
+much as you like, read what you like, say 'Damn' under your breath as
+much as you like, but don't let go of your job. I've knocked about
+too much, and I've seen too many promising young fellows cut their own
+throats for pure moonshine, not to have a right to say that.”
+
+Theron could not be insensible to the friendly hand on his shoulder, or
+to the strenuous sincerity of the voice which thus adjured him.
+
+“Well,” he said vaguely, smiling up into her earnest eyes, “if we agree
+that it IS moonshine.”
+
+“See here!” she exclaimed, with renewed animation, patting his shoulder
+in a brisk, automatic way, to point the beginnings of her confidences:
+“I'll tell you something. It's about myself. I've got a religion of my
+own, and it's got just one plank in it, and that is that the time to
+separate the sheep from the goats is on Judgment Day, and that it can't
+be done a minute before.”
+
+The young minister took in the thought, and turned it about in his mind,
+and smiled upon it.
+
+“And that brings me to what I'm going to tell you,” Sister Soulsby
+continued. She leaned back in her chair, and crossed her knees so
+that one well-shaped and artistically shod foot poised itself close to
+Theron's hand. Her eyes dwelt upon his face with an engaging candor.
+
+“I began life,” she said, “as a girl by running away from a stupid home
+with a man that I knew was married already. After that, I supported
+myself for a good many years--generally, at first, on the stage. I've
+been a front-ranker in Amazon ballets, and I've been leading lady in
+comic opera companies out West. I've told fortunes in one room of a
+mining-camp hotel where the biggest game of faro in the Territory went
+on in another. I've been a professional clairvoyant, and I've been a
+professional medium, and I've been within one vote of being indicted
+by a grand jury, and the money that bought that vote was put up by the
+smartest and most famous train-gambler between Omaha and 'Frisco, a
+gentleman who died in his boots and took three sheriff's deputies along
+with him to Kingdom-Come. Now, that's MY record.”
+
+Theron looked earnestly at her, and said nothing.
+
+“And now take Soulsby,” she went on. “Of course I take it for granted
+there's a good deal that he has never felt called upon to mention. He
+hasn't what you may call a talkative temperament. But there is also a
+good deal that I do know. He's been an actor, too, and to this day I'd
+back him against Edwin Booth himself to recite 'Clarence's Dream.' And
+he's been a medium, and then he was a travelling phrenologist, and for
+a long time he was advance agent for a British Blondes show, and when I
+first saw him he was lecturing on female diseases--and he had HIS little
+turn with a grand jury too. In fact, he was what you may call a regular
+bad old rooster.”
+
+Again Theron suffered the pause to lapse without comment--save for an
+amorphous sort of conversation which he felt to be going on between his
+eyes and those of Sister Soulsby.
+
+“Well, then,” she resumed, “so much for us apart. Now about us together.
+We liked each other from the start. We compared notes, and we found that
+we had both soured on living by fakes, and that we were tired of the
+road, and wanted to settle down and be respectable in our old age. We
+had a little money--enough to see us through a year or two. Soulsby had
+always hungered and longed to own a garden and raise flowers, and had
+never been able to stay long enough in one place to see so much as a
+bean-pod ripen. So we took a little place in a quiet country village
+down on the Southern Tier, and he planted everything three deep all over
+the place, and I bought a roomful of cheap good books, and we started
+in. We took to it like ducks to water for a while, and I don't say that
+we couldn't have stood it out, just doing nothing, to this very day; but
+as luck would have it, during the first winter there was a revival at
+the local Methodist church, and we went every evening--at first just to
+kill time, and then because we found we liked the noise and excitement
+and general racket of the thing. After it was all over each of us found
+that the other had been mighty near going up to the rail and joining the
+mourners. And another thing had occurred to each of us, too--that is,
+what tremendous improvements there were possible in the way that amateur
+revivalist worked up his business. This stuck in our crops, and we
+figured on it all through the winter.--Well, to make a long story short,
+we finally went into the thing ourselves.”
+
+“Tell me one thing,” interposed Theron. “I'm anxious to understand
+it all as we go along. Were you and he at any time sincerely
+converted?--that is, I mean, genuinely convicted of sin and conscious
+of--you know what I mean!”
+
+“Oh, bless you, yes,” responded Sister Soulsby. “Not only once--dozens
+of times--I may say every time. We couldn't do good work if we weren't.
+But that's a matter of temperament--of emotions.”
+
+“Precisely. That was what I was getting at,” explained Theron.
+
+“Well, then, hear what I was getting at,” she went on. “You were talking
+very loudly here about frauds and hypocrisies and so on, a few minutes
+ago. Now I say that Soulsby and I do good, and that we're good fellows.
+Now take him, for example. There isn't a better citizen in all
+Chemung County than he is, or a kindlier neighbor, or a better or more
+charitable man. I've known him to stay up a whole winter's night in
+a poor Irishman's stinking and freezing stable, trying to save his
+cart-horse for him, that had been seized with some sort of fit. The
+man's whole livelihood, and his family's, was in that horse; and when it
+died, Soulsby bought him another, and never told even ME about it. Now
+that I call real piety, if you like.”
+
+“So do I,” put in Theron, cordially.
+
+“And this question of fraud,” pursued his companion,--“look at it in
+this light. You heard us sing. Well, now, I was a singer, of course, but
+Soulsby hardly knew one note from another. I taught him to sing, and he
+went at it patiently and diligently, like a little man. And I invented
+that scheme of finding tunes which the crowd didn't know, and so
+couldn't break in on and smother. I simply took Chopin--he is full of
+sixths, you know--and I got all sorts of melodies out of his waltzes
+and mazurkas and nocturnes and so on, and I trained Soulsby just to sing
+those sixths so as to make the harmony, and there you are. He couldn't
+sing by himself any more than a crow, but he's got those sixths of his
+down to a hair. Now that's machinery, management, organization. We take
+these tunes, written by a devil-may-care Pole who was living with George
+Sand openly at the time, and pass 'em off on the brethren for hymns.
+It's a fraud, yes; but it's a good fraud. So they are all good frauds.
+I say frankly that I'm glad that the change and the chance came to help
+Soulsby and me to be good frauds.”
+
+“And the point is that I'm to be a good fraud, too,” commented the young
+minister.
+
+She had risen, and he got to his feet as well. He instinctively sought
+for her hand, and pressed it warmly, and held it in both his, with an
+exuberance of gratitude and liking in his manner.
+
+Sister Soulsby danced her eyes at him with a saucy little shake of the
+head. “I'm afraid you'll never make a really GOOD fraud,” she said. “You
+haven't got it in you. Your intentions are all right, but your execution
+is hopelessly clumsy. I came up to your bedroom there twice while you
+were sick, just to say 'howdy,' and you kept your eyes shut, and all the
+while a blind horse could have told that you were wide awake.”
+
+“I must have thought it was my wife,” said Theron.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+When the lingering dusk finally settled down upon this long summer
+evening, the train bearing the Soulsbys homeward was already some score
+of miles on its way, and the Methodists of Octavius had nearly finished
+their weekly prayer-meeting.
+
+After the stirring events of the revival, it was only to be expected
+that this routine, home-made affair should suffer from a reaction. The
+attendance was larger than usual, perhaps, but the proceedings were
+spiritless and tame. Neither the pastor nor his wife was present at
+the beginning, and the class-leader upon whom control devolved made but
+feeble headway against the spell of inertia which the hot night-air
+laid upon the gathering. Long pauses intervened between the perfunctory
+praise-offerings and supplications, and the hymns weariedly raised from
+time to time fell again in languor by the wayside.
+
+Alice came in just as people were beginning to hope that some one
+would start the Doxology, and bring matters to a close. Her appearance
+apparently suggested this to the class-leader, for in a few moments the
+meeting had been dismissed, and some of the members, on their way out,
+were shaking hands with their minister's wife, and expressing the polite
+hope that he was better. The worried look in her face, and the obvious
+stains of recent tears upon her cheeks imparted an added point and
+fervor to these inquiries, but she replied to all in tones of
+studied tranquillity that, although not feeling well enough to attend
+prayer-meeting, Brother Ware was steadily recovering strength, and
+confidently expected to be in complete health by Sunday. They left her,
+and could hardly wait to get into the vestibule to ask one another in
+whispers what on earth she could have been crying about.
+
+Meanwhile Brother Ware improved his convalescent state by pacing slowly
+up and down under the elms on the side of the street opposite the
+Catholic church. There were no houses here for a block and more; the
+sidewalk was broken in many places, so that passers-by avoided it; the
+overhanging boughs shrouded it all in obscurity; it was preeminently a
+place to be alone in.
+
+Theron had driven to the depot with his guests an hour before, and after
+a period of pleasant waiting on the platform, had said good-bye to
+them as the train moved away. Then he turned to Alice, who had also
+accompanied them in the carriage, and was conscious of a certain
+annoyance at her having come. That long familiar talk of the afternoon
+had given him the feeling that he was entitled to bid farewell to Sister
+Soulsby--to both the Soulsbys--by himself.
+
+“I am afraid folks will think it strange--neither of us attending the
+prayer-meeting,” he said, with a suggestion of reproof in his tone, as
+they left the station-yard.
+
+“If we get back in time, I'll run in for a minute,” answered Alice, with
+docility.
+
+“No--no,” he broke in. “I'm not equal to walking so fast. You run on
+ahead, and explain matters, and I will come along slowly.”
+
+“The hack we came in is still there in the yard,” the wife suggested.
+“We could drive home in that. I don't believe it would cost more than a
+quarter--and if you're feeling badly--”
+
+“But I am NOT feeling badly,” Theron replied, with frank impatience.
+“Only I feel--I feel that being alone with my thoughts would be good for
+me.”
+
+“Oh, certainly--by all means!” Alice had said, and turned sharply on her
+heel.
+
+Being alone with these thoughts, Theron strolled aimlessly about, and
+did not think at all. The shadows gathered, and fireflies began to
+disclose their tiny gleams among the shrubbery in the gardens.
+A lamp-lighter came along, and passed him, leaving in his wake a
+straggling double line of lights, glowing radiantly against the
+black-green of the trees. This recalled to Theron that he had heard that
+the town council lit the street lamps by the almanac, and economized gas
+when moonshine was due. The idea struck him as droll, and he dwelt
+upon it in various aspects, smiling at some of its comic possibilities.
+Looking up in the middle of one of these whimsical conceits, the
+sportive impulse died suddenly within him. He realized that it was dark,
+and that the massive black bulk reared against the sky on the other side
+of the road was the Catholic church. The other fact, that he had been
+there walking to and fro for some time, was borne in upon him more
+slowly. He turned, and resumed the pacing up and down with a still more
+leisurely step, musing upon the curious way in which people's minds all
+unconsciously follow about where instincts and intuitions lead.
+
+No doubt it was what Sister Soulsby had said about Catholics which had
+insensibly guided his purposeless stroll in this direction. What a
+woman that was! Somehow the purport of her talk--striking, and even
+astonishing as he had found it--did not stand out so clearly in his
+memory as did the image of the woman herself. She must have
+been extremely pretty once. For that matter she still was a most
+attractive-looking woman. It had been a genuine pleasure to have her in
+the house--to see her intelligent responsive face at the table--to have
+it in one's power to make drafts at will upon the fund of sympathy and
+appreciation, of facile mirth and ready tenderness in those big eyes of
+hers. He liked that phrase she had used about herself--“a good fellow.”
+ It seemed to fit her to a “t.” And Soulsby was a good fellow too. All at
+once it occurred to him to wonder whether they were married or not.
+
+But really that was no affair of his, he reflected. A citizen of the
+intellectual world should be above soiling his thoughts with mean
+curiosities of that sort, and he drove the impertinent query down again
+under the surface of his mind. He refused to tolerate, as well, sundry
+vagrant imaginings which rose to cluster about and literalize the
+romance of her youth which Sister Soulsby had so frankly outlined.
+He would think upon nothing but her as he knew her,--the kindly,
+quick-witted, capable and charming woman who had made such a brilliant
+break in the monotony of life at that dull parsonage of his. The
+only genuine happiness in life must consist in having bright, smart,
+attractive women like that always about.
+
+The lights were visible now in the upper rooms of Father Forbes'
+pastorate across the way. Theron paused for a second to consider whether
+he wanted to go over and call on the priest. He decided that mentally he
+was too fagged and flat for such an undertaking. He needed another sort
+of companionship--some restful, soothing human contact, which should
+exact nothing from him in return, but just take charge of him,
+with soft, wise words and pleasant plays of fancy, and jokes
+and--and--something of the general effect created by Sister Soulsby's
+eyes. The thought expanded itself, and he saw that he had never realized
+before--nay, never dreamt before--what a mighty part the comradeship of
+talented, sweet-natured and beautiful women must play in the development
+of genius, the achievement of lofty aims, out in the great world of
+great men. To know such women--ah, that would never fall to his hapless
+lot.
+
+The priest's lamps blinked at him through the trees. He remembered that
+priests were supposed to be even further removed from the possibilities
+of such contact than he was himself. His memory reverted to that
+horribly ugly old woman whom Father Forbes had spoken of as his
+housekeeper. Life under the same roof with such a hag must be even worse
+than--worse than--
+
+The young minister did not finish the comparison, even in the privacy
+of his inner soul. He stood instead staring over at the pastorate, in a
+kind of stupor of arrested thought. The figure of a woman passed in view
+at the nearest window--a tall figure with pale summer clothes of some
+sort, and a broad summer hat--a flitting effect of diaphanous shadow
+between him and the light which streamed from the casement.
+
+Theron felt a little shiver run over him, as if the delicate coolness of
+the changing night-air had got into his blood. The window was open, and
+his strained hearing thought it caught the sound of faint laughter. He
+continued to gaze at the place where the vision had appeared, the while
+a novel and strange perception unfolded itself upon his mind.
+
+He had come there in the hope of encountering Celia Madden.
+
+Now that he looked this fact in the face, there was nothing remarkable
+about it. In truth, it was simplicity itself. He was still a sick man,
+weak in body and dejected in spirits. The thought of how unhappy and
+unstrung he was came to him now with an insistent pathos that brought
+tears to his eyes. He was only obeying the universal law of nature--the
+law which prompts the pallid spindling sprout of the potato in the
+cellar to strive feebly toward the light.
+
+From where he stood in the darkness he stretched out his hands in the
+direction of that open window. The gesture was his confession to the
+overhanging boughs, to the soft night-breeze, to the stars above--and
+it bore back to him something of the confessional's vague and wistful
+solace. He seemed already to have drawn down into his soul a taste
+of the refreshment it craved. He sighed deeply, and the hot moisture
+smarted again upon his eyelids, but this time not all in grief. With
+his tender compassion for himself there mingled now a flutter of buoyant
+prescience, of exquisite expectancy.
+
+Fate walked abroad this summer night. The street door of the pastorate
+opened, and in the flood of illumination which spread suddenly forth
+over the steps and sidewalk, Theron saw again the tall form, with the
+indefinitely light-hued flowing garments and the wide straw hat. He
+heard a tuneful woman's voice call out “Good-night, Maggie,” and caught
+no response save the abrupt closing of the door, which turned everything
+black again with a bang. He listened acutely for another instant, and
+then with long, noiseless strides made his way down his deserted side of
+the street. He moderated his pace as he turned to cross the road at the
+corner, and then, still masked by the trees, halted altogether, in a
+momentary tumult of apprehension. No--yes--it was all right. The girl
+sauntered out from the total darkness into the dim starlight of the open
+corner.
+
+“Why, bless me, is that you, Miss Madden?”
+
+Celia seemed to discern readily enough, through the accents of surprise,
+the identity of the tall, slim man who addressed her from the shadows.
+
+“Good-evening, Mr. Ware,” she said, with prompt affability. “I'm so glad
+to find you out again. We heard you were ill.”
+
+“I have been very ill,” responded Theron, as they shook hands and walked
+on together. He added, with a quaver in his voice, “I am still far
+from strong. I really ought not to be out at all. But--but the longing
+for--for--well, I COULDN'T stay in any longer. Even if it kills me, I
+shall be glad I came out tonight.”
+
+“Oh, we won't talk of killing,” said Celia. “I don't believe in
+illnesses myself.”
+
+“But you believe in collapses of the nerves,” put in Theron, with gentle
+sadness, “in moral and spiritual and mental breakdowns. I remember how I
+was touched by the way you told me YOU suffered from them. I had to take
+what you said then for granted. I had had no experience of it myself.
+But now I know what it is.” He drew a long, pathetic sigh. “Oh, DON'T I
+know what it is!” he repeated gloomily.
+
+“Come, my friend, cheer up,” Celia purred at him, in soothing tones. He
+felt that there was a deliciously feminine and sisterly intuition in
+her speech, and in the helpful, nurse-like way in which she drew his arm
+through hers. He leaned upon this support, and was glad of it in every
+fibre of his being.
+
+“Do you remember? You promised--that last time I saw you--to play for
+me,” he reminded her. They were passing the little covered postern door
+at the side and rear of the church as he spoke, and he made a half halt
+to point the coincidence.
+
+“Oh, there's no one to blow the organ,” she said, divining his
+suggestion. “And I haven't the key--and, besides, the organ is too heavy
+and severe for an invalid. It would overwhelm you tonight.”
+
+“Not as you would know how to play it for me,” urged Theron, pensively.
+“I feel as if good music to-night would make me well again. I am really
+very ill and weak--and unhappy!”
+
+The girl seemed moved by the despairing note in his voice. She invited
+him by a sympathetic gesture to lean even more directly on her arm.
+
+“Come home with me, and I'll play Chopin to you,” she said, in
+compassionate friendliness. “He is the real medicine for bruised and
+wounded nerves. You shall have as much of him as you like.”
+
+The idea thus unexpectedly thrown forth spread itself like some vast and
+inexpressibly alluring vista before Theron's imagination. The spice of
+adventure in it fascinated his mind as well, but for a shrinking moment
+the flesh was weak.
+
+“I'm afraid your people would--would think it strange,” he faltered--and
+began also to recall that he had some people of his own who would be
+even more amazed.
+
+“Nonsense,” said Celia, in fine, bold confidence, and with a reassuring
+pressure on his arm. “I allow none of my people to question what I do.
+They never dream of such a preposterous thing. Besides, you will see
+none of them. Mrs. Madden is at the seaside, and my father and brother
+have their own part of the house. I shan't listen for a minute to your
+not coming. Come, I'm your doctor. I'm to make you well again.”
+
+There was further conversation, and Theron more or less knew that he was
+bearing a part in it, but his whole mind seemed concentrated, in a
+sort of delicious terror, upon the wonderful experience to which every
+footstep brought him nearer. His magnetized fancy pictured a great
+spacious parlor, such as a mansion like the Maddens' would of course
+contain, and there would be a grand piano, and lace curtains, and
+paintings in gold frames, and a chandelier, and velvet easy-chairs, and
+he would sit in one of these, surrounded by all the luxury of the rich,
+while Celia played to him. There would be servants about, he presumed,
+and very likely they would recognize him, and of course they would
+talk about it to Tom, Dick and Harry afterward. But he said to himself
+defiantly that he didn't care.
+
+He withdrew his arm from hers as they came upon the well-lighted main
+street. He passed no one who seemed to know him. Presently they came
+to the Madden place, and Celia, without waiting for the gravelled walk,
+struck obliquely across the lawn. Theron, who had been lagging behind
+with a certain circumspection, stepped briskly to her side now. Their
+progress over the soft, close-cropped turf in the dark together, with
+the scent of lilies and perfumed shrubs heavy on the night air, and
+the majestic bulk of the big silent house rising among the trees before
+them, gave him a thrilling sense of the glory of individual freedom.
+
+“I feel a new man already,” he declared, as they swung along on the
+grass. He breathed a long sigh of content, and drew nearer, so that
+their shoulders touched now and again as they walked. In a minute more
+they were standing on the doorstep, and Theron heard the significant
+jingle of a bunch of keys which his companion was groping for in her
+elusive pocket. He was conscious of trembling a little at the sound.
+
+It seemed that, unlike other people, the Maddens did not have their
+parlor on the ground-floor, opening off the front hall. Theron stood in
+the complete darkness of this hall, till Celia had lit one of several
+candles which were in their hand-sticks on a sort of sideboard next the
+hat-rack. She beckoned him with a gesture of her head, and he followed
+her up a broad staircase, magnificent in its structural appointments
+of inlaid woods, and carpeted with what to his feet felt like down. The
+tiny light which his guide bore before her half revealed, as they passed
+in their ascent, tall lengths of tapestry, and the dull glint of
+armor and brazen discs in shadowed niches on the nearer wall. Over the
+stair-rail lay an open space of such stately dimensions, bounded by
+terminal lines of decoration so distant in the faint candle-flicker,
+that the young country minister could think of no word but “palatial” to
+fit it all.
+
+At the head of the flight, Celia led the way along a wide corridor to
+where it ended. Here, stretched from side to side, and suspended from
+broad hoops of a copper-like metal, was a thick curtain, of a uniform
+color which Theron at first thought was green, and then decided must be
+blue. She pushed its heavy folds aside, and unlocked another door. He
+passed under the curtain behind her, and closed the door.
+
+The room into which he had made his way was not at all after the fashion
+of any parlor he had ever seen. In the obscure light it was difficult
+to tell what it resembled. He made out what he took to be a painter's
+easel, standing forth independently in the centre of things. There were
+rows of books on rude, low shelves. Against one of the two windows was
+a big, flat writing-table--or was it a drawing-table?--littered with
+papers. Under the other window was a carpenter's bench, with a large
+mound of something at one end covered with a white cloth. On a table
+behind the easel rose a tall mechanical contrivance, the chief feature
+of which was a thick upright spiral screw. The floor was of bare
+wood stained brown. The walls of this queer room had photographs and
+pictures, taken apparently from illustrated papers, pinned up at random
+for their only ornament.
+
+Celia had lighted three or four other candles on the mantel. She
+caught the dumfounded expression with which her guest was surveying his
+surroundings, and gave a merry little laugh.
+
+“This is my workshop,” she explained. “I keep this for the things I do
+badly--things I fool with. If I want to paint, or model in clay, or bind
+books, or write, or draw, or turn on the lathe, or do some carpentering,
+here's where I do it. All the things that make a mess which has to
+be cleaned up--they are kept out here--because this is as far as the
+servants are allowed to come.”
+
+She unlocked still another door as she spoke--a door which was also
+concealed behind a curtain.
+
+“Now,” she said, holding up the candle so that its reddish flare rounded
+with warmth the creamy fulness of her chin and throat, and glowed upon
+her hair in a flame of orange light--“now I will show you what is my
+very own.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+Theron Ware looked about him with frankly undisguised astonishment.
+
+The room in which he found himself was so dark at first that it
+yielded little to the eye, and that little seemed altogether beyond his
+comprehension. His gaze helplessly followed Celia and her candle
+about as she busied herself in the work of illumination. When she had
+finished, and pinched out the taper, there were seven lights in the
+apartment--lights beaming softly through half-opaque alternating
+rectangles of blue and yellow glass. They must be set in some sort of
+lanterns around against the wall, he thought, but the shape of these he
+could hardly make out.
+
+Gradually his sight adapted itself to this subdued light, and he began
+to see other things. These queer lamps were placed, apparently, so as to
+shed a special radiance upon some statues which stood in the corners of
+the chamber, and upon some pictures which were embedded in the walls.
+Theron noted that the statues, the marble of which lost its aggressive
+whiteness under the tinted lights, were mostly of naked men and women;
+the pictures, four or five in number, were all variations of a single
+theme--the Virgin Mary and the Child.
+
+A less untutored vision than his would have caught more swiftly the
+scheme of color and line in which these works of art bore their share.
+The walls of the room were in part of flat upright wooden columns,
+terminating high above in simple capitals, and they were all painted in
+pale amber and straw and primrose hues, irregularly wavering here and
+there toward suggestions of white. Between these pilasters were broader
+panels of stamped leather, in gently varying shades of peacock blue.
+These contrasted colors vaguely interwove and mingled in what he
+could see of the shadowed ceiling far above. They were repeated in the
+draperies and huge cushions and pillows of the low, wide divan which ran
+about three sides of the room. Even the floor, where it revealed itself
+among the scattered rugs, was laid in a mosaic pattern of matched woods,
+which, like the rugs, gave back these same shifting blues and uncertain
+yellows.
+
+The fourth side of the apartment was broken in outline at one end by the
+door through which they had entered, and at the other by a broad, square
+opening, hung with looped-back curtains of a thin silken stuff. Between
+the two apertures rose against the wall what Theron took at first glance
+to be an altar. There were pyramidal rows of tall candles here on either
+side, each masked with a little silken hood; below, in the centre, a
+shelf-like projection supported what seemed a massive, carved casket,
+and in the beautiful intricacies of this, and the receding canopy of
+delicate ornamentation which depended above it, the dominant color was
+white, deepening away in its shadows, by tenderly minute gradations, to
+the tints which ruled the rest of the room.
+
+Celia lighted some of the high, thick tapers in these candelabra, and
+opened the top of the casket. Theron saw with surprise that she had
+uncovered the keyboard of a piano. He viewed with much greater amazement
+her next proceeding--which was to put a cigarette between her lips, and,
+bending over one of the candles with it for an instant, turn to him with
+a filmy, opalescent veil of smoke above her head.
+
+“Make yourself comfortable anywhere,” she said, with a gesture which
+comprehended all the divans and pillows in the place. “Will you smoke?”
+
+“I have never tried since I was a little boy,” said Theron, “but I think
+I could. If you don't mind, I should like to see.”
+
+Lounging at his ease on the oriental couch, Theron experimented
+cautiously upon the unaccustomed tobacco, and looked at Celia with what
+he felt to be the confident quiet of a man of the world. She had thrown
+aside her hat, and in doing so had half released some of the heavy
+strands of hair coiled at the back of her head. His glance instinctively
+rested upon this wonderful hair of hers. There was no mistaking the
+sudden fascination its disorder had for his eye.
+
+She stood before him with the cigarette poised daintily between thumb
+and finger of a shapely hand, and smiled comprehendingly down on her
+guest.
+
+“I suffered the horrors of the damned with this hair of mine when I was
+a child,” she said. “I daresay all children have a taste for persecuting
+red-heads; but it's a specialty with Irish children. They get hold
+somehow of an ancient national superstition, or legend, that red hair
+was brought into Ireland by the Danes. It's been a term of reproach with
+us since Brian Boru's time to call a child a Dane. I used to be pursued
+and baited with it every day of my life, until the one dream of my
+ambition was to get old enough to be a Sister of Charity, so that I
+might hide my hair under one of their big beastly white linen caps. I've
+got rather away from that ideal since, I'm afraid,” she added, with a
+droll downward curl of her lip.
+
+“Your hair is very beautiful,” said Theron, in the calm tone of a
+connoisseur.
+
+“I like it myself,” Celia admitted, and blew a little smoke-ring toward
+him. “I've made this whole room to match it. The colors, I mean,” she
+explained, in deference to his uplifted brows. “Between us, we make up
+what Whistler would call a symphony. That reminds me--I was going to
+play for you. Let me finish the cigarette first.”
+
+Theron felt grateful for her reticence about the fact that he had laid
+his own aside. “I have never seen a room at all like this,” he remarked.
+“You are right; it does fit you perfectly.”
+
+She nodded her sense of his appreciation. “It is what I like,” she
+said. “It expresses ME. I will not have anything about me--or anybody
+either--that I don't like. I suppose if an old Greek could see it, it
+would make him sick, but it represents what I mean by being a Greek. It
+is as near as an Irishman can get to it.”
+
+“I remember your puzzling me by saying that you were a Greek.”
+
+Celia laughed, and tossed the cigarette-end away. “I'd puzzle you more,
+I'm afraid, if I tried to explain to you what I really meant by it. I
+divide people up into two classes, you know--Greeks and Jews. Once you
+get hold of that principle, all other divisions and classifications,
+such as by race or language or nationality, seem pure foolishness. It
+is the only true division there is. It is just as true among negroes
+or wild Indians who never heard of Greece or Jerusalem, as it is among
+white folks. That is the beauty of it. It works everywhere, always.”
+
+“Try it on me,” urged Theron, with a twinkling eye. “Which am I?”
+
+“Both,” said the girl, with a merry nod of the head. “But now I'll play.
+I told you you were to hear Chopin. I prescribe him for you. He is the
+Greekiest of the Greeks. THERE was a nation where all the people were
+artists, where everybody was an intellectual aristocrat, where the
+Philistine was as unknown, as extinct, as the dodo. Chopin might have
+written his music for them.”
+
+“I am interested in Shopang,” put in Theron, suddenly recalling
+Sister Soulsby's confidences as to the source of her tunes. “He lived
+with--what's his name--George something. We were speaking about him only
+this afternoon.”
+
+Celia looked down into her visitor's face at first inquiringly, then
+with a latent grin about her lips. “Yes--George something,” she said, in
+a tone which mystified him.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware was sitting up, a minute afterward, in a ferment of
+awakened consciousness that he had never heard the piano played before.
+After a little, he noiselessly rearranged the cushions, and settled
+himself again in a recumbent posture. It was beyond his strength to
+follow that first impulse, and keep his mind abreast with what his ears
+took in. He sighed and lay back, and surrendered his senses to the mere
+unthinking charm of it all.
+
+It was the Fourth Prelude that was singing in the air about him--a
+simple, plaintive strain wandering at will over a surface of steady
+rhythmic movement underneath, always creeping upward through mysteries
+of sweetness, always sinking again in cadences of semi-tones. With only
+a moment's pause, there came the Seventh Waltz--a rich, bold confusion
+which yet was not confused. Theron's ears dwelt with eager delight upon
+the chasing medley of swift, tinkling sounds, but it left his thoughts
+free.
+
+From where he reclined, he turned his head to scrutinize, one by one,
+the statues in the corners. No doubt they were beautiful--for this was a
+department in which he was all humility--and one of them, the figure of
+a broad-browed, stately, though thick-waisted woman, bending slightly
+forward and with both arms broken off, was decently robed from the hips
+downward. The others were not robed at all. Theron stared at them with
+the erratic, rippling jangle of the waltz in his ears, and felt that he
+possessed a new and disturbing conception of what female emancipation
+meant in these later days. Roving along the wall, his glance rested
+again upon the largest of the Virgin pictures--a full-length figure
+in sweeping draperies, its radiant, aureoled head upturned in rapt
+adoration, its feet resting on a crescent moon which shone forth in
+bluish silver through festooned clouds of cherubs. The incongruity
+between the unashamed statues and this serene incarnation of holy
+womanhood jarred upon him for the instant. Then his mind went to the
+piano.
+
+Without a break the waltz had slowed and expanded into a passage of what
+might be church music, an exquisitely modulated and gently solemn chant,
+through which a soft, lingering song roved capriciously, forcing the
+listener to wonder where it was coming out, even while it caressed and
+soothed to repose.
+
+He looked from the Madonna to Celia. Beyond the carelessly drooping
+braids and coils of hair which blazed between the candles, he could see
+the outline of her brow and cheek, the noble contour of her lifted chin
+and full, modelled throat, all pink as the most delicate rose leaf
+is pink, against the cool lights of the altar-like wall. The sight
+convicted him in the court of his own soul as a prurient and mean-minded
+rustic. In the presence of such a face, of such music, there ceased to
+be any such thing as nudity, and statues no more needed clothes than
+did those slow, deep, magnificent chords which came now, gravely
+accumulating their spell upon him.
+
+“It is all singing!” the player called out to him over her shoulder, in
+a minute of rest. “That is what Chopin does--he sings!”
+
+She began, with an effect of thinking of something else, the Sixth
+Nocturne, and Theron at first thought she was not playing anything in
+particular, so deliberately, haltingly, did the chain of charm unwind
+itself into sequence. Then it came closer to him than the others had
+done. The dreamy, wistful, meditative beauty of it all at once oppressed
+and inspired him. He saw Celia's shoulders sway under the impulse of the
+RUBATO license--the privilege to invest each measure with the stress of
+the whole, to loiter, to weep, to run and laugh at will--and the music
+she made spoke to him as with a human voice. There was the wooing sense
+of roses and moonlight, of perfumes, white skins, alluring languorous
+eyes, and then--
+
+“You know this part, of course,” he heard her say.
+
+On the instant they had stepped from the dark, scented, starlit garden,
+where the nightingale sang, into a great cathedral. A sombre and lofty
+anthem arose, and filled the place with the splendor of such dignified
+pomp of harmony and such suggestions of measureless choral power and
+authority that Theron sat abruptly up, then was drawn resistlessly to
+his feet. He stood motionless in the strange room, feeling most of all
+that one should kneel to hear such music.
+
+“This you'll know too--the funeral march from the Second Sonata,” she
+was saying, before he realized that the end of the other had come. He
+sank upon the divan again, bending forward and clasping his hands tight
+around his knees. His heart beat furiously as he listened to the weird,
+mediaeval processional, with its wild, clashing chords held down in
+the bondage of an orderly sadness. There was a propelling motion in
+the thing--a sense of being borne bodily along--which affected him
+like dizziness. He breathed hard through the robust portions of stern,
+vigorous noise, and rocked himself to and fro when, as rosy morn
+breaks upon a storm-swept night, the drums are silenced for the sweet,
+comforting strain of solitary melody. The clanging minor harmonies into
+which the march relapses came to their abrupt end. Theron rose once
+more, and moved with a hesitating step to the piano.
+
+“I want to rest a little,” he said, with his hand on her shoulder.
+
+“Whew! so do I,” exclaimed Celia, letting her hands fall with an
+exaggerated gesture of weariness. “The sonatas take it out of one! They
+are hideously difficult, you know. They are rarely played.”
+
+“I didn't know,” remarked Theron. She seemed not to mind his hand upon
+her shoulder, and he kept it there. “I didn't know anything about music
+at all. What I do know now is that--that this evening is an event in my
+life.”
+
+She looked up at him and smiled. He read unsuspected tendernesses and
+tolerances of friendship in the depths of her eyes, which emboldened
+him to stir the fingers of that audacious hand in a lingering, caressing
+trill upon her shoulder. The movement was of the faintest, but having
+ventured it, he drew his hand abruptly away.
+
+“You are getting on,” she said to him. There was an enigmatic twinkle
+in the smile with which she continued to regard him. “We are Hellenizing
+you at a great rate.”
+
+A sudden thought seemed to strike her. She shifted her eyes toward
+vacancy with a swift, abstracted glance, reflected for a moment, then
+let a sparkling half-wink and the dimpling beginnings of an almost
+roguish smile mark her assent to the conceit, whatever it might be.
+
+“I will be with you in a moment,” he heard her say; and while the words
+were still in his ears she had risen and passed out of sight through
+the broad, open doorway to the right. The looped curtains fell together
+behind her. Presently a mellow light spread over their delicately
+translucent surface--a creamy, undulating radiance which gave the effect
+of moving about among the myriad folds of the silk.
+
+Theron gazed at these curtains for a little, then straightened his
+shoulders with a gesture of decision, and, turning on his heel, went
+over and examined the statues in the further corners minutely.
+
+“If you would like some more, I will play you the Berceuse now.”
+
+Her voice came to him with a delicious shock. He wheeled round and
+beheld her standing at the piano, with one hand resting, palm upward,
+on the keys. She was facing him. Her tall form was robed now in some
+shapeless, clinging drapery, lustrous and creamy and exquisitely soft,
+like the curtains. The wonderful hair hung free and luxuriant about her
+neck and shoulders, and glowed with an intensity of fiery color which
+made all the other hues of the room pale and vague. A fillet of faint,
+sky-like blue drew a gracious span through the flame of red above her
+temples, and from this there rose the gleam of jewels. Her head inclined
+gently, gravely, toward him--with the posture of that armless woman in
+marble he had been studying--and her brown eyes, regarding him from the
+shadows, emitted light.
+
+“It is a lullaby--the only one he wrote,” she said, as Theron,
+pale-faced and with tightened lips, approached her. “No--you mustn't
+stand there,” she added, sinking into the seat before the instrument;
+“go back and sit where you were.”
+
+The most perfect of lullabies, with its swaying abandonment to cooing
+rhythm, ever and again rising in ripples to the point of insisting on
+something, one knows not what, and then rocking, melting away once
+more, passed, so to speak, over Theron's head. He leaned back upon the
+cushions, and watched the white, rounded forearm which the falling folds
+of this strange, statue-like drapery made bare.
+
+There was more that appealed to his mood in the Third Ballade. It
+seemed to him that there were words going along with it--incoherent and
+impulsive yet very earnest words, appealing to him in strenuous argument
+and persuasion. Each time he almost knew what they said, and strained
+after their meaning with a passionate desire, and then there would come
+a kind of cuckoo call, and everything would swing dancing off again into
+a mockery of inconsequence.
+
+Upon the silence there fell the pure, liquid, mellifluous melody of a
+soft-throated woman singing to her lover.
+
+“It is like Heine--simply a love-poem,” said the girl, over her
+shoulder.
+
+Theron followed now with all his senses, as she carried the Ninth
+Nocturne onward. The stormy passage, which she banged finely forth,
+was in truth a lover's quarrel; and then the mild, placid flow of sweet
+harmonies into which the furore sank, dying languorously away upon a
+silence all alive with tender memories of sound--was that not also a
+part of love?
+
+They sat motionless through a minute--the man on the divan, the girl
+at the piano--and Theron listened for what he felt must be the audible
+thumping of his heart.
+
+Then, throwing back her head, with upturned face, Celia began what she
+had withheld for the last--the Sixteenth Mazurka. This strange foreign
+thing she played with her eyes closed, her head tilted obliquely so that
+Theron could see the rose-tinted, beautiful countenance, framed as if
+asleep in the billowing luxuriance of unloosed auburn hair. He fancied
+her beholding visions as she wrought the music--visions full of barbaric
+color and romantic forms. As his mind swam along with the gliding,
+tricksy phantom of a tune, it seemed as if he too could see these
+visions--as if he gazed at them through her eyes.
+
+It could not be helped. He lifted himself noiselessly to his feet, and
+stole with caution toward her. He would hear the rest of this weird,
+voluptuous fantasy standing thus, so close behind her that he could look
+down upon her full, uplifted lace--so close that, if she moved, that
+glowing nimbus of hair would touch him.
+
+There had been some curious and awkward pauses in this last piece, which
+Theron, by some side cerebration, had put down to her not watching
+what her fingers did. There came another of these pauses now--an odd,
+unaccountable halt in what seemed the middle of everything. He stared
+intently down upon her statuesque, dreaming face during the hush, and
+caught his breath as he waited. There fell at last a few faltering
+ascending notes, making a half-finished strain, and then again there was
+silence.
+
+Celia opened her eyes, and poured a direct, deep gaze into the face
+above hers. Its pale lips were parted in suspense, and the color had
+faded from its cheeks.
+
+“That is the end,” she said, and, with a turn of her lithe body, stood
+swiftly up, even while the echoes of the broken melody seemed panting in
+the air about her for completion.
+
+Theron put his hands to his face, and pressed them tightly against eyes
+and brow for an instant. Then, throwing them aside with an expansive
+downward sweep of the arms, and holding them clenched, he returned
+Celia's glance. It was as if he had never looked into a woman's eyes
+before.
+
+“It CAN'T be the end!” he heard himself saying, in a low voice charged
+with deep significance. He held her gaze in the grasp of his with
+implacable tenacity. There was a trouble about breathing, and the mosaic
+floor seemed to stir under his feet. He clung defiantly to the one idea
+of not releasing her eyes.
+
+“How COULD it be the end?” he demanded, lifting an uncertain hand to
+his breast as he spoke, and spreading it there as if to control the
+tumultuous fluttering of his heart. “Things don't end that way!”
+
+A sharp, blinding spasm of giddiness closed upon and shook him, while
+the brave words were on his lips. He blinked and tottered under it, as
+it passed, and then backed humbly to his divan and sat down, gasping a
+little, and patting his hand on his heart. There was fright written all
+over his whitened face.
+
+“We--we forgot that I am a sick man,” he said feebly, answering Celia's
+look of surprised inquiry with a forced, wan smile. “I was afraid my
+heart had gone wrong.”
+
+She scrutinized him for a further moment, with growing reassurance
+in her air. Then, piling up the pillows and cushions behind him for
+support, for all the world like a big sister again, she stepped into the
+inner room, and returned with a flagon of quaint shape and a tiny glass.
+She poured this latter full to the brim of a thick yellowish, aromatic
+liquid, and gave it him to drink.
+
+“This Benedictine is all I happen to have,” she said. “Swallow it down.
+It will do you good.”
+
+Theron obeyed her. It brought tears to his eyes; but, upon reflection,
+it was grateful and warming. He did feel better almost immediately. A
+great wave of comfort seemed to enfold him as he settled himself back
+on the divan. For that one flashing instant he had thought that he was
+dying. He drew a long grateful breath of relief, and smiled his content.
+
+Celia had seated herself beside him, a little away. She sat with her
+head against the wall, and one foot curled under her, and almost faced
+him.
+
+“I dare say we forced the pace a little,” she remarked, after a pause,
+looking down at the floor, with the puckers of a ruminating amusement
+playing in the corners of her mouth. “It doesn't do for a man to get to
+be a Greek all of a sudden. He must work along up to it gradually.”
+
+He remembered the music. “Oh, if I only knew how to tell you,” he
+murmured ecstatically, “what a revelation your playing has been to me!
+I had never imagined anything like it. I shall think of it to my dying
+day.”
+
+He began to remember as well the spirit that was in the air when the
+music ended. The details of what he had felt and said rose vaguely in
+his mind. Pondering them, his eye roved past Celia's white-robed figure
+to the broad, open doorway beyond. The curtains behind which she had
+disappeared were again parted and fastened back. A dim light was burning
+within, out of sight, and its faint illumination disclosed a room filled
+with white marbles, white silks, white draperies of varying sorts, which
+shaped themselves, as he looked, into the canopy and trappings of an
+extravagantly over-sized and sumptuous bed. He looked away again.
+
+“I wish you would tell me what you really mean by that Greek idea of
+yours,” he said with the abruptness of confusion.
+
+Celia did not display much enthusiasm in the tone of her answer. “Oh,”
+ she said almost indifferently, “lots of things. Absolute freedom from
+moral bugbears, for one thing. The recognition that beauty is the only
+thing in life that is worth while. The courage to kick out of one's life
+everything that isn't worth while; and so on.”
+
+“But,” said Theron, watching the mingled delicacy and power of the bared
+arm and the shapely grace of the hand which she had lifted to her
+face, “I am going to get you to teach it ALL to me.” The memories began
+crowding in upon him now, and the baffling note upon which the mazurka
+had stopped short chimed like a tuning-fork in his ears. “I want to be
+a Greek myself, if you're one. I want to get as close to you--to your
+ideal, that is, as I can. You open up to me a whole world that I had not
+even dreamed existed. We swore our friendship long ago, you know: and
+now, after tonight--you and the music have decided me. I am going to put
+the things out of MY life that are not worthwhile. Only you must help
+me; you must tell me how to begin.”
+
+He looked up as he spoke, to enforce the almost tender entreaty of his
+words. The spectacle of a yawn, only fractionally concealed behind those
+talented fingers, chilled his soft speech, and sent a flush over his
+face. He rose on the instant.
+
+Celia was nothing abashed at his discovery. She laughed gayly in
+confession of her fault, and held her hand out to let him help her
+disentangle her foot from her draperies, and get off the divan. It
+seemed to be her meaning that he should continue holding her hand after
+she was also standing.
+
+“You forgive me, don't you?” she urged smilingly. “Chopin always first
+excites me, then sends me to sleep. You see how YOU sleep tonight!”
+
+The brown, velvety eyes rested upon him, from under their heavy lids,
+with a languorous kindliness. Her warm, large palm clasped his in frank
+liking.
+
+“I don't want to sleep at all,” Mr. Ware was impelled to say. “I want to
+lie awake and think about--about everything all over again.”
+
+She smiled drowsily. “And you're sure you feel strong enough to walk
+home?”
+
+“Yes,” he replied, with a lingering dilatory note, which deepened upon
+reflection into a sigh. “Oh, yes.”
+
+He followed her and her candle down the magnificent stairway again. She
+blew the light out in the hall, and, opening the front door, stood with
+him for a silent moment on the threshold. Then they shook hands once
+more, and with a whispered good-night, parted.
+
+Celia, returning to the blue and yellow room, lighted a cigarette and
+helped herself to some Benedictine in the glass which Theron had used.
+She looked meditatively at this little glass for a moment, turning it
+about in her fingers with a smile. The smile warmed itself suddenly into
+a joyous laugh. She tossed the glass aside, and, holding out her flowing
+skirts with both hands, executed a swinging pirouette in front of the
+gravely beautiful statue of the armless woman.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+It was apparent to the Rev. Theron Ware, from the very first moment of
+waking next morning, that both he and the world had changed over night.
+The metamorphosis, in the harsh toils of which he had been laboring
+blindly so long, was accomplished. He stood forth, so to speak, in a new
+skin, and looked about him, with perceptions of quite an altered kind,
+upon what seemed in every way a fresh existence. He lacked even the
+impulse to turn round and inspect the cocoon from which he had emerged.
+Let the past bury the past. He had no vestige of interest in it.
+
+The change was not premature. He found himself not in the least confused
+by it, or frightened. Before he had finished shaving, he knew himself
+to be easily and comfortably at home in his new state, and master of all
+its requirements.
+
+It seemed as if Alice, too, recognized that he had become another man,
+when he went down and took his chair at the breakfast table. They had
+exchanged no words since their parting in the depot-yard the previous
+evening--an event now faded off into remote vagueness in Theron's
+mind. He smiled brilliantly in answer to the furtive, half-sullen,
+half-curious glance she stole at him, as she brought the dishes in.
+
+“Ah! potatoes warmed up in cream!” he said, with hearty pleasure in his
+tone. “What a mind-reader you are, to be sure!”
+
+“I'm glad you're feeling so much better,” she said briefly, taking her
+seat.
+
+“Better?” he returned. “I'm a new being!”
+
+She ventured to look him over more freely, upon this assurance. He
+perceived and catalogued, one by one, the emotions which the small brain
+was expressing through those shallow blue eyes of hers. She was
+turning over this, that, and the other hostile thought and childish
+grievance--most of all she was dallying with the idea of asking him
+where he had been till after midnight. He smiled affably in the face of
+this scattering fire of peevish glances, and did not dream of resenting
+any phase of them all.
+
+“I am going down to Thurston's this morning, and order that piano sent
+up today,” he announced presently, in a casual way.
+
+“Why, Theron, can we afford it?” the wife asked, regarding him with
+surprise.
+
+“Oh, easily enough,” he replied light-heartedly. “You know they've
+increased my salary.”
+
+She shook her head. “No, I didn't. How should I? You don't realize it,”
+ she went on, dolefully, “but you're getting so you don't tell me the
+least thing about your affairs nowadays.”
+
+Theron laughed aloud. “You ought to be grateful--such melancholy affairs
+as mine have been till now,” he declared--“that is, if it weren't absurd
+to think such a thing.” Then, more soberly, he explained: “No, my girl,
+it is you who don't realize. I am carrying big projects in my mind--big,
+ambitious thoughts and plans upon which great things depend. They no
+doubt make me seem preoccupied and absent-minded; but it is a wife's
+part to understand, and make allowances, and not intrude trifles which
+may throw everything out of gear. Don't think I'm scolding, my girl. I
+only speak to reassure you and--and help you to comprehend. Of course I
+know that you wouldn't willingly embarrass my--my career.”
+
+“Of course not,” responded Alice, dubiously; “but--but--”
+
+“But what? Theron felt compelled by civility to say, though on the
+instant he reproached himself for the weakness of it.
+
+“Well--I hardly know how to say it,” she faltered, “but it was nicer in
+the old days, before you bothered your head about big projects, and
+your career, as you call it, and were just a good, earnest, simple young
+servant of the Lord. Oh, Theron!” she broke forth suddenly, with tearful
+zeal, “I get sometimes lately almost scared lest you should turn out to
+be a--a BACKSLIDER!”
+
+The husband sat upright, and hardened his countenance. But yesterday the
+word would have had in it all sorts of inherited terrors for him. This
+morning's dawn of a new existence revealed it as merely an empty and
+stupid epithet.
+
+“These are things not to be said,” he admonished her, after a moment's
+pause, and speaking with carefully measured austerity. “Least of all are
+they to be said to a clergyman--by his wife.”
+
+It was on the tip of Alice's tongue to retort, “Better by his wife than
+by outsiders!” but she bit her lips, and kept the gibe back. A rebuke of
+this form and gravity was a novelty in their relations. The fear that it
+had been merited troubled, even while it did not convince, her mind, and
+the puzzled apprehension was to be read plainly enough on her face.
+
+Theron, noting it, saw a good deal more behind. Really, it was amazing
+how much wiser he had grown all at once. He had been married for years,
+and it was only this morning that he suddenly discovered how a wife
+ought to be handled. He continued to look sternly away into space for a
+little. Then his brows relaxed slowly and under the visible influence of
+melting considerations. He nodded his head, turned toward her abruptly,
+and broke the silence with labored amiability.
+
+“Come, come--the day began so pleasantly--it was so good to feel well
+again--let us talk about the piano instead. That is,” he added, with an
+obvious overture to playfulness, “if the thought of having a piano is
+not too distasteful to you.”
+
+Alice yielded almost effusively to his altered mood. They went together
+into the sitting-room, to measure and decide between the two available
+spaces which were at their disposal, and he insisted with resolute
+magnanimity on her settling this question entirely by herself. When at
+last he mentioned the fact that it was Friday, and he would look over
+some sermon memoranda before he went out, Alice retired to the kitchen
+in openly cheerful spirits.
+
+Theron spread some old manuscript sermons before him on his desk,
+and took down his scribbling-book as well. But there his application
+flagged, and he surrendered himself instead, chin on hand, to staring
+out at the rhododendron in the yard. He recalled how he had seen Soulsby
+patiently studying this identical bush. The notion of Soulsby, not
+knowing at all how to sing, yet diligently learning those sixths,
+brought a smile to his mind; and then he seemed to hear Celia calling
+out over her shoulder, “That's what Chopin does--he sings!” The spirit
+of that wonderful music came back to him, enfolded him in its wings. It
+seemed to raise itself up--a palpable barrier between him and all that
+he had known and felt and done before. That was his new birth--that
+marvellous night with the piano. The conceit pleased him--not the less
+because there flashed along with it the thought that it was a poet that
+had been born. Yes; the former country lout, the narrow zealot, the
+untutored slave groping about in the dark after silly superstitions,
+cringing at the scowl of mean Pierces and Winches, was dead. There was
+an end of him, and good riddance. In his place there had been born a
+Poet--he spelled the word out now unabashed--a child of light, a
+lover of beauty and sweet sounds, a recognizable brother to Renan and
+Chopin--and Celia!
+
+Out of the soothing, tenderly grateful revery, a practical suggestion
+suddenly took shape. He acted upon it without a moment's delay, getting
+out his letter-pad, and writing hurriedly--
+
+“Dear Miss Madden,--Life will be more tolerable to me if before
+nightfall I can know that there is a piano under my roof. Even if it
+remains dumb, it will be some comfort to have it here and look at it,
+and imagine how a great master might make it speak.
+
+“Would it be too much to beg you to look in at Thurston's, say at eleven
+this forenoon, and give me the inestimable benefit of your judgment in
+selecting an instrument?
+
+“Do not trouble to answer this, for I am leaving home now, but shall
+call at Thurston's at eleven, and wait.
+
+“Thanking you in anticipation,
+
+“I am--”
+
+Here Theron's fluency came to a sharp halt. There were adverbs enough
+and to spare on the point of his pen, but the right one was not easy to
+come at. “Gratefully,” “faithfully,” “sincerely,” “truly”--each in turn
+struck a false note. He felt himself not quite any of these things. At
+last he decided to write just the simple word “yours,” and then wavered
+between satisfaction at his boldness, dread lest he had been over-bold,
+and, worst of the lot, fear that she would not notice it one way or
+the other--all the while he sealed and addressed the letter, put it
+carefully in an inner pocket, and got his hat.
+
+There was a moment's hesitation as to notifying the kitchen of his
+departure. The interests of domestic discipline seemed to point the
+other way. He walked softly through the hall, and let himself out by the
+front door without a sound.
+
+Down by the canal bridge he picked out an idle boy to his mind--a lad
+whose aspect appeared to promise intelligence as a messenger, combined
+with large impartiality in sectarian matters. He was to have ten
+cents on his return; and he might report himself to his patron at the
+bookstore yonder.
+
+Theron was grateful to the old bookseller for remaining at his desk in
+the rear. There was a tacit compliment in the suggestion that he was
+not a mere customer, demanding instant attention. Besides, there was no
+keeping “Thurston's” out of conversations in this place.
+
+Loitering along the shelves, the young minister's eye suddenly found
+itself arrested by a name on a cover. There were a dozen narrow volumes
+in uniform binding, huddled together under a cardboard label of “Eminent
+Women Series.” Oddly enough, one of these bore the title “George Sand.”
+ Theron saw there must be some mistake, as he took the book down, and
+opened it. His glance hit by accident upon the name of Chopin. Then he
+read attentively until almost the stroke of eleven.
+
+“We have to make ourselves acquainted with all sorts of queer phases of
+life,” he explained in self-defence to the old bookseller, then counting
+out the money for the book from his lean purse. He smiled as he added,
+“There seems something almost wrong about taking advantage of the
+clergyman's discount for a life of George Sand.”
+
+“I don't know,” answered the other, pleasantly. “Guess she wasn't
+so much different from the rest of 'em--except that she didn't mind
+appearances. We know about her. We don't know about the others.”
+
+“I must hurry,” said Theron, turning on his heel. The haste with which
+he strode out of the store, crossed the street, and made his way toward
+Thurston's, did not prevent his thinking much upon the astonishing
+things he had encountered in this book. Their relation to Celia forced
+itself more and more upon his mind. He could recall the twinkle in
+her eye, the sub-mockery in her tone, as she commented with that
+half-contemptuous “Yes--George something!” upon his blundering
+ignorance. His mortification at having thus exposed his dull rusticity
+was swallowed up in conjectures as to just what her tolerant familiarity
+with such things involved. He had never before met a young unmarried
+woman who would have confessed to him any such knowledge. But then, of
+course, he had never known a girl who resembled Celia in any other way.
+He recognized vaguely that he must provide himself with an entire new
+set of standards by which to measure and comprehend her. But it was for
+the moment more interesting to wonder what her standards were. Did she
+object to George Sand's behavior? Or did she sympathize with that sort
+of thing? Did those statues, and the loose-flowing diaphonous toga
+and unbound hair, the cigarettes, the fiery liqueur, the deliberately
+sensuous music--was he to believe that they signified--?
+
+“Good-morning, Mr. Ware. You have managed by a miracle to hit on one of
+my punctual days,” said Celia.
+
+She was standing on the doorstep, at the entrance to the musical
+department of Thurston's. He had not noticed before the fact that the
+sun was shining. The full glare of its strong light, enveloping her
+figure as she stood, and drawing the dazzled eye for relief to the bower
+of softened color, close beneath her parasol of creamy silk and lace,
+was what struck him now first of all. It was as if Celia had brought the
+sun with her.
+
+Theron shook hands with her, and found joy in the perception, that his
+own hand trembled. He put boldly into words the thought that came to
+him.
+
+“It was generous of you,” he said, “to wait for me out here, where all
+might delight in the sight of you, instead of squandering the privilege
+on a handful of clerks inside.”
+
+Miss Madden beamed upon him, and nodded approval.
+
+“Alcibiades never turned a prettier compliment,” she remarked. They went
+in together at this, and Theron made a note of the name.
+
+During the ensuing half-hour, the young minister followed about even
+more humbly than the clerks in Celia's commanding wake. There were a
+good many pianos in the big show-room overhead, and Theron found himself
+almost awed by their size and brilliancy of polish, and the thought of
+the tremendous sum of money they represented altogether. Not so with the
+organist. She ordered them rolled around this way or that, as if they
+had been so many checkers on a draught-board. She threw back their
+covers with the scant ceremony of a dispensary dentist opening paupers'
+mouths. She exploited their several capacities with masterful hands,
+not deigning to seat herself, but just slightly bending forward, and
+sweeping her fingers up and down their keyboards--able, domineering
+fingers which pounded, tinkled, meditated, assented, condemned, all in
+a flash, and amid what affected the layman's ears as a hopelessly
+discordant hubbub.
+
+Theron moved about in the group, nursing her parasol in his arms, and
+watching her. The exaggerated deference which the clerks and salesmen
+showed to her as the rich Miss Madden, seemed to him to be mixed with a
+certain assertion of the claims of good-fellowship on the score of her
+being a musician. There undoubtedly was a sense of freemasonry between
+them. They alluded continually in technical terms to matters of which he
+knew nothing, and were amused at remarks of hers which to him carried no
+meaning whatever. It was evident that the young men liked her, and that
+their liking pleased her. It thrilled him to think that she knew he
+liked her, too, and to recall what abundant proofs she had given that
+here, also, she had pleasure in the fact. He clung insistently to the
+memory of these evidences. They helped him to resist a disagreeable
+tendency to feel himself an intruder, an outsider, among these
+pianoforte experts.
+
+When it was all over, Celia waved the others aside, and talked with
+Theron. “I suppose you want me to tell you the truth,” she said.
+“There's nothing here really good. It is always much better to buy of
+the makers direct.”
+
+“Do they sell on the instalment plan?” he asked. There was a wistful
+effect in his voice which caught her attention.
+
+She looked away--out through the window on the street below--for
+a moment. Then her eyes returned to his, and regarded him with a
+comforting, friendly, half-motherly glance, recalling for all the world
+the way Sister Soulsby had looked at him at odd times.
+
+“Oh, you want it at once--I see,” she remarked softly. “Well, this
+Adelberger is the best value for the money.”
+
+Mr. Ware followed her finger, and beheld with dismay that it pointed
+toward the largest instrument in the room--a veritable leviathan among
+pianos. The price of this had been mentioned as $600. He turned over the
+fact that this was two-thirds his yearly salary, and found the courage
+to shake his head.
+
+“It would be too large--much too large--for the room,” he explained.
+“And, besides, it is more than I like to pay--or CAN pay, for that
+matter.” It was pitiful to be explaining such details, but there was no
+help for it.
+
+They picked out a smaller one, which Celia said was at least of fair
+quality. “Now leave all the bargaining to me,” she adjured him. “These
+prices that they talk about in the piano trade are all in the air. There
+are tremendous discounts, if one knows how to insist upon them. All
+you have to do is to tell them to send it to your house--you wanted it
+today, you said?”
+
+“Yes--in memory of yesterday,” he murmured.
+
+She herself gave the directions, and Thurston's people, now all salesmen
+again, bowed grateful acquiescence. Then she sailed regally across the
+room and down the stairs, drawing Theron in her train. The hirelings
+made salaams to him as well; it would have been impossible to interpose
+anything so trivial and squalid as talk about terms and dates of
+payment.
+
+“I am ever so much obliged to you,” he said fervently, in the
+comparative solitude of the lower floor. She had paused to look at
+something in the book-department.
+
+“Of course I was entirely at your service; don't mention it,” she
+replied, reaching forth her hand in an absent way for her parasol.
+
+He held up instead the volume he had purchased. “Guess what that is! You
+never would guess in this wide world!” His manner was surcharged with a
+sense of the surreptitious.
+
+“Well, then, there's no good trying, IS there?” commented Celia, her
+glance roving again toward the shelves.
+
+“It is a life of George Sand,” whispered Theron. “I've been reading it
+this morning--all the Chopin part--while I was waiting for you.”
+
+To his surprise, there was an apparently displeased contraction of her
+brows as he made this revelation. For the instant, a dreadful fear of
+having offended her seized upon and sickened him. But then her face
+cleared, as by magic. She smiled, and let her eyes twinkle in laughter
+at him, and lifted a forefinger in the most winning mockery of
+admonition.
+
+“Naughty! naughty!” she murmured back, with a roguishly solemn wink.
+
+He had no response ready for this, but mutely handed her the parasol.
+The situation had suddenly grown too confused for words, or even sequent
+thoughts. Uppermost across the hurly-burly of his mind there scudded the
+singular reflection that he should never hear her play on that new piano
+of his. Even as it flashed by out of sight, he recognized it for one of
+the griefs of his life; and the darkness which followed seemed nothing
+but a revolt against the idea of having a piano at all. He would
+countermand the order. He would--but she was speaking again.
+
+They had strolled toward the door, and her voice was as placidly
+conventional as if the talk had never strayed from the subject of
+pianos. Theron with an effort pulled himself together, and laid hold of
+her words.
+
+“I suppose you will be going the other way,” she was saying. “I shall
+have to be at the church all day. We have just got a new Mass over from
+Vienna, and I'm head over heels in work at it. I can have Father Forbes
+to myself today, too. That bear of a doctor has got the rheumatism, and
+can't come out of his cave, thank Heaven!”
+
+And then she was receding from view, up the sunlit, busy sidewalk, and
+Theron, standing on the doorstep, ruefully rubbed his chin. She had said
+he was going the other way, and, after a little pause, he made her words
+good, though each step he took seemed all in despite of his personal
+inclinations. Some of the passers-by bowed to him, and one or two
+paused as if to shake hands and exchange greetings. He nodded responses
+mechanically, but did not stop. It was as if he feared to interrupt the
+process of lifting his reluctant feet and propelling them forward, lest
+they should wheel and scuttle off in the opposite direction.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+Deliberate as his progress was, the diminishing number of store-fronts
+along the sidewalk, and the increasing proportion of picket-fences
+enclosing domestic lawns, forced upon Theron's attention the fact that
+he was nearing home. It was a trifle past the hour for his midday meal.
+He was not in the least hungry; still less did he feel any desire just
+now to sit about in that library living-room of his. Why should he go
+home at all? There was no reason whatever--save that Alice would be
+expecting him. Upon reflection, that hardly amounted to a reason. Wives,
+with their limited grasp of the realities of life, were always expecting
+their husbands to do things which it turned out not to be feasible for
+them to do. The customary male animal spent a considerable part of his
+life in explaining to his mate why it had been necessary to disappoint
+or upset her little plans for his comings and goings. It was in the very
+nature of things that it should be so.
+
+Sustained by these considerations, Mr. Ware slackened his steps, then
+halted irresolutely, and after a minute's hesitation, entered the small
+temperance restaurant before which, as by intuition, he had paused. The
+elderly woman who placed on the tiny table before him the tea and rolls
+he ordered, was entirely unknown to him, he felt sure, yet none the less
+she smiled at him, and spoke almost familiarly--“I suppose Mrs. Ware is
+at the seaside, and you are keeping bachelor's hall?”
+
+“Not quite that,” he responded stiffly, and hurried through the meagre
+and distasteful repast, to avoid any further conversation.
+
+There was an idea underlying her remark, however, which recurred to him
+when he had paid his ten cents and got out on the street again. There
+was something interesting in the thought of Alice at the seaside.
+Neither of them had ever laid eyes on salt water, but Theron took for
+granted the most extravagant landsman's conception of its curative and
+invigorating powers. It was apparent to him that he was going to pay
+much greater attention to Alice's happiness and well-being in the future
+than he had latterly done. He had bought her, this very day, a superb
+new piano. He was going to simply insist on her having a hired girl. And
+this seaside notion--why, that was best of all.
+
+His fancy built up pleasant visions of her feasting her delighted eyes
+upon the marvel of a great ocean storm, or roaming along a beach strewn
+with wonderful marine shells, exhibiting an innocent joy in their
+beauty. The fresh sea-breeze blew through her hair, as he saw her in
+mind's eye, and brought the hardy flush of health back upon her rather
+pallid cheeks. He was prepared already hardly to know her, so robust and
+revivified would she have become, by the time he went down to the depot
+to meet her on her return.
+
+For his imagination stopped short of seeing himself at the seaside.
+It sketched instead pictures of whole weeks of solitary academic calm,
+alone with his books and his thoughts. The facts that he had no books,
+and that nobody dreamed of interfering with his thoughts, subordinated
+themselves humbly to his mood. The prospect, as he mused fondly upon
+it, expanded to embrace the priest's and the doctor's libraries; the
+thoughts which he longed to be alone with involved close communion
+with their thoughts. It could not but prove a season of immense mental
+stimulation and ethical broadening. It would have its lofty poetic and
+artistic side as well; the languorous melodies of Chopin stole over his
+revery, as he dwelt upon these things, and soft azure and golden lights
+modelled forth the exquisite outlines of tall marble forms.
+
+He opened the gate leading to Dr. Ledsmar's house. His walk had brought
+him quite out of the town, and up, by a broad main highway which
+yet took on all sorts of sylvan charms, to a commanding site on the
+hillside. Below, in the valley, lay Octavius, at one end half-hidden in
+factory smoke, at the other, where narrow bands of water gleamed upon
+the surface of a broad plain piled symmetrically with lumber, presenting
+an oddly incongruous suggestion of forest odors and the simplicity of
+the wilderness. In the middle distance, on gradually rising ground,
+stretched a wide belt of dense, artificial foliage, peeping through
+which tiled turrets and ornamented chimneys marked the polite residences
+of those who, though they neither stoked the furnace fires to the west,
+nor sawed the lumber on the east, lived in purple and fine linen from
+the profits of this toil. Nearer at hand, pastures with grazing cows on
+the one side of the road, and the nigh, weather-stained board fence
+of the race-course on the other, completed the jumble of primitive
+rusticity and urban complications characterizing the whole picture.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar's house, toward which Theron's impulses had been secretly
+leading him ever since Celia's parting remark about the rheumatism, was
+of that spacious and satisfying order of old-fashioned houses which men
+of leisure and means built for themselves while the early traditions of
+a sparse and contented homogeneous population were still strong in the
+Republic. There was a hospitable look about its wide veranda, its broad,
+low bulk, and its big, double front door, which did not fit at all with
+the sketch of a man-hating recluse that the doctor had drawn of himself.
+
+Theron had prepared his mind for the effect of being admitted by a
+Chinaman, and was taken somewhat aback when the door was opened by the
+doctor himself. His reception was pleasant enough, almost cordial, but
+the sense of awkwardness followed him into his host's inner room and
+rested heavily upon his opening speech.
+
+“I heard, quite by accident, that you were ill,” he said, laying aside
+his hat.
+
+“It's nothing at all,” replied Ledsmar. “Merely a stiff shoulder that I
+wear from time to time in memory of my father. It ought to be quite gone
+by nightfall. It was good of you to come, all the same. Sit down if you
+can find a chair. As usual, we are littered up to our eyes here. That's
+it--throw those things on the floor.”
+
+Mr. Ware carefully deposited an armful of pamphlets on the rug at his
+feet, and sat down. Litter was indeed the word for what he saw about
+him. Bookcases, chairs, tables, the corners of the floor, were all
+buried deep under disorderly strata of papers, diagrams, and opened
+books. One could hardly walk about without treading on them. The dust
+which danced up into the bar of sunshine streaming in from the window,
+as the doctor stepped across to another chair, gave Theron new ideas
+about the value of Chinese servants.
+
+“I must thank you, first of all, doctor,” he began, “for your kindness
+in coming when I was ill. 'I was sick, and ye visited me.'”
+
+“You mustn't think of it that way,” said Ledsmar; “your friend came for
+me, and of course I went; and gladly too. There was nothing that I
+could do, or that anybody could do. Very interesting man, that friend
+of yours. And his wife, too--both quite out of the common. I don't know
+when I've seen two such really genuine people. I should like to have
+known more of them. Are they still here?”
+
+“They went yesterday,” Theron replied. His earlier shyness had worn off,
+and he felt comfortably at his ease. “I don't know,” he went on, “that
+the word 'genuine' is just what would have occurred to me to describe
+the Soulsbys. They are very interesting people, as you say--MOST
+interesting--and there was a time, I dare say, when I should have
+believed in their sincerity. But of course I saw them and their
+performance from the inside--like one on the stage of a theatre, you
+know, instead of in the audience, and--well, I understand things better
+than I used to.”
+
+The doctor looked over his spectacles at him with a suggestion of
+inquiry in his glance, and Theron continued: “I had several long talks
+with her; she told me very frankly the whole story of her life--and and
+it was decidedly queer, I can assure you! I may say to you--you will
+understand what I mean--that since my talk with you, and the books you
+lent me, I see many things differently. Indeed, when I think upon it
+sometimes my old state of mind seems quite incredible to me. I can use
+no word for my new state short of illumination.”
+
+Dr. Ledsmar continued to regard his guest with that calm, interrogatory
+scrutiny of his. He did not seem disposed to take up the great issue of
+illumination. “I suppose,” he said after a little, “no woman can come
+in contact with a priest for any length of time WITHOUT telling him the
+'story of her life,' as you call it. They all do it. The thing amounts
+to a law.”
+
+The young minister's veins responded with a pleasurable thrill to the
+use of the word “priest” in obvious allusion to himself. “Perhaps in
+fairness I ought to explain,” he said, “that in her case it was only
+done in the course of a long talk about myself. I might say that it was
+by way of kindly warning to me. She saw how I had become unsettled in
+many--many of my former views--and she was nervous lest this should lead
+me to--to--”
+
+“To throw up the priesthood,” the doctor interposed upon his hesitation.
+“Yes, I know the tribe. Why, my dear sir, your entire profession would
+have perished from the memory of mankind, if it hadn't been for women.
+It is a very curious subject. Lots of thinkers have dipped into it,
+but no one has gone resolutely in with a search-light and exploited the
+whole thing. Our boys, for instance, traverse in their younger years all
+the stages of the childhood of the race. They have terrifying dreams
+of awful monsters and giant animals of which they have never so much
+as heard in their waking hours; they pass through the lust for digging
+caves, building fires, sleeping out in the woods, hunting with bows
+and arrows--all remote ancestral impulses; they play games with stones,
+marbles, and so on at regular stated periods of the year which they
+instinctively know, just as they were played in the Bronze Age, and
+heaven only knows how much earlier. But the boy goes through all this,
+and leaves it behind him--so completely that the grown man feels himself
+more a stranger among boys of his own place who are thinking and doing
+precisely the things he thought and did a few years before, than he
+would among Kurds or Esquimaux. But the woman is totally different. She
+is infinitely more precocious as a girl. At an age when her slow brother
+is still stubbing along somewhere in the neolithic period, she has flown
+way ahead to a kind of mediaeval stage, or dawn of mediaevalism, which
+is peculiarly her own. Having got there, she stays there; she dies
+there. The boy passes her, as the tortoise did the hare. He goes on,
+if he is a philosopher, and lets her remain in the dark ages, where she
+belongs. If he happens to be a fool, which is customary, he stops and
+hangs around in her vicinity.”
+
+Theron smiled. “We priests,” he said, and paused again to enjoy the
+words--“I suppose I oughtn't to inquire too closely just where we belong
+in the procession.”
+
+“We are considering the question impersonally,” said the doctor. “First
+of all, what you regard as religion is especially calculated to attract
+women. They remain as superstitious today, down in the marrow of their
+bones, as they were ten thousand years ago. Even the cleverest of
+them are secretly afraid of omens, and respect auguries. Think of the
+broadest women you know. One of them will throw salt over her shoulder
+if she spills it. Another drinks money from her cup by skimming the
+bubbles in a spoon. Another forecasts her future by the arrangement of
+tea-grounds. They make the constituency to which an institution based
+on mysteries, miracles, and the supernatural generally, would naturally
+appeal. Secondly, there is the personality of the priest.”
+
+“Yes,” assented Ware. There rose up before him, on the instant, the
+graceful, portly figure and strong, comely face of Father Forbes.
+
+“Women are not a metaphysical people. They do not easily follow
+abstractions. They want their dogmas and religious sentiments embodied
+in a man, just as they do their romantic fancies. Of course you
+Protestants, with your married clergy, see less of the effects of this
+than celibates do, but even with you there is a great deal in it.
+Why, the very institution of celibacy itself was forced upon the early
+Christian Church by the scandal of rich Roman ladies loading bishops
+and handsome priests with fabulous gifts until the passion for currying
+favor with women of wealth, and marrying them or wheedling their
+fortunes from them, debauched the whole priesthood. You should read your
+Jerome.”
+
+“I will--certainly,” said the listener, resolving to remember the name
+and refer it to the old bookseller.
+
+“Well, whatever laws one sect or another makes, the woman's attitude
+toward the priest survives. She desires to see him surrounded by
+flower-pots and candles, to have him smelling of musk. She would like
+to curl his hair, and weave garlands in it. Although she is not learned
+enough to have ever heard of such things, she intuitively feels in his
+presence a sort of backwash of the old pagan sensuality and lascivious
+mysticism which enveloped the priesthood in Greek and Roman days. Ugh!
+It makes one sick!”
+
+Dr. Ledsmar rose, as he spoke, and dismissed the topic with a dry little
+laugh. “Come, let me show you round a bit,” he said. “My shoulder is
+easier walking than sitting.”
+
+“Have you never written a book yourself?” asked Theron, getting to his
+feet.
+
+“I have a thing on serpent-worship,” the scientist replied--“written
+years ago.”
+
+“I can't tell you how I should enjoy reading it,” urged the other.
+
+The doctor laughed again. “You'll have to learn German, then, I 'm
+afraid. It is still in circulation in Germany, I believe, on its merits
+as a serious book. I haven't a copy of the edition in English. THAT was
+all exhausted by collectors who bought it for its supposed obscenity,
+like Burton's 'Arabian Nights.' Come this way, and I will show you my
+laboratory.”
+
+They moved out of the room, and through a passage, Ledsmar talking as
+he led the way. “I took up that subject, when I was at college, by a
+curious chance. I kept a young monkey in my rooms, which had been born
+in captivity. I brought home from a beer hall--it was in Germany--some
+pretzels one night, and tossed one toward the monkey. He jumped toward
+it, then screamed and ran back shuddering with fright. I couldn't
+understand it at first. Then I saw that the curled pretzel, lying there
+on the floor, was very like a little coiled-up snake. The monkey had
+never seen a snake, but it was in his blood to be afraid of one.
+That incident changed my whole life for me. Up to that evening, I had
+intended to be a lawyer.”
+
+Theron did not feel sure that he had understood the point of the
+anecdote. He looked now, without much interest, at some dark little
+tanks containing thick water, a row of small glass cases with adders and
+other lesser reptiles inside, and a general collection of boxes, jars,
+and similar receptacles connected with the doctor's pursuits. Further
+on was a smaller chamber, with a big empty furnace, and shelves bearing
+bottles and apparatus like a drugstore.
+
+It was pleasanter in the conservatory--a low, spacious structure with
+broad pathways between the plants, and an awning over the sunny side
+of the roof. The plants were mostly orchids, he learned. He had read
+of them, but never seen any before. No doubt they were curious; but he
+discovered nothing to justify the great fuss made about them. The heat
+grew oppressive inside, and he was glad to emerge into the garden. He
+paused under the grateful shade of a vine-clad trellis, took off his
+hat, and looked about him with a sigh of relief. Everything seemed
+old-fashioned and natural and delightfully free from pretence in the
+big, overgrown field of flowers and shrubs.
+
+Theron recalled with some surprise Celia's indictment of the doctor as a
+man with no poetry in his soul. “You must be extremely fond of flowers,”
+ he remarked.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar shrugged his well shoulder. “They have their points,” he
+said briefly. “These are all dioecious here. Over beyond are monoecious
+species. My work is to test the probabilities for or against Darwin's
+theory that hermaphroditism in plants is a late by-product of these
+earlier forms.”
+
+“And is his theory right?” asked Mr. Ware, with a polite show of
+interest.
+
+“We may know in the course of three or four hundred years,” replied
+Ledsmar. He looked up into his guest's face with a quizzical half-smile.
+“That is a very brief period for observation when such a complicated
+question as sex is involved,” he added. “We have been studying the
+female of our own species for some hundreds of thousands of years, and
+we haven't arrived at the most elementary rules governing her actions.”
+
+They had moved along to a bed of tall plants, the more forward of which
+were beginning to show bloom. “Here another task will begin next month,”
+ the doctor observed. “These are salvias, pentstemons, and antirrhinums,
+or snapdragons, planted very thick for the purpose. Humble-bees bore
+holes through their base, to save the labor of climbing in and out of
+the flowers, and we don't quite know yet why some hive-bees discover and
+utilize these holes at once, while others never do. It may be merely the
+old-fogy conservatism of the individual, or there may be a law in it.”
+
+These seemed very paltry things for a man of such wisdom to bother
+his head about. Theron looked, as he was bidden, at the rows of hives
+shining in the hot sun on a bench along the wall, but offered no comment
+beyond a casual, “My mother was always going to keep bees, but somehow
+she never got around to it. They say it pays very well, though.”
+
+“The discovery of the reason why no bee will touch the nectar of the
+EPIPACTIS LATIFOLIA, though it is sweet to our taste, and wasps are
+greedy for it, WOULD pay,” commented the doctor. “Not like a blue
+rhododendron, in mere money, but in recognition. Lots of men have
+achieved a half-column in the 'Encyclopedia Britannica' on a smaller
+basis than that.”
+
+They stood now at the end of the garden, before a small, dilapidated
+summer-house. On the bench inside, facing him, Theron saw a strange
+recumbent figure stretched at full length, apparently sound asleep, or
+it might be dead. Looking closer, with a startled surprise, he made out
+the shaven skull and outlandish garb of a Chinaman. He turned toward his
+guide in the expectation of a scene.
+
+The doctor had already taken out a note-book and pencil, and was drawing
+his watch from his pocket. He stepped into the summer-house, and,
+lifting the Oriental's limp arm, took account of his pulse. Then, with
+head bowed low, side-wise, he listened for the heart-action. Finally, he
+somewhat brusquely pushed back one of the Chinaman's eyelids, and made
+a minute inspection of what the operation disclosed. Returning to the
+light, he inscribed some notes in his book, put it back in his pocket,
+and came out. In answer to Theron's marvelling stare, he pointed toward
+a pipe of odd construction lying on the floor beneath the sleeper.
+
+“This is one of my regular afternoon duties,” he explained, again with
+the whimsical half-smile. “I am increasing his dose monthly by regular
+stages, and the results promise to be rather remarkable. Heretofore,
+observations have been made mostly on diseased or morbidly deteriorated
+subjects. This fellow of mine is strong as an ox, perfectly nourished,
+and watched over intelligently. He can assimilate opium enough to kill
+you and me and every other vertebrate creature on the premises, without
+turning a hair, and he hasn't got even fairly under way yet.”
+
+The thing was unpleasant, and the young minister turned away. They
+walked together up the path toward the house. His mind was full now of
+the hostile things which Celia had said about the doctor. He had vaguely
+sympathized with her then, upon no special knowledge of his own. Now he
+felt that his sentiments were vehemently in accord with hers. The doctor
+WAS a beast.
+
+And yet--as they moved slowly along through the garden the thought took
+sudden shape in his mind--it would be only justice for him to get also
+the doctor's opinion of Celia. Even while they offended and repelled
+him, he could not close his eyes to the fact that the doctor's
+experiments and occupations were those of a patient and exact man of
+science--a philosopher. And what he had said about women--there was
+certainly a great deal of acumen and shrewd observation in that. If
+he would only say what he really thought about Celia, and about her
+relations with the priest! Yes, Theron recognized now there was nothing
+else that he so much needed light upon as those puzzling ties between
+Celia and Father Forbes.
+
+He paused, with a simulated curiosity, about one of the flower-beds.
+“Speaking of women and religion”--he began, in as casual a tone as he
+could command--“I notice curiously enough in my own case, that as I
+develop in what you may call the--the other direction, my wife, who
+formerly was not especially devote, is being strongly attracted by the
+most unthinking and hysterical side of--of our church system.”
+
+The doctor looked at him, nodded, and stooped to nip some buds from a
+stalk in the bed.
+
+“And another case,” Theron went on--“of course it was all so new and
+strange to me--but the position which Miss Madden seems to occupy about
+the Catholic Church here--I suppose you had her in mind when you spoke.”
+
+Ledsmar stood up. “My mind has better things to busy itself with than
+mad asses of that description,” he replied. “She is not worth talking
+about--a mere bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed lewdness. If
+she were even a type, she might be worth considering; but she is simply
+an abnormal sport, with a little brain addled by notions that she is
+like Hypatia, and a large impudence rendered intolerable by the fact
+that she has money. Her father is a decent man. He ought to have her
+whipped.”
+
+Mr. Ware drew himself erect, as he listened to these outrageous words.
+It would be unmanly, he felt, to allow such comments upon an absent
+friend to pass unrebuked. Yet there was the courtesy due to a host to
+be considered. His mind, fluttering between these two extremes,
+alighted abruptly upon a compromise. He would speak so as to show his
+disapproval, yet not so as to prevent his finding out what he wanted to
+know. The desire to hear Ledsmar talk about Celia and the priest
+seemed now to have possessed him for a long time, to have dictated his
+unpremeditated visit out here, to have been growing in intensity all the
+while he pretended to be interested in orchids and bees and the drugged
+Chinaman. It tugged passionately at his self-control as he spoke.
+
+“I cannot in the least assent to your characterization of the lady,” he
+began with rhetorical dignity.
+
+“Bless me!” interposed the doctor, with deceptive cheerfulness, “that is
+not required of you at all. It is a strictly personal opinion, offered
+merely as a contribution to the general sum of hypotheses.”
+
+“But,” Theron went on, feeling his way, “of course, I gathered that
+evening that you had prejudices in the matter; but these are rather
+apart from the point I had in view. We were speaking, you will remember,
+of the traditional attitude of women toward priests--wanting to curl
+their hair and put flowers in it, you know, and that suggested to me
+some individual illustrations, and it occurred to me to wonder just what
+were the relations between Miss Madden and--and Father Forbes. She
+said this morning, for instance--I happened to meet her, quite by
+accident--that she was going to the church to practise a new piece, and
+that she could have Father Forbes to herself all day. Now that would
+be quite an impossible remark in our--that is, in any Protestant
+circles--and purely as a matter of comparison, I was curious to ask you
+just how much there was in it. I ask you, because going there so much
+you have had exceptional opportunities for--”
+
+A sharp exclamation from his companion interrupted the clergyman's
+hesitating monologue. It began like a high-pitched, violent word, but
+dwindled suddenly into a groan of pain. The doctor's face, too, which
+had on the flash of Theron's turning seemed given over to unmixed anger,
+took on an expression of bodily suffering instead.
+
+“My shoulder has grown all at once excessively painful,” he said
+hastily. “I'm afraid I must ask you to excuse me, Mr. Ware.”
+
+Carrying the afflicted side with ostentatious caution, he led the way
+without ado round the house to the front gate on the road. He had put
+his left hand under his coat to press it against his aching shoulder,
+and his right hung palpably helpless. This rendered it impossible for
+him to shake hands with his guest in parting.
+
+“You're sure there's nothing I can do,” said Theron, lingering on the
+outer side of the gate. “I used to rub my father's shoulders and back;
+I'd gladly--”
+
+“Oh, not for worlds!” groaned the doctor. His anguish was so impressive
+that Theron, as he walked down the road, quite missed the fact that
+there had been no invitation to come again.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar stood for a minute or two, his gaze meditatively following
+the retreating figure. Then he went in, opening the front door with
+his right hand, and carrying himself once more as if there were no such
+thing as rheumatism in the world. He wandered on through the hall into
+the laboratory, and stopped in front of the row of little tanks full of
+water.
+
+Some deliberation was involved in whatever his purpose might be, for he
+looked from one tank to another with a pondering, dilatory gaze. At last
+he plunged his hand into the opaque fluid and drew forth a long, slim,
+yellowish-green lizard, with a coiling, sinuous tail and a pointed, evil
+head. The reptile squirmed and doubled itself backward around his wrist,
+darting out and in with dizzy swiftness its tiny forked tongue.
+
+The doctor held the thing up to the light, and, scrutinizing it through
+his spectacles, nodded his head in sedate approval. A grim smile curled
+in his beard.
+
+“Yes, you are the type,” he murmured to it, with evident enjoyment in
+the conceit. “Your name isn't Johnny any more. It's the Rev. Theron
+Ware.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+The annual camp-meeting of the combined Methodist districts of Octavius
+and Thessaly was held this year in the second half of September, a
+little later than usual. Of the nine days devoted to this curious
+survival of primitive Wesleyanism, the fifth fell upon a Saturday. On
+the noon of that day the Rev. Theron Ware escaped for some hours from
+the burden of work and incessant observation which he shared with twenty
+other preachers, and walked alone in the woods.
+
+The scene upon which he turned his back was one worth looking at. A
+spacious, irregularly defined clearing in the forest lay level as a
+tennis-court, under the soft haze of autumn sunlight. In the centre was
+a large, roughly constructed frame building, untouched by paint, but
+stained and weather-beaten with time. Behind it were some lines of
+horse-sheds, and still further on in that direction, where the trees
+began, the eye caught fragmentary glimpses of low roofs and the fronts
+of tiny cottages, withdrawn from full view among the saplings and
+underbrush. At the other side of the clearing, fully fourscore tents
+were pitched, some gray and mended, others dazzlingly white in their
+newness. The more remote of these tents fell into an orderly arrangement
+of semi-circular form, facing that part of the engirdling woods where
+the trees were largest, and their canopy of overhanging foliage was
+lifted highest from the ground. Inside this half-ring of tents were many
+rounded rows of benches, which followed in narrowing lines the idea of
+an amphitheatre cut in two. In the centre, just under the edge of the
+roof of boughs, rose a wooden pagoda, in form not unlike an open-air
+stand for musicians. In front of this, and leading from it on the level
+of its floor, there projected a platform, railed round with aggressively
+rustic woodwork. The nearest benches came close about this platform.
+
+At the hour when Theron started away, there were few enough signs of
+life about this encampment. The four or five hundred people who were in
+constant residence were eating their dinners in the big boarding-house,
+or the cottages or the tents. It was not the time of day for strangers.
+Even when services were in progress by daylight, the regular attendants
+did not make much of a show, huddled in a gray-black mass at the front
+of the auditorium, by comparison with the great green and blue expanses
+of nature about them.
+
+The real spectacle was in the evening when, as the shadows gathered, big
+clusters of kerosene torches, hung on the trees facing the audience were
+lighted. The falling darkness magnified the glow of the lights, and
+the size and importance of what they illumined. The preacher, bending
+forward over the rails of the platform, and fastening his eyes upon the
+abashed faces of those on the “anxious seat” beneath him, borrowed an
+effect of druidical mystery from the wall of blackness about him, from
+the flickering reflections on the branches far above, from the cool
+night air which stirred across the clearing. The change was in the blood
+of those who saw and heard him, too. The decorum and half-heartedness
+of their devotions by day deepened under the glare of the torches into a
+fervent enthusiasm, even before the services began. And if there was in
+the rustic pulpit a man whose prayers or exhortations could stir their
+pulses, they sang and groaned and bellowed out their praises with an
+almost barbarous license, such as befitted the wilderness.
+
+But in the evening not all were worshippers. For a dozen miles round
+on the country-side, young farm-workers and their girls regarded the
+camp-meeting as perhaps the chief event of the year--no more to be
+missed than the country fair or the circus, and offering, from many
+points of view, more opportunities for genuine enjoyment than either.
+Their behavior when they came was pretty bad--not the less so because
+all the rules established by the Presiding Elders for the regulation of
+strangers took it for granted that they would act as viciously as
+they knew how. These sight-seers sometimes ventured to occupy the back
+benches where the light was dim. More often they stood outside, in the
+circular space between the tents and the benches, and mingled cat-calls,
+drovers' yelps, and all sorts of mocking cries and noises with the
+“Amens” of the earnest congregation. Their rough horse-play on the
+fringe of the sanctified gathering was grievous enough; everybody knew
+that much worse things went on further out in the surrounding darkness.
+Indeed, popular report gave to these external phases of the
+camp-meeting an even more evil fame than attached to the later moonlight
+husking-bees, or the least reputable of the midwinter dances at Dave
+Randall's low halfway house.
+
+Cynics said that the Methodists found consolation for this scandal in
+the large income they derived from their unruly visitors' gate-money.
+This was unfair. No doubt the money played its part, but there was
+something else far more important. The pious dwellers in the camp,
+intent upon reviving in their poor modern way the character and
+environment of the heroic early days, felt the need of just this hostile
+and scoffing mob about them to bring out the spirit they sought. Theirs
+was pre-eminently a fighting religion, which languished in peaceful
+fair weather, but flamed high in the storm. The throng of loafers and
+light-minded worldlings of both sexes, with their jeering interruptions
+and lewd levity of conduct, brought upon the scene a kind of visible
+personal devil, with whom the chosen could do battle face to face. The
+daylight services became more and more perfunctory, as the sojourn in
+the woods ran its course, and interest concentrated itself upon the
+night meetings, for the reason that THEN came the fierce wrestle with
+a Beelzebub of flesh and blood. And it was not so one-sided a contest,
+either!
+
+No evening passed without its victories for the pulpit. Careless or
+mischievous young people who were pushed into the foremost ranks of the
+mockers, and stood grinning and grimacing under the lights, would of
+a sudden feel a spell clamped upon them. They would hear a strange,
+quavering note in the preacher's voice, catch the sense of a piercing,
+soul-commanding gleam in his eye--not at all to be resisted. These
+occult forces would take control of them, drag them forward as in a
+dream to the benches under the pulpit, and abase them there like
+worms in the dust. And then the preacher would descend, and the elders
+advance, and the torch-fires would sway and dip before the wind of the
+mighty roar that went up in triumph from the brethren.
+
+These combats with Satan at close quarters, if they made the week-day
+evenings exciting, reacted with an effect of crushing dulness upon the
+Sunday services. The rule was to admit no strangers to the grounds
+from Saturday night to Monday morning. Every year attempts were made to
+rescind or modify this rule, and this season at least three-fourths of
+the laymen in attendance had signed a petition in favor of opening
+the gates. The two Presiding Elders, supported by a dozen of the older
+preachers, resisted the change, and they had the backing of the more
+bigoted section of the congregation from Octavius. The controversy
+reached a point where Theron's Presiding Elder threatened to quit the
+grounds, and the leaders of the open-Sunday movement spoke freely of the
+ridiculous figure which its cranks and fanatics made poor Methodism cut
+in the eyes of modern go-ahead American civilization. Then Theron Ware
+saw his opportunity, and preached an impromptu sermon upon the sanctity
+of the Sabbath, which ended all discussion. Sometimes its arguments
+seemed to be on one side, sometimes on the other, but always they were
+clothed with so serene a beauty of imagery, and moved in such a lofty
+and rarefied atmosphere of spiritual exaltation, that it was impossible
+to link them to so sordid a thing as this question of gate-money. When
+he had finished, nobody wanted the gates opened. The two factions found
+that the difference between them had melted out of existence. They sat
+entranced by the charm of the sermon; then, glancing around at the empty
+benches, glaringly numerous in the afternoon sunlight, they whispered
+regrets that ten thousand people had not been there to hear that
+marvellous discourse. Theron's conquest was of exceptional dimensions.
+The majority, whose project he had defeated, were strangers who
+appreciated and admired his effort most. The little minority of his own
+flock, though less susceptible to the influence of graceful diction
+and delicately balanced rhetoric, were proud of the distinction he had
+reflected upon them, and delighted with him for having won their
+fight. The Presiding Elders wrung his hand with a significant grip. The
+extremists of his own charge beamed friendship upon him for the first
+time. He was the veritable hero of the week.
+
+The prestige of this achievement made it the easier for Theron to get
+away by himself next day, and walk in the woods. A man of such power
+had a right to solitude. Those who noted his departure from the camp
+remembered with pleasure that he was to preach again on the morrow.
+He was going to commune with God in the depths of the forest, that the
+Message next day might be clearer and more luminous still.
+
+Theron strolled for a little, with an air of aimlessness, until he was
+well outside the more or less frequented neighborhood of the camp.
+Then he looked at the sun and the lay of the land with that informing
+scrutiny of which the farm-bred boy never loses the trick, turned, and
+strode at a rattling pace down the hillside. He knew nothing personally
+of this piece of woodland--a spur of the great Adirondack wilderness
+thrust southward into the region of homesteads and dairies and
+hop-fields--but he had prepared himself by a study of the map, and
+he knew where he wanted to go. Very Soon he hit upon the path he had
+counted upon finding, and at this he quickened his gait.
+
+Three months of the new life had wrought changes in Theron. He bore
+himself more erectly, for one thing; his shoulders were thrown back, and
+seemed thicker. The alteration was even more obvious in his face. The
+effect of lank, wistful, sallow juvenility had vanished. It was the
+countenance of a mature, well-fed, and confident man, firmer and more
+rounded in its outlines, and with a glow of health on its whole surface.
+Under the chin were the suggestions of fulness which bespeak an easy
+mind. His clothes were new; the frock-coat fitted him, and the thin,
+dark-colored autumn overcoat, with its silk lining exposed at the
+breast, gave a masculine bulk and shape to his figure. He wore a shining
+tall hat, and, in haste though he was, took pains not to knock it
+against low-hanging branches.
+
+All had gone well--more than well--with him. The second Quarterly
+Conference had passed without a ripple. Both the attendance and the
+collections at his church were larger than ever before, and the tone of
+the congregation toward him was altered distinctly for the better. As
+for himself, he viewed with astonished delight the progress he had made
+in his own estimation. He had taken Sister Soulsby's advice, and the
+results were already wonderful. He had put aside, once and for all, the
+thousand foolish trifles and childish perplexities which formerly had
+racked his brain, and worried him out of sleep and strength. He borrowed
+all sorts of books boldly now from the Octavius public library, and
+could swim with a calm mastery and enjoyment upon the deep waters into
+which Draper and Lecky and Laing and the rest had hurled him. He dallied
+pleasurably, a little languorously, with a dozen aspects of the case
+against revealed religion, ranging from the mild heterodoxy of Andover's
+qualms to the rude Ingersoll's rollicking negation of God himself, as a
+woman of coquetry might play with as many would-be lovers. They amused
+him; they were all before him to choose; and he was free to postpone
+indefinitely the act of selection. There was a sense of the luxurious in
+this position which softened bodily as well as mental fibres. He ceased
+to grow indignant at things below or outside his standards, and he
+bought a small book which treated of the care of the hand and finger
+nails.
+
+Alice had accepted with deference his explanation that shapely hands
+played so important a part in pulpit oratory. For that matter, she now
+accepted whatever he said or did with admirable docility. It was months
+since he could remember her venturing upon a critical attitude toward
+him.
+
+She had not wished to leave home, for the seaside or any other resort,
+during the summer, but had worked outside in her garden more than usual.
+This was inexpensive, and it seemed to do her as much good as a holiday
+could have done. Her new devotional zeal was now quite an odd thing; it
+had not slackened at all from the revival pitch. At the outset she had
+tried several times to talk with her husband upon this subject. He
+had discouraged conversation about her soul and its welfare, at first
+obliquely, then, under compulsion, with some directness. His thoughts
+were absorbed, he said, by the contemplation of vast, abstract schemes
+of creation and the government of the universe, and it only diverted and
+embarrassed his mind to try to fasten it upon the details of personal
+salvation. Thereafter the topic was not broached between them.
+
+She bestowed a good deal of attention, too, upon her piano. The knack of
+a girlish nimbleness of touch had returned to her after a few weeks, and
+she made music which Theron supposed was very good--for her. It pleased
+him, at all events, when he sat and listened to it; but he had a far
+greater pleasure, as he listened, in dwelling upon the memories of the
+yellow and blue room which the sounds always brought up. Although three
+months had passed, Thurston's had never asked for the first payment
+on the piano, or even sent in a bill. This impressed him as being
+peculiarly graceful behavior on his part, and he recognized its delicacy
+by not going near Thurston's at all.
+
+An hour's sharp walk, occasionally broken by short cuts across open
+pastures, but for the most part on forest paths, brought Theron to the
+brow of a small knoll, free from underbrush, and covered sparsely with
+beech-trees. The ground was soft with moss and the powdered remains of
+last year's foliage; the leaves above him were showing the first yellow
+stains of autumn. A sweet smell of ripening nuts was thick upon the
+air, and busy rustlings and chirpings through the stillness told how the
+chipmunks and squirrels were attending to their harvest.
+
+Theron had no ears for these noises of the woodland. He had halted, and
+was searching through the little vistas offered between the stout gray
+trunks of the beeches for some sign of a more sophisticated sort. Yes!
+there were certainly voices to be heard, down in the hollow. And
+now, beyond all possibility of mistake, there came up to him the low,
+rhythmic throb of music. It was the merest faint murmur of music, made
+up almost wholly of groaning bass notes, but it was enough. He moved
+down the slope, swiftly at first, then with increasing caution. The
+sounds grew louder as he advanced, until he could hear the harmony of
+the other strings in its place beside the uproar of the big fiddles, and
+distinguish from both the measured noise of many feet moving as one.
+
+He reached a place from which, himself unobserved, he could overlook
+much of what he had come to see.
+
+The bottom of the glade below him lay out in the full sunshine, as flat
+and as velvety in its fresh greenness as a garden lawn. Its open expanse
+was big enough to accommodate several distinct crowds, and here the
+crowds were--one massed about an enclosure in which young men were
+playing at football, another gathered further off in a horse-shoe curve
+at the end of a baseball diamond, and a third thronging at a point where
+the shade of overhanging woods began, focussed upon a centre of interest
+which Theron could not make out. Closer at hand, where a shallow stream
+rippled along over its black-slate bed, some little boys, with legs
+bared to the thighs, were paddling about, under the charge of two men
+clad in long black gowns. There were others of these frocked monitors
+scattered here and there upon the scene--pallid, close-shaven, monkish
+figures, who none the less wore modern hats, and superintended with
+knowledge the games of the period. Theron remembered that these were the
+Christian Brothers, the semi-monastic teachers of the Catholic school.
+
+And this was the picnic of the Catholics of Octavius. He gazed in
+mingled amazement and exhilaration upon the spectacle. There seemed
+to be literally thousands of people on the open fields before him, and
+apparently there were still other thousands in the fringes of the woods
+round about. The noises which arose from this multitude--the shouts of
+the lads in the water, the playful squeals of the girls in the swings,
+the fused uproar of the more distant crowds, and above all the diligent,
+ordered strains of the dance-music proceeding from some invisible
+distance in the greenwood--charmed his ears with their suggestion of
+universal merriment. He drew a long breath--half pleasure, half wistful
+regret--as he remembered that other gathering in the forest which he had
+left behind.
+
+At any rate, it should be well behind him today, whatever the morrow
+might bring! Evidently he was on the wrong side of the circle for the
+headquarters of the festivities. He turned and walked to the right
+through the beeches, making a detour, under cover, of the crowds at
+play. At last he rounded the long oval of the clearing, and found
+himself at the very edge of that largest throng of all, which had been
+too far away for comprehension at the beginning. There was no mystery
+now. A rough, narrow shed, fully fifty feet in length, imposed itself
+in an arbitrary line across the face of this crowd, dividing it into two
+compact halves. Inside this shed, protected all round by a waist-high
+barrier of boards, on top of which ran a flat, table-like covering, were
+twenty men in their shirt-sleeves, toiling ceaselessly to keep abreast
+of the crowd's thirst for beer. The actions of these bartenders greatly
+impressed Theron. They moved like so many machines, using one
+hand, apparently, to take money and give change, and with the other
+incessantly sweeping off rows of empty glasses, and tossing forward in
+their place fresh, foaming glasses five at a time. Hundreds of arms and
+hands were continually stretched out, on both sides of the shed, toward
+this streaming bar, and through the babel of eager cries rose without
+pause the racket of mallets tapping new kegs.
+
+Theron had never seen any considerable number of his fellow-citizens
+engaged in drinking lager beer before. His surprise at the facility of
+those behind the bar began to yield, upon observation, to a profound
+amazement at the thirst of those before it. The same people seemed to
+be always in front, emptying the glasses faster than the busy men inside
+could replenish them, and clamoring tirelessly for more. Newcomers had
+to force their way to the bar by violent efforts, and once there they
+stayed until pushed bodily aside. There were actually women to be seen
+here and there in the throng, elbowing and shoving like the rest for a
+place at the front. Some of the more gallant young men fought their
+way outward, from time to time, carrying for safety above their heads
+glasses of beer which they gave to young and pretty girls standing on
+the fringe of the crowd, among the trees.
+
+Everywhere a remarkable good-humor prevailed. Once a sharp fight broke
+out, just at the end of the bar nearest Theron, and one young man was
+knocked down. A rush of the onlookers confused everything before the
+minister's eyes for a minute, and then he saw the aggrieved combatant up
+on his legs again, consenting under the kindly pressure of the crowd to
+shake hands with his antagonist, and join him in more beer. The incident
+caught his fancy. There was something very pleasingly human, he thought,
+in this primitive readiness to resort to fisticuffs, and this frank and
+genial reconciliation.
+
+Perhaps there was something contagious in this wholesale display of
+thirst, for the Rev. Mr. Ware became conscious of a notion that he
+should like to try a glass of beer. He recalled having heard that
+lager was really a most harmless beverage. Of course it was out of the
+question that he should show himself at the bar. Perhaps some one would
+bring him out a glass, as if he were a pretty girl. He looked about for
+a possible messenger. Turning, he found himself face to face with two
+smiling people, into whose eyes he stared for an instant in dumfounded
+blankness. Then his countenance flashed with joy, and he held out both
+hands in greeting. It was Father Forbes and Celia.
+
+“We stole down upon you unawares,” said the priest, in his cheeriest
+manner. He wore a brown straw hat, and loose clothes hardly at all
+clerical in form, and had Miss Madden's arm drawn lightly within his
+own. “We could barely believe our eyes--that it could be you whom we
+saw, here among the sinners!”
+
+“I am in love with your sinners,” responded Theron, as he shook hands
+with Celia, and trusted himself to look fully into her eyes. “I've had
+five days of the saints, over in another part of the woods, and they've
+bored the head off me.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+At the command of Father Forbes, a lad who was loitering near them went
+down through the throng to the bar, and returned with three glasses of
+beer. It pleased the Rev. Mr. Ware that the priest should have taken
+it for granted that he would do as the others did. He knocked his glass
+against theirs in compliance with a custom strange to him, but which
+they seemed to understand very well. The beer itself was not so
+agreeable to the taste as he had expected, but it was cold and
+refreshing.
+
+When the boy had returned with the glasses, the three stood for a moment
+in silence, meditatively watching the curious scene spread below them.
+Beyond the bar, Theron could catch now through the trees regularly
+recurring glimpses of four or five swings in motion. These were nearest
+him, and clearest to the vision as well, at the instant when they
+reached their highest forward point. The seats were filled with girls,
+some of them quite grown young women, and their curving upward sweep
+through the air was disclosing at its climax a remarkable profusion of
+white skirts and black stockings. The sight struck him as indecorous in
+the extreme, and he turned his eyes away. They met Celia's; and there
+was something latent in their brown depths which prompted him, after a
+brief dalliance of interchanging glances, to look again at the swings.
+
+“That old maid Curran is really too ridiculous, with those white
+stockings of hers,” remarked Celia; “some friend ought to tell her to
+dye them.”
+
+“Or pad them,” suggested Father Forbes, with a gay little chuckle. “I
+daresay the question of swings and ladies' stockings hardly arises with
+you, over at the camp-meeting, Mr. Ware?”
+
+Theron laughed aloud at the conceit. “I should say not!” he replied.
+
+“I'm just dying to see a camp-meeting!” said Celia. “You hear such racy
+accounts of what goes on at them.”
+
+“Don't go, I beg of you!” urged Theron, with doleful emphasis. “Don't
+let's even talk about them. I should like to feel this afternoon as if
+there was no such thing within a thousand miles of me as a camp-meeting.
+Do you know, all this interests me enormously. It is a revelation to me
+to see these thousands of good, decent, ordinary people, just frankly
+enjoying themselves like human beings. I suppose that in this whole huge
+crowd there isn't a single person who will mention the subject of his
+soul to any other person all day long.”
+
+“I should think the assumption was a safe one,” said the priest,
+smilingly, “unless,” he added on afterthought, “it be by way of a genial
+profanity. There used to be some old Clare men who said 'Hell to my
+soul!' when they missed at quoits, but I haven't heard it for a long
+time. I daresay they're all dead.”
+
+“I shall never forget that death-bed--where I saw you first,” remarked
+Theron, musingly. “I date from that experience a whole new life. I have
+been greatly struck lately, in reading our 'Northern Christian Advocate'
+to see in the obituary notices of prominent Methodists how over and over
+again it is recorded that they got religion in their youth through being
+frightened by some illness of their own, or some epidemic about them.
+The cholera year of 1832 seems to have made Methodists hand over
+fist. Even to this day our most successful revivalists, those who work
+conversions wholesale wherever they go, do it more by frightful pictures
+of hell-fire surrounding the sinner's death-bed than anything else.
+You could hear the same thing at our camp-meeting tonight, if you were
+there.”
+
+“There isn't so much difference as you think,” said Father Forbes,
+dispassionately. “Your people keep examining their souls, just as
+children keep pulling up the bulbs they have planted to see are there
+any roots yet. Our people are more satisfied to leave their souls alone,
+once they have been planted, so to speak, by baptism. But fear of hell
+governs them both, pretty much alike. As I remember saying to you once
+before, there is really nothing new under the sun. Even the saying isn't
+new. Though there seem to have been the most tremendous changes in
+races and civilizations and religions, stretching over many thousands
+of years, yet nothing is in fact altered very much. Where religions are
+concerned, the human race are still very like savages in a dangerous
+wood in the dark, telling one another ghost stories around a camp-fire.
+They have always been like that.”
+
+“What nonsense!” cried Celia. “I have no patience with such gloomy
+rubbish. The Greeks had a religion full of beauty and happiness and
+light-heartedness, and they weren't frightened of death at all. They
+made the image of death a beautiful boy, with a torch turned down. Their
+greatest philosophers openly preached and practised the doctrine of
+suicide when one was tired of life. Our own early Church was full of
+these broad and beautiful Greek ideas. You know that yourself! And it
+was only when your miserable Jeromes and Augustines and Cyrils brought
+in the abominable meannesses and cruelties of the Jewish Old Testament,
+and stamped out the sane and lovely Greek elements in the Church,
+that Christians became the poor, whining, cowardly egotists they are,
+troubling about their little tin-pot souls, and scaring themselves in
+their churches by skulls and crossbones.”
+
+“My dear Celia,” interposed the priest, patting her shoulder gently, “we
+will have no Greek debate today. Mr. Ware has been permitted to taboo
+camp-meetings, and I claim the privilege to cry off on Greeks. Look at
+those fellows down there, trampling over one another to get more beer.
+What have they to do with Athens, or Athens with them? I take it, Mr.
+Ware,” he went on, with a grave face but a twinkling eye, “that what we
+are observing here in front of us is symbolical of a great ethical
+and theological revolution, which in time will modify and control the
+destiny of the entire American people. You see those young Irishmen
+there, struggling like pigs at a trough to get their fill of German
+beer. That signifies a conquest of Teuton over Kelt more important and
+far-reaching in its results than the landing of Hengist and Horsa.
+The Kelt has come to grief heretofore--or at least been forced to play
+second fiddle to other races--because he lacked the right sort of a
+drink. He has in his blood an excess of impulsive, imaginative, even
+fantastic qualities. It is much easier for him to make a fool of
+himself, to begin with, than it is for people of slower wits and more
+sluggish temperaments. When you add whiskey to that, or that essence of
+melancholia which in Ireland they call 'porther,' you get the Kelt at
+his very weakest and worst. These young men down there are changing all
+that. They have discovered lager. Already many of them can outdrink
+the Germans at their own beverage. The lager-drinking Irishman in a few
+generations will be a new type of humanity--the Kelt at his best. He
+will dominate America. He will be THE American. And his church--with
+the Italian element thrown clean out of it, and its Pope living, say, in
+Baltimore or Georgetown--will be the Church of America.”
+
+“Let us have some more lager at once,” put in Celia. “This revolution
+can't be hurried forward too rapidly.”
+
+Theron could not feel sure how much of the priest's discourse was in
+jest, how much in earnest. “It seems to me,” he said, “that as things
+are going, it doesn't look much as if the America of the future will
+trouble itself about any kind of a church. The march of science must
+very soon produce a universal scepticism. It is in the nature of human
+progress. What all intelligent men recognize today, the masses must
+surely come to see in time.”
+
+Father Forbes laughed outright this time. “My dear Mr. Ware,” he said,
+as they touched glasses again, and sipped the fresh beer that had been
+brought them, “of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless
+and empty as this idea that humanity progresses. The savage's natural
+impression is that the world he sees about him was made for him, and
+that the rest of the universe is subordinated to him and his world, and
+that all the spirits and demons and gods occupy themselves exclusively
+with him and his affairs. That idea was the basis of every pagan
+religion, and it is the basis of the Christian religion, simply because
+it is the foundation of human nature. That foundation is just as firm
+and unshaken today as it was in the Stone Age. It will always
+remain, and upon it will always be built some kind of a religious
+superstructure. 'Intelligent men,' as you call them, really have very
+little influence, even when they all pull one way. The people as a whole
+soon get tired of them. They give too much trouble. The most powerful
+forces in human nature are self-protection and inertia. The middle-aged
+man has found out that the chief wisdom in life is to bend to the
+pressures about him, to shut up and do as others do. Even when he thinks
+he has rid his own mind of superstitions, he sees that he will best
+enjoy a peaceful life by leaving other peoples' superstitions alone.
+That is always the ultimate view of the crowd.”
+
+“But I don't see,” observed Theron, “granting that all this is true, how
+you think the Catholic Church will come out on top. I could understand
+it of Unitarianism, or Universalism, or the Episcopal Church, where
+nobody seems to have to believe particularly in anything except the
+beauty of its burial service, but I should think the very rigidity of
+the Catholic creed would make it impossible. There everything is hard
+and fast; nothing is elastic; there is no room for compromise.”
+
+“The Church is always compromising,” explained the priest, “only it does
+it so slowly that no one man lives long enough to quite catch it at the
+trick. No; the great secret of the Catholic Church is that it doesn't
+debate with sceptics. No matter what points you make against it, it
+is never betrayed into answering back. It simply says these things are
+sacred mysteries, which you are quite free to accept and be saved, or
+reject and be damned. There is something intelligible and fine about
+an attitude like that. When people have grown tired of their absurd and
+fruitless wrangling over texts and creeds which, humanly speaking, are
+all barbaric nonsense, they will come back to repose pleasantly under
+the Catholic roof, in that restful house where things are taken for
+granted. There the manners are charming, the service excellent, the
+decoration and upholstery most acceptable to the eye, and the music”--he
+made a little mock bow here to Celia--“the music at least is divine.
+There you have nothing to do but be agreeable, and avoid scandal, and
+observe the convenances. You are no more expected to express doubts
+about the Immaculate Conception than you are to ask the lady whom you
+take down to dinner how old she is. Now that is, as I have said,
+an intelligent and rational church for people to have. As the Irish
+civilize themselves--you observe them diligently engaged in the process
+down below there--and the social roughness of their church becomes
+softened and ameliorated, Americans will inevitably be attracted toward
+it. In the end, it will embrace them all, and be modified by them, and
+in turn influence their development, till you will have a new nation and
+a new national church, each representative of the other.”
+
+“And all this is to be done by lager beer!” Theron ventured to comment,
+jokingly. He was conscious of a novel perspiration around the bridge of
+his nose, which was obviously another effect of the drink.
+
+The priest passed the pleasantry by. “No,” he said seriously; “what you
+must see is that there must always be a church. If one did not exist, it
+would be necessary to invent it. It is needed, first and foremost, as a
+police force. It is needed, secondly, so to speak, as a fire insurance.
+It provides the most even temperature and pure atmosphere for the growth
+of young children. It furnishes the best obtainable social machinery for
+marrying off one's daughters, getting to know the right people, patching
+up quarrels, and so on. The priesthood earn their salaries as the agents
+for these valuable social arrangements. Their theology is thrown in as
+a sort of intellectual diversion, like the ritual of a benevolent
+organization. There are some who get excited about this part of it, just
+as one hears of Free-Masons who believe that the sun rises and sets to
+exemplify their ceremonies. Others take their duties more quietly, and,
+understanding just what it all amounts to, make the best of it, like you
+and me.”
+
+Theron assented to the philosophy and the compliment by a grave bow.
+“Yes, that is the idea--to make the best of it,” he said, and fastened
+his regard boldly this time upon the swings.
+
+“We were both ordained by our bishops,” continued the priest, “at an
+age when those worthy old gentlemen would not have trusted our combined
+wisdom to buy a horse for them.”
+
+“And I was married,” broke in Theron, with an eagerness almost vehement,
+“when I had only just been ordained! At the worst, YOU had only the
+Church fastened upon your back, before you were old enough to know
+what you wanted. It is easy enough to make the best of THAT, but it is
+different with me.”
+
+A marked silence followed this outburst. The Rev. Mr. Ware had never
+spoken of his marriage to either of these friends before; and something
+in their manner seemed to suggest that they did not find the subject
+inviting, now that it had been broached. He himself was filled with a
+desire to say more about it. He had never clearly realized before what
+a genuine grievance it was. The moisture at the top of his nose merged
+itself into tears in the corners of his eyes, as the cruel enormity of
+the sacrifice he had made in his youth rose before him. His whole life
+had been fettered and darkened by it. He turned his gaze from the swings
+toward Celia, to claim the sympathy he knew she would feel for him.
+
+But Celia was otherwise engaged. A young man had come up to her--a tall
+and extremely thin young man, soberly dressed, and with a long, gaunt,
+hollow-eyed face, the skin of which seemed at once florid and pale. He
+had sandy hair and the rough hands of a workman; but he was speaking to
+Miss Madden in the confidential tones of an equal.
+
+“I can do nothing at all with him,” this newcomer said to her. “He'll
+not be said by me. Perhaps he'd listen to you!”
+
+“It's likely I'll go down there!” said Celia. “He may do what he likes
+for all me! Take my advice, Michael, and just go your way, and leave
+him to himself. There was a time when I would have taken out my eyes
+for him, but it was love wasted and thrown away. After the warnings he's
+had, if he WILL bring trouble on himself, let's make it no affair of
+ours.”
+
+Theron had found himself exchanging glances of inquiry with this young
+man. “Mr. Ware,” said Celia, here, “let me introduce you to my brother
+Michael--my full brother.”
+
+Mr. Ware remembered him now, and began, in response to the other's
+formal bow, to say something about their having met in the dark, inside
+the church. But Celia held up her hand. “I'm afraid, Mr. Ware,” she said
+hurriedly, “that you are in for a glimpse of the family skeleton. I will
+apologize for the infliction in advance.”
+
+Wonderingly, Theron followed her look, and saw another young man who
+had come up the path from the crowd below, and was close upon them. The
+minister recognized in him a figure which had seemed to be the centre of
+almost every group about the bar that he had studied in detail. He was
+a small, dapper, elegantly attired youth, with dark hair, and the
+handsome, regularly carved face of an actor. He advanced with a smiling
+countenance and unsteady step--his silk hat thrust back upon his head,
+his frock-coat and vest unbuttoned, and his neckwear disarranged--and
+saluted the company with amiability.
+
+“I saw you up here, Father Forbes,” he said, with a thickened and
+erratic utterance. “Whyn't you come down and join us? I'm setting 'em up
+for everybody. You got to take care of the boys, you know. I'll blow in
+the last cent I've got in the world for the boys, every time, and they
+know it. They're solider for me than they ever were for anybody. That's
+how it is. If you stand by the boys, the boys'll stand by you. I'm going
+to the Assembly for this district, and they ain't nobody can stop me.
+The boys are just red hot for me. Wish you'd come down, Father Forbes,
+and address a few words to the meeting--just mention that I'm a
+candidate, and say I'm bound to win, hands down. That'll make you solid
+with the boys, and we'll be all good fellows together. Come on down!”
+
+The priest affably disengaged his arm from the clutch which the speaker
+had laid upon it, and shook his head in gentle deprecation. “No, no; you
+must excuse me, Theodore,” he said. “We mustn't meddle in politics, you
+know.”
+
+“Politics be damned!” urged Theodore, grabbing the priest's other arm,
+and tugging at it stoutly to pull him down the path. “I say, boys” he
+shouted to those below, “here's Father Forbes, and he's going to come
+down and address the meeting. Come on, Father! Come down, and have a
+drink with the boys!”
+
+It was Celia who sharply pulled his hand away from the priest's arm
+this time. “Go away with you!” she snapped in low, angry tones at the
+intruder. “You should be ashamed of yourself! If you can't keep sober
+yourself, you can at least keep your hands off the priest. I should
+think you'd have more decency, when you're in such a state as this, than
+to come where I am. If you've no respect for yourself, you might have
+that much respect for me! And before strangers, too!
+
+“Oh, I mustn't come where YOU are, eh?” remarked the peccant Theodore,
+straightening himself with an elaborate effort. “You've bought these
+woods, have you? I've got a hundred friends here, all the same, for
+every one you'll ever have in your life, Red-head, and don't you forget
+it.”
+
+“Go and spend your money with them, then, and don't come insulting
+decent people,” said Celia.
+
+“Before strangers, too!” the young man called out, with beery sarcasm.
+“Oh, we'll take care of the strangers all right.” He had not seemed to
+be aware of Theron's presence, much less his identity, before; but he
+turned to him now with a knowing grin. “I'm running for the Assembly,
+Mr. Ware,” he said, speaking loudly and with deliberate effort to avoid
+the drunken elisions and comminglings to which his speech tended, “and I
+want you to fix up the Methodists solid for me. I'm going to drive over
+to the camp-meeting tonight, me and some of the boys in a barouche, and
+I'll put a twenty-dollar bill on their plate. Here it is now, if you
+want to see it.”
+
+As the young man began fumbling in a vest-pocket, Theron gathered his
+wits together.
+
+“You'd better not go this evening,” he said, as convincingly as he
+knew how; “because the gates will be closed very early, and the
+Saturday-evening services are of a particularly special nature, quite
+reserved for those living on the grounds.”
+
+“Rats!” said Theodore, raising his head, and abandoning the search for
+the bill. “Why don't you speak out like a man, and say you think I'm too
+drunk?”
+
+“I don't think that is a question which need arise between us, Mr.
+Madden,” murmured Theron, confusedly.
+
+“Oh, don't you make any mistake! A hell of a lot of questions arise
+between us, Mr. Ware,” cried Theodore, with a sudden accession of vigor
+in tone and mien. “And one of 'em is--go away from me, Michael!--one of
+'em is, I say, why don't you leave our girls alone? They've got their
+own priests to make fools of themselves over, without any sneak of a
+Protestant parson coming meddling round them. You're a married man into
+the bargain; and you've got in your house this minute a piano that my
+sister bought and paid for. Oh, I've seen the entry in Thurston's books!
+You have the cheek to talk to me about being drunk--why--”
+
+These remarks were never concluded, for Father Forbes here clapped a
+hand abruptly over the offending mouth, and flung his free arm in a
+tight grip around the young man's waist. “Come with me, Michael!” he
+said, and the two men led the reluctant and resisting Theodore at a
+sharp pace off into the woods.
+
+Theron and Celia stood and watched them disappear among the undergrowth.
+“It's the dirty Foley blood that's in him,” he heard her say, as if
+between clenched teeth.
+
+The girl's big brown eyes, when Theron looked into them again, were
+still fixed upon the screen of foliage, and dilated like those of a
+Medusa mask. The blood had gone away, and left the fair face and neck
+as white, it seemed to him, as marble. Even her lips, fiercely bitten
+together, appeared colorless. The picture of consuming and powerless
+rage which she presented, and the shuddering tremor which ran over her
+form, as visible as the quivering track of a gust of wind across a pond,
+awed and frightened him.
+
+Tenderness toward her helpless state came too, and uppermost. He drew
+her arm into his, and turned their backs upon the picnic scene.
+
+“Let us walk a little up the path into the woods,” he said, “and get
+away from all this.”
+
+“The further away the better,” she answered bitterly, and he felt the
+shiver run through her again as she spoke.
+
+The methodical waltz-music from that unseen dancing platform rose again
+above all other sounds. They moved up the woodland path, their steps
+insensibly falling into the rhythm of its strains, and vanished from
+sight among the trees.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+Theron and Celia walked in silence for some minutes, until the noises
+of the throng they had left behind were lost. The path they followed had
+grown indefinite among the grass and creepers of the forest carpet;
+now it seemed to end altogether in a little copse of young birches, the
+delicately graceful stems of which were clustered about a parent stump,
+long since decayed and overgrown with lichens and layers of thick moss.
+
+As the two paused, the girl suddenly sank upon her knees, then threw
+herself face forward upon the soft green bark which had formed itself
+above the roots of the ancient mother-tree. Her companion looked down
+in pained amazement at what he saw. Her body shook with the violence
+of recurring sobs, or rather gasps of wrath and grief Her hands, with
+stiffened, claw-like fingers, dug into the moss and tangle of tiny
+vines, and tore them by the roots. The half-stifled sounds of weeping
+that arose from where her face grovelled in the leaves were terrible
+to his ears. He knew not what to say or do, but gazed in resourceless
+suspense at the strange figure she made. It seemed a cruelly long time
+that she lay there, almost at his feet, struggling fiercely with the
+fury that was in her.
+
+All at once the paroxysms passed away, the sounds of wild weeping
+ceased. Celia sat up, and with her handkerchief wiped the tears and
+leafy fragments from her face. She rearranged her hat and the braids of
+her hair with swift, instinctive touches, brushed the woodland debris
+from her front, and sprang to her feet.
+
+“I'm all right now,” she said briskly. There was palpable effort in her
+light tone, and in the stormy sort of smile which she forced upon her
+blotched and perturbed countenance, but they were only too welcome to
+Theron's anxious mood.
+
+“Thank God!” he blurted out, all radiant with relief. “I feared you were
+going to have a fit--or something.”
+
+Celia laughed, a little artificially at first, then with a genuine
+surrender to the comic side of his visible fright. The mirth came back
+into the brown depths of her eyes again, and her face cleared itself of
+tear-stains and the marks of agitation. “I AM a nice quiet party for
+a Methodist minister to go walking in the woods with, am I not?” she
+cried, shaking her skirts and smiling at him.
+
+“I am not a Methodist minister--please!” answered Theron--“at least not
+today--and here--with you! I am just a man--nothing more--a man who has
+escaped from lifelong imprisonment, and feels for the first time what it
+is to be free!”
+
+“Ah, my friend,” Celia said, shaking her head slowly, “I'm afraid you
+deceive yourself. You are not by any means free. You are only looking
+out of the window of your prison, as you call it. The doors are locked,
+just the same.”
+
+“I will smash them!” he declared, with confidence. “Or for that matter,
+I HAVE smashed them--battered them to pieces. You don't realize what
+progress I have made, what changes there have been in me since that
+night, you remember that wonderful night! I am quite another being, I
+assure you! And really it dates from way beyond that--why, from the very
+first evening, when I came to you in the church. The window in Father
+Forbes' room was open, and I stood by it listening to the music next
+door, and I could just faintly see on the dark window across the
+alley-way a stained-glass picture of a woman. I suppose it was the
+Virgin Mary. She had hair like yours, and your face, too; and that is
+why I went into the church and found you. Yes, that is why.”
+
+Celia regarded him with gravity. “You will get yourself into great
+trouble, my friend,” she said.
+
+“That's where you're wrong,” put in Theron. “Not that I'd mind any
+trouble in this wide world, so long as you called me 'my friend,' but
+I'm not going to get into any at all. I know a trick worth two of that.
+I've learned to be a showman. I can preach now far better than I used
+to, and I can get through my work in half the time, and keep on the
+right side of my people, and get along with perfect smoothness. I
+was too green before. I took the thing seriously, and I let every
+mean-fisted curmudgeon and crazy fanatic worry me, and keep me on pins
+and needles. I don't do that any more. I've taken a new measure of life.
+I see now what life is really worth, and I'm going to have my share of
+it. Why should I deliberately deny myself all possible happiness for the
+rest of my days, simply because I made a fool of myself when I was in my
+teens? Other men are not eternally punished like that, for what they
+did as boys, and I won't submit to it either. I will be as free to enjoy
+myself as--as Father Forbes.”
+
+Celia smiled softly, and shook her head again. “Poor man, to call HIM
+free!” she said: “why, he is bound hand and foot. You don't in the least
+realize how he is hedged about, the work he has to do, the thousand
+suspicious eyes that watch his every movement, eager to bring the Bishop
+down upon him. And then think of his sacrifice--the great sacrifice of
+all--to never know what love means, to forswear his manhood, to live
+a forlorn, celibate life--you have no idea how sadly that appeals to a
+woman.”
+
+“Let us sit down here for a little,” said Theron; “we seem at the end of
+the path.” She seated herself on the root-based mound, and he reclined
+at her side, with an arm carelessly extended behind her on the moss.
+
+“I can see what you mean,” he went on, after a pause. “But to me, do you
+know, there is an enormous fascination in celibacy. You forget that I
+know the reverse of the medal. I know how the mind can be cramped, the
+nerves harassed, the ambitions spoiled and rotted, the whole existence
+darkened and belittled, by--by the other thing. I have never talked to
+you before about my marriage.”
+
+“I don't think we'd better talk about it now,” observed Celia. “There
+must be many more amusing topics.”
+
+He missed the spirit of her remark. “You are right,” he said slowly. “It
+is too sad a thing to talk about. But there! it is my load, and I bear
+it, and there's nothing more to be said.”
+
+Theron drew a heavy sigh, and let his fingers toy abstractedly with a
+ribbon on the outer edge of Celia's penumbra of apparel.
+
+“No,” she said. “We mustn't snivel, and we mustn't sulk. When I get into
+a rage it makes me ill, and I storm my way through it and tear things,
+but it doesn't last long, and I come out of it feeling all the better.
+I don't know that I've ever seen your wife. I suppose she hasn't got red
+hair?”
+
+“I think it's a kind of light brown,” answered Theron, with an effect of
+exerting his memory.
+
+“It seems that you only take notice of hair in stained-glass windows,”
+ was Celia's comment.
+
+“Oh-h!” he murmured reproachfully, “as if--as if--but I won't say what I
+was going to.”
+
+“That's not fair!” she said. The little touch of whimsical mockery which
+she gave to the serious declaration was delicious to him. “You have me
+at such a disadvantage! Here am I rattling out whatever comes into my
+head, exposing all my lightest emotions, and laying bare my very heart
+in candor, and you meditate, you turn things over cautiously in your
+mind, like a second Machiavelli. I grow afraid of you; you are so subtle
+and mysterious in your reserves.”
+
+Theron gave a tug at the ribbon, to show the joy he had in her delicate
+chaff. “No, it is you who are secretive,” he said. “You never told me
+about--about the piano.”
+
+The word was out! A minute before it had seemed incredible to him that
+he should ever have the courage to utter it--but here it was. He laid
+firm hold upon the ribbon, which it appeared hung from her waist, and
+drew himself a trifle nearer to her. “I could never have consented to
+take it, I'm afraid,” he went on in a low voice, “if I had known. And
+even as it is, I fear it won't be possible.”
+
+“What are you afraid of?” asked Celia. “Why shouldn't you take it?
+People in your profession never do get anything unless it's given to
+them, do they? I've always understood it was like that. I've often
+read of donation parties--that's what they're called, isn't it?--where
+everybody is supposed to bring some gift to the minister. Very well,
+then, I've simply had a donation party of my own, that's all. Unless
+you mean that my being a Catholic makes a difference. I had supposed you
+were quite free from that kind of prejudice.”
+
+“So I am! Believe me, I am!” urged Theron. “When I'm with you, it seems
+impossible to realize that there are people so narrow and contracted
+in their natures as to take account of such things. It is another
+atmosphere that I breathe near you. How could you imagine that such a
+thought--about our difference of creed--would enter my head? In
+fact,” he concluded with a nervous half-laugh, “there isn't any such
+difference. Whatever your religion is, it's mine too. You remember--you
+adopted me as a Greek.”
+
+“Did I?” she rejoined. “Well, if that's the case, it leaves you without
+a leg to stand on. I challenge you to find any instance where a Greek
+made any difficulties about accepting a piano from a friend. But
+seriously--while we are talking about it--you introduced the subject:
+I didn't--I might as well explain to you that I had no such intention,
+when I picked the instrument out. It was later, when I was talking to
+Thurston's people about the price, that the whim seized me. Now it is
+the one fixed rule of my life to obey my whims. Whatever occurs to me as
+a possibly pleasant thing to do, straight like a hash, I go and do it.
+It is the only way that a person with means, with plenty of money, can
+preserve any freshness of character. If they stop to think what it would
+be prudent to do, they get crusted over immediately. That is the curse
+of rich people--they teach themselves to distrust and restrain every
+impulse toward unusual actions. They get to feel that it is more
+necessary for them to be cautious and conventional than it is for
+others. I would rather work at a wash-tub than occupy that attitude
+toward my bank account. I fight against any sign of it that I detect
+rising in my mind. The instant a wish occurs to me, I rush to gratify
+it. That is my theory of life. That accounts for the piano; and I don't
+see that you've anything to say about it at all.”
+
+It seemed very convincing, this theory of life. Somehow, the thought
+of Miss Madden's riches had never before assumed prominence in Theron's
+mind. Of course her father was very wealthy, but it had not occurred
+to him that the daughter's emancipation might run to the length of a
+personal fortune. He knew so little of rich people and their ways!
+
+He lifted his head, and looked up at Celia with an awakened humility and
+awe in his glance. The glamour of a separate banking-account shone upon
+her. Where the soft woodland light played in among the strands of her
+disordered hair, he saw the veritable gleam of gold. A mysterious new
+suggestion of power blended itself with the beauty of her face, was
+exhaled in the faint perfume of her garments. He maintained a timorous
+hold upon the ribbon, wondering at his hardihood in touching it, or
+being near her at all.
+
+“What surprises me,” he heard himself saying, “is that you are
+contented to stay in Octavius. I should think that you would travel--go
+abroad--see the beautiful things of the world, surround yourself with
+the luxuries of big cities--and that sort of thing.”
+
+Celia regarded the forest prospect straight in front of her with
+a pensive gaze. “Sometime--no doubt I will sometime,” she said
+abstractedly.
+
+“One reads so much nowadays,” he went on, “of American heiresses going
+to Europe and marrying dukes and noblemen. I suppose you will do that
+too. Princes would fight one another for you.”
+
+The least touch of a smile softened for an instant the impassivity of
+her countenance. Then she stared harder than ever at the vague, leafy
+distance. “That is the old-fashioned idea,” she said, in a musing tone,
+“that women must belong to somebody, as if they were curios, or statues,
+or race-horses. You don't understand, my friend, that I have a different
+view. I am myself, and I belong to myself, exactly as much as any man.
+The notion that any other human being could conceivably obtain the
+slightest property rights in me is as preposterous, as ridiculous,
+as--what shall I say?--as the notion of your being taken out with a
+chain on your neck and sold by auction as a slave, down on the canal
+bridge. I should be ashamed to be alive for another day, if any other
+thought were possible to me.”
+
+“That is not the generally accepted view, I should think,” faltered
+Theron.
+
+“No more is it the accepted view that young married Methodist ministers
+should sit out alone in the woods with red-headed Irish girls. No, my
+friend, let us find what the generally accepted views are, and as fast
+as we find them set our heels on them. There is no other way to live
+like real human beings. What on earth is it to me that other women crawl
+about on all-fours, and fawn like dogs on any hand that will buckle
+a collar onto them, and toss them the leavings of the table? I am not
+related to them. I have nothing to do with them. They cannot make any
+rules for me. If pride and dignity and independence are dead in them,
+why, so much the worse for them! It is no affair of mine. Certainly it
+is no reason why I should get down and grovel also. No; I at least stand
+erect on my legs.”
+
+Mr. Ware sat up, and stared confusedly, with round eyes and parted lips,
+at his companion. Instinctively his brain dragged forth to the surface
+those epithets which the doctor had hurled in bitter contempt at
+her--“mad ass, a mere bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed
+lewdness.” The words rose in their order on his memory, hard and
+sharp-edged, like arrow-heads. But to sit there, quite at her side; to
+breathe the same air, and behold the calm loveliness of her profile; to
+touch the ribbon of her dress--and all the while to hold these poisoned
+darts of abuse levelled in thought at her breast--it was monstrous. He
+could have killed the doctor at that moment. With an effort, he drove
+the foul things from his mind--scattered them back into the darkness.
+He felt that he had grown pale, and wondered if she had heard the groan
+that seemed to have been forced from him in the struggle. Or was the
+groan imaginary?
+
+Celia continued to sit unmoved, composedly looking upon vacancy.
+Theron's eyes searched her face in vain for any sign of consciousness
+that she had astounded and bewildered him. She did not seem to be
+thinking of him at all. The proud calm of her thoughtful countenance
+suggested instead occupation with lofty and remote abstractions and
+noble ideals. Contemplating her, he suddenly perceived that what she had
+been saying was great, wonderful, magnificent. An involuntary thrill ran
+through his veins at recollection of her words. His fancy likened it to
+the sensation he used to feel as a youth, when the Fourth of July reader
+bawled forth that opening clause: “When, in the course of human events,
+it becomes necessary,” etc. It was nothing less than another Declaration
+of Independence he had been listening to.
+
+He sank again recumbent at her side, and stretched the arm behind her,
+nearer than before. “Apparently, then, you will never marry.” His voice
+trembled a little.
+
+“Most certainly not!” said Celia.
+
+“You spoke so feelingly a little while ago,” he ventured along, with
+hesitation, “about how sadly the notion of a priest's sacrificing
+himself--never knowing what love meant--appealed to a woman. I should
+think that the idea of sacrificing herself would seem to her even sadder
+still.”
+
+“I don't remember that we mentioned THAT,” she replied. “How do you
+mean--sacrificing herself?”
+
+Theron gathered some of the outlying folds of her dress in his hand, and
+boldly patted and caressed them. “You, so beautiful and so free, with
+such fine talents and abilities,” he murmured; “you, who could have the
+whole world at your feet--are you, too, never going to know what love
+means? Do you call that no sacrifice? To me it is the most terrible that
+my imagination can conceive.”
+
+Celia laughed--a gentle, amused little laugh, in which Theron's ears
+traced elements of tenderness. “You must regulate that imagination of
+yours,” she said playfully. “It conceives the thing that is not. Pray,
+when”--and here, turning her head, she bent down upon his face a gaze of
+arch mock-seriousness--“pray, when did I describe myself in these terms?
+When did I say that I should never know what love meant?”
+
+For answer Theron laid his head down upon his arm, and closed his
+eyes, and held his face against the draperies encircling her. “I cannot
+think!” he groaned.
+
+The thing that came uppermost in his mind, as it swayed and rocked in
+the tempest of emotion, was the strange reminiscence of early childhood
+in it all. It was like being a little boy again, nestling in an
+innocent, unthinking transport of affection against his mother's skirts.
+The tears he felt scalding his eyes were the spontaneous, unashamed
+tears of a child; the tremulous and exquisite joy which spread,
+wave-like, over him, at once reposeful and yearning, was full of
+infantile purity and sweetness. He had not comprehended at all before
+what wellsprings of spiritual beauty, what limpid depths of idealism,
+his nature contained.
+
+“We were speaking of our respective religions,” he heard Celia say, as
+imperturbably as if there had been no digression worth mentioning.
+
+“Yes,” he assented, and moved his head so that he looked up at her back
+hair, and the leaves high above, mottled against the sky. The wish
+to lie there, where now he could just catch the rose-leaf line of her
+under-chin as well, was very strong upon him. “Yes?” he repeated.
+
+“I cannot talk to you like that,” she said; and he sat up again
+shamefacedly.
+
+“Yes--I think we were speaking of religions--some time ago,” he
+faltered, to relieve the situation. The dreadful thought that she might
+be annoyed began to oppress him.
+
+“Well, you said whatever my religion was, it was yours too. That
+entitles you at least to be told what the religion is. Now, I am a
+Catholic.”
+
+Theron, much mystified, nodded his head. Could it be possible--was there
+coming a deliberate suggestion that he should become a convert? “Yes--I
+know,” he murmured.
+
+“But I should explain that I am only a Catholic in the sense that its
+symbolism is pleasant to me. You remember what Schopenhauer said--you
+cannot have the water by itself: you must also have the jug that it is
+in. Very well; the Catholic religion is my jug. I put into it the things
+I like. They were all there long ago, thousands of years ago. The Jews
+threw them out; we will put them back again. We will restore art and
+poetry and the love of beauty, and the gentle, spiritual, soulful life.
+The Greeks had it; and Christianity would have had it too, if it hadn't
+been for those brutes they call the Fathers. They loved ugliness and
+dirt and the thought of hell-fire. They hated women. In all the earlier
+stages of the Church, women were very prominent in it. Jesus himself
+appreciated women, and delighted to have them about him, and talk with
+them and listen to them. That was the very essence of the Greek spirit;
+and it breathed into Christianity at its birth a sweetness and a grace
+which twenty generations of cranks and savages like Paul and Jerome
+and Tertullian weren't able to extinguish. But the very man, Cyril, who
+killed Hypatia, and thus began the dark ages, unwittingly did another
+thing which makes one almost forgive him. To please the Egyptians, he
+secured the Church's acceptance of the adoration of the Virgin. It is
+that idea which has kept the Greek spirit alive, and grown and grown,
+till at last it will rule the world. It was only epileptic Jews who
+could imagine a religion without sex in it.”
+
+“I remember the pictures of the Virgin in your room,” said Theron,
+feeling more himself again. “I wondered if they quite went with the
+statues.”
+
+The remark won a smile from Celia's lips.
+
+“They get along together better than you suppose,” she answered.
+“Besides, they are not all pictures of Mary. One of them, standing on
+the moon, is of Isis with the infant Horus in her arms. Another might as
+well be Mahamie, bearing the miraculously born Buddha, or Olympias with
+her child Alexander, or even Perictione holding her babe Plato--all
+these were similar cases, you know. Almost every religion had its
+Immaculate Conception. What does it all come to, except to show us that
+man turns naturally toward the worship of the maternal idea? That is the
+deepest of all our instincts--love of woman, who is at once daughter and
+wife and mother. It is that that makes the world go round.”
+
+Brave thoughts shaped themselves in Theron's mind, and shone forth in a
+confident yet wistful smile on his face.
+
+“It is a pity you cannot change estates with me for one minute,” he
+said, in steady, low tone. “Then you would realize the tremendous truth
+of what you have been saying. It is only your intellect that has reached
+out and grasped the idea. If you were in my place, you would discover
+that your heart was bursting with it as well.”
+
+Celia turned and looked at him.
+
+“I myself,” he went on, “would not have known, half an hour ago, what
+you meant by the worship of the maternal idea. I am much older than
+you. I am a strong, mature man. But when I lay down there, and shut my
+eyes--because the charm and marvel of this whole experience had for
+the moment overcome me--the strangest sensation seized upon me. It was
+absolutely as if I were a boy again, a good, pure-minded, fond little
+child, and you were the mother that I idolized.”
+
+Celia had not taken her eyes from his face. “I find myself liking you
+better at this moment,” she said, with gravity, “than I have ever liked
+you before.”
+
+Then, as by a sudden impulse, she sprang to her feet. “Come!” she cried,
+her voice and manner all vivacity once more, “we have been here long
+enough.”
+
+Upon the instant, as Theron was more laboriously getting up, it became
+apparent to them both that perhaps they had been there too long.
+
+A boy with a gun under his arm, and two gray squirrels tied by the tails
+slung across his shoulder, stood at the entrance to the glade, some
+dozen paces away, regarding them with undisguised interest. Upon the
+discovery that he was in turn observed, he resumed his interrupted
+progress through the woods, whistling softly as he went, and vanished
+among the trees.
+
+“Heavens above!” groaned Theron, shudderingly.
+
+“Know him?” he went on, in answer to the glance of inquiry on his
+companion's face. “I should think I did! He spades my--my wife's garden
+for her. He used to bring our milk. He works in the law office of one
+of my trustees--the one who isn't friendly to me, but is very friendly
+indeed with my--with Mrs. Ware. Oh, what shall I do? It may easily mean
+my ruin!”
+
+Celia looked at him attentively. The color had gone out of his face, and
+with it the effect of earnestness and mental elevation which, a minute
+before, had caught her fancy. “Somehow, I fear that I do not like you
+quite so much just now, my friend,” she remarked.
+
+“In God's name, don't say that!” urged Theron. He raised his voice in
+agitated entreaty. “You don't know what these people are--how they would
+leap at the barest hint of a scandal about me. In my position I am a
+thousand times more defenceless than any woman. Just a single whisper,
+and I am done for!”
+
+“Let me point out to you, Mr. Ware,” said Celia, slowly, “that to be
+seen sitting and talking with me, whatever doubts it may raise as to
+a gentleman's intellectual condition, need not necessarily blast his
+social reputation beyond all hope whatever.”
+
+Theron stared at her, as if he had not grasped her meaning. Then he
+winced visibly under it, and put out his hands to implore her. “Forgive
+me! Forgive me!” he pleaded. “I was beside myself for the moment with
+the fright of the thing. Oh, say you do forgive me, Celia!” He made
+haste to support this daring use of her name. “I have been so happy
+today--so deeply, so vastly happy--like the little child I spoke of--and
+that is so new in my lonely life--that--the suddenness of the thing--it
+just for the instant unstrung me. Don't be too hard on me for it! And
+I had hoped, too--I had had such genuine heartfelt pleasure in the
+thought--that, an hour or two ago, when you were unhappy, perhaps it had
+been some sort of consolation to you that I was with you.”
+
+Celia was looking away. When he took her hand she did not withdraw it,
+but turned and nodded in musing general assent to what he had said.
+“Yes, we have both been unstrung, as you call it, today,” she said,
+decidedly out of pitch. “Let each forgive the other, and say no more
+about it.”
+
+She took his arm, and they retraced their steps along the path, again
+in silence. The labored noise of the orchestra, as it were, returned to
+meet them. They halted at an intersecting footpath.
+
+“I go back to my slavery--my double bondage,” said Theron, letting his
+voice sink to a sigh. “But even if I am put on the rack for it, I shall
+have had one day of glory.”
+
+“I think you may kiss me, in memory of that one day--or of a few minutes
+in that day,” said Celia.
+
+Their lips brushed each other in a swift, almost perfunctory caress.
+
+Theron went his way at a hurried pace, the sobered tones of her
+“good-bye” beating upon his brain with every measure of the droning
+waltz-music.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+The memory of the kiss abode with Theron. Like Aaron's rod, it swallowed
+up one by one all competing thoughts and recollections, and made his
+brain its slave.
+
+Even as he strode back through the woods to the camp-meeting, it was the
+kiss that kept his feet in motion, and guided their automatic course.
+All along the watches of the restless night, it was the kiss that bore
+him sweet company, and wandered with him from one broken dream of bliss
+to another. Next day, it was the kiss that made of life for him a sort
+of sunlit wonderland. He preached his sermon in the morning, and took
+his appointed part in the other services of afternoon and evening,
+apparently to everybody's satisfaction: to him it was all a vision.
+
+When the beautiful full moon rose, this Sunday evening, and glorified
+the clearing and the forest with its mellow harvest radiance, he could
+have groaned with the burden of his joy. He went out alone into the
+light, and bared his head to it, and stood motionless for a long time.
+In all his life, he had never been impelled as powerfully toward earnest
+and soulful thanksgiving. The impulse to kneel, there in the pure,
+tender moonlight, and lift up offerings of praise to God, kept uppermost
+in his mind. Some formless resignation restrained him from the act
+itself, but the spirit of it hallowed his mood. He gazed up at the broad
+luminous face of the satellite. “You are our God,” he murmured. “Hers
+and mine! You are the most beautiful of heavenly creatures, as she is of
+the angels on earth. I am speechless with reverence for you both.”
+
+It was not until the camp-meeting broke up, four days later, and Theron
+with the rest returned to town, that the material aspects of what had
+happened, and might be expected to happen, forced themselves upon his
+mind. The kiss was a child of the forest. So long as Theron remained in
+the camp, the image of the kiss, which was enshrined in his heart and
+ministered to by all his thoughts, continued enveloped in a haze of
+sylvan mystery, like a dryad. Suggestions of its beauty and holiness
+came to him in the odors of the woodland, at the sight of wild flowers
+and water-lilies. When he walked alone in unfamiliar parts of the
+forest, he carried about with him the half-conscious idea of somewhere
+coming upon a strange, hidden pool which mortal eye had not seen
+before--a deep, sequestered mere of spring-fed waters, walled in by
+rich, tangled growths of verdure, and bearing upon its virgin bosom only
+the shadows of the primeval wilderness, and the light of the eternal
+skies. His fancy dwelt upon some such nook as the enchanted home of
+the fairy that possessed his soul. The place, though he never found it,
+became real to him. As he pictured it, there rose sometimes from among
+the lily-pads, stirring the translucent depths and fluttering over the
+water's surface drops like gems, the wonderful form of a woman, with
+pale leaves wreathed in her luxuriant red hair, and a skin which gave
+forth light.
+
+With the homecoming to Octavius, his dreams began to take more account
+of realities. In a day or two he was wide awake, and thinking hard. The
+kiss was as much as ever the ceaseless companion of his hours, but it no
+longer insisted upon shrouding itself in vines and woodland creepers, or
+outlining itself in phosphorescent vagueness against mystic backgrounds
+of nymph-haunted glades. It advanced out into the noonday, and assumed
+tangible dimensions and substance. He saw that it was related to the
+facts of his daily life, and had, in turn, altered his own relations to
+all these facts.
+
+What ought he to do? What COULD he do? Apparently, nothing but wait.
+He waited for a week--then for another week. The conclusion that the
+initiative had been left to him began to take shape in his mind. From
+this it seemed but a step to the passionate resolve to act at once.
+
+Turning the situation over and over in his anxious thoughts, two things
+stood out in special prominence. One was that Celia loved him. The other
+was that the boy in Gorringe's law office, and possibly Gorringe, and
+heaven only knew how many others besides, had reasons for suspecting
+this to be true.
+
+And what about Celia? Side by side with the moving rapture of thinking
+about her as a woman, there rose the substantial satisfaction of
+contemplating her as Miss Madden. She had kissed him, and she was very
+rich. The things gradually linked themselves before his eyes. He tried
+a thousand varying guesses at what she proposed to do, and each time
+reined up his imagination by the reminder that she was confessedly a
+creature of whims, who proposed to do nothing, but was capable of all
+things.
+
+And as to the boy. If he had blabbed what he saw, it was incredible that
+somebody should not take the subject up, and impart a scandalous twist
+to it, and send it rolling like a snowball to gather up exaggeration and
+foul innuendo till it was big enough to overwhelm him. What would happen
+to him if a formal charge were preferred against him? He looked it up
+in the Discipline. Of course, if his accusers magnified their mean
+suspicions and calumnious imaginings to the point of formulating a
+charge, it would be one of immorality. They could prove nothing; there
+was nothing to prove. At the worst, it was an indiscretion, which would
+involve his being admonished by his Presiding Elder. Or if these narrow
+bigots confused slanders with proofs, and showed that they intended to
+convict him, then it would be open to him to withdraw from the ministry,
+in advance of his condemnation. His relation to the church would be
+the same as if he had been expelled, but to the outer world it would be
+different. And supposing he did withdraw from the ministry?
+
+Yes; this was the important point. What if he did abandon this mistaken
+profession of his? On its mental side the relief would be prodigious,
+unthinkable. But on the practical side, the bread-and-butter side? For
+some days Theron paused with a shudder when he reached this question.
+The thought of the plunge into unknown material responsibilities gave
+him a sinking heart. He tried to imagine himself lecturing, canvassing
+for books or insurance policies, writing for newspapers--and remained
+frightened. But suddenly one day it occurred to him that these qualms
+and forebodings were sheer folly. Was not Celia rich? Would she not with
+lightning swiftness draw forth that check-book, like the flashing sword
+of a champion from its scabbard, and run to his relief? Why, of course.
+It was absurd not to have thought of that before.
+
+He recalled her momentary anger with him, that afternoon in the woods,
+when he had cried out that discovery would mean ruin to him. He saw
+clearly enough now that she had been grieved at his want of faith in her
+protection. In his flurry of fright, he had lost sight of the fact that,
+if exposure and trouble came to him, she would naturally feel that she
+had been the cause of his martyrdom. It was plain enough now. If he got
+into hot water, it would be solely on account of his having been seen
+with her. He had walked into the woods with her--“the further the
+better” had been her own words--out of pure kindliness, and the
+desire to lead her away from the scene of her brother's and her own
+humiliation. But why amplify arguments? Her own warm heart would tell
+her, on the instant, how he had been sacrificed for her sake, and would
+bring her, eager and devoted, to his succor.
+
+That was all right, then. Slowly, from this point, suggestions expanded
+themselves. The future could be, if he willed it, one long serene
+triumph of love, and lofty intellectual companionship, and existence
+softened and enriched at every point by all that wealth could command,
+and the most exquisite tastes suggest. Should he will it! Ah! the
+question answered itself. But he could not enter upon this beckoning
+heaven of a future until he had freed himself. When Celia said to him,
+“Come!” he must not be in the position to reply, “I should like to, but
+unfortunately I am tied by the leg.” He should have to leave Octavius,
+leave the ministry, leave everything. He could not begin too soon to
+face these contingencies.
+
+Very likely Celia had not thought it out as far as this. With her,
+it was a mere vague “sometime I may.” But the harder masculine sense,
+Theron felt, existed for the very purpose of correcting and giving point
+to these loose feminine notions of time and space. It was for him to
+clear away the obstacles, and map the plans out with definite decision.
+
+One warm afternoon, as he lolled in his easy-chair under the open
+window of his study, musing upon the ever-shifting phases of this vast,
+complicated, urgent problem, some chance words from the sidewalk in
+front came to his ears, and, coming, remained to clarify his thoughts.
+
+Two ladies whose voices were strange to him had stopped--as so many
+people almost daily stopped--to admire the garden of the parsonage. One
+of them expressed her pleasure in general terms. Said the other--
+
+“My husband declares those dahlias alone couldn't be matched for thirty
+dollars, and that some of those gladiolus must have cost three or four
+dollars apiece. I know we've spent simply oceans of money on our garden,
+and it doesn't begin to compare with this.”
+
+“It seems like a sinful waste to me,” said her companion.
+
+“No-o,” the other hesitated. “No, I don't think quite that--if you can
+afford it just as well as not. But it does seem to me that I'd rather
+live in a little better house, and not spend it ALL on flowers. Just
+LOOK at that cactus!”
+
+The voices died away. Theron sat up, with a look of arrested thought
+upon his face, then sprang to his feet and moved hurriedly through the
+parlor to an open front window. Peering out with caution he saw that the
+two women receding from view were fashionably dressed and evidently
+came from homes of means. He stared after them in a blank way until they
+turned a corner.
+
+He went into the hall then, put on his frock-coat and hat, and stepped
+out into the garden. He was conscious of having rather avoided it
+heretofore--not altogether without reasons of his own, lying unexamined
+somewhere in the recesses of his mind. Now he walked slowly about, and
+examined the flowers with great attentiveness. The season was
+advancing, and he saw that many plants had gone out of bloom. But what a
+magnificent plenitude of blossoms still remained!
+
+Thirty dollars' worth of dahlias--that was what the stranger had said.
+Theron hardly brought himself to credit the statement; but all the same
+it was apparent to even his uninformed eye that these huge, imbricated,
+flowering masses, with their extraordinary half-colors, must be unusual.
+He remembered that the boy in Gorringe's office had spoken of just one
+lot of plants costing thirty-one dollars and sixty cents, and there had
+been two other lots as well. The figures remained surprisingly distinct
+in his memory. It was no good deceiving himself any longer: of course
+these were the plants that Gorringe had spent his money upon, here all
+about him.
+
+As he surveyed them with a sour regard, a cool breeze stirred across the
+garden. The tall, over-laden flower-spikes of gladioli bent and nodded
+at him; the hollyhocks and flaming alvias, the clustered blossoms on the
+standard roses, the delicately painted lilies on their stilt-like stems,
+fluttered in the wind, and seemed all bowing satirically to him. “Yes,
+Levi Gorringe paid for us!” He almost heard their mocking declaration.
+
+Out in the back-yard, where a longer day of sunshine dwelt, there were
+many other flowers, and notably a bed of geraniums which literally made
+the eye ache. Standing at this rear corner of the house, he caught the
+droning sound of Alice's voice, humming a hymn to herself as she went
+about her kitchen work. He saw her through the open window. She was
+sweeping, and had a sort of cap on her head which did not add to the
+graces of her appearance. He looked at her with a hard glance, recalling
+as a fresh grievance the ten days of intolerable boredom he had spent
+cooped up in a ridiculous little tent with her, at the camp-meeting. She
+must have realized at the time how odious the enforced companionship was
+to him. Yes, beyond doubt she did. It came back to him now that they
+had spoken but rarely to each other. She had not even praised his sermon
+upon the Sabbath-question, which every one else had been in raptures
+over. For that matter she no longer praised anything he did, and took
+obvious pains to preserve toward him a distant demeanor. So much the
+better, he felt himself thinking. If she chose to behave in that
+offish and unwifely fashion, she could blame no one but herself for its
+results.
+
+She had seen him, and came now to the window, watering-pot and broom
+in hand. She put her head out, to breathe a breath of dustless air, and
+began as if she would smile on him. Then her face chilled and stiffened,
+as she caught his look.
+
+“Shall you be home for supper?” she asked, in her iciest tone.
+
+He had not thought of going out before. The question, and the manner of
+it, gave immediate urgency to the idea of going somewhere. “I may or I
+may not,” he replied. “It is quite impossible for me to say.” He turned
+on his heel with this, and walked briskly out of the yard and down the
+street.
+
+It was the most natural thing that presently he should be strolling past
+the Madden house, and letting a covert glance stray over its front and
+the grounds about it, as he loitered along. Every day since his return
+from the woods he had given the fates this chance of bringing Celia
+to meet him, without avail. He had hung about in the vicinity of the
+Catholic church on several evenings as well, but to no purpose. The
+organ inside was dumb, and he could detect no signs of Celia's presence
+on the curtains of the pastorate next door. This day, too, there was
+no one visible at the home of the Maddens, and he walked on, a little
+sadly. It was weary work waiting for the signal that never came.
+
+But there were compensations. His mind reverted doggedly to the flowers
+in his garden, and to Alice's behavior toward him. They insisted upon
+connecting themselves in his thoughts. Why should Levi Gorringe, a
+money-lender, and therefore the last man in the world to incur reckless
+expenditure, go and buy perhaps a hundred dollars, worth of flowers for
+his wife's garden? It was time--high time--to face this question. And
+his experiencing religion afterward, just when Alice did, and marching
+down to the rail to kneel beside her--that was a thing to be thought of,
+too.
+
+Meditation, it is true, hardly threw fresh light upon the matter. It
+was incredible, of course, that there should be anything wrong. To even
+shape a thought of Alice in connection with gallantry would be wholly
+impossible. Nor could it be said that Gorringe, in his new capacity as a
+professing church-member, had disclosed any sign of ulterior motives,
+or of insincerity. Yet there the facts were. While Theron pondered them,
+their mystery, if they involved a mystery, baffled him altogether.
+But when he had finished, he found himself all the same convinced that
+neither Alice nor Gorringe would be free to blame him for anything
+he might do. He had grounds for complaint against them. If he did not
+himself know just what these grounds were, it was certain enough that
+THEY knew. Very well, then, let them take the responsibility for what
+happened.
+
+It was indeed awkward that at the moment, as Theron chanced to emerge
+temporarily from his brown-study, his eyes fell full upon the spare,
+well-knit form of Levi Gorringe himself, standing only a few feet away,
+in the staircase entrance to his law office. His lean face, browned by
+the summer's exposure, had a more Arabian aspect than ever. His hands
+were in his pockets, and he held an unlighted cigar between his teeth.
+He looked the Rev. Mr. Ware over calmly, and nodded recognition.
+
+Theron had halted instinctively. On the instant he would have given
+a great deal not to have stopped at all. It was stupid of him to have
+paused, but it would not do now to go on without words of some sort. He
+moved over to the door-way, and made a half-hearted pretence of looking
+at the photographs in one of the show-cases at its side. As Mr. Gorringe
+did not take his hands from his pockets, there was no occasion for any
+formal greeting.
+
+“I had no idea that they took such good pictures in Octavius,” Theron
+remarked after a minute's silence, still bending in examination of the
+photographs.
+
+“They ought to; they charge New York prices,” observed the lawyer,
+sententiously.
+
+Theron found in the words confirmation of his feeling that Gorringe was
+not naturally a lavish or extravagant man. Rather was he a careful and
+calculating man, who spent money only for a purpose. Though the minister
+continued gazing at the stiff presentments of local beauties and
+swains, his eyes seemed to see salmon-hued hollyhocks and spotted lilies
+instead. Suddenly a resolve came to him. He stood erect, and faced his
+trustee.
+
+“Speaking of the price of things,” he said, with an effort of arrogance
+in his measured tone, “I have never had an opportunity before of
+mentioning the subject of the flowers you have so kindly furnished for
+my--for MY garden.”
+
+“Why mention it now?” queried Gorringe, with nonchalance. He turned his
+cigar about with a movement of his lips, and worked it into the corner
+of his mouth. He did not find it necessary to look at Theron at all.
+
+“Because--” began Mr. Ware, and then hesitated--“because--well, it
+raises a question of my being under obligation, which I--”
+
+“Oh, no, sir,” said the lawyer; “put that out of your mind. You are no
+more under obligation to me than I am to you. Oh, no, make yourself easy
+about that. Neither of us owes the other anything.”
+
+“Not even good-will--I take that to be your meaning,” retorted Theron,
+with some heat.
+
+“The words are yours, sir,” responded Gorringe, coolly. “I do not object
+to them.”
+
+“As you like,” put in the other. “If it be so, why, then all the more
+reason why I should, under the circumstances--”
+
+“Under what circumstances?” interposed the lawyer. “Let us be clear
+about this thing as we go along. To what circumstances do you refer?”
+
+He had turned his eyes now, and looked Theron in the face. A slight
+protrusion of his lower jaw had given the cigar an upward tilt under the
+black mustache.
+
+“The circumstances are that you have brought or sent to my garden a
+great many very expensive flower-plants and bushes and so on.”
+
+“And you object? I had not supposed that clergymen in general--and you
+in particular--were so sensitive. Have donation parties, then, gone out
+of date?”
+
+“I understand your sneer well enough,” retorted Theron, “but that
+can pass. The main point is, that you did me the honor to send these
+plants--or to smuggle them in--but never once deigned to hint to me that
+you had done so. No one told me. Except by mere accident, I should not
+have known to this day where they came from.”
+
+Mr. Gorringe twisted the cigar at another angle, with lines of grim
+amusement about the corner of his mouth. “I should have thought,” he
+said with dry deliberation, “that possibly this fact might have raised
+in your mind the conceivable hypothesis that the plants might not be
+intended for you at all.”
+
+“That is precisely it, sir,” said Theron. There were people passing, and
+he was forced to keep his voice down. It would have been a relief, he
+felt, to shout. “That is it--they were not intended for me.”
+
+“Well, then, what are you talking about?” The lawyer's speech had become
+abrupt almost to incivility.
+
+“I think my remarks have been perfectly clear,” said the minister, with
+dignity. It was a new experience to be addressed in that fashion.
+It occurred to him to add, “Please remember that I am not in the
+witness-box, to be bullied or insulted by a professional.”
+
+Gorringe studied Theron's face attentively with a cold, searching
+scrutiny. “You may thank your stars you're not!” he said, with
+significance.
+
+What on earth could he mean? The words and the menacing tone greatly
+impressed Theron. Indeed, upon reflection, he found that they frightened
+him. The disposition to adopt a high tone with the lawyer was melting
+away.
+
+“I do not see,” he began, and then deliberately allowed his voice to
+take on an injured and plaintive inflection--“I do not see why you
+should adopt this tone toward me--Brother Gorringe.”
+
+The lawyer scowled, and bit sharply into the cigar, but said nothing.
+
+“If I have unconsciously offended you in any way,” Theron went on, “I
+beg you to tell me how. I liked you from the beginning of my pastorate
+here, and the thought that latterly we seemed to be drifting apart has
+given me much pain. But now it is still more distressing to find you
+actually disposed to quarrel with me. Surely, Brother Gorringe, between
+a pastor and a probationer who--”
+
+“No,” Gorringe broke in; “quarrel isn't the word for it. There isn't any
+quarrel, Mr. Ware.” He stepped down from the door-stone to the sidewalk
+as he spoke, and stood face to face with Theron. Working-men with
+dinner-pails, and factory girls, were passing close to them, and he
+lowered his voice to a sharp, incisive half-whisper as he added, “It
+wouldn't be worth any grown man's while to quarrel with so poor a
+creature as you are.”
+
+Theron stood confounded, with an empty stare of bewilderment on his
+face. It rose in his mind that the right thing to feel was rage,
+righteous indignation, fury; but for the life of him, he could not
+muster any manly anger. The character of the insult stupefied him.
+
+“I do not know that I have anything to say to you in reply,” he
+remarked, after what seemed to him a silence of minutes. His lips
+framed the words automatically, but they expressed well enough the blank
+vacancy of his mind. The suggestion that anybody deemed him a “poor
+creature” grew more astounding, incomprehensible, as it swelled in his
+brain.
+
+“No, I suppose not,” snapped Gorringe. “You're not the sort to stand up
+to men; your form is to go round the corner and take it out of somebody
+weaker than yourself--a defenceless woman, for instance.”
+
+“Oh--ho!” said Theron. The exclamation had uttered itself. The sound of
+it seemed to clarify his muddled thoughts; and as they ranged themselves
+in order, he began to understand. “Oh--ho!” he said again, and nodded
+his head in token of comprehension.
+
+The lawyer, chewing his cigar with increased activity, glared at him.
+“What do you mean?” he demanded peremptorily.
+
+“Mean?” said the minister. “Oh, nothing that I feel called upon to
+explain to you.”
+
+It was passing strange, but his self-possession had all at once returned
+to him. As it became more apparent that the lawyer was losing his
+temper, Theron found the courage to turn up the corners of his lips in
+show of a bitter little smile of confidence. He looked into the other's
+dusky face, and flaunted this smile at it in contemptuous defiance. “It
+is not a subject that I can discuss with propriety--at this stage,” he
+added.
+
+“Damn you! Are you talking about those flowers?”
+
+“Oh, I am not talking about anything in particular,” returned Theron,
+“not even the curious choice of language which my latest probationer
+seems to prefer.”
+
+“Go and strike my name off the list!” said Gorringe, with rising
+passion. “I was a fool to ever have it there. To think of being a
+probationer of yours--my God!”
+
+“That will be a pity--from one point of view,” remarked Theron, still
+with the ironical smile on his lips. “You seemed to enter upon the new
+life with such deliberation and fixity of purpose, too! I can imagine
+the regrets your withdrawal will cause, in certain quarters. I only hope
+that it will not discourage those who accompanied you to the altar,
+and shared your enthusiasm at the time.” He had spoken throughout with
+studied slowness and an insolent nicety of utterance.
+
+“You had better go away!” broke forth Gorringe. “If you don't, I shall
+forget myself.”
+
+“For the first time?” asked Theron. Then, warned by the flash in the
+lawyer's eye, he turned on his heel and sauntered, with a painstaking
+assumption of a mind quite at ease, up the street.
+
+Gorringe's own face twitched and his veins tingled as he looked after
+him. He spat the shapeless cigar out of his mouth into the gutter, and,
+drawing forth another from his pocket, clenched it between his teeth,
+his gaze following the tall form of the Methodist minister till it was
+merged in the crowd.
+
+“Well, I'm damned!” he said aloud to himself.
+
+The photographer had come down to take in his showcases for the night.
+He looked up from his task at the exclamation, and grinned inquiringly.
+
+“I've just been talking to a man,” said the lawyer, “who's so much
+meaner than any other man I ever heard of that it takes my breath away.
+He's got a wife that's as pure and good as gold, and he knows it, and
+she worships the ground he walks on, and he knows that too. And yet the
+scoundrel is around trying to sniff out some shadow of a pretext for
+misusing her worse than he's already done. Yes, sir; he'd be actually
+tickled to death if he could nose up some hint of a scandal about
+her--something that he could pretend to believe, and work for his own
+advantage to levy blackmail, or get rid of her, or whatever suited his
+book. I didn't think there was such an out-and-out cur on this whole
+footstool. I almost wish, by God, I'd thrown him into the canal!”
+
+“Yes, you lawyers must run against some pretty snide specimens,”
+ remarked the photographer, lifting one of the cases from its sockets.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+Theron spent half an hour in aimless strolling about the streets. From
+earliest boyhood his mind had always worked most clearly when he walked
+alone. Every mental process which had left a mark upon his memory and
+his career--the daydreams of future academic greatness and fame which
+had fashioned themselves in his brain as a farm lad; the meditations,
+raptures, and high resolves of his student period at the seminary; the
+more notable sermons and powerful discourse by which he had revealed the
+genius that was in him to astonished and delighted assemblages--all were
+associated in his retrospective thoughts with solitary rambles.
+
+He had a very direct and vivid consciousness now that it was good to be
+on his legs, and alone. He had never in his life been more sensible of
+the charm of his own companionship. The encounter with Gorringe seemed
+to have cleared all the clouds out of his brain, and restored lightness
+to his heart. After such an object lesson, the impossibility of his
+continuing to sacrifice himself to a notion of duty to these low-minded
+and coarse-natured villagers was beyond all argument. There could no
+longer be any doubt about his moral right to turn his back upon them, to
+wash his hands of the miserable combination of hypocrisy and hysterics
+which they called their spiritual life.
+
+And the question of Gorringe and Alice, that too stood precisely where
+he wanted it. Even in his own thoughts, he preferred to pursue it no
+further. Between them somewhere an offence of concealment, it might be
+of conspiracy, had been committed against him. It was no business of his
+to say more, or to think more. He rested his case simply on the fact,
+which could not be denied, and which he was not in the least interested
+to have explained, one way or the other. The recollection of Gorringe's
+obvious disturbance of mind was especially pleasant to him. He himself
+had been magnanimous almost to the point of weakness. He had gone out
+of his way to call the man “brother,” and to give him an opportunity of
+behaving like a gentleman; but his kindly forbearance had been wasted.
+Gorringe was not the man to understand generous feelings, much less rise
+to their level. He had merely shown that he would be vicious if he knew
+how. It was more important and satisfactory to recall that he had also
+shown a complete comprehension of the injured husband's grievance. The
+fact that he had recognized it was enough--was, in fact, everything.
+
+In the background of his thoughts Theron had carried along a notion of
+going and dining with Father Forbes when the time for the evening meal
+should arrive. The idea in itself attracted him, as a fitting capstone
+to his resolve not to go home to supper. It gave just the right kind
+of character to his domestic revolt. But when at last he stood on the
+doorstep of the pastorate, waiting for an answer to the tinkle of the
+electric bell he had heard ring inside, his mind contained only the
+single thought that now he should hear something about Celia. Perhaps he
+might even find her there; but he put that suggestion aside as slightly
+unpleasant.
+
+The hag-faced housekeeper led him, as before, into the dining-room. It
+was still daylight, and he saw on the glance that the priest was alone
+at the table, with a book beside him to read from as he ate.
+
+Father Forbes rose and came forward, greeting his visitor with profuse
+urbanity and smiles. If there was a perfunctory note in the invitation
+to sit down and share the meal, Theron did not catch it. He frankly
+displayed his pleasure as he laid aside his hat, and took the chair
+opposite his host.
+
+“It is really only a few months since I was here, in this room, before,”
+ he remarked, as the priest closed his book and tossed it to one side,
+and the housekeeper came in to lay another place. “Yet it might have
+been years, many long years, so tremendous is the difference that the
+lapse of time has wrought in me.”
+
+“I am afraid we have nothing to tempt you very much, Mr. Ware,” remarked
+Father Forbes, with a gesture of his plump white hand which embraced the
+dishes in the centre of the table. “May I send you a bit of this boiled
+mutton? I have very homely tastes when I am by myself.”
+
+“I was saying,” Theron observed, after some moments had passed in
+silence, “that I date such a tremendous revolution in my thoughts, my
+beliefs, my whole mind and character, from my first meeting with you,
+my first coming here. I don't know how to describe to you the enormous
+change that has come over me; and I owe it all to you.”
+
+“I can only hope, then, that it is entirely of a satisfactory nature,”
+ said the priest, politely smiling.
+
+“Oh, it is so splendidly satisfactory!” said Theron, with fervor. “I
+look back at myself now with wonder and pity. It seems incredible
+that, such a little while ago, I should have been such an ignorant
+and unimaginative clod of earth, content with such petty ambitions and
+actually proud of my limitations.”
+
+“And you have larger ambitions now?” asked the other. “Pray let me help
+you to some potatoes. I am afraid that ambitions only get in our way and
+trip us up. We clergymen are like street-car horses. The more steadily
+we jog along between the rails, the better it is for us.”
+
+“Oh, I don't intend to remain in the ministry,” declared Theron. The
+statement seemed to him a little bald, now that he had made it; and as
+his companion lifted his brows in surprise, he added stumblingly: “That
+is, as I feel now, it seems to me impossible that I should remain much
+longer. With you, of course, it is different. You have a thousand things
+to interest and pleasantly occupy you in your work and its ceremonies,
+so that mere belief or non-belief in the dogma hardly matters. But in
+our church dogma is everything. If you take that away, or cease to have
+its support, the rest is intolerable, hideous.”
+
+Father Forbes cut another slice of mutton for himself. “It is a pretty
+serious business to make such a change at your time of life. I take it
+for granted you will think it all over very carefully before you commit
+yourself.” He said this with an almost indifferent air, which rather
+chilled his listener's enthusiasm.
+
+“Oh, yes,”, Theron made answer; “I shall do nothing rash. But I have a
+good many plans for the future.”
+
+Father Forbes did not ask what these were, and a brief further period of
+silence fell upon the table.
+
+“I hope everything went off smoothly at the picnic,” Theron ventured, at
+last. “I have not seen any of you since then.”
+
+The priest shook his head and sighed. “No,” he said. “It is a bad
+business. I have had a great deal of unhappiness out of it this past
+fortnight. That young man who was rude to you--of course it was mere
+drunken, irresponsible nonsense on his part--has got himself into a
+serious scrape, I'm afraid. It is being kept quite within the family,
+and we hope to manage so that it will remain there, but it has terribly
+upset his father and his sister. But that, after all, is not so hard
+to bear as the other affliction that has come upon the Maddens. You
+remember Michael, the other brother? He seems to have taken cold that
+evening, or perhaps over-exerted himself. He has been seized with quick
+consumption. He will hardly last till snow flies.”
+
+“Oh, I am GRIEVED to hear that!” Theron spoke with tremulous
+earnestness. It seemed to him as if Michael were in some way related to
+him.
+
+“It is very hard upon them all,” the priest went on. “Michael is as
+sweet and holy a character as it is possible for any one to think of. He
+is the apple of his father's eye. They were inseparable, those two. Do
+you know the father, Mr. Madden?”
+
+Theron shook his head. “I think I have seen him,” he said. “A small man,
+with gray whiskers.”
+
+“A peasant,” said Father Forbes, “but with a heart of gold. Poor man! he
+has had little enough out of his riches. Ah, the West Coast people, what
+tragedies I have seen among them over here! They have rudimentary lung
+organizations, like a frog's, to fit the mild, wet soft air they live
+in. The sharp air here kills them off like flies in a frost. Whole
+families go. I should think there are a dozen of old Jeremiah's children
+in the cemetery. If Michael could have passed his twenty-eighth year,
+there would have been hope for him, at least till his thirty-fifth.
+These pulmonary things seem to go by sevens, you know.”
+
+“I didn't know,” said Theron. “It is very strange--and very sad.” His
+startled mind was busy, all at once, with conjectures as to Celia's age.
+
+“The sister--Miss Madden--seems extremely strong,” he remarked
+tentatively.
+
+“Celia may escape the general doom,” said the priest. His guest noted
+that he clenched his shapely white hand on the table as he spoke, and
+that his gentle, carefully modulated voice had a gritty hardness in its
+tone. “THAT would be too dreadful to think of,” he added.
+
+Theron shuddered in silence, and strove to shut his mind against the
+thought.
+
+“She has taken Michael's illness so deeply to heart,” the priest
+proceeded, “and devoted herself to him so untiringly that I get a little
+nervous about her. I have been urging her to go away and get a change of
+air and scene, if only for a few days. She does not sleep well, and that
+is always a bad thing.”
+
+“I think I remember her telling me once that sometimes she had sleepless
+spells,” said Theron. “She said that then she banged on her piano at
+all hours, or dragged the cushions about from room to room, like a wild
+woman. A very interesting young lady, don't you find her so?”
+
+Father Forbes let a wan smile play on his lips. “What, our Celia?”
+ he said. “Interesting! Why, Mr. Ware, there is no one like her in the
+world. She is as unique as--what shall I say?--as the Irish are among
+races. Her father and mother were both born in mud-cabins, and she--she
+might be the daughter of a hundred kings, except that they seem mostly
+rather under-witted than otherwise. She always impresses me as a sort of
+atavistic idealization of the old Kelt at his finest and best. There in
+Ireland you got a strange mixture of elementary early peoples, walled
+off from the outer world by the four seas, and free to work out their
+own racial amalgam on their own lines. They brought with them at the
+outset a great inheritance of Eastern mysticism. Others lost it, but the
+Irish, all alone on their island, kept it alive and brooded on it, and
+rooted their whole spiritual side in it. Their religion is full of it;
+their blood is full of it; our Celia is fuller of it than anybody else.
+The Ireland of two thousand years ago is incarnated in her. They are the
+merriest people and the saddest, the most turbulent and the most docile,
+the most talented and the most unproductive, the most practical and the
+most visionary, the most devout and the most pagan. These impossible
+contradictions war ceaselessly in their blood. When I look at Celia,
+I seem to see in my mind's eye the fair young-ancestral mother of them
+all.”
+
+Theron gazed at the speaker with open admiration. “I love to hear you
+talk,” he said simply.
+
+An unbidden memory flitted upward in his mind. Those were the very words
+that Alice had so often on her lips in their old courtship days. How
+curious it was! He looked at the priest, and had a quaint sensation of
+feeling as a romantic woman must feel in the presence of a specially
+impressive masculine personality. It was indeed strange that this
+soft-voiced, portly creature in a gown, with his white, fat hands and
+his feline suavity of manner, should produce such a commanding and
+unique effect of virility. No doubt this was a part of the great sex
+mystery which historically surrounded the figure of the celibate priest
+as with an atmosphere. Women had always been prostrating themselves
+before it. Theron, watching his companion's full, pallid face in the
+lamp-light, tried to fancy himself in the priest's place, looking down
+upon these worshipping female forms. He wondered what the celibate's
+attitude really was. The enigma fascinated him.
+
+Father Forbes, after his rhetorical outburst, and been eating. He pushed
+aside his cheese-plate. “I grow enthusiastic on the subject of my race
+sometimes,” he remarked, with the suggestion of an apology. “But I make
+up for it other times--most of the time--by scolding them. If it were
+not such a noble thing to be an Irishman, it would be ridiculous.”
+
+“Ah,” said Theron, deprecatingly, “who would not be enthusiastic in
+talking of Miss Madden? What you said about her was perfect. As you
+spoke, I was thinking how proud and thankful we ought to be for the
+privilege of knowing her--we who do know her well--although of course
+your friendship with her is vastly more intimate than mine--than mine
+could ever hope to be.”
+
+The priest offered no comment, and Theron went on: “I hardly know how to
+describe the remarkable impression she makes upon me. I can't imagine to
+myself any other young woman so brilliant or broad in her views, or so
+courageous. Of course, her being so rich makes it easier for her to do
+just what she wants to do, but her bravery is astonishing all the same.
+We had a long and very sympathetic talk in the woods, that day of the
+picnic, after we left you. I don't know whether she spoke to you about
+it?”
+
+Father Forbes made a movement of the head and eyes which seemed to
+negative the suggestion.
+
+“Her talk,” continued Theron, “gave me quite new ideas of the range and
+capacity of the female mind. I wonder that everybody in Octavius isn't
+full of praise and admiration for her talents and exceptional character.
+In such a small town as this, you would think she would be the centre of
+attention--the pride of the place.”
+
+“I think she has as much praise as is good for her,” remarked the
+priest, quietly.
+
+“And here's a thing that puzzles me,” pursued Mr. Ware. “I was immensely
+surprised to find that Dr. Ledsmar doesn't even think she is smart--or
+at least he professes the utmost intellectual contempt for her, and says
+he dislikes her into the bargain. But of course she dislikes him, too,
+so that's only natural. But I can't understand his denying her great
+ability.”
+
+The priest smiled in a dubious way. “Don't borrow unnecessary alarm
+about that, Mr. Ware,” he said, with studied smoothness of modulated
+tones. “These two good friends of mine have much enjoyment out of
+the idea that they are fighting for the mastery over my poor unstable
+character. It has grown to be a habit with them, and a hobby as well,
+and they pursue it with tireless zest. There are not many intellectual
+diversions open to us here, and they make the most of this one. It
+amuses them, and it is not without its charms for me, in my capacity
+as an interested observer. It is a part of the game that they should
+pretend to themselves that they detest each other. In reality I fancy
+that they like each other very much. At any rate, there is nothing to be
+disturbed about.”
+
+His mellifluous tones had somehow the effect of suggesting to Theron
+that he was an outsider and would better mind his own business. Ah, if
+this purring pussy-cat of a priest only knew how little of an outsider
+he really was! The thought gave him an easy self-control.
+
+“Of course,” he said, “our warm mutual friendship makes the observation
+of these little individual vagaries merely a part of a delightful whole.
+I should not dream of discussing Miss Madden's confidences to me, or the
+doctor's either, outside our own little group.”
+
+Father Forbes reached behind him and took from a chair his black
+three-cornered cap with the tassel. “Unfortunately I have a sick call
+waiting me,” he said, gathering up his gown and slowly rising.
+
+“Yes, I saw the man sitting in the hall,” remarked Theron, getting to
+his feet.
+
+“I would ask you to go upstairs and wait,” the priest went on, “but my
+return, unhappily, is quite uncertain. Another evening I may be more
+fortunate. I am leaving town tomorrow for some days, but when I get
+back--”
+
+The polite sentence did not complete itself. Father Forbes had come out
+into the hall, giving a cool nod to the working-man, who rose from the
+bench as they passed, and shook hands with his guest on the doorstep.
+
+When the door had closed upon Mr. Ware, the priest turned to the man.
+“You have come about those frames,” he said. “If you will come upstairs,
+I will show you the prints, and you can give me a notion of what can
+be done with them. I rather fancy the idea of a triptych in carved old
+English, if you can manage it.”
+
+After the workman had gone away, Father Forbes put on slippers and an
+old loose soutane, lighted a cigar, and, pushing an easy-chair over to
+the reading lamp, sat down with a book. Then something occurred to him,
+and he touched the house-bell at his elbow.
+
+“Maggie,” he said gently, when the housekeeper appeared at the door, “I
+will have the coffee and FINE CHAMPAGNE up here, if it is no trouble.
+And--oh, Maggie--I was compelled this evening to turn the blameless
+visit of the framemaker into a venial sin, and that involves a needless
+wear and tear of conscience. I think that--hereafter--you understand?--I
+am not invariably at home when the Rev. Mr. Ware does me the honor to
+call.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+That night brought the first frost of the season worth counting. In
+the morning, when Theron came downstairs, his casual glance through
+the window caught a desolate picture of blackened dahlia stalks and
+shrivelled blooms. The gayety and color of the garden were gone, and in
+their place was shabby and dishevelled ruin. He flung the sash up and
+leaned out. The nipping autumn air was good to breathe. He looked about
+him, surveying the havoc the frost had wrought among the flowers, and
+smiled.
+
+At breakfast he smiled again--a mirthless and calculated smile. “I
+see that Brother Gorringe's flowers have come to grief over night,” he
+remarked.
+
+Alice looked at him before she spoke, and saw on his face a confirmation
+of the hostile hint in his voice. She nodded in a constrained way, and
+said nothing.
+
+“Or rather, I should say,” Theron went on, with deliberate words, “the
+late Brother Gorringe's flowers.”
+
+“How do you mean--LATE” asked his wife, swiftly.
+
+“Oh, calm yourself!” replied the husband. “He is not dead. He has only
+intimated to me his desire to sever his connection. I may add that he
+did so in a highly offensive manner.”
+
+“I am very sorry,” said Alice, in a low tone, and with her eyes on her
+plate.
+
+“I took it for granted you would be grieved at his backsliding,”
+ remarked Theron, making his phrases as pointed as he could. “He was
+such a promising probationer, and you took such a keen interest in his
+spiritual awakening. But the frost has nipped his zeal--along with the
+hundred or more dollars' worth of flowers by which he testified his
+faith. I find something interesting in their having been blasted
+simultaneously.”
+
+Alice dropped all pretence of interest in her breakfast. With a flushed
+face and lips tightly compressed, she made a movement as if to rise from
+her chair. Then, changing her mind, she sat bolt upright and faced her
+husband.
+
+“I think we had better have this out right now,” she said, in a voice
+which Theron hardly recognized. “You have been hinting round the subject
+long enough--too long. There are some things nobody is obliged to put
+up with, and this is one of them. You will oblige me by saying out in so
+many words what it is you are driving at.”
+
+The outburst astounded Theron. He laid down his knife and fork, and
+gazed at his wife in frank surprise. She had so accustomed him, of late,
+to a demeanor almost abject in its depressed docility that he had quite
+forgotten the Alice of the old days, when she had spirit and courage
+enough for two, and a notable tongue of her own. The flash in her
+eyes and the lines of resolution about her mouth and chin for a moment
+daunted him. Then he observed by a flutter of the frill at her wrist
+that she was trembling.
+
+“I am sure I have nothing to 'say out in so many words,' as you put
+it,” he replied, forcing his voice into cool, impassive tones. “I merely
+commented upon a coincidence, that was all. If, for any reason under
+the sun, the subject chances to be unpleasant to you, I have no earthly
+desire to pursue it.”
+
+“But I insist upon having it pursued!” returned Alice. “I've had just
+all I can stand of your insinuations and innuendoes, and it's high time
+we had some plain talk. Ever since the revival, you have been dropping
+sly, underhand hints about Mr. Gorringe and--and me. Now I ask you what
+you mean by it.”
+
+Yes, there was a shake in her voice, and he could see how her bosom
+heaved in a tremor of nervousness. It was easy for him to be very calm.
+
+“It is you who introduce these astonishing suggestions, not I,” he
+replied coldly. “It is you who couple your name with his--somewhat to my
+surprise, I admit--but let me suggest that we drop the subject. You
+are excited just now, and you might say things that you would prefer to
+leave unsaid. It would surely be better for all concerned to say no more
+about it.”
+
+Alice, staring across the table at him with knitted brows, emitted a
+sharp little snort of indignation. “Well, I never! Theron, I wouldn't
+have thought it of you!”
+
+“There are so many things you wouldn't have thought, on such a variety
+of subjects,” he observed, with a show of resuming his breakfast. “But
+why continue? We are only angering each other.”
+
+“Never mind that,” she replied, with more control over her speech. “I
+guess things have come to a pass where a little anger won't do any harm.
+I have a right to insist on knowing what you mean by your insinuations.”
+
+Theron sighed. “Why will you keep harping on the thing?” he asked
+wearily. “I have displayed no curiosity. I don't ask for any
+explanations. I think I mentioned that the man had behaved insultingly
+to me--but that doesn't matter. I don't bring it up as a grievance. I
+am very well able to take care of myself I have no wish to recur to the
+incident in any way. So far as I am concerned, the topic is dismissed.”
+
+“Listen to me!” broke in Alice, with eager gravity. She hesitated, as he
+looked up with a nod of attention, and reflected as well as she was able
+among her thoughts for a minute or two. “This is what I want to say to
+you. Ever since we came to this hateful Octavius, you and I have been
+drifting apart--or no, that doesn't express it--simply rushing away from
+each other. It only began last spring, and now the space between us
+is so wide that we are worse than complete strangers. For strangers at
+least don't hate each other, and I've had a good many occasions lately
+to see that you positively do hate me--”
+
+“What grotesque absurdity” interposed Theron, impatiently.
+
+“No, it isn't absurdity; it's gospel truth,” retorted Alice. “And--don't
+interrupt me--there have been times, too, when I have had to ask myself
+if I wasn't getting almost to hate you in return. I tell you this
+frankly.”
+
+“Yes, you are undoubtedly frank,” commented the husband, toying with his
+teaspoon. “A hypercritical person might consider, almost too frank.”
+
+Alice scanned his face closely while he spoke, and held her breath as
+if in expectant suspense. Her countenance clouded once more. “You don't
+realize, Theron,” she said gravely; “your voice when you speak to me,
+your look, your manner, they have all changed. You are like another
+man--some man who never loved me, and doesn't even know me, much less
+like me. I want to know what the end of it is to be. Up to the time of
+your sickness last summer, until after the Soulsbys went away, I didn't
+let myself get downright discouraged. It seemed too monstrous for
+belief that you should go away out of my life like that. It didn't seem
+possible that God could allow such a thing. It came to me that I had
+been lax in my Christian life, especially in my position as a minister's
+wife, and that this was my punishment. I went to the altar, to intercede
+with Him, and to try to loose my burden at His feet. But nothing has
+come of it. I got no help from you.”
+
+“Really, Alice,” broke in Theron, “I explained over and over again to
+you how preoccupied I was--with the book--and affairs generally.”
+
+“I got no assistance from Heaven either,” she went on, declining the
+diversion he offered. “I don't want to talk impiously, but if there is a
+God, he has forgotten me, his poor heart-broken hand-maiden.”
+
+“You are talking impiously, Alice,” observed her husband. “And you are
+doing me cruel injustice, into the bargain.”
+
+“I only wish I were!” she replied; “I only wish to God I were!”
+
+“Well, then, accept my complete assurance that you ARE--that your whole
+conception of me, and of what you are pleased to describe as my change
+toward you, is an entire and utter mistake. Of course, the married
+state is no more exempt from the universal law of growth, development,
+alteration, than any other human institution. On its spiritual side, of
+course, viewed either as a sacrament, or as--”
+
+“Don't let us go into that,” interposed Alice, abruptly. “In fact, there
+is no good in talking any more at all. It is as if we didn't speak the
+same language. You don't understand what I say; it makes no impression
+upon your mind.”
+
+“Quite to the contrary,” he assured her; “I have been deeply interested
+and concerned in all you have said. I think you are laboring under a
+great delusion, and I have tried my best to convince you of it; but
+I have never heard you speak more intelligibly or, I might say,
+effectively.”
+
+A little gleam of softness stole over Alice's face. “If you only gave me
+a little more credit for intelligence,” she said, “you would find that I
+am not such a blockhead as you think I am.”
+
+“Come, come!” he said, with a smiling show of impatience. “You really
+mustn't impute things to me wholesale, like that.”
+
+She was glad to answer the smile in kind. “No; but truly,” she pleaded,
+“you don't realize it, but you have grown into a way of treating me as
+if I had absolutely no mind at all.”
+
+“You have a very admirable mind,” he responded, and took up his teaspoon
+again. She reached for his cup, and poured out hot coffee for him. An
+almost cheerful spirit had suddenly descended upon the breakfast table.
+
+“And now let me say the thing I have been aching to say for months,” she
+began in less burdened voice.
+
+He lifted his brows. “Haven't things been discussed pretty fully
+already?” he asked.
+
+The doubtful, harassed expression clouded upon her face at his
+words, and she paused. “No,” she said resolutely, after an
+instant's reflection; “it is my duty to discuss this, too. It is a
+misunderstanding all round. You remember that I told you Mr. Gorringe
+had given me some plants, which he got from some garden or other?”
+
+“If you really wish to go on with the subject--yes I have a recollection
+of that particular falsehood of his.”
+
+“He did it with the kindest and friendliest motives in the world!”
+ protested Alice. “He saw how down-in-the-mouth and moping I was here,
+among these strangers--and I really was getting quite peaked and
+run-down--and he said I stayed indoors too much and it would do me all
+sorts of good to work in the garden, and he would send me some plants.
+The next I knew, here they were, with a book about mixing soils and
+planting, and so on. When I saw him next, and thanked him, I suppose I
+showed some apprehension about his having laid out money on them, and
+he, just to ease my mind, invented the story about his getting them for
+nothing. When I found out the truth--I got it out of that boy, Harvey
+Semple--he admitted it quite frankly--said he was wrong to deceive me.”
+
+“This was in the fine first fervor of his term of probation, I suppose,”
+ put in Theron. He made no effort to dissemble the sneer in his voice.
+
+“Well,” answered Alice, with a touch of acerbity, “I have told you
+now, and it is off my mind. There never would have been the slightest
+concealment about it, if you hadn't begun by keeping me at arm's length,
+and making it next door to impossible to speak to you at all, and if--”
+
+“And if he hadn't lied.” Theron, as he finished her sentence for her,
+rose from the table. Dallying for a brief moment by his chair, there
+seemed the magnetic premonition in the air of some further and kindlier
+word. Then he turned and walked sedately into the next room, and closed
+the door behind him. The talk was finished; and Alice, left alone,
+passed the knuckle of her thumb over one swimming eye and then the
+other, and bit her lips and swallowed down the sob that rose in her
+throat.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+It was early afternoon when Theron walked out of his yard, bestowing no
+glance upon the withered and tarnished show of the garden, and started
+with a definite step down the street. The tendency to ruminative
+loitering, which those who saw him abroad always associated with his
+tall, spare figure, was not suggested today. He moved forward like a man
+with a purpose.
+
+All the forenoon in the seclusion of the sitting-room, with a book
+opened before him, he had been thinking hard. It was not the talk with
+Alice that occupied his thoughts. That rose in his mind from time to
+time, only as a disagreeable blur, and he refused to dwell upon it. It
+was nothing to him, he said to himself, what Gorringe's motives in lying
+had been. As for Alice, he hardened his heart against her. Just now
+it was her mood to try and make up to him. But it had been something
+different yesterday, and who could say what it would be tomorrow? He
+really had passed the limit of patience with her shifting emotional
+vagaries, now lurching in this direction, now in that. She had had her
+chance to maintain a hold upon his interest and imagination, and had
+let it slip. These were the accidents of life, the inevitable harsh
+happenings in the great tragedy of Nature. They could not be helped, and
+there was nothing more to be said.
+
+He had bestowed much more attention upon what the priest had said the
+previous evening. He passed in review all the glowing tributes Father
+Forbes had paid to Celia. They warmed his senses as he recalled them,
+but they also, in a curious, indefinite way, caused him uneasiness.
+There had been a personal fervor about them which was something more
+than priestly. He remembered how the priest had turned pale and faltered
+when the question whether Celia would escape the general doom of her
+family came up. It was not a merely pastoral agitation that, he felt
+sure.
+
+A hundred obscure hints, doubts, stray little suspicions, crowded upward
+together in his thoughts. It became apparent to him now that from the
+outset he had been conscious of something queer--yes, from that very
+first day when he saw the priest and Celia together, and noted their
+glance of recognition inside the house of death. He realized now, upon
+reflection, that the tone of other people, his own parishioners and his
+casual acquaintances in Octavius alike, had always had a certain note of
+reservation in it when it touched upon Miss Madden. Her running in and
+out of the pastorate at all hours, the way the priest patted her on
+the shoulder before others, the obvious dislike the priest's ugly old
+housekeeper bore her, the astonishing freedom of their talk with each
+other--these dark memories loomed forth out of a mass of sinister
+conjecture.
+
+He could bear the uncertainty no longer. Was it indeed not entirely his
+own fault that it had existed thus long? No man with the spirit of a
+mouse would have shilly-shallied in this preposterous fashion, week
+after week, with the fever of a beautiful woman's kiss in his blood, and
+the woman herself living only round the corner. The whole world had been
+as good as offered to him--a bewildering world of wealth and beauty and
+spiritual exaltation and love--and he, like a weak fool, had waited for
+it to be brought to him on a salver, as it were, and actually forced
+upon his acceptance! “That is my failing,” he reflected; “these
+miserable ecclesiastical bandages of mine have dwarfed my manly side.
+The meanest of Thurston's clerks would have shown a more adventurous
+spirit and a bolder nerve. If I do not act at once, with courage and
+resolution, everything will be lost. Already she must think me unworthy
+of the honor it was in her sweet will to bestow.” Then he remembered
+that she was now always at home. “Not another hour of foolish
+indecision!” he whispered to himself. “I will put my destiny to the
+test. I will see her today!”
+
+A middle-aged, plain-faced servant answered his ring at the door-bell
+of the Madden mansion. She was palpably Irish, and looked at him with a
+saddened preoccupation in her gray eyes, holding the door only a little
+ajar.
+
+Theron had got out one of his cards. “I wish to make inquiry about
+young Mr. Madden--Mr. Michael Madden,” he said, holding the card forth
+tentatively. “I have only just heard of his illness, and it has been a
+great grief to me.”
+
+“He is no better,” answered the woman, briefly.
+
+“I am the Rev. Mr. Ware,” he went on, “and you may say that, if he is
+well enough, I should be glad to see him.”
+
+The servant peered out at him with a suddenly altered expression, then
+shook her head. “I don't think he would be wishing to see YOU,” she
+replied. It was evident from her tone that she suspected the visitor's
+intentions.
+
+Theron smiled in spite of himself. “I have not come as a clergyman,” he
+explained, “but as a friend of the family. If you will tell Miss Madden
+that I am here, it will do just as well. Yes, we won't bother him. If
+you will kindly hand my card to his sister.”
+
+When the domestic turned at this and went in, Theron felt like throwing
+his hat in the air, there where he stood. The woman's churlish sectarian
+prejudices had played ideally into his hands. In no other imaginable way
+could he have asked for Celia so naturally. He wondered a little that a
+servant at such a grand house as this should leave callers standing on
+the doorstep. Still more he wondered what he should say to the lady of
+his dream when he came into her presence.
+
+“Will you please to walk this way?” The woman had returned. She closed
+the door noiselessly behind him, and led the way, not up the sumptuous
+staircase, as Theron had expected, but along through the broad hall,
+past several large doors, to a small curtained archway at the end.
+She pushed aside this curtain, and Theron found himself in a sort of
+conservatory, full of the hot, vague light of sunshine falling through
+ground-glass. The air was moist and close, and heavy with the smell of
+verdure and wet earth. A tall bank of palms, with ferns sprawling at
+their base, reared itself directly in front of him. The floor was of
+mosaic, and he saw now that there were rugs upon it, and that there were
+chairs and sofas, and other signs of habitation. It was, indeed, only
+half a greenhouse, for the lower part of it was in rosewood panels, with
+floral paintings on them, like a room.
+
+Moving to one side of the barrier of palms, he discovered, to his great
+surprise, the figure of Michael, sitting propped up with pillows in
+a huge easy-chair. The sick man was looking at him with big, gravely
+intent eyes. His face did not show as much change as Theron had in fancy
+pictured. It had seemed almost as bony and cadaverous on the day of the
+picnic. The hands spread out on the chair-arms were very white and
+thin, though, and the gaze in the blue eyes had a spectral quality which
+disturbed him.
+
+Michael raised his right hand, and Theron, stepping forward, took it
+limply in his for an instant. Then he laid it down again. The touch of
+people about to die had always been repugnant to him. He could feel on
+his own warm palm the very damp of the grave.
+
+“I only heard from Father Forbes last evening of your--your ill-health,”
+ he said, somewhat hesitatingly. He seated himself on a bench beneath
+the palms, facing the invalid, but still holding his hat. “I hope very
+sincerely that you will soon be all right again.”
+
+“My sister is lying down in her room,” answered Michael. He had not once
+taken his sombre and embarrassing gaze from the other's face. The voice
+in which he uttered this uncalled-for remark was thin in fibre, cold
+and impassive. It fell upon Theron's ears with a suggestion of hidden
+meaning. He looked uneasily into Michael's eyes, and then away again.
+They seemed to be looking straight through him, and there was no
+shirking the sensation that they saw and comprehended things with an
+unnatural prescience.
+
+“I hope she is feeling better,” Theron found himself saying. “Father
+Forbes mentioned that she was a little under the weather. I dined with
+him last night.”
+
+“I am glad that you came,” said Michael, after a little pause. His
+earnest, unblinking eyes seemed to supplement his tongue with speech of
+their own. “I do be thinking a great deal about you. I have matters to
+speak of to you, now that you are here.”
+
+Theron bowed his head gently, in token of grateful attention. He tried
+the experiment of looking away from Michael, but his glance went back
+again irresistibly, and fastened itself upon the sick man's gaze, and
+clung there.
+
+“I am next door to a dead man,” he went on, paying no heed to the
+other's deprecatory gesture. “It is not years or months with me, but
+weeks. Then I go away to stand up for judgment on my sins, and if it is
+His merciful will, I shall see God. So I say my good-byes now, and so
+you will let me speak plainly, and not think ill of what I say. You
+are much changed, Mr. Ware, since you came to Octavius, and it is not a
+change for the good.”
+
+Theron lifted his brows in unaffected surprise, and put inquiry into his
+glance.
+
+“I don't know if Protestants will be saved, in God's good time, or not,”
+ continued Michael. “I find there are different opinions among the clergy
+about that, and of course it is not for me, only a plain mechanic, to be
+sure where learned and pious scholars are in doubt. But I am sure about
+one thing. Those Protestants, and others too, mind you, who profess
+and preach good deeds, and themselves do bad deeds--they will never be
+saved. They will have no chance at all to escape hell-fire.”
+
+“I think we are all agreed upon that, Mr. Madden,” said Theron, with
+surface suavity.
+
+“Then I say to you, Mr. Ware, you are yourself in a bad path. Take the
+warning of a dying man, sir, and turn from it!”
+
+The impulse to smile tugged at Theron's facial muscles. This was
+really too droll. He looked up at the ceiling, the while he forced his
+countenance into a polite composure, then turned again to Michael, with
+some conciliatory commonplace ready for utterance. But he said nothing,
+and all suggestion of levity left his mind, under the searching
+inspection bent upon him by the young man's hollow eyes. What did
+Michael suspect? What did he know? What was he hinting at, in this
+strange talk of his?
+
+“I saw you often on the street when first you came here,” continued
+Michael. “I knew the man who was here before you--that is, by sight--and
+he was not a good man. But your face, when you came, pleased me. I liked
+to look at you. I was tormented just then, do you see, that so many
+decent, kindly people, old school-mates and friends and neighbors of
+mine--and, for that matter, others all over the country must lose their
+souls because they were Protestants. At my boyhood and young manhood,
+that thought took the joy out of me. Sometimes I usen't to sleep a whole
+night long, for thinking that some lad I had been playing with, perhaps
+in his own house, that very day, would be taken when he died, and his
+mother too, when she died, and thrown into the flames of hell for
+all eternity. It made me so unhappy that finally I wouldn't go to any
+Protestant boy's house, and have his mother be nice to me, and give me
+cake and apples--and me thinking all the while that they were bound to
+be damned, no matter how good they were to me.”
+
+The primitive humanity of this touched Theron, and he nodded approbation
+with a tender smile in his eyes, forgetting for the moment that a
+personal application of the monologue had been hinted at.
+
+“But then later, as I grew up,” the sick man went on, “I learned that it
+was not altogether certain. Some of the authorities, I found, maintained
+that it was doubtful, and some said openly that there must be salvation
+possible for good people who lived in ignorance of the truth through no
+fault of their own. Then I had hope one day, and no hope the next, and
+as I did my work I thought it over, and in the evenings my father and
+I talked it over, and we settled nothing of it at all. Of course, how
+could we?”
+
+“Did you ever discuss the question with your sister?” it occurred
+suddenly to Theron to interpose. He was conscious of some daring in
+doing so, and he fancied that Michael's drawn face clouded a little at
+his words.
+
+“My sister is no theologian,” he answered briefly. “Women have no call
+to meddle with such matters. But I was saying--it was in the middle of
+these doubtings of mine that you came here to Octavius, and I noticed
+you on the streets, and once in the evening--I made no secret of it to
+my people--I sat in the back of your church and heard you preach. As I
+say, I liked you. It was your face, and what I thought it showed of the
+man underneath it, that helped settle my mind more than anything else. I
+said to myself: 'Here is a young man, only about my own age, and he has
+education and talents, and he does not seek to make money for himself,
+or a great name, but he is content to live humbly on the salary of a
+book-keeper, and devote all his time to prayer and the meditation of
+his religion, and preaching, and visiting the sick and the poor, and
+comforting them. His very face is a pleasure and a help for those in
+suffering and trouble to look at. The very sight of it makes one believe
+in pure thoughts and merciful deeds. I will not credit it that God
+intends damning such a man as that, or any like him!'”
+
+Theron bowed, with a slow, hesitating gravity of manner, and deep, not
+wholly complacent, attention on his face. Evidently all this was by way
+of preparation for something unpleasant.
+
+“That was only last spring,” said Michael. His tired voice sank for
+a sentence or two into a meditative half-whisper. “And it was MY last
+spring of all. I shall not be growing weak any more, or drawing hard
+breaths, when the first warm weather comes. It will be one season to
+me hereafter, always the same.” He lifted his voice with perceptible
+effort. “I am talking too much. The rest I can say in a word. Only half
+a year has gone by, and you have another face on you entirely. I had
+noticed the small changes before, one by one. I saw the great change,
+all of a sudden, the day of the picnic. I see it a hundred times more
+now, as you sit there. If it seemed to me like the face of a saint
+before, it is more like the face of a bar-keeper now!”
+
+This was quite too much. Theron rose, flushed to the temples, and
+scowled down at the helpless man in the chair. He swallowed the sharp
+words which came uppermost, and bit and moistened his lips as he forced
+himself to remember that this was a dying man, and Celia's brother, to
+whom she was devoted, and whom he himself felt he wanted to be very fond
+of. He got the shadow of a smile on to his countenance.
+
+“I fear you HAVE tired yourself unduly,” he said, in as non-contentious
+a tone as he could manage. He even contrived a little deprecatory laugh.
+“I am afraid your real quarrel is with the air of Octavius. It agrees
+with me so wonderfully--I am getting as fat as a seal. But I do hope I
+am not paying for it by such a wholesale deterioration inside. If my own
+opinion could be of any value, I should assure you that I feel myself
+an infinitely better and broader and stronger man than I was when I came
+here.”
+
+Michael shook his head dogmatically. “That is the greatest pity of all,”
+ he said, with renewed earnestness. “You are entirely deceived about
+yourself. You do not at all realize how you have altered your direction,
+or where you are going. It was a great misfortune for you, sir, that
+you did not keep among your own people. That poor half-brother of mine,
+though the drink was in him when he said that same to you, never spoke
+a truer word. Keep among your own people, Mr. Ware! When you go among
+others--you know what I mean--you have no proper understanding of what
+their sayings and doings really mean. You do not realize that they are
+held up by the power of the true Church, as a little child learning to
+walk is held up with a belt by its nurse. They can say and do things,
+and no harm at all come to them, which would mean destruction to you,
+because they have help, and you are walking alone. And so be said by me,
+Mr. Ware! Go back to the way you were brought up in, and leave alone the
+people whose ways are different from yours. You are a married man, and
+you are the preacher of a religion, such as it is. There can be nothing
+better for you than to go and strive to be a good husband, and to set a
+good example to the people of your Church, who look up to you--and mix
+yourself up no more with outside people and outside notions that only do
+you mischief. And that is what I wanted to say to you.”
+
+Theron took up his hat. “I take in all kindness what you have felt it
+your duty to say to me, Mr. Madden,” he said. “I am not sure that I have
+altogether followed you, but I am very sure you mean it well.”
+
+“I mean well by you,” replied Michael, wearily moving his head on the
+pillow, and speaking in an undertone of languor and pain, “and I mean
+well by others, that are nearer to me, and that I have a right to care
+more about. When a man lies by the site of his open grave, he does not
+be meaning ill to any human soul.”
+
+“Yes--thanks--quite so!” faltered Theron. He dallied for an instant
+with the temptation to seek some further explanation, but the sight of
+Michael's half-closed eyes and worn-out expression decided him against
+it. It did not seem to be expected, either, that he should shake hands,
+and with a few perfunctory words of hope for the invalid's recovery,
+which fell with a jarring note of falsehood upon his own ears, he turned
+and left the room. As he did so, Michael touched a bell on the table
+beside him.
+
+Theron drew a long breath in the hall, as the curtain fell behind him.
+It was an immense relief to escape from the oppressive humidity and heat
+of the flower-room, and from that ridiculous bore of a Michael as well.
+
+The middle-aged, grave-faced servant, warned by the bell, stood waiting
+to conduct him to the door.
+
+“I am sorry to have missed Miss Madden,” he said to her. “She must be
+quite worn out. Perhaps later in the day--”
+
+“She will not be seeing anybody today,” returned the woman. “She is
+going to New York this evening, and she is taking some rest against the
+journey.”
+
+“Will she be away long?” he asked mechanically. The servant's answer, “I
+have no idea,” hardly penetrated his consciousness at all.
+
+He moved down the steps, and along the gravel to the street, in a maze
+of mental confusion. When he reached the sidewalk, under the familiar
+elms, he paused, and made a definite effort to pull his thoughts
+together, and take stock of what had happened, of what was going to
+happen; but the thing baffled him. It was as if some drug had stupefied
+his faculties.
+
+He began to walk, and gradually saw that what he was thinking about was
+the fact of Celia's departure for New York that evening. He stared
+at this fact, at first in its nakedness, then clothed with reassuring
+suggestions that this was no doubt a trip she very often made. There was
+a blind sense of comfort in this idea, and he rested himself upon it.
+Yes, of course, she travelled a great deal. New York must be as familiar
+to her as Octavius was to him. Her going there now was quite a matter of
+course--the most natural thing in the world.
+
+Then there burst suddenly uppermost in his mind the other fact--that
+Father Forbes was also going to New York that evening. The two things
+spindled upward, side by side, yet separately, in his mental vision;
+then they twisted and twined themselves together. He followed their
+convolutions miserably, walking as if his eyes were shut.
+
+In slow fashion matters defined and arranged themselves before him.
+The process of tracing their sequence was all torture, but there was no
+possibility, no notion, of shirking any detail of the pain. The priest
+had spoken of his efforts to persuade Celia to go away for a few days,
+for rest and change of air and scene. He must have known only too well
+that she was going, but of that he had been careful to drop no hint. The
+possibility of accident was too slight to be worth considering. People
+on such intimate terms as Celia and the priest--people with such
+facilities for seeing each other whenever they desired--did not find
+themselves on the same train of cars, with the same long journey in
+view, by mere chance.
+
+Theron walked until dusk began to close in upon the autumn day. It grew
+colder, as he turned his face homeward. He wondered if it would freeze
+again over-night, and then remembered the shrivelled flowers in his
+wife's garden. For a moment they shaped themselves in a picture before
+his mind's eye; he saw their blackened foliage, their sicklied, drooping
+stalks, and wilted blooms, and as he looked, they restored themselves to
+the vigor and grace and richness of color of summer-time, as vividly as
+if they had been painted on a canvas. Or no, the picture he stared at
+was not on canvas, but on the glossy, varnished panel of a luxurious
+sleeping-car. He shook his head angrily and blinked his eyes again and
+again, to prevent their seeing, seated together in the open window above
+this panel, the two people he knew were there, gloved and habited for
+the night's journey, waiting for the train to start.
+
+
+
+“Very much to my surprise,” he found himself saying to Alice, watching
+her nervously as she laid the supper-table, “I find I must go to Albany
+tonight. That is, it isn't absolutely necessary, for that matter, but
+I think it may easily turn out to be greatly to my advantage to go.
+Something has arisen--I can't speak about it as yet--but the sooner I
+see the Bishop about it the better. Things like that occur in a man's
+life, where boldly striking out a line of action, and following it up
+without an instant's delay, may make all the difference in the world
+to him. Tomorrow it might be too late; and, besides, I can be home the
+sooner again.”
+
+Alice's face showed surprise, but no trace of suspicion. She spoke with
+studied amiability during the meal, and deferred with such unexpected
+tact to his implied desire not to be questioned as to the mysterious
+motives of the journey, that his mood instinctively softened and warmed
+toward her, as they finished supper.
+
+He smiled a little. “I do hope I shan't have to go on tomorrow to New
+York; but these Bishops of ours are such gad-abouts one never knows
+where to catch them. As like as not Sanderson may be down in New York,
+on Book-Concern business or something; and if he is, I shall have to
+chase him up. But, after all, perhaps the trip will do me good--the
+change of air and scene, you know.”
+
+“I'm sure I hope so,” said Alice, honestly enough. “If you do go on to
+New York, I suppose you'll go by the river-boat. Everybody talks so much
+of that beautiful sail down the Hudson.”
+
+“That's an idea!” exclaimed Theron, welcoming it with enthusiasm. “It
+hadn't occurred to me. If I do have to go, and it is as lovely as they
+make out, the next time I promise I won't go without you, my girl. I
+HAVE been rather out of sorts lately,” he continued. “When I come back,
+I daresay I shall be feeling better, more like my old self. Then I'm
+going to try, Alice, to be nicer to you than I have been of late. I'm
+afraid there was only too much truth in what you said this morning.”
+
+“Never mind what I said this morning--or any other time,” broke in
+Alice, softly. “Don't ever remember it again, Theron, if only--only--”
+
+He rose as she spoke, moved round the table to where she sat, and,
+bending over her, stopped the faltering sentence with a kiss. When was
+it, he wondered, that he had last kissed her? It seemed years, ages,
+ago.
+
+An hour later, with hat and overcoat on, and his valise in his hand, he
+stood on the doorstep of the parsonage, and kissed her once more before
+he turned and descended into the darkness. He felt like whistling as his
+feet sounded firmly on the plank sidewalk beyond the gate. It seemed as
+if he had never been in such capital good spirits before in his life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+The train was at a standstill somewhere, and the dull, ashen beginnings
+of daylight had made a first feeble start toward effacing the lamps in
+the car-roof, when the new day opened for Theron. A man who had just
+come in stopped at the seat upon which he had been stretched through the
+night, and, tapping him brusquely on the knee, said, “I'm afraid I must
+trouble you, sir.” After a moment of sleep-burdened confusion, he sat
+up, and the man took the other half of the seat and opened a newspaper,
+still damp from the press. It was morning, then.
+
+Theron rubbed a clear space upon the clouded window with his thumb, and
+looked out. There was nothing to be seen but a broad stretch of tracks,
+and beyond this the shadowed outlines of wagons and machinery in a yard,
+with a background of factory buildings.
+
+The atmosphere in the car was vile beyond belief. He thought of opening
+the window, but feared that the peremptory-looking man with the paper,
+who had wakened him and made him sit up, might object. They were the
+only people in the car who were sitting up. Backwards and forwards,
+on either side of the narrow aisle, the dim light disclosed recumbent
+forms, curled uncomfortably into corners, or sprawling at difficult
+angles which involved the least interference with one another. Here and
+there an upturned face gave a livid patch of surface for the mingled
+play of the gray dawn and the yellow lamp-light. A ceaseless noise of
+snoring was in the air.
+
+He got up and walked to the tank of ice-water at the end of the aisle,
+and took a drink from the most inaccessible portion of the common
+tin-cup's rim. The happy idea of going out on the platform struck him,
+and he acted upon it. The morning air was deliciously cool and fresh
+by contrast, and he filled his lungs with it again and again. Standing
+here, he could discern beyond the buildings to the right the faint
+purplish outlines of great rounded hills. Some workmen, one of them
+bearing a torch, were crouching along under the side of the train,
+pounding upon the resonant wheels with small hammers. He recalled having
+heard the same sound in the watches of the night, during a prolonged
+halt. Some one had said it was Albany. He smiled in spite of himself at
+the thought that Bishop Sanderson would never know about the visit he
+had missed.
+
+Swinging himself to the ground, he bent sidewise and looked forward down
+the long train. There were five, six, perhaps more, sleeping-cars on
+in front. Which one of them, he wondered--and then there came the sharp
+“All aboard!” from the other side, and he bundled up the steps again,
+and entered the car as the train slowly resumed its progress.
+
+He was wide-awake now, and quite at his ease. He took his seat, and
+diverted himself by winking gravely at a little child facing him on the
+next seat but one. There were four other children in the family party,
+encamped about the tired and still sleeping mother whose back was turned
+to Theron. He recalled now having noticed this poor woman last night,
+in the first stage of his journey--how she fed her brood from one of the
+numerous baskets piled under their feet, and brought water in a tin dish
+of her own from the tank to use in washing their faces with a rag, and
+loosened their clothes to dispose them for the night's sleep. The face
+of the woman, her manner and slatternly aspect, and the general effect
+of her belongings, bespoke squalid ignorance and poverty. Watching her,
+Theron had felt curiously interested in the performance. In one sense,
+it was scarcely more human than the spectacle of a cat licking her
+kittens, or a cow giving suck to her calf. Yet, in another, was there
+anything more human?
+
+The child who had wakened before the rest regarded him with placidity,
+declining to be amused by his winkings, but exhibiting no other emotion.
+She had been playing by herself with a couple of buttons tied on
+a string, and after giving a civil amount of attention to Theron's
+grimaces, she turned again to the superior attractions of this toy. Her
+self-possession, her capacity for self-entertainment, the care she took
+not to arouse the others, all impressed him very much. He felt in his
+pocket for a small coin, and, reaching forward, offered it to her. She
+took it calmly, bestowed a tranquil gaze upon him for a moment, and went
+back to the buttons. Her indifference produced an unpleasant sensation
+upon him somehow, and he rubbed the steaming window clear again, and
+stared out of it.
+
+The wide river lay before him, flanked by a precipitous wall of
+cliffs which he knew instantly must be the Palisades. There was an
+advertisement painted on them which he tried in vain to read. He was
+surprised to find they interested him so slightly. He had heard all his
+life of the Hudson, and especially of it just at this point. The reality
+seemed to him almost commonplace. His failure to be thrilled depressed
+him for the moment.
+
+“I suppose those ARE the Palisades?” he asked his neighbor.
+
+The man glanced up from his paper, nodded, and made as if to resume his
+reading. But his eye had caught something in the prospect through the
+window which arrested his attention. “By George!” he exclaimed, and
+lifted himself to get a clearer view.
+
+“What is it?” asked Theron, peering forth as well.
+
+“Nothing; only Barclay Wendover's yacht is still there. There's been a
+hitch of some sort. They were to have left yesterday.”
+
+“Is that it--that long black thing?” queried Theron. “That can't be a
+yacht, can it?”
+
+“What do you think it is?” answered the other. They were looking at a
+slim, narrow hull, lying at anchor, silent and motionless on the drab
+expanse of water. “If that ain't a yacht, they haven't begun building
+any yet. They're taking her over to the Mediterranean for a cruise, you
+know--around India and Japan for the winter, and home by the South Sea
+islands. Friend o' mine's in the party. Wouldn't mind the trip myself.”
+
+“But do you mean to say,” asked Theron, “that that little shell of a
+thing can sail across the ocean? Why, how many people would she hold?”
+
+The man laughed. “Well,” he said, “there's room for two sets of
+quadrilles in the chief saloon, if the rest keep their legs well up on
+the sofas. But there's only ten or a dozen in the party this time.
+More than that rather get in one another's way, especially with so many
+ladies on board.”
+
+Theron asked no more questions, but bent his head to see the last of
+this wonderful craft. The sight of it, and what he had heard about it,
+suddenly gave point and focus to his thoughts. He knew at last what it
+was that had lurked, formless and undesignated, these many days in the
+background of his dreams. The picture rose in his mind now of Celia as
+the mistress of a yacht. He could see her reclining in a low easy-chair
+upon the polished deck, with the big white sails billowing behind her,
+and the sun shining upon the deep blue waves, and glistening through the
+splash of spray in the air, and weaving a halo of glowing gold about
+her fair head. Ah, how the tender visions crowded now upon him! Eternal
+summer basked round this enchanted yacht of his fancy--summer sought
+now in Scottish firths or Norwegian fiords, now in quaint old Southern
+harbors, ablaze with the hues of strange costumes and half-tropical
+flowers and fruits, now in far-away Oriental bays and lagoons, or among
+the coral reefs and palm-trees of the luxurious Pacific. He dwelt upon
+these new imaginings with the fervent longing of an inland-born boy.
+Every vague yearning he had ever felt toward salt-water stirred again in
+his blood at the thought of the sea--with Celia.
+
+Why not? She had never visited any foreign land. “Sometime,” she had
+said, “sometime, no doubt I will.” He could hear again the wistful,
+musing tone of her voice. The thought had fascinations for her, it was
+clear. How irresistibly would it not appeal to her, presented with the
+added charm of a roving, vagrant independence on the high seas, free
+to speed in her snow-winged chariot wherever she willed over the deep,
+loitering in this place, or up-helm-and-away to another, with no more
+care or weight of responsibility than the gulls tossing through the air
+in her wake!
+
+Theron felt, rather than phrased to himself, that there would not be
+“ten or a dozen in the party” on that yacht. Without defining anything
+in his mind, he breathed in fancy the same bold ocean breeze which
+filled the sails, and toyed with Celia's hair; he looked with her as she
+sat by the rail, and saw the same waves racing past, the same vast dome
+of cloud and ether that were mirrored in her brown eyes, and there was
+no one else anywhere near them. Even the men in sailors' clothes,
+who would be pulling at ropes, or climbing up tarred ladders, kept
+themselves considerately outside the picture. Only Celia sat there, and
+at her feet, gazing up again into her face as in the forest, the man
+whose whole being had been consecrated to her service, her worship, by
+the kiss.
+
+“You've passed it now. I was trying to point out the Jumel house to
+you--where Aaron Burr lived, you know.”
+
+Theron roused himself from his day-dream, and nodded with a confused
+smile at his neighbor. “Thanks,” he faltered; “I didn't hear you. The
+train makes such a noise, and I must have been dozing.”
+
+He looked about him. The night aspect, as of a tramps' lodging-house,
+had quite disappeared from the car. Everybody was sitting up; and the
+more impatient were beginning to collect their bundles and hand-bags
+from the racks and floor. An expressman came through, jangling a huge
+bunch of brass checks on leathern thongs over his arm, and held parley
+with passengers along the aisle. Outside, citified streets, with stores
+and factories, were alternating in the moving panorama with open fields;
+and, even as he looked, these vacant spaces ceased altogether, and
+successive regular lines of pavement, between two tall rows of houses
+all alike, began to stretch out, wheel to the right, and swing off out
+of view, for all the world like the avenues of hop-poles he remembered
+as a boy. Then was a long tunnel, its darkness broken at stated
+intervals by brief bursts of daylight from overhead, and out of this all
+at once the train drew up its full length in some vast, vaguely lighted
+enclosure, and stopped.
+
+“Yes, this is New York,” said the man, folding up his paper, and
+springing to his feet. The narrow aisle was filled with many others who
+had been prompter still; and Theron stood, bag in hand, waiting till
+this energetic throng should have pushed itself bodily past him forth
+from the car. Then he himself made his way out, drifting with a sense of
+helplessness in their resolute wake. There rose in his mind the sudden
+conviction that he would be too late. All the passengers in the forward
+sleepers would be gone before he could get there. Yet even this terror
+gave him no new power to get ahead of anybody else in the tightly packed
+throng.
+
+Once on the broad platform, the others started off briskly; they all
+seemed to know just where they wanted to go, and to feel that no instant
+of time was to be lost in getting there. Theron himself caught some of
+this urgent spirit, and hurled himself along in the throng with reckless
+haste, knocking his bag against peoples' legs, but never pausing for
+apology or comment until he found himself abreast of the locomotive at
+the head of the train. He drew aside from the main current here, and
+began searching the platform, far and near, for those he had travelled
+so far to find.
+
+The platform emptied itself. Theron lingered on in puzzled hesitation,
+and looked about him. In the whole immense station, with its acres of
+tracks and footways, and its incessantly shifting processions of people,
+there was visible nobody else who seemed also in doubt, or who appeared
+capable of sympathizing with indecision in any form. Another train came
+in, some way over to the right, and before it had fairly stopped,
+swarms of eager men began boiling out of each end of each car, literally
+precipitating themselves over one another, it seemed to Theron, in their
+excited dash down the steps. As they caught their footing below, they
+started racing pell-mell down the platform to its end; there he saw
+them, looking more than ever like clustered bees in the distance,
+struggling vehemently in a dense mass up a staircase in the remote
+corner of the building.
+
+“What are those folks running for? Is there a fire?” he asked an
+amiable-faced young mulatto, in the uniform of the sleeping-car service,
+who passed him with some light hand-bags.
+
+“No; they's Harlem people, I guess--jes' catchin' the Elevated--that's
+all, sir,” he answered obligingly.
+
+At the moment some passengers emerged slowly from one of the
+sleeping-cars, and came loitering toward him.
+
+“Why, are there people still in these cars?” he asked eagerly. “Haven't
+they all gone?”
+
+“Some has; some ain't,” the porter replied. “They most generally take
+their time about it. They ain't no hurry, so long's they get out 'fore
+we're drawn round to the drill-yard.”
+
+There was still hope, then. Theron took up his bag and walked forward,
+intent upon finding some place from which he could watch unobserved the
+belated stragglers issuing from the sleeping-cars. He started back
+all at once, confronted by a semi-circle of violent men with whips
+and badges, who stunned his hearing by a sudden vociferous outburst of
+shouts and yells. They made furious gestures at him with their whips
+and fists, to enforce the incoherent babel of their voices; and in these
+gestures, as in their faces and cries, there seemed a great deal of
+menace and very little invitation. There was a big policeman sauntering
+near by, and Theron got the idea that it was his presence alone which
+protected him from open violence at the hands of these savage hackmen.
+He tightened his clutch on his valise, and, turning his back on them
+and their uproar, tried to brave it out and stand where he was. But the
+policeman came lounging slowly toward him, with such authority in his
+swaying gait, and such urban omniscience written all over his broad,
+sandy face, that he lost heart, and beat an abrupt retreat off to the
+right, where there were a number of doorways, near which other people
+had ventured to put down baggage on the floor.
+
+Here, somewhat screened from observation, he stood for a long time,
+watching at odd moments the ceaselessly varying phases of the strange
+scene about him, but always keeping an eye on the train he had himself
+arrived in. It was slow and dispiriting work. A dozen times his heart
+failed him, and he said to himself mournfully that he had had his
+journey for nothing. Then some new figure would appear, alighting from
+the steps of a sleeper, and hope revived in his breast.
+
+At last, when over half an hour of expectancy had been marked off by the
+big clock overhead, his suspense came to an end. He saw Father Forbes'
+erect and substantial form, standing on the car platform nearest of
+all, balancing himself with his white hands on the rails, waiting for
+something. Then after a little he came down, followed by a black porter,
+whose arms were burdened by numerous bags and parcels. The two stood
+a minute or so more in hesitation at the side of the steps. Then Celia
+descended, and the three advanced.
+
+The importance of not being discovered was uppermost in Theron's mind,
+now that he saw them actually coming toward him. He had avoided this the
+previous evening, in the Octavius depot, with some skill, he flattered
+himself. It gave him a pleasurable sense of being a man of affairs,
+almost a detective, to be confronted by the necessity now of baffling
+observation once again. He was still rather without plans for keeping
+them in view, once they left the station. He had supposed that he would
+be able to hear what hotel they directed their driver to take them to,
+and, failing that, he had fostered a notion, based upon a story he had
+read when a boy, of throwing himself into another carriage, and bidding
+his driver to pursue them in hot haste, and on his life not fail to
+track them down. These devices seemed somewhat empty, now that the
+urgent moment was at hand; and as he drew back behind some other
+loiterers, out of view, he sharply racked his wits for some way of
+coping with this most pressing problem.
+
+It turned out, however, that there was no difficulty at all. Father
+Forbes and Celia seemed to have no use for the hackmen, but moved
+straight forward toward the street, through the doorway next to that
+in which Theron cowered. He stole round, and followed them at a safe
+distance, making Celia's hat, and the portmanteau perched on the
+shoulder of the porter behind her, his guides. To his surprise, they
+still kept on their course when they had reached the sidewalk, and went
+over the pavement across an open square which spread itself directly
+in front of the station. Hanging as far behind as he dared, he saw them
+pass to the other sidewalk diagonally opposite, proceed for a block or
+so along this, and then separate at a corner. Celia and the negro lad
+went down a side street, and entered the door of a vast, tall red-brick
+building which occupied the whole block. The priest, turning on his
+heel, came back again and went boldly up the broad steps of the front
+entrance to this same structure, which Theron now discovered to be the
+Murray Hill Hotel.
+
+Fortune had indeed favored him. He not only knew where they were, but he
+had been himself a witness to the furtive way in which they entered
+the house by different doors. Nothing in his own limited experience of
+hotels helped him to comprehend the notion of a separate entrance
+for ladies and their luggage. He did not feel quite sure about the
+significance of what he had observed, in his own mind. But it was
+apparent to him that there was something underhanded about it.
+
+After lingering awhile on the steps of the hotel, and satisfying himself
+by peeps through the glass doors that the coast was clear, he ventured
+inside. The great corridor contained many people, coming, going, or
+standing about, but none of them paid any attention to him. At last
+he made up his mind, and beckoned a colored boy to him from a group
+gathered in the shadows of the big central staircase. Explaining that
+he did not at that moment wish a room, but desired to leave his bag, the
+boy took him to a cloak-room, and got him a check for the thing. With
+this in his pocket he felt himself more at his ease, and turned to walk
+away. Then suddenly he wheeled, and, bending his body over the counter
+of the cloak-room, astonished the attendant inside by the eagerness with
+which he scrutinized the piled rows of portmanteaus, trunks, overcoats,
+and bundles in the little enclosure.
+
+“What is it you want? Here's your bag, if you're looking for that,” this
+man said to him.
+
+“No, thanks; it's nothing,” replied Theron, straightening himself again.
+He had had a narrow escape. Father Forbes and Celia, walking side by
+side, had come down the small passage in which he stood, and had passed
+him so closely that he had felt her dress brush against him. Fortunately
+he had seen them in time, and by throwing himself half into the
+cloak-room, had rendered recognition impossible.
+
+He walked now in the direction they had taken, till he came to the
+polite colored man at an open door on the left, who was bowing people
+into the breakfast room. Standing in the doorway, he looked about him
+till his eye lighted upon his two friends, seated at a small table by
+a distant window, with a black waiter, card in hand, bending over in
+consultation with them.
+
+Returning to the corridor, he made bold now to march up to the desk and
+examine the register. The priest's name was not there. He found only the
+brief entry, “Miss Madden, Octavius,” written, not by her, but by Father
+Forbes. On the line were two numbers in pencil, with an “and” between
+them. An indirect question to one of the clerks helped him to an
+explanation of this. When there were two numbers, it meant that the
+guest in question had a parlor as well as a bedroom.
+
+Here he drew a long, satisfied breath, and turned away. The first half
+of his quest stood completed--and that much more fully and easily than
+he had dared to hope. He could not but feel a certain new respect for
+himself as a man of resource and energy. He had demonstrated that people
+could not fool with him with impunity.
+
+It remained to decide what he would do with his discovery, now that
+it had been so satisfactorily made. As yet, he had given this hardly a
+thought. Even now, it did not thrust itself forward as a thing demanding
+instant attention. It was much more important, first of all, to get a
+good breakfast. He had learned that there was another and less formal
+eating-place, downstairs in the basement by the bar, with an entrance
+from the street. He walked down by the inner stairway instead, feeling
+himself already at home in the big hotel. He ordered an ample breakfast,
+and came out while it was being served to wash and have his boots
+blacked, and he gave the man a quarter of a dollar. His pockets were
+filled with silver quarters, half-dollars, and dollars almost to a
+burdensome point, and in his valise was a bag full of smaller change,
+including many rolls of copper cents which Alice always counted and
+packed up on Mondays. In the hurry of leaving he had brought with him
+the church collections for the past two weeks. It occurred to him that
+he must keep a strict account of his expenditure. Meanwhile he gave ten
+cents to another man in a silk-sleeved cardigan jacket, who had merely
+stood by and looked at him while his boots were being polished. There
+was a sense of metropolitan affluence in the very atmosphere.
+
+The little table in the adjoining room, on which Theron found his meal
+in waiting for him, seemed a vision of delicate napery and refined
+appointments in his eyes. He was wolfishly hungry, and the dishes he
+looked upon gave him back assurances by sight and smell that he was very
+happy as well. The servant in attendance had an extremely white apron
+and a kindly black face. He bowed when Theron looked at him, with the
+air of a lifelong admirer and humble friend.
+
+“I suppose you'll have claret with your breakfast, sir?” he remarked, as
+if it were a matter of course.
+
+“Why, certainly,” answered Theron, stretching his legs contentedly
+under the table, and tucking the corner of his napkin in his
+neckband.--“Certainly, my good man.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+At ten o'clock Theron, loitering near the bookstall in the corridor, saw
+Father Forbes come downstairs, pass out through the big front doors, get
+into a carriage, and drive away.
+
+This relieved him of a certain sense of responsibility, and he retired
+to a corner sofa and sat down. The detective side of him being off duty,
+so to speak, there was leisure at last for reflection upon the other
+aspects of his mission. Yes; it was high time for him to consider what
+he should do next.
+
+It was easier to recognize this fact, however, than to act upon it.
+His mind was full of tricksy devices for eluding this task of serious
+thought which he sought to impose upon it. It seemed so much pleasanter
+not to think at all--but just to drift. He found himself watching with
+envy the men who, as they came out from their breakfast, walked over to
+the bookstall, and bought cigars from the row of boxes nestling there
+among the newspaper piles. They had such evident delight in the work
+of selection; they took off the ends of the cigars so carefully, and
+lighted them with such meditative attention,--he could see that he was
+wofully handicapped by not knowing how to smoke. He had had the most
+wonderful breakfast of his life, but even in the consciousness of
+comfortable repletion which pervaded his being, there was an obstinate
+sense of something lacking. No doubt a good cigar was the thing needed
+to round out the perfection of such a breakfast. He half rose once,
+fired by a sudden resolution to go over and get one. But of course that
+was nonsense; it would only make him sick. He sat down, and determinedly
+set himself to thinking.
+
+The effort finally brought fruit--and of a kind which gave him a very
+unhappy quarter of an hour. The lover part of him was uppermost now,
+insistently exposing all its raw surfaces to the stings and scalds of
+jealousy. Up to this moment, his brain had always evaded the direct
+question of how he and the priest relatively stood in Celia's
+estimation. It forced itself remorselessly upon him now; and his
+thoughts, so far from shirking the subject, seemed to rise up to meet
+it. It was extremely unpleasant, all this.
+
+But then a calmer view asserted itself. Why go out of his way to
+invent anguish for himself? The relations between Celia and the priest,
+whatever they might be, were certainly of old standing. They had begun
+before his time. His own romance was a more recent affair, and must take
+its place, of course, subject to existing conditions.
+
+It was all right for him to come to New York, and satisfy his legitimate
+curiosity as to the exact character and scope of these conditions. But
+it was foolish to pretend to be amazed or dismayed at the discovery of
+their existence. They were a part of the situation which he, with his
+eyes wide open, had accepted. It was his function to triumph over them,
+to supplant them, to rear the edifice of his own victorious passion upon
+their ruins. It was to this that Celia's kiss had invited him. It was
+for this that he had come to New York. To let his purpose be hampered or
+thwarted now by childish doubts and jealousies would be ridiculous.
+
+He rose, and holding himself very erect, walked with measured
+deliberation across the corridor and up the broad staircase. There was
+an elevator near at hand, he had noticed, but he preferred the stairs.
+One or two of the colored boys clustered about the foot of the stairs
+looked at him, and he had a moment of dreadful apprehension lest they
+should stop his progress. Nothing was said, and he went on. The numbers
+on the first floor were not what he wanted, and after some wandering
+about he ascended to the next, and then to the third. Every now and then
+he encountered attendants, but intuitively he bore himself with an air
+of knowing what he was about which protected him from inquiry.
+
+Finally he came upon the hall-way he sought. Passing along, he found
+the doors bearing the numbers he had memorized so well. They were quite
+close together, and there was nothing to help him guess which belonged
+to the parlor. He hesitated, gazing wistfully from one to the other. In
+the instant of indecision, even while his alert ear caught the sound of
+feet coming along toward the passage in which he stood, a thought came
+to quicken his resolve. It became apparent to him that his discovery
+gave him a certain new measure of freedom with Celia, a sort of right to
+take things more for granted than heretofore. He chose a door at random,
+and rapped distinctly on the panel.
+
+“Come!”
+
+The voice he knew for Celia's. The single word, however, recalled
+the usage of Father Forbes, which he had noted more than once at the
+pastorate, when Maggie had knocked.
+
+He straightened his shoulders, took his hat off, and pushed open the
+door. It WAS the parlor--a room of sofas, pianos, big easy-chairs, and
+luxurious bric-a-brac. A tall woman was walking up and down in it, with
+bowed head. Her back was at the moment toward him; and he looked at her,
+saying to himself that this was the lady of his dreams, the enchantress
+of the kiss, the woman who loved him--but somehow it did not seem to his
+senses to be Celia.
+
+She turned, and moved a step or two in his direction before she
+mechanically lifted her eyes and saw who was standing in her doorway.
+She stopped short, and regarded him. Her face was in the shadow, and he
+could make out nothing of its expression, save that there was a general
+effect of gravity about it.
+
+“I cannot receive you,” she said. “You must go away. You have no
+business to come like this without sending up your card.”
+
+Theron smiled at her. The notion of taking in earnest her inhospitable
+words did not at all occur to him. He could see now that her face had
+vexed and saddened lines upon it, and the sharpness of her tone remained
+in his ears. But he smiled again gently, to reassure her.
+
+“I ought to have sent up my name, I know,” he said, “but I couldn't bear
+to wait. I just saw your name on the register and--you WILL forgive me,
+won't you?--I ran to you at once. I know you won't have the heart to
+send me away!”
+
+She stood where she had halted, her arms behind her, looking him fixedly
+in the face. He had made a movement to advance, and offer his hand in
+greeting, but her posture checked the impulse. His courage began to
+falter under her inspection.
+
+“Must I really go down again?” he pleaded. “It's a crushing penalty to
+suffer for such little indiscretion. I was so excited to find you were
+here--I never stopped to think. Don't send me away; please don't!”
+
+Celia raised her head. “Well, shut the door, then,” she said, “since you
+are so anxious to stay. You would have done much better, though, very
+much better indeed, to have taken the hint and gone away.”
+
+“Will you shake hands with me, Celia?” he asked softly, as he came near
+her.
+
+“Sit there, please!” she made answer, indicating a chair in the middle
+of the room. He obeyed her, but to his surprise, instead of seating
+herself as well, she began walking up and down the length of the floor
+again. After a turn or two she stopped in front of him, and looked him
+full in the eye. The light from the windows was on her countenance now,
+and its revelations vaguely troubled him. It was a Celia he had never
+seen before who confronted him.
+
+“I am much occupied by other matters,” she said, speaking with cold
+impassivity, “but still I find myself curious to know just what limits
+you set to your dishonesty.”
+
+Theron stared up at her. His lips quivered, but no speech came to them.
+If this was all merely fond playfulness, it was being carried to a
+heart-aching point.
+
+“I saw you hiding about in the depot at home last evening,” she went on.
+“You come up here, pretending to have discovered me by accident, but I
+saw you following me from the Grand Central this morning.”
+
+“Yes, I did both these things,” said Theron, boldly. A fine bravery
+tingled in his veins all at once. He looked into her face and found the
+spirit to disregard its frowning aspect. “Yes, I did them,” he repeated
+defiantly. “That is not the hundredth part, or the thousandth part,
+of what I would do for your sake. I have got way beyond caring for any
+consequences. Position, reputation, the good opinion of fools--what are
+they? Life itself--what does it amount to? Nothing at all--with you in
+the balance!”
+
+“Yes--but I am not in the balance,” observed Celia, quietly. “That is
+where you have made your mistake.”
+
+Theron laid aside his hat. Women were curious creatures, he reflected.
+Some were susceptible to one line of treatment, some to another. His own
+reading of Celia had always been that she liked opposition, of a smart,
+rattling, almost cheeky, sort. One got on best with her by saying bright
+things. He searched his brain now for some clever quip that would strike
+sparks from the adamantine mood which for the moment it was her whim to
+assume. To cover the process, he smiled a little. Then her beauty,
+as she stood before him, her queenly form clad in a more stiffly
+fashionable dress than he had seen her wearing before, appealed afresh
+and overwhelmingly to him. He rose to his feet.
+
+“Have you forgotten our talk in the woods?” he murmured with a wooing
+note. “Have you forgotten the kiss?”
+
+She shook her head calmly. “I have forgotten nothing.”
+
+“Then why play with me so cruelly now?” he went on, in a voice of tender
+deprecation. “I know you don't mean it, but all the same it bruises my
+heart a little. I build myself so wholly upon you, I have made existence
+itself depend so completely upon your smile, upon a soft glance in your
+eyes, that when they are not there, why, I suffer, I don't know how to
+live at all. So be kinder to me, Celia!”
+
+“I was kinder, as you call it, when you came in,” she replied. “I
+told you to go away. That was pure kindness--more kindness than you
+deserved.”
+
+Theron looked at his hat, where it stood on the carpet by his feet. He
+felt tears coming into his eyes. “You tell me that you remember,” he
+said, in depressed tones, “and yet you treat me like this! Perhaps I am
+wrong. No doubt it is my own fault. I suppose I ought not to have come
+down here at all.”
+
+Celia nodded her head in assent to this view.
+
+“But I swear that I was helpless in the matter,” he burst forth. “I HAD
+to come! It would have been literally impossible for me to have stayed
+at home, knowing that you were here, and knowing also that--that--”
+
+“Go on!” said Celia, thrusting forth her under-lip a trifle, and
+hardening still further the gleam in her eye, as he stumbled over his
+sentence and left it unfinished. “What was the other thing that you were
+'knowing'?”
+
+“Knowing--” he took up the word hesitatingly--“knowing that life would
+be insupportable to me if I could not be near you.”
+
+She curled her lip at him. “You skated over the thin spot very well,”
+ she commented. “It was on the tip of your tongue to mention the fact
+that Father Forbes came with me. Oh, I can read you through and through,
+Mr. Ware.”
+
+In a misty way Theron felt things slipping from his grasp. The rising
+moisture blurred his eyes as their gaze clung to Celia.
+
+“Then if you do read me,” he protested, “you must know how utterly my
+heart and brain are filled with you. No other man in all the world can
+yield himself so absolutely to the woman he worships as I can. You have
+taken possession of me so wholly, I am not in the least master of myself
+any more. I don't know what I say or what I do. I am not worthy of you,
+I know. No man alive could be that. But no one else will idolize and
+reverence you as I do. Believe me when I say that, Celia! And how can
+you blame me, in your heart, for following you? 'Whither thou goest,
+I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my
+people, and thy God my God; where thou diest, will I die, and there will
+I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death
+part thee and me!'”
+
+Celia shrugged her shoulders, and moved a few steps away from him.
+Something like despair seized upon him.
+
+“Surely,” he urged with passion, “surely I have a right to remind you of
+the kiss!”
+
+She turned. “The kiss,” she said meditatively. “Yes, you have a right
+to remind me of it. Oh, yes, an undoubted right. You have another right
+too--the right to have the kiss explained to you. It was of the good-bye
+order. It signified that we weren't to meet again, and that just for one
+little moment I permitted myself to be sorry for you. That was all.”
+
+He held himself erect under the incredible words, and gazed blankly at
+her. The magnitude of what he confronted bewildered him; his mind was
+incapable of taking it in. “You mean--” he started to say, and then
+stopped, helplessly staring into her face, with a dropped jaw. It was
+too much to try to think what she meant.
+
+A little side-thought sprouted in the confusion of his brain. It grew
+until it spread a bitter smile over his pale face. “I know so little
+about kisses,” he said; “I am such a greenhorn at that sort of thing.
+You should have had pity on my inexperience, and told me just what brand
+of kiss it was I was getting. Probably I ought to have been able to
+distinguish, but you see I was brought up in the country--on a farm.
+They don't have kisses in assorted varieties there.”
+
+She bowed her head slightly. “Yes, you are entitled to say that,” she
+assented. “I was to blame, and it is quite fair that you should tell
+me so. You spoke of your inexperience, your innocence. That was why I
+kissed you in saying good-bye. It was in memory of that innocence of
+yours, to which you yourself had been busy saying good-bye ever since I
+first saw you. The idea seemed to me to mean something at the moment. I
+see now that it was too subtle. I do not usually err on that side.”
+
+Theron kept his hold upon her gaze, as if it afforded him bodily
+support. He felt that he ought to stoop and take up his hat, but he
+dared not look away from her. “Do you not err now, on the side of
+cruelty?” he asked her piteously.
+
+It seemed for the instant as if she were wavering, and he swiftly thrust
+forth other pleas. “I admit that I did wrong to follow you to New York.
+I see that now. But it was an offence committed in entire good faith.
+Think of it, Celia! I have never seen you since that day--that day in
+the woods. I have waited--and waited--with no sign from you, no chance
+of seeing you at all. Think what that meant to me! Everything in the
+world had been altered for me, torn up by the roots. I was a new being,
+plunged into a new existence. The kiss had done that. But until saw you
+again, I could not tell whether this vast change in me and my life was
+for good or for bad--whether the kiss had come to me as a blessing or a
+curse. The suspense was killing me, Celia! That is why, when I learned
+that you were coming here, I threw everything to the winds and followed
+you. You blame me for it, and I bow my head and accept the blame. But
+are you justified in punishing me so terribly--in going on after I have
+confessed my error, and cutting my heart into little strips, putting me
+to death by torture?”
+
+“Sit down,” said Celia, with a softened weariness in her voice. She
+seated herself in front of him as he sank into his chair again. “I don't
+want to give you unnecessary pain, but you have insisted on forcing
+yourself into a position where there isn't anything else but pain. I
+warned you to go away, but you wouldn't. No matter how gently I may try
+to explain things to you, you are bound to get nothing but suffering out
+of the explanation. Now shall I still go on?”
+
+He inclined his head in token of assent, and did not lift it again, but
+raised toward her a disconsolate gaze from a pallid, drooping face.
+
+“It is all in a single word, Mr. Ware,” she proceeded, in low tones.
+“I speak for others as well as myself, mind you--we find that you are a
+bore.”
+
+Theron's stiffened countenance remained immovable. He continued to stare
+unblinkingly up into her eyes.
+
+“We were disposed to like you very much when we first knew you,”
+ Celia went on. “You impressed us as an innocent, simple, genuine young
+character, full of mother's milk. It was like the smell of early spring
+in the country to come in contact with you. Your honesty of nature,
+your sincerity in that absurd religion of yours, your general NAIVETE of
+mental and spiritual get-up, all pleased us a great deal. We thought you
+were going to be a real acquisition.”
+
+“Just a moment--whom do you mean by 'we'?” He asked the question calmly
+enough, but in a voice with an effect of distance in it.
+
+“It may not be necessary to enter into that,” she replied. “Let me go
+on. But then it became apparent, little by little, that we had misjudged
+you. We liked you, as I have said, because you were unsophisticated and
+delightfully fresh and natural. Somehow we took it for granted you would
+stay so. Rut that is just what you didn't do--just what you hadn't the
+sense to try to do. Instead, we found you inflating yourself with
+all sorts of egotisms and vanities. We found you presuming upon the
+friendships which had been mistakenly extended to you. Do you want
+instances? You went to Dr. Ledsmar's house that very day after I had
+been with you to get a piano at Thurston's, and tried to inveigle him
+into talking scandal about me. You came to me with tales about him. You
+went to Father Forbes, and sought to get him to gossip about us both.
+Neither of those men will ever ask you inside his house again. But that
+is only one part of it. Your whole mind became an unpleasant thing
+to contemplate. You thought it would amuse and impress us to hear you
+ridiculing and reviling the people of your church, whose money supports
+you, and making a mock of the things they believe in, and which you for
+your life wouldn't dare let them know you didn't believe in. You talked
+to us slightingly about your wife. What were you thinking of, not
+to comprehend that that would disgust us? You showed me once--do you
+remember?--a life of George Sand that you had just bought,--bought
+because you had just discovered that she had an unclean side to her
+life. You chuckled as you spoke to me about it, and you were for all the
+world like a little nasty boy, giggling over something dirty that older
+people had learned not to notice. These are merely random incidents.
+They are just samples, picked hap-hazard, of the things in you which
+have been opening our eyes, little by little, to our mistake. I
+can understand that all the while you really fancied that you were
+expanding, growing, in all directions. What you took to be improvement
+was degeneration. When you thought that you were impressing us most by
+your smart sayings and doings, you were reminding us most of the fable
+about the donkey trying to play lap-dog. And it wasn't even an honest,
+straightforward donkey at that!”
+
+She uttered these last words sorrowfully, her hands clasped in her lap,
+and her eyes sinking to the floor. A silence ensued. Then Theron reached
+a groping hand out for his hat, and, rising, walked with a lifeless,
+automatic step to the door.
+
+He had it half open, when the impossibility of leaving in this way
+towered suddenly in his path and overwhelmed him. He slammed the door
+to, and turned as if he had been whirled round by some mighty wind.
+He came toward her, with something almost menacing in the vigor of his
+movements, and in the wild look upon his white, set face. Halting
+before her, he covered the tailor-clad figure, the coiled red hair, the
+upturned face with its simulated calm, the big brown eyes, the rings
+upon the clasped fingers, with a sweeping, comprehensive glare of
+passion.
+
+“This is what you have done to me, then!”
+
+His voice was unrecognizable in his own ears--hoarse and broken, but
+with a fright-compelling something in it which stimulated his rage. The
+horrible notion of killing her, there where she sat, spread over the
+chaos of his mind with an effect of unearthly light--red and abnormally
+evil. It was like that first devilish radiance ushering in Creation, of
+which the first-fruit was Cain. Why should he not kill her? In all ages,
+women had been slain for less. Yes--and men had been hanged. Something
+rose and stuck in his dry throat; and as he swallowed it down, the
+sinister flare of murderous fascination died suddenly away into
+darkness. The world was all black again--plunged in the Egyptian night
+which lay upon the face of the deep while the earth was yet without form
+and void. He was alone on it--alone among awful, planetary solitudes
+which crushed him.
+
+The sight of Celia, sitting motionless only a pace in front of him, was
+plain enough to his eyes. It was an illusion. She was really a star,
+many millions of miles away. These things were hard to understand; but
+they were true, none the less. People seemed to be about him, but in
+fact he was alone. He recalled that even the little child in the car,
+playing with those two buttons on a string, would have nothing to do
+with him. Take his money, yes; take all he would give her--but not smile
+at him, not come within reach of him! Men closed the doors of their
+houses against him. The universe held him at arm's length as a nuisance.
+
+He was standing with one knee upon a sofa. Unconsciously he had moved
+round to the side of Celia; and as he caught the effect of her face now
+in profile, memory-pictures began at once building themselves in his
+brain--pictures of her standing in the darkened room of the cottage of
+death, declaiming the CONFITEOR; of her seated at the piano, under the
+pure, mellowed candle-light; of her leaning her chin on her hands, and
+gazing meditatively at the leafy background of the woods they were in;
+of her lying back, indolently content, in the deck-chair on the yacht of
+his fancy--that yacht which a few hours before had seemed so brilliantly
+and bewitchingly real to him, and now--now--!
+
+He sank in a heap upon the couch, and, burying his face among its
+cushions, wept and groaned aloud. His collapse was absolute. He sobbed
+with the abandonment of one who, in the veritable presence of death,
+lets go all sense of relation to life.
+
+Presently some one was touching him on the shoulder--an incisive,
+pointed touch--and he checked himself, and lifted his face.
+
+“You will have to get up, and present some sort of an appearance, and
+go away at once,” Celia said to him in low, rapid tones. “Some gentlemen
+are at the door, whom I have been waiting for.”
+
+As he stupidly sat up and tried to collect his faculties, Celia had
+opened the door and admitted two visitors. The foremost was Father
+Forbes; and he, with some whispered, smiling words, presented to her his
+companion, a tall, robust, florid man of middle-age, with a frock-coat
+and a gray mustache, sharply waxed. The three spoke for a moment
+together. Then the priest's wandering eye suddenly lighted upon the
+figure on the sofa. He stared, knitted his brows, and then lifted them
+in inquiry as he turned to Celia.
+
+“Poor man!” she said readily, in tones loud enough to reach Theron. “It
+is our neighbor, Father, the Rev. Mr. Ware. He hit upon my name in
+the register quite unexpectedly, and I had him come up. He is in sore
+distress--a great and sudden bereavement. He is going now. Won't you
+speak to him in the hall--a few words, Father? It would please him. He
+is terribly depressed.”
+
+The words had drawn Theron to his feet, as by some mechanical process.
+He took up his hat and moved dumbly to the door. It seemed to him that
+Celia intended offering to shake hands; but he went past her with only
+some confused exchange of glances and a murmured word or two. The tall
+stranger, who drew aside to let him pass, had acted as if he expected to
+be introduced. Theron, emerging into the hall, leaned against the wall
+and looked dreamily at the priest, who had stepped out with him.
+
+“I am very sorry to learn that you are in trouble, Mr. Ware,” Father
+Forbes said, gently enough, but in hurried tones. “Miss Madden is also
+in trouble. I mentioned to you that her brother had got into a serious
+scrape. I have brought my old friend, General Brady, to consult with
+her about the matter. He knows all the parties concerned, and he can set
+things right if anybody can.”
+
+“It's a mistake about me--I 'm not in any trouble at all,” said Theron.
+“I just dropped in to make a friendly call.”
+
+The priest glanced sharply at him, noting with a swift, informed
+scrutiny how he sprawled against the wall, and what vacuity his eyes and
+loosened lips expressed.
+
+“Then you have a talent for the inopportune amounting to positive
+genius,” said Father Forbes, with a stormy smile.
+
+“Tell me this, Father Forbes,” the other demanded, with impulsive
+suddenness, “is it true that you don't want me in your house again? Is
+that the truth or not?”
+
+“The truth is always relative, Mr. Ware,” replied the priest, turning
+away, and closing the door of the parlor behind him with a decisive
+sound.
+
+Left alone, Theron started to make his way downstairs. He found his
+legs wavering under him and making zigzag movements of their own in a
+bewildering fashion. He referred this at first, in an outburst of fresh
+despair, to the effects of his great grief. Then, as he held tight to
+the banister and governed his descent step by step, it occurred to him
+that it must be the wine he had had for breakfast. Upon examination, he
+was not so unhappy, after all.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+At the second peal of the door-bell, Brother Soulsby sat up in bed.
+It was still pitch-dark, and the memory of the first ringing fluttered
+musically in his awakening consciousness as a part of some dream he had
+been having.
+
+“Who the deuce can that be?” he mused aloud, in querulous resentment at
+the interruption.
+
+“Put your head out of the window, and ask,” suggested his wife,
+drowsily.
+
+The bell-pull scraped violently in its socket, and a third outburst of
+shrill reverberations clamored through the silent house.
+
+“Whatever you do, I'd do it before he yanked the whole thing to pieces,”
+ added the wife, with more decision.
+
+Brother Soulsby was wide awake now. He sprang to the floor, and, groping
+about in the obscurity, began drawing on some of his clothes. He rapped
+on the window during the process, to show that the house was astir, and
+a minute afterward made his way out of the room and down the stairs, the
+boards creaking under his stockinged feet as he went.
+
+Nearly a quarter of an hour passed before he returned. Sister Soulsby,
+lying in sleepy quiescence, heard vague sounds of voices at the front
+door, and did not feel interested enough to lift her head and listen.
+A noise of footsteps on the sidewalk followed, first receding from the
+door, then turning toward it, this second time marking the presence of
+more than one person. There seemed in this the implication of a guest,
+and she shook off the dozing impulses which enveloped her faculties,
+and waited to hear more. There came up, after further muttering of male
+voices, the undeniable chink of coins striking against one another. Then
+more footsteps, the resonant slam of a carriage door out in the street,
+the grinding of wheels turning on the frosty road, and the racket of a
+vehicle and horses going off at a smart pace into the night. Somebody
+had come, then. She yawned at the thought, but remained well awake,
+tracing idly in her mind, as various slight sounds rose from the lower
+floor, the different things Soulsby was probably doing. Their spare room
+was down there, directly underneath, but curiously enough no one seemed
+to enter it. The faint murmur of conversation which from time to
+time reached her came from the parlor instead. At last she heard her
+husband's soft tread coming up the staircase, and still there had been
+no hint of employing the guest-chamber. What could he be about? she
+wondered.
+
+Brother Soulsby came in, bearing a small lamp in his hand, the reddish
+light of which, flaring upward, revealed an unlooked-for display of
+amusement on his thin, beardless face. He advanced to the bedside,
+shading the glare from her blinking eyes with his palm, and grinned.
+
+“A thousand guesses, old lady,” he said, with a dry chuckle, “and you
+wouldn't have a ghost of a chance. You might guess till Hades froze over
+seven feet thick, and still you wouldn't hit it.”
+
+She sat up in turn. “Good gracious, man,” she began, “you don't mean--”
+ Here the cheerful gleam in his small eyes reassured her, and she sighed
+relief, then smiled confusedly. “I half thought, just for the minute,”
+ she explained, “it might be some bounder who'd come East to try and
+blackmail me. But no, who is it--and what on earth have you done with
+him?”
+
+Brother Soulsby cackled in merriment. “It's Brother Ware of Octavius,
+out on a little bat, all by himself. He says he's been on the loose only
+two days; but it looks more like a fortnight.”
+
+“OUR Brother Ware?” she regarded him with open-eyed surprise.
+
+“Well, yes, I suppose he's OUR Brother Ware--some,” returned Soulsby,
+genially. “He seems to think so, anyway.”
+
+“But tell me about it!” she urged eagerly. “What's the matter with him?
+How does he explain it?”
+
+“Well, he explains it pretty badly, if you ask me,” said Soulsby, with
+a droll, joking eye and a mock-serious voice. He seated himself on the
+side of the bed, facing her, and still considerately shielding her
+from the light of the lamp he held. “But don't think I suggested any
+explanations. I've been a mother myself. He's merely filled himself up
+to the neck with rum, in the simple, ordinary, good old-fashioned way.
+That's all. What is there to explain about that?”
+
+She looked meditatively at him for a time, shaking her head. “No,
+Soulsby,” she said gravely, at last. “This isn't any laughing matter.
+You may be sure something bad has happened, to set him off like that.
+I'm going to get up and dress right now. What time is it?”
+
+“Now don't you do anything of the sort,” he urged persuasively. “It
+isn't five o'clock; it'll be dark for nearly an hour yet. Just you turn
+over, and have another nap. He's all right. I put him on the sofa, with
+the buffalo robe round him. You'll find him there, safe and sound, when
+it's time for white folks to get up. You know how it breaks you up all
+day, not to get your full sleep.”
+
+“I don't care if it makes me look as old as the everlasting hills,” she
+said. “Can't you understand, Soulsby? The thing worries me--gets on my
+nerves. I couldn't close an eye, if I tried. I took a great fancy to
+that young man. I told you so at the time.”
+
+Soulsby nodded, and turned down the wick of his lamp a trifle. “Yes, I
+know you did,” he remarked in placidly non-contentious tones. “I
+can't say I saw much in him myself, but I daresay you're right.” There
+followed a moment's silence, during which he experimented in turning the
+wick up again. “But, anyway,” he went on, “there isn't anything you can
+do. He'll sleep it off, and the longer he's left alone the better. It
+isn't as if we had a hired girl, who'd come down and find him there, and
+give the whole thing away. He's fixed up there perfectly comfortable;
+and when he's had his sleep out, and wakes up on his own account, he'll
+be feeling a heap better.”
+
+The argument might have carried conviction, but on the instant the sound
+of footsteps came to them from the room below. The subdued noise rose
+regularly, as of one pacing to and fro.
+
+“No, Soulsby, YOU come back to bed, and get YOUR sleep out. I'm going
+downstairs. It's no good talking; I'm going.”
+
+Brother Soulsby offered no further opposition, either by talk or
+demeanor, but returned contentedly to bed, pulling the comforter over
+his ears, and falling into the slow, measured respiration of tranquil
+slumber before his wife was ready to leave the room.
+
+The dim, cold gray of twilight was sifting furtively through the lace
+curtains of the front windows when Mrs. Soulsby, lamp in hand, entered
+the parlor. She confronted a figure she would have hardly recognized.
+The man seemed to have been submerged in a bath of disgrace. From the
+crown of his head to the soles of his feet, everything about him was
+altered, distorted, smeared with an intangible effect of shame. In the
+vague gloom of the middle distance, between lamp and window, she noticed
+that his shoulders were crouched, like those of some shambling tramp.
+The frowsy shadows of a stubble beard lay on his jaw and throat. His
+clothes were crumpled and hung awry; his boots were stained with mud.
+The silk hat on the piano told its battered story with dumb eloquence.
+
+Lifting the lamp, she moved forward a step, and threw its light upon his
+face. A little groan sounded involuntarily upon her lips. Out of a mask
+of unpleasant features, swollen with drink and weighted by the physical
+craving for rest and sleep, there stared at her two bloodshot eyes,
+shining with the wild light of hysteria. The effect of dishevelled hair,
+relaxed muscles, and rough, half-bearded lower face lent to these eyes,
+as she caught their first glance, an unnatural glare. The lamp shook
+in her hand for an instant. Then, ashamed of herself, she held out her
+other hand fearlessly to him.
+
+“Tell me all about it, Theron,” she said calmly, and with a soothing,
+motherly intonation in her voice.
+
+He did not take the hand she offered, but suddenly, with a wailing moan,
+cast himself on his knees at her feet. He was so tall a man that the
+movement could have no grace. He abased his head awkwardly, to bury
+it among the folds of the skirts at her ankles. She stood still for a
+moment, looking down upon him. Then, blowing out the light, she reached
+over and set the smoking lamp on the piano near by. The daylight made
+things distinguishable in a wan, uncertain way, throughout the room.
+
+“I have come out of hell, for the sake of hearing some human being speak
+to me like that!”
+
+The thick utterance proceeded in a muffled fashion from where his face
+grovelled against her dress. Its despairing accents appealed to her, but
+even more was she touched by the ungainly figure he made, sprawling on
+the carpet.
+
+“Well, since you are out, stay out,” she answered, as reassuringly as
+she could. “But get up and take a seat here beside me, like a sensible
+man, and tell me all about it. Come! I insist!”
+
+In obedience to her tone, and the sharp tug at his shoulder with which
+she emphasized it, he got slowly to his feet, and listlessly seated
+himself on the sofa to which she pointed. He hung his head, and began
+catching his breath with a periodical gasp, half hiccough, half sob.
+
+“First of all,” she said, in her brisk, matter-of-fact manner, “don't
+you want to lie down there again, and have me tuck you up snug with the
+buffalo robe, and go to sleep? That would be the best thing you could
+do.”
+
+He shook his head disconsolately, from side to side. “I can't!” he
+groaned, with a swifter recurrence of the sob-like convulsions. “I'm
+dying for sleep, but I'm too--too frightened!”
+
+“Come, I'll sit beside you till you drop off,” she said, with masterful
+decision. He suffered himself to be pushed into recumbency on the couch,
+and put his head with docility on the pillow she brought from the spare
+room. When she had spread the fur over him, and pushed her chair close
+to the sofa, she stood by it for a little, looking down in meditation at
+his demoralized face. Under the painful surface-blur of wretchedness
+and fatigued debauchery, she traced reflectively the lineaments of the
+younger and cleanlier countenance she had seen a few months before.
+Nothing essential had been taken away. There was only this pestiferous
+overlaying of shame and cowardice to be removed. The face underneath was
+still all right.
+
+With a soft, maternal touch, she smoothed the hair from his forehead
+into order. Then she seated herself, and, when he got his hand out from
+under the robe and thrust it forth timidly, she took it in hers and
+held it in a warm, sympathetic grasp. He closed his eyes at this, and
+gradually the paroxysmal catch in his breathing lapsed. The daylight
+strengthened, until at last tiny flecks of sunshine twinkled in the
+meshes of the further curtains at the window. She fancied him asleep,
+and gently sought to disengage her hand, but his fingers clutched at it
+with vehemence, and his eyes were wide open.
+
+“I can't sleep at all,” he murmured. “I want to talk.”
+
+“There 's nothing in the world to hinder you,” she commented smilingly.
+
+“I tell you the solemn truth,” he said, lifting his voice in dogged
+assertion: “the best sermon I ever preached in my life, I preached only
+three weeks ago, at the camp-meeting. It was admitted by everybody to be
+far and away my finest effort! They will tell you the same!”
+
+“It's quite likely,” assented Sister Soulsby. “I quite believe it.”
+
+“Then how can anybody say that I've degenerated, that I've become a
+fool?” he demanded.
+
+“I haven't heard anybody hint at such a thing,” she answered quietly.
+
+“No, of course, YOU haven't heard them!” he cried. “I heard them,
+though!” Then, forcing himself to a sitting posture, against the
+restraint of her hand, he flung back the covering. “I'm burning hot
+already! Yes, those were the identical words: I haven't improved; I've
+degenerated. People hate me; they won't have me in their houses. They
+say I'm a nuisance and a bore. I'm like a little nasty boy. That's what
+they say. Even a young man who was dying--lying right on the edge of his
+open grave--told me solemnly that I reminded him of a saint once, but I
+was only fit for a barkeeper now. They say I really don't know anything
+at all. And I'm not only a fool, they say, I'm a dishonest fool into the
+bargain!”
+
+“But who says such twaddle as that?” she returned consolingly. The
+violence of his emotion disturbed her. “You mustn't imagine such things.
+You are among friends here. Other people are your friends, too. They
+have the very highest opinion of you.”
+
+“I haven't a friend on earth but you!” he declared solemnly. His eyes
+glowed fiercely, and his voice sank into a grave intensity of tone. “I
+was going to kill myself. I went on to the big bridge to throw myself
+off, and a policeman saw me trying to climb over the railing, and he
+grabbed me and marched me away. Then he threw me out at the entrance,
+and said he would club my head off if I came there again. And then I
+went and stood and let the cable-cars pass close by me, and twenty times
+I thought I had the nerve to throw myself under the next one, and then
+I waited for the next--and I was afraid! And then I was in a crowd
+somewhere, and the warning came to me that I was going to die. The fool
+needn't go kill himself: God would take care of that. It was my heart,
+you know. I've had that terrible fluttering once before. It seized me
+this time, and I fell down in the crowd, and some people walked over
+me, but some one else helped me up, and let me sit down in a big lighted
+hallway, the entrance to some theatre, and some one brought me some
+brandy, but somebody else said I was drunk, and they took it away again,
+and put me out. They could see I was a fool, that I hadn't a friend
+on earth. And when I went out, there was a big picture of a woman in
+tights, and the word 'Amazons' overhead--and then I remembered you. I
+knew you were my friend--the only one I have on earth.”
+
+“It is very flattering--to be remembered like that,” said Sister
+Soulsby, gently. The disposition to laugh was smothered by a pained
+perception of the suffering he was undergoing. His face had grown drawn
+and haggard under the burden of his memories as he rambled on.
+
+“So I came straight to you,” he began again. “I had just money enough
+left to pay my fare. The rest is in my valise at the hotel--the Murray
+Hill Hotel. It belongs to the church. I stole it from the church. When I
+am dead they can get it back again!”
+
+Sister Soulsby forced a smile to her lips. “What nonsense you
+talk--about dying!” she exclaimed. “Why, man alive, you'll sleep this
+all off like a top, if you'll only lie down and give yourself a chance.
+Come, now, you must do as you're told.”
+
+With a resolute hand, she made him lie down again, and once more covered
+him with the fur. He submitted, and did not even offer to put out his
+arm this time, but looked in piteous dumbness at her for a long time.
+While she sat thus in silence, the sound of Brother Soulsby moving about
+upstairs became audible.
+
+Theron heard it, and the importance of hurrying on some further
+disclosure seemed to suggest itself. “I can see you think I'm just
+drunk,” he said, in low, sombre tones. “Of course that's what HE
+thought. The hackman thought so, and so did the conductor, and
+everybody. But I hoped you would know better. I was sure you would see
+that it was something worse than that. See here, I'll tell you. Then
+you'll understand. I've been drinking for two days and one whole night,
+on my feet all the while, wandering alone in that big strange New York,
+going through places where they murdered men for ten cents, mixing
+myself up with the worst people in low bar-rooms and dance-houses, and
+they saw I had money in my pocket, too, and yet nobody touched me, or
+offered to lay a finger on me. Do you know why? They understood that I
+wanted to get drunk, and couldn't. The Indians won't harm an idiot, or
+lunatic, you know. Well, it was the same with these vilest of the vile.
+They saw that I was a fool whom God had taken hold of, to break his
+heart first, and then to craze his brain, and then to fling him on a
+dunghill to die like a dog. They believe in God, those people. They're
+the only ones who do, it seems to me. And they wouldn't interfere when
+they saw what He was doing to me. But I tell you I wasn't drunk. I
+haven't been drunk. I'm only heart-broken, and crushed out of shape
+and life--that's all. And I've crawled here just to have a friend by me
+when--when I come to the end.”
+
+“You're not talking very sensibly, or very bravely either, Theron Ware,”
+ remarked his companion. “It's cowardly to give way to notions like
+that.”
+
+“Oh, I 'm not afraid to die; don't think that,” he remonstrated wearily.
+“If there is a Judgment, it has hit me as hard as it can already. There
+can't be any hell worse than that I've gone through. Here I am talking
+about hell,” he continued, with a pained contraction of the muscles
+about his mouth--a stillborn, malformed smile--“as if I believed in one!
+I've got way through all my beliefs, you know. I tell you that frankly.”
+
+“It's none of my business,” she reassured him. “I'm not your Bishop, or
+your confessor. I'm just your friend, your pal, that's all.”
+
+“Look here!” he broke in, with some animation and a new intensity of
+glance and voice. “If I was going to live, I'd have some funny things to
+tell. Six months ago I was a good man. I not only seemed to be good, to
+others and to myself, but I was good. I had a soul; I had a conscience.
+I was going along doing my duty, and I was happy in it. We were poor,
+Alice and I, and people behaved rather hard toward us, and sometimes we
+were a little down in the mouth about it; but that was all. We really
+were happy; and I--I really was a good man. Here's the kind of joke God
+plays! You see me here six months after. Look at me! I haven't got an
+honest hair in my head. I'm a bad man through and through, that's what
+I am. I look all around at myself, and there isn't an atom left anywhere
+of the good man I used to be. And, mind you, I never lifted a finger
+to prevent the change. I didn't resist once; I didn't make any fight.
+I just walked deliberately down-hill, with my eyes wide open. I told
+myself all the while that I was climbing uphill instead, but I knew in
+my heart that it was a lie. Everything about me was a lie. I wouldn't be
+telling the truth, even now, if--if I hadn't come to the end of my rope.
+Now, how do you explain that? How can it be explained? Was I really
+rotten to the core all the time, years ago, when I seemed to everybody,
+myself and the rest, to be good and straight and sincere? Was it all a
+sham, or does God take a good man and turn him into an out-and-out bad
+one, in just a few months--in the time that it takes an ear of corn to
+form and ripen and go off with the mildew? Or isn't there any God at
+all--but only men who live and die like animals? And that would explain
+my case, wouldn't it? I got bitten and went vicious and crazy, and
+they've had to chase me out and hunt me to my death like a mad dog! Yes,
+that makes it all very simple. It isn't worth while to discuss me at
+all as if I had a soul, is it? I'm just one more mongrel cur that's gone
+mad, and must be put out of the way. That's all.”
+
+“See here,” said Sister Soulsby, alertly, “I half believe that a good
+cuffing is what you really stand in need of. Now you stop all this
+nonsense, and lie quiet and keep still! Do you hear me?”
+
+The jocose sternness which she assumed, in words and manner, seemed to
+soothe him. He almost smiled up at her in a melancholy way, and sighed
+profoundly.
+
+“I've told you MY religion before,” she went on with gentleness. “The
+sheep and the goats are to be separated on Judgment Day, but not a
+minute sooner. In other words, as long as human life lasts, good, bad,
+and indifferent are all braided up together in every man's nature, and
+every woman's too. You weren't altogether good a year ago, any more than
+you're altogether bad now. You were some of both then; you're some
+of both now. If you've been making an extra sort of fool of yourself
+lately, why, now that you recognize it, the only thing to do is to slow
+steam, pull up, and back engine in the other direction. In that way
+you'll find things will even themselves up. It's a see-saw with all
+of us, Theron Ware--sometimes up; sometimes down. But nobody is rotten
+clear to the core.”
+
+He closed his eyes, and lay in silence for a time.
+
+“This is what day of the week?” he asked, at last.
+
+“Friday, the nineteenth.”
+
+“Wednesday--that would be the seventeenth. That was the day ordained for
+my slaughter. On that morning, I was the happiest man in the world.
+No king could have been so proud and confident as I was. A wonderful
+romance had come to me. The most beautiful young woman in the world, the
+most talented too, was waiting for me. An express train was carrying me
+to her, and it couldn't go fast enough to keep up with my eagerness. She
+was very rich, and she loved me, and we were to live in eternal summer,
+wherever we liked, on a big, beautiful yacht. No one else had such a
+life before him as that. It seemed almost too good for me, but I thought
+I had grown and developed so much that perhaps I would be worthy of it.
+Oh, how happy I was! I tell you this because--because YOU are not like
+the others. You will understand.”
+
+“Yes, I understand,” she said patiently. “Well--you were being so
+happy.”
+
+“That was in the morning--Wednesday the seventeenth--early in the
+morning. There was a little girl in the car, playing with some buttons,
+and when I tried to make friends with her, she looked at me, and she
+saw, right at a glance, that I was a fool. 'Out of the mouths of babes
+and sucklings,' you know. She was the first to find it out. It began
+like that, early in the morning. But then after that everybody knew it.
+They had only to look at me and they said: 'Why, this is a fool--like a
+little nasty boy; we won't let him into our houses; we find him a bore.'
+That is what they said.”
+
+“Did SHE say it?” Sister Soulsby permitted herself to ask.
+
+For answer Theron bit his lips, and drew his chin under the fur, and
+pushed his scowling face into the pillow. The spasmodic, sob-like gasps
+began to shake him again. She laid a compassionate hand upon his hot
+brow.
+
+“That is why I made my way here to you,” he groaned piteously. “I knew
+you would sympathize; I could tell it all to you. And it was so awful,
+to die there alone in the strange city--I couldn't do it--with nobody
+near me who liked me, or thought well of me. Alice would hate me. There
+was no one but you. I wanted to be with you--at the last.”
+
+His quavering voice broke off in a gust of weeping, and his face frankly
+surrendered itself to the distortions of a crying child's countenance,
+wide-mouthed and tragically grotesque in its abandonment of control.
+
+Sister Soulsby, as her husband's boots were heard descending the stairs,
+rose, and drew the robe up to half cover his agonized visage. She patted
+the sufferer softly on the head, and then went to the stair-door.
+
+“I think he'll go to sleep now,” she said, lifting her voice to the
+new-comer, and with a backward nod toward the couch. “Come out into the
+kitchen while I get breakfast, or into the sitting-room, or somewhere,
+so as not to disturb him. He's promised me to lie perfectly quiet, and
+try to sleep.”
+
+When they had passed together out of the room, she turned. “Soulsby,”
+ she said with half-playful asperity, “I'm disappointed in you. For a man
+who's knocked about as much as you have, I must say you've picked up an
+astonishingly small outfit of gumption. That poor creature in there is
+no more drunk than I am. He's been drinking--yes, drinking like a
+fish; but it wasn't able to make him drunk. He's past being drunk; he's
+grief-crazy. It's a case of 'woman.' Some girl has made a fool of him,
+and decoyed him up in a balloon, and let him drop. He's been hurt bad,
+too.”
+
+“We have all been hurt in our day and generation,” responded Brother
+Soulsby, genially. “Don't you worry; he'll sleep that off too. It takes
+longer than drink, and it doesn't begin to be so pleasant, but it can be
+slept off. Take my word for it, he'll be a different man by noon.”
+
+When noon came, however, Brother Soulsby was on his way to summon one
+of the village doctors. Toward nightfall, he went out again to telegraph
+for Alice.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+Spring fell early upon the pleasant southern slopes of the Susquehanna
+country. The snow went off as by magic. The trees budded and leaved
+before their time. The birds came and set up their chorus in the elms,
+while winter seemed still a thing of yesterday.
+
+Alice, clad gravely in black, stood again upon a kitchen-stoop, and
+looked across an intervening space of back-yards and fences to where the
+tall boughs, fresh in their new verdure, were silhouetted against the
+pure blue sky. The prospect recalled to her irresistibly another sunlit
+morning, a year ago, when she had stood in the doorway of her own
+kitchen, and surveyed a scene not unlike this; it might have been with
+the same carolling robins, the same trees, the same azure segment of
+the tranquil, speckless dome. Then she was looking out upon surroundings
+novel and strange to her, among which she must make herself at home as
+best she could. But at least the ground was secure under her feet; at
+least she had a home, and a word from her lips could summon her husband
+out, to stand beside her with his arm about her, and share her buoyant,
+hopeful joy in the promises of spring.
+
+To think that that was only one little year ago--the mere revolution of
+four brief seasons! And now--!
+
+Sister Soulsby, wiping her hands on her apron, came briskly out upon
+the stoop. Some cheerful commonplace was on her tongue, but a glance at
+Alice's wistful face kept it back. She passed an arm around her waist
+instead, and stood in silence, looking at the elms.
+
+“It brings back memories to me--all this,” said Alice, nodding her head,
+and not seeking to dissemble the tears which sprang to her eyes.
+
+“The men will be down in a minute, dear,” the other reminded her.
+“They'd nearly finished packing before I put the biscuits in the oven.
+We mustn't wear long faces before folks, you know.”
+
+“Yes, I know,” murmured Alice. Then, with a sudden impulse, she turned
+to her companion. “Candace,” she said fervently, “we're alone here for
+the moment; I must tell you that if I don't talk gratitude to you, it's
+simply and solely because I don't know where to begin, or what to say.
+I'm just dumfounded at your goodness. It takes my speech away. I only
+know this, Candace: God will be very good to you.”
+
+“Tut! tut!” replied Sister Soulsby, “that's all right, you dear thing. I
+know just how you feel. Don't dream of being under obligation to explain
+it to me, or to thank us at all. We've had all sorts of comfort out of
+the thing--Soulsby and I. We used to get downright lonesome, here all
+by ourselves, and we've simply had a winter of pleasant company instead,
+that s all. Besides, there's solid satisfaction in knowing that at
+last, for once in our lives we've had a chance to be of some real use to
+somebody who truly needed it. You can't imagine how stuck up that makes
+us in our own conceit. We feel as if we were George Peabody and Lady
+Burdett-Coutts, and several other philanthropists thrown in. No,
+seriously, don't think of it again. We're glad to have been able to do
+it all; and if you only go ahead now, and prosper and be happy, why,
+that will be the only reward we want.”
+
+“I hope we shall do well,” said Alice. “Only tell me this, Candace. You
+do think I was right, don't you, in insisting on Theron's leaving the
+ministry altogether? He seems convinced enough now that it was the right
+thing to do; but I grow nervous sometimes lest he should find it harder
+than he thought to get along in business, and regret the change--and
+blame me.”
+
+“I think you may rest easy in your mind about that,” the other
+responded. “Whatever else he does, he will never want to come within
+gunshot of a pulpit again. It came too near murdering him for that.”
+
+Alice looked at her doubtfully. “Something came near murdering him, I
+know. But it doesn't seem to me that I would say it was the ministry.
+And I guess you know pretty well yourself what it was. Of course, I've
+never asked any questions, and I've hushed up everybody at Octavius
+who tried to quiz me about it--his disappearance and my packing up
+and leaving, and all that--and I've never discussed the question with
+you--but--”
+
+“No, and there's no good going into it now,” put in Sister Soulsby,
+with amiable decisiveness. “It's all past and gone. In fact, I hardly
+remember much about it now myself. He simply got into deep water, poor
+soul, and we've floated him out again, safe and sound. That's all.
+But all the same, I was right in what I said. He was a mistake in the
+ministry.”
+
+“But if you'd known him in previous years,” urged Alice, plaintively,
+“before we were sent to that awful Octavius. He was the very ideal of
+all a young minister should be. People used to simply worship him,
+he was such a perfect preacher, and so pure-minded and friendly
+with everybody, and threw himself into his work so. It was all that
+miserable, contemptible Octavius that did the mischief.”
+
+Sister Soulsby slowly shook her head. “If there hadn't been a screw
+loose somewhere,” she said gently, “Octavius wouldn't have hurt him. No,
+take my word for it, he never was the right man for the place. He seemed
+to be, no doubt, but he wasn't. When pressure was put on him, it found
+out his weak spot like a shot, and pushed on it, and--well, it came near
+smashing him, that's all.”
+
+“And do you think he'll always be a--a back-slider,” mourned Alice.
+
+“For mercy's sake, don't ever try to have him pretend to be anything
+else!” exclaimed the other. “The last state of that man would be worse
+than the first. You must make up your mind to that. And you mustn't show
+that you're nervous about it. You mustn't get nervous! You mustn't be
+afraid of things. Just you keep a stiff upper lip, and say you WILL get
+along, you WILL be happy. That's your only chance, Alice. He isn't going
+to be an angel of light, or a saint, or anything of that sort, and it's
+no good expecting it. But he'll be just an average kind of man--a little
+sore about some things, a little wiser than he was about some others.
+You can get along perfectly with him, if you only keep your courage up,
+and don't show the white feather.”
+
+“Yes, I know; but I've had it pretty well taken out of me,” commented
+Alice. “It used to come easy to me to be cheerful and resolute and all
+that; but it's different now.”
+
+Sister Soulsby stole a swift glance at the unsuspecting face of her
+companion which was not all admiration, but her voice remained patiently
+affectionate. “Oh, that'll all come back to you, right enough. You'll
+have your hands full, you know, finding a house, and unpacking all your
+old furniture, and buying new things, and getting your home settled.
+It'll keep you so busy you won't have time to feel strange or lonesome,
+one bit. You'll see how it'll tone you up. In a year's time you won't
+know yourself in the looking-glass.”
+
+“Oh, my health is good enough,” said Alice; “but I can't help thinking,
+suppose Theron should be taken sick again, away out there among
+strangers. You know he's never appeared to me to have quite got his
+strength back. These long illnesses, you know, they always leave a mark
+on a man.”
+
+“Nonsense! He's strong as an ox,” insisted Sister Soulsby. “You mark my
+word, he'll thrive in Seattle like a green bay-tree.”
+
+“Seattle!” echoed Alice, meditatively. “It sounds like the other end of
+the world, doesn't it?”
+
+The noise of feet in the house broke upon the colloquy, and the women
+went indoors, to join the breakfast party. During the meal, it was
+Brother Soulsby who bore the burden of the conversation. He was full of
+the future of Seattle and the magnificent impending development of that
+Pacific section. He had been out there, years ago, when it was next door
+to uninhabited. He had visited the district twice since, and the changes
+discoverable each new time were more wonderful than anything Aladdin's
+lamp ever wrought. He had secured for Theron, through some of his
+friends in Portland, the superintendency of a land and real estate
+company, which had its headquarters in Seattle, but ambitiously linked
+its affairs with the future of all Washington Territory. In an hour's
+time the hack would come to take the Wares and their baggage to the
+depot, the first stage in their long journey across the continent
+to their new home. Brother Soulsby amiably filled the interval with
+reminiscences of the Oregon of twenty years back, with instructive
+dissertations upon the soil, climate, and seasons of Puget Sound and the
+Columbia valley, and, above all, with helpful characterizations of the
+social life which had begun to take form in this remotest West. He had
+nothing but confidence, to all appearances, in the success of his young
+friend, now embarking on this new career. He seemed so sanguine about
+it that the whole atmosphere of the breakfast room lightened up, and the
+parting meal, surrounded by so many temptations to distraught broodings
+and silences as it was, became almost jovial in its spirit.
+
+At last, it was time to look for the carriage. The trunks and hand-bags
+were ready in the hall, and Sister Soulsby was tying up a package of
+sandwiches for Alice to keep by her in the train.
+
+Theron, with hat in hand, and overcoat on arm, loitered restlessly into
+the kitchen, and watched this proceeding for a moment. Then he sauntered
+out upon the stoop, and, lifting his head and drawing as long a breath
+as he could, looked over at the elms.
+
+Perhaps the face was older and graver; it was hard to tell. The long
+winter's illness, with its recurring crises and sustained confinement,
+had bleached his skin and reduced his figure to gauntness, but there was
+none the less an air of restored and secure good health about him. Only
+in the eyes themselves, as they rested briefly upon the prospect, did
+a substantial change suggest itself. They did not dwell fondly upon the
+picture of the lofty, spreading boughs, with their waves of sap-green
+leafage stirring against the blue. They did not soften and glow this
+time, at the thought of how wholly one felt sure of God's goodness in
+these wonderful new mornings of spring.
+
+They looked instead straight through the fairest and most moving
+spectacle in nature's processional, and saw afar off, in conjectural
+vision, a formless sort of place which was Seattle. They surveyed its
+impalpable outlines, its undefined dimensions, with a certain cool
+glitter of hard-and-fast resolve. There rose before his fancy, out of
+the chaos of these shapeless imaginings, some faces of men, then more
+behind them, then a great concourse of uplifted countenances, crowded
+close together as far as the eye could reach. They were attentive faces
+all, rapt, eager, credulous to a degree. Their eyes were admiringly bent
+upon a common object of excited interest. They were looking at HIM; they
+strained their ears to miss no cadence of his voice. Involuntarily
+he straightened himself, stretched forth his hand with the pale, thin
+fingers gracefully disposed, and passed it slowly before him from side
+to side, in a comprehensive, stately gesture. The audience rose at him,
+as he dropped his hand, and filled his day-dream with a mighty roar of
+applause, in volume like an ocean tempest, yet pitched for his hearing
+alone.
+
+He smiled, shook himself with a little delighted tremor, and turned on
+the stoop to the open door.
+
+“What Soulsby said about politics out there interested me enormously,”
+ he remarked to the two women. “I shouldn't be surprised if I found
+myself doing something in that line. I can speak, you know, if I can't
+do anything else. Talk is what tells, these days. Who knows? I may turn
+up in Washington a full-blown senator before I'm forty. Stranger things
+have happened than that, out West!”
+
+“We'll come down and visit you then, Soulsby and I,” said Sister
+Soulsby, cheerfully. “You shall take us to the White House, Alice, and
+introduce us.”
+
+“Oh, it isn't likely I would come East,” said Alice, pensively. “Most
+probably I'd be left to amuse myself in Seattle. But there--I think
+that's the carriage driving up to the door.”
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Damnation of Theron Ware, by Harold Frederic
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+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Damnation of Theron Ware, by Harold Frederic
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
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+
+Project Gutenberg's The Damnation of Theron Ware, by Harold Frederic
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Damnation of Theron Ware
+
+Author: Harold Frederic
+
+Release Date: March 8, 2006 [EBook #133]
+Last Updated: March 14, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAMNATION OF THERON WARE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Meredith Ricker, John Hamm and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE DAMNATION OF THERON WARE
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      by Harold Frederic
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_PART1"> <b>PART I</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_PART2"> <b>PART II</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_PART3"> <b>PART III</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER XXII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER XXIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER XXIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_PART4"> <b>PART IV</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0025"> CHAPTER XXV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0026"> CHAPTER XXVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0027"> CHAPTER XXVII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0028"> CHAPTER XXVIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0029"> CHAPTER XXIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0030"> CHAPTER XXX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0031"> CHAPTER XXXI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0032"> CHAPTER XXXII </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART1" id="link2H_PART1">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      PART I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      No such throng had ever before been seen in the building during all its
+      eight years of existence. People were wedged together most uncomfortably
+      upon the seats; they stood packed in the aisles and overflowed the
+      galleries; at the back, in the shadows underneath these galleries, they
+      formed broad, dense masses about the doors, through which it would be
+      hopeless to attempt a passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The light, given out from numerous tin-lined circles of flaring gas-jets
+      arranged on the ceiling, fell full upon a thousand uplifted faces&mdash;some
+      framed in bonnets or juvenile curls, others bearded or crowned with
+      shining baldness&mdash;but all alike under the spell of a dominant emotion
+      which held features in abstracted suspense and focussed every eye upon a
+      common objective point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The excitement of expectancy reigned upon each row of countenances, was
+      visible in every attitude&mdash;nay, seemed a part of the close,
+      overheated atmosphere itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An observer, looking over these compact lines of faces and noting the
+      uniform concentration of eagerness they exhibited, might have guessed that
+      they were watching for either the jury's verdict in some peculiarly
+      absorbing criminal trial, or the announcement of the lucky numbers in a
+      great lottery. These two expressions seemed to alternate, and even to
+      mingle vaguely, upon the upturned lineaments of the waiting throng&mdash;the
+      hope of some unnamed stroke of fortune and the dread of some adverse
+      decree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a glance forward at the object of this universal gaze would have
+      sufficed to shatter both hypotheses. Here was neither a court of justice
+      nor a tombola. It was instead the closing session of the annual Nedahma
+      Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Bishop was about to
+      read out the list of ministerial appointments for the coming year. This
+      list was evidently written in a hand strange to him, and the slow,
+      near-sighted old gentleman, having at last sufficiently rubbed the glasses
+      of his spectacles, and then adjusted them over his nose with annoying
+      deliberation, was now silently rehearsing his task to himself&mdash;the
+      while the clergymen round about ground their teeth and restlessly shuffled
+      their feet in impatience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon a closer inspection of the assemblage, there were a great many of
+      these clergymen. A dozen or more dignified, and for the most part elderly,
+      brethren sat grouped about the Bishop in the pulpit. As many others, not
+      quite so staid in mien, and indeed with here and there almost a suggestion
+      of frivolity in their postures, were seated on the steps leading down from
+      this platform. A score of their fellows sat facing the audience, on chairs
+      tightly wedged into the space railed off round the pulpit; and then came
+      five or six rows of pews, stretching across the whole breadth of the
+      church, and almost solidly filled with preachers of the Word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were very old men among these&mdash;bent and decrepit veterans who
+      had known Lorenzo Dow, and had been ordained by elders who remembered
+      Francis Asbury and even Whitefield. They sat now in front places, leaning
+      forward with trembling and misshapen hands behind their hairy ears,
+      waiting to hear their names read out on the superannuated list, it might
+      be for the last time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sight of these venerable Fathers in Israel was good to the eyes,
+      conjuring up, as it did, pictures of a time when a plain and homely people
+      had been served by a fervent and devoted clergy&mdash;by preachers who
+      lacked in learning and polish, no doubt, but who gave their lives without
+      dream of earthly reward to poverty and to the danger and wearing toil of
+      itinerant missions through the rude frontier settlements. These pictures
+      had for their primitive accessories log-huts, rough household implements,
+      coarse clothes, and patched old saddles which told of weary years of
+      journeying; but to even the least sympathetic vision there shone upon them
+      the glorified light of the Cross and Crown. Reverend survivors of the
+      heroic times, their very presence there&mdash;sitting meekly at the
+      altar-rail to hear again the published record of their uselessness and of
+      their dependence upon church charity&mdash;was in the nature of a
+      benediction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The large majority of those surrounding these patriarchs were middle-aged
+      men, generally of a robust type, with burly shoulders, and bushing beards
+      framing shaven upper lips, and who looked for the most part like honest
+      and prosperous farmers attired in their Sunday clothes. As exceptions to
+      this rule, there were scattered stray specimens of a more urban class,
+      worthies with neatly trimmed whiskers, white neckcloths, and even
+      indications of hair-oil&mdash;all eloquent of citified charges; and now
+      and again the eye singled out a striking and scholarly face, at once
+      strong and simple, and instinctively referred it to the faculty of one of
+      the several theological seminaries belonging to the Conference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect of these faces as a whole was toward goodness, candor, and
+      imperturbable self-complacency rather than learning or mental astuteness;
+      and curiously enough it wore its pleasantest aspect on the countenances of
+      the older men. The impress of zeal and moral worth seemed to diminish by
+      regular gradations as one passed to younger faces; and among the very
+      beginners, who had been ordained only within the past day or two, this
+      decline was peculiarly marked. It was almost a relief to note the relative
+      smallness of their number, so plainly was it to be seen that they were not
+      the men their forbears had been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And if those aged, worn-out preachers facing the pulpit had gazed instead
+      backward over the congregation, it may be that here too their old eyes
+      would have detected a difference&mdash;what at least they would have
+      deemed a decline.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But nothing was further from the minds of the members of the First M. E.
+      Church of Tecumseh than the suggestion that they were not an improvement
+      on those who had gone before them. They were undoubtedly the smartest and
+      most important congregation within the limits of the Nedahma Conference,
+      and this new church edifice of theirs represented alike a scale of outlay
+      and a standard of progressive taste in devotional architecture unique in
+      the Methodism of that whole section of the State. They had a right to be
+      proud of themselves, too. They belonged to the substantial order of the
+      community, with perhaps not so many very rich men as the Presbyterians
+      had, but on the other hand with far fewer extremely poor folk than the
+      Baptists were encumbered with. The pews in the first four rows of their
+      church rented for one hundred dollars apiece&mdash;quite up to the
+      Presbyterian highwater mark&mdash;and they now had almost abolished free
+      pews altogether. The oyster suppers given by their Ladies' Aid Society in
+      the basement of the church during the winter had established rank among
+      the fashionable events in Tecumseh's social calendar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A comprehensive and satisfied perception of these advantages was uppermost
+      in the minds of this local audience, as they waited for the Bishop to
+      begin his reading. They had entertained this Bishop and his Presiding
+      Elders, and the rank and file of common preachers, in a style which could
+      not have been remotely approached by any other congregation in the
+      Conference. Where else, one would like to know, could the Bishop have been
+      domiciled in a Methodist house where he might have a sitting-room all to
+      himself, with his bedroom leading out of it? Every clergyman present had
+      been provided for in a private residence&mdash;even down to the Licensed
+      Exhorters, who were not really ministers at all when you came to think of
+      it, and who might well thank their stars that the Conference had assembled
+      among such open-handed people. There existed a dim feeling that these
+      Licensed Exhorters&mdash;an uncouth crew, with country store-keepers and
+      lumbermen and even a horse-doctor among their number&mdash;had taken
+      rather too much for granted, and were not exhibiting quite the proper
+      degree of gratitude over their reception.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a more important issue hung now imminent in the balance&mdash;was
+      Tecumseh to be fairly and honorably rewarded for her hospitality by being
+      given the pastor of her choice?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All were agreed&mdash;at least among those who paid pew-rents&mdash;upon
+      the great importance of a change in the pulpit of the First M. E. Church.
+      A change in persons must of course take place, for their present pastor
+      had exhausted the three-year maximum of the itinerant system, but there
+      was needed much more than that. For a handsome and expensive church
+      building like this, and with such a modern and go-ahead congregation, it
+      was simply a vital necessity to secure an attractive and fashionable
+      preacher. They had held their own against the Presbyterians these past few
+      years only by the most strenuous efforts, and under the depressing
+      disadvantage of a minister who preached dreary out-of-date sermons, and
+      who lacked even the most rudimentary sense of social distinctions. The
+      Presbyterians had captured the new cashier of the Adams County Bank, who
+      had always gone to the Methodist Church in the town he came from, but now
+      was lost solely because of this tiresome old fossil of theirs; and there
+      were numerous other instances of the same sort, scarcely less grievous.
+      That this state of things must be altered was clear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The unusually large local attendance upon the sessions of the Conference
+      had given some of the more guileless of visiting brethren a high notion of
+      Tecumseh's piety; and perhaps even the most sophisticated stranger never
+      quite realized how strictly it was to be explained by the anxiety to pick
+      out a suitable champion for the fierce Presbyterian competition. Big
+      gatherings assembled evening after evening to hear the sermons of those
+      selected to preach, and the church had been almost impossibly crowded at
+      each of the three Sunday services. Opinions had naturally differed a good
+      deal during the earlier stages of this scrutiny, but after last night's
+      sermon there could be but one feeling. The man for Tecumseh was the
+      Reverend Theron Ware.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The choice was an admirable one, from points of view much more exalted
+      than those of the local congregation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You could see Mr. Ware sitting there at the end of the row inside the
+      altar-rail&mdash;the tall, slender young man with the broad white brow,
+      thoughtful eyes, and features moulded into that regularity of strength
+      which used to characterize the American Senatorial type in those far-away
+      days of clean-shaven faces and moderate incomes before the War. The
+      bright-faced, comely, and vivacious young woman in the second side pew was
+      his wife&mdash;and Tecumseh noted with approbation that she knew how to
+      dress. There were really no two better or worthier people in the building
+      than this young couple, who sat waiting along with the rest to hear their
+      fate. But unhappily they had come to know of the effort being made to
+      bring them to Tecumseh; and their simple pride in the triumph of the
+      husband's fine sermon had become swallowed up in a terribly anxious
+      conflict of hope and fear. Neither of them could maintain a satisfactory
+      show of composure as the decisive moment approached. The vision of
+      translation from poverty and obscurity to such a splendid post as this&mdash;truly
+      it was too dazzling for tranquil nerves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tedious Bishop had at last begun to call his roll of names, and the
+      good people of Tecumseh mentally ticked them off, one by one, as the list
+      expanded. They felt that it was like this Bishop&mdash;an unimportant and
+      commonplace figure in Methodism, not to be mentioned in the same breath
+      with Simpson and Janes and Kingsley&mdash;that he should begin with the
+      backwoods counties, and thrust all these remote and pitifully rustic
+      stations ahead of their own metropolitan charge. To these they listened
+      but listlessly&mdash;indifferent alike to the joy and to the dismay which
+      he was scattering among the divines before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The announcements were being doled out with stumbling hesitation. After
+      each one a little half-rustling movement through the crowded rows of
+      clergymen passed mute judgment upon the cruel blow this brother had
+      received, the reward justly given to this other, the favoritism by which a
+      third had profited. The Presiding Elders, whose work all this was, stared
+      with gloomy and impersonal abstraction down upon the rows of blackcoated
+      humanity spread before them. The ministers returned this fixed and
+      perfunctory gaze with pale, set faces, only feebly masking the emotions
+      which each new name stirred somewhere among them. The Bishop droned on
+      laboriously, mispronouncing words and repeating himself as if he were
+      reading a catalogue of unfamiliar seeds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First church of Tecumseh&mdash;Brother Abram G. Tisdale!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no doubt about it! These were actually the words that had been
+      uttered. After all this outlay, all this lavish hospitality, all this
+      sacrifice of time and patience in sitting through those sermons, to draw
+      from the grab-bag nothing better than&mdash;a Tisdale!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A hum of outraged astonishment&mdash;half groan, half wrathful snort
+      bounded along from pew to pew throughout the body of the church. An echo
+      of it reached the Bishop, and so confused him that he haltingly repeated
+      the obnoxious line. Every local eye turned as by intuition to where the
+      calamitous Tisdale sat, and fastened malignantly upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Could anything be worse? This Brother Tisdale was past fifty&mdash;a
+      spindling, rickety, gaunt old man, with a long horse-like head and
+      vacantly solemn face, who kept one or the other of his hands continually
+      fumbling his bony jaw. He had been withdrawn from routine service for a
+      number of years, doing a little insurance canvassing on his own account,
+      and also travelling for the Book Concern. Now that he wished to return to
+      parochial work, the richest prize in the whole list, Tecumseh, was given
+      to him&mdash;to him who had never been asked to preach at a Conference,
+      and whose archaic nasal singing of &ldquo;Greenland's Icy Mountains&rdquo; had made
+      even the Licensed Exhorters grin! It was too intolerably dreadful to think
+      of!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An embittered whisper to the effect that Tisdale was the Bishop's cousin
+      ran round from pew to pew. This did not happen to be true, but indignant
+      Tecumseh gave it entire credit. The throngs about the doors dwindled as by
+      magic, and the aisles cleared. Local interest was dead; and even some of
+      the pewholders rose and made their way out. One of these murmured audibly
+      to his neighbors as he departed that HIS pew could be had now for sixty
+      dollars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So it happened that when, a little later on, the appointment of Theron
+      Ware to Octavius was read out, none of the people of Tecumseh either noted
+      or cared. They had been deeply interested in him so long as it seemed
+      likely that he was to come to them&mdash;before their clearly expressed
+      desire for him had been so monstrously ignored. But now what became of him
+      was no earthly concern of theirs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the Doxology had been sung and the Conference formally declared
+      ended, the Wares would fain have escaped from the flood of handshakings
+      and boisterous farewells which spread over the front part of the church.
+      But the clergymen were unusually insistent upon demonstrations of
+      cordiality among themselves&mdash;the more, perhaps, because it was
+      evident that the friendliness of their local hosts had suddenly evaporated&mdash;and,
+      of all men in the world, the present incumbent of the Octavius pulpit now
+      bore down upon them with noisy effusiveness, and defied evasion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brother Ware&mdash;we have never been interduced&mdash;but let me clasp
+      your hand! And&mdash;Sister Ware, I presume&mdash;yours too!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a portly man, who held his head back so that his face seemed all
+      jowl and mouth and sandy chin-whisker. He smiled broadly upon them with
+      half-closed eyes, and shook hands again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said to 'em,&rdquo; he went on with loud pretence of heartiness, &ldquo;the minute
+      I heerd your name called out for our dear Octavius, 'I must go over an'
+      interduce myself.' It will be a heavy cross to part with those dear
+      people, Brother Ware, but if anything could wean me to the notion, so to
+      speak, it would be the knowledge that you are to take up my labors in
+      their midst. Perhaps&mdash;ah&mdash;perhaps they ARE jest a trifle close
+      in money matters, but they come out strong on revivals. They'll need a
+      good deal o' stirrin' up about parsonage expenses, but, oh! such seasons
+      of grace as we've experienced there together!&rdquo; He shook his head, and
+      closed his eyes altogether, as if transported by his memories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Ware smiled faintly in decorous response, and bowed in silence;
+      but his wife resented the unctuous beaming of content on the other's wide
+      countenance, and could not restrain her tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem to bear up tolerably well under this heavy cross, as you call
+      it,&rdquo; she said sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The will o' the Lord, Sister Ware&mdash;the will o' the Lord!&rdquo; he
+      responded, disposed for the instant to put on his pompous manner with her,
+      and then deciding to smile again as he moved off. The circumstance that he
+      was to get an additional three hundred dollars yearly in his new place was
+      not mentioned between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By a mutual impulse the young couple, when they had at last gained the
+      cool open air, crossed the street to the side where over-hanging trees
+      shaded the infrequent lamps, and they might be comparatively alone. The
+      wife had taken her husband's arm, and pressed closely upon it as they
+      walked. For a time no word passed, but finally he said, in a grave voice,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is hard upon you, poor girl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she stopped short, buried her face against his shoulder, and fell to
+      sobbing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He strove with gentle, whispered remonstrance to win her from this mood,
+      and after a few moments she lifted her head and they resumed their walk,
+      she wiping her eyes as they went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I couldn't keep it in a minute longer!&rdquo; she said, catching her breath
+      between phrases. &ldquo;Oh, WHY do they behave so badly to us, Theron?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled down momentarily upon her as they moved along, and patted her
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Somebody must have the poor places, Alice,&rdquo; he said consolingly. &ldquo;I am a
+      young man yet, remember. We must take our turn, and be patient. For 'we
+      know that all things work together for good.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And your sermon was so head-and-shoulders above all the others!&rdquo; she went
+      on breathlessly. &ldquo;Everybody said so! And Mrs. Parshall heard it so DIRECT
+      that you were to be sent here, and I know she told everybody how much I
+      was lotting on it&mdash;I wish we could go right off tonight without going
+      to her house&mdash;I shall be ashamed to look her in the face&mdash;and of
+      course she knows we're poked off to that miserable Octavius.&mdash;Why,
+      Theron, they tell me it's a worse place even than we've got now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, not at all,&rdquo; he put in reassuringly. &ldquo;It has grown to be a large town&mdash;oh,
+      quite twice the size of Tyre. It's a great Irish place, I've heard. Our
+      own church seems to be a good deal run down there. We must build it up
+      again; and the salary is better&mdash;a little.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he too was depressed, and they walked on toward their temporary
+      lodging in a silence full of mutual grief. It was not until they had come
+      within sight of this goal that he prefaced by a little sigh of resignation
+      these further words,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come&mdash;let us make the best of it, my girl! After all, we are in the
+      hands of the Lord.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, don't, Theron!&rdquo; she said hastily. &ldquo;Don't talk to me about the Lord
+      tonight; I can't bear it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Theron! Come out here! This is the funniest thing we have heard yet!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Ware stood on the platform of her new kitchen stoop. The bright flood
+      of May-morning sunshine completely enveloped her girlish form, clad in a
+      simple, fresh-starched calico gown, and shone in golden patches upon her
+      light-brown hair. She had a smile on her face, as she looked down at the
+      milk boy standing on the bottom step&mdash;a smile of a doubtful sort,
+      stormily mirthful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come out a minute, Theron!&rdquo; she called again; and in obedience to the
+      summons the tall lank figure of her husband appeared in the open doorway
+      behind her. A long loose, open dressing-gown dangled to his knees, and his
+      sallow, clean-shaven, thoughtful face wore a morning undress expression of
+      youthful good-nature. He leaned against the door-sill, crossed his large
+      carpet slippers, and looked up into the sky, drawing a long satisfied
+      breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a beautiful morning!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;The elms over there are full of
+      robins. We must get up earlier these mornings, and take some walks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife indicated the boy with the milk-pail on his arm, by a wave of her
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Guess what he tells me!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It wasn't a mistake at all, our
+      getting no milk yesterday or the Sunday before. It seems that that's the
+      custom here, at least so far as the parsonage is concerned.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter, boy?&rdquo; asked the young minister, drawling his words a
+      little, and putting a sense of placid irony into them. &ldquo;Don't the cows
+      give milk on Sunday, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was not going to be chaffed. &ldquo;Oh, I'll bring you milk fast enough
+      on Sundays, if you give me the word,&rdquo; he said with nonchalance. &ldquo;Only it
+      won't last long.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you mean&mdash;'won't last long'?&rdquo;, asked Mrs. Ware, briskly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy liked her&mdash;both for herself, and for the doughnuts fried with
+      her own hands, which she gave him on his morning round. He dropped his
+      half-defiant tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The thing of it's this,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;Every new minister starts in
+      saying we can deliver to this house on Sundays, an' then gives us notice
+      to stop before the month's out. It's the trustees that does it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Theron Ware uncrossed his feet and moved out on to the stoop
+      beside his wife. &ldquo;What's that you say?&rdquo; he interjected. &ldquo;Don't THEY take
+      milk on Sundays?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nope!&rdquo; answered the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young couple looked each other in the face for a puzzled moment, then
+      broke into a laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, we'll try it, anyway,&rdquo; said the preacher. &ldquo;You can go on bringing
+      it Sundays till&mdash;till&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Till you cave in an' tell me to stop,&rdquo; put in the boy. &ldquo;All right!&rdquo; and
+      he was off on the instant, the dipper jangling loud incredulity in his
+      pail as he went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Wares exchanged another glance as he disappeared round the corner of
+      the house, and another mutual laugh seemed imminent. Then the wife's face
+      clouded over, and she thrust her under-lip a trifle forward out of its
+      place in the straight and gently firm profile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's just what Wendell Phillips said,&rdquo; she declared. &ldquo;'The Puritan's idea
+      of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister stroked his chin thoughtfully, and let his gaze wander
+      over the backyard in silence. The garden parts had not been spaded up, but
+      lay, a useless stretch of muddy earth, broken only by last year's
+      cabbage-stumps and the general litter of dead roots and vegetation. The
+      door of the tenantless chicken-coop hung wide open. Before it was a great
+      heap of ashes and cinders, soaked into grimy hardness by the recent spring
+      rains, and nearer still an ancient chopping-block, round which were
+      scattered old weather-beaten hardwood knots which had defied the axe,
+      parts of broken barrels and packing-boxes, and a nameless debris of tin
+      cans, clam-shells, and general rubbish. It was pleasanter to lift the
+      eyes, and look across the neighbors' fences to the green, waving tops of
+      the elms on the street beyond. How lofty and beautiful they were in the
+      morning sunlight, and with what matchless charm came the song of the
+      robins, freshly installed in their haunts among the new pale-green leaves!
+      Above them, in the fresh, scented air, glowed the great blue dome, radiant
+      with light and the purification of spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron lifted his thin, long-fingered hand, and passed it in a slow arch
+      of movement to comprehend this glorious upper picture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What matter anyone's ideas of hell,&rdquo; he said, in soft, grave tones, &ldquo;when
+      we have that to look at, and listen to, and fill our lungs with? It seems
+      to me that we never FEEL quite so sure of God's goodness at other times as
+      we do in these wonderful new mornings of spring.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The wife followed his gesture, and her eyes rested for a brief moment,
+      with pleased interest, upon the trees and the sky. Then they reverted,
+      with a harsher scrutiny, to the immediate foreground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those Van Sizers ought to be downright ashamed of themselves,&rdquo; she said,
+      &ldquo;to leave everything in such a muss as this. You MUST see about getting a
+      man to clean up the yard, Theron. It's no use your thinking of doing it
+      yourself. In the first place, it wouldn't look quite the thing, and,
+      second, you'd never get at it in all your born days. Or if a man would
+      cost too much, we might get a boy. I daresay Harvey would come around,
+      after he'd finished with his milk-route in the forenoon. We could give him
+      his dinner, you know, and I'd bake him some cookies. He's got the greatest
+      sweet-tooth you ever heard of. And then perhaps if we gave him a quarter,
+      or say half a dollar, he'd be quite satisfied. I'll speak to him in the
+      morning. We can save a dollar or so that way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose every little does help,&rdquo; commented Mr. Ware, with a doleful
+      lack of conviction. Then his face brightened. &ldquo;I tell you what let's do!&rdquo;
+       he exclaimed. &ldquo;Get on your street dress, and we'll take a long walk, way
+      out into the country. You've never seen the basin, where they float the
+      log-rafts in, or the big sawmills. The hills beyond give you almost
+      mountain effects, they are so steep; and they say there's a sulphur spring
+      among the slate on the hill-side, somewhere, with trees all about it; and
+      we could take some sandwiches with us&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You forget,&rdquo; put in Mrs. Ware,&mdash;&ldquo;those trustees are coming at
+      eleven.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So they are!&rdquo; assented the young minister, with something like a sigh. He
+      cast another reluctant, lingering glance at the sunlit elm boughs, and,
+      turning, went indoors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He loitered for an aimless minute in the kitchen, where his wife, her
+      sleeves rolled to the elbow, now resumed the interrupted washing of the
+      breakfast dishes&mdash;perhaps with vague visions of that ever-receding
+      time to come when they might have a hired girl to do such work. Then he
+      wandered off into the room beyond, which served them alike as living-room
+      and study, and let his eye run along the two rows of books that
+      constituted his library. He saw nothing which he wanted to read. Finally
+      he did take down &ldquo;Paley's Evidences,&rdquo; and seated himself in the big
+      armchair&mdash;that costly and oversized anomaly among his humble
+      house-hold gods; but the book lay unopened on his knee, and his eyelids
+      half closed themselves in sign of revery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was his third charge&mdash;this Octavius which they both knew they
+      were going to dislike so much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first had been in the pleasant dairy and hop country many miles to the
+      south, on another watershed and among a different kind of people. Perhaps,
+      in truth, the grinding labor, the poverty of ideas, the systematic
+      selfishness of later rural experience, had not been lacking there; but
+      they played no part in the memories which now he passed in tender review.
+      He recalled instead the warm sunshine on the fertile expanse of fields;
+      the sleek, well-fed herds of &ldquo;milkers&rdquo; coming lowing down the road under
+      the maples; the prosperous and hospitable farmhouses, with their orchards
+      in blossom and their spacious red barns; the bountiful boiled dinners
+      which cheery housewives served up with their own skilled hands. Of course,
+      he admitted to himself, it would not be the same if he were to go back
+      there again. He was conscious of having moved along&mdash;was it, after
+      all, an advance?&mdash;to a point where it was unpleasant to sit at table
+      with the unfragrant hired man, and still worse to encounter the bucolic
+      confusion between the functions of knives and forks. But in those happy
+      days&mdash;young, zealous, himself farm-bred&mdash;these trifles had been
+      invisible to him, and life there among those kindly husbandmen had seemed,
+      by contrast with the gaunt surroundings and gloomy rule of the theological
+      seminary, luxuriously abundant and free.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was there too that the crowning blessedness of his youth&mdash;nay,
+      should he not say of all his days?&mdash;had come to him. There he had
+      first seen Alice Hastings,&mdash;the bright-eyed, frank-faced, serenely
+      self-reliant girl, who now, less than four years thereafter, could be
+      heard washing the dishes out in the parsonage kitchen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How wonderful she had seemed to him then! How beautiful and all-beneficent
+      the miracle still appeared! Though herself the daughter of a farmer, her
+      presence on a visit within the borders of his remote country charge had
+      seemed to make everything, there a hundred times more countrified than it
+      had ever been before. She was fresh from the refinements of a town
+      seminary: she read books; it was known that she could play upon the piano.
+      Her clothes, her manners, her way of speaking, the readiness of her
+      thoughts and sprightly tongue&mdash;not least, perhaps, the imposing
+      current understanding as to her father's wealth&mdash;placed her on a
+      glorified pinnacle far away from the girls of the neighborhood. These
+      honest and good-hearted creatures indeed called ceaseless attention to her
+      superiority by their deference and open-mouthed admiration, and treated it
+      as the most natural thing in the world that their young minister should be
+      visibly &ldquo;taken&rdquo; with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron Ware, in truth, left this first pastorate of his the following
+      spring, in a transfiguring halo of romance. His new appointment was to
+      Tyre&mdash;a somewhat distant village of traditional local pride and
+      substance&mdash;and he was to be married only a day or so before entering
+      upon his pastoral duties there. The good people among whom he had begun
+      his ministry took kindly credit to themselves that he had met his bride
+      while she was &ldquo;visiting round&rdquo; their countryside. In part by jocose
+      inquiries addressed to the expectant groom, in part by the confidences of
+      the postmaster at the corners concerning the bulk and frequency of the
+      correspondence passing between Theron and the now remote Alice&mdash;they
+      had followed the progress of the courtship through the autumn and winter
+      with friendly zest. When he returned from the Conference, to say good-bye
+      and confess the happiness that awaited him, they gave him a &ldquo;donation&rdquo;&mdash;quite
+      as if he were a married pastor with a home of his own, instead of a shy
+      young bachelor, who received his guests and their contributions in the
+      house where he boarded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went away with tears of mingled regret and proud joy in his eyes,
+      thinking a good deal upon their predictions of a distinguished career
+      before him, feeling infinitely strengthened and upborne by the hearty
+      fervor of their God-speed, and taking with him nearly two wagon-loads of
+      vegetables, apples, canned preserves, assorted furniture, glass dishes,
+      cheeses, pieced bedquilts, honey, feathers, and kitchen utensils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the three years' term in Tyre, it was pleasantest to dwell upon the
+      beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young couple&mdash;after being married out at Alice's home in an
+      adjoining county, under the depressing conditions of a hopelessly
+      bedridden mother, and a father and brothers whose perceptions were
+      obviously closed to the advantages of a matrimonial connection with
+      Methodism&mdash;came straight to the house which their new congregation
+      rented as a parsonage. The impulse of reaction from the rather grim
+      cheerlessness of their wedding lent fresh gayety to their lighthearted,
+      whimsical start at housekeeping. They had never laughed so much in all
+      their lives as they did now in these first months&mdash;over their weird
+      ignorance of domestic details; with its mishaps, mistakes, and
+      entertaining discoveries; over the comical super-abundances and
+      shortcomings of their &ldquo;donation&rdquo; outfit; over the thousand and one quaint
+      experiences of their novel relation to each other, to the congregation,
+      and to the world of Tyre at large.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron, indeed, might be said never to have laughed before. Up to that
+      time no friendly student of his character, cataloguing his admirable
+      qualities, would have thought of including among them a sense of humor,
+      much less a bent toward levity. Neither his early strenuous battle to get
+      away from the farm and achieve such education as should serve to open to
+      him the gates of professional life, nor the later wave of religious
+      enthusiasm which caught him up as he stood on the border-land of manhood,
+      and swept him off into a veritable new world of views and aspirations, had
+      been a likely school of merriment. People had prized him for his innocent
+      candor and guileless mind, for his good heart, his pious zeal, his modesty
+      about gifts notably above the average, but it had occurred to none to
+      suspect in him a latent funny side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But who could be solemn where Alice was?&mdash;Alice in a quandary over
+      the complications of her cooking stove; Alice boiling her potatoes all
+      day, and her eggs for half an hour; Alice ordering twenty pounds of steak
+      and half a pound of sugar, and striving to extract a breakfast beverage
+      from the unground coffee-bean? Clearly not so tenderly fond and
+      sympathetic a husband as Theron. He began by laughing because she laughed,
+      and grew by swift stages to comprehend, then frankly to share, her
+      amusement. From this it seemed only a step to the development of a humor
+      of his own, doubling, as it were, their sportive resources. He found
+      himself discovering a new droll aspect in men and things; his phraseology
+      took on a dryly playful form, fittingly to present conceits which danced
+      up, unabashed, quite into the presence of lofty and majestic truths. He
+      got from this nothing but satisfaction; it obviously involved increased
+      claims to popularity among his parishioners, and consequently magnified
+      powers of usefulness, and it made life so much more a joy and a thing to
+      be thankful for. Often, in the midst of the exchange of merry quip and
+      whimsical suggestion, bright blossoms on that tree of strength and
+      knowledge which he felt expanding now with a mighty outward pushing in all
+      directions, he would lapse into deep gravity, and ponder with a swelling
+      heart the vast unspeakable marvel of his blessedness, in being thus
+      enriched and humanized by daily communion with the most worshipful of
+      womankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This happy and good young couple took the affections of Tyre by storm. The
+      Methodist Church there had at no time held its head very high among the
+      denominations, and for some years back had been in a deplorably sinking
+      state, owing first to the secession of the Free Methodists and then to the
+      incumbency of a pastor who scandalized the community by marrying a black
+      man to a white woman. But the Wares changed all this. Within a month the
+      report of Theron's charm and force in the pulpit was crowding the church
+      building to its utmost capacity&mdash;and that, too, with some of Tyre's
+      best people. Equally winning was the atmosphere of jollity and juvenile
+      high spirits which pervaded the parsonage under these new conditions, and
+      which Theron and Alice seemed to diffuse wherever they went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus swimmingly their first year sped, amid universal acclaim. Mrs. Ware
+      had a recognized social place, quite outside the restricted limits of
+      Methodism, and shone in it with an unflagging brilliancy altogether beyond
+      the traditions of Tyre. Delightful as she was in other people's houses,
+      she was still more naively fascinating in her own quaint and somewhat
+      harum-scarum domicile; and the drab, two-storied, tin-roofed little
+      parsonage might well have rattled its clapboards to see if it was not in
+      dreamland&mdash;so gay was the company, so light were the hearts, which it
+      sheltered in these new days. As for Theron, the period was one of
+      incredible fructification and output. He scarcely recognized for his own
+      the mind which now was reaching out on all sides with the arms of an
+      octopus, exploring unsuspected mines of thought, bringing in rich
+      treasures of deduction, assimilating, building, propounding as if by some
+      force quite independent of him. He could not look without blinking
+      timidity at the radiance of the path stretched out before him, leading
+      upward to dazzling heights of greatness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the end of this first year the Wares suddenly discovered that they were
+      eight hundred dollars in debt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second year was spent in arriving, by slow stages and with a cruel
+      wealth of pathetic detail, at a realization of what being eight hundred
+      dollars in debt meant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not in their elastic and buoyant natures to grasp the full
+      significance of the thing at once, or easily. Their position in the social
+      structure, too, was all against clear-sightedness in material matters. A
+      general, for example, uniformed and in the saddle, advancing through the
+      streets with his staff in the proud wake of his division's massed walls of
+      bayonets, cannot be imagined as quailing at the glance thrown at him by
+      his tailor on the sidewalk. Similarly, a man invested with sacerdotal
+      authority, who baptizes, marries, and buries, who delivers judgments from
+      the pulpit which may not be questioned in his hearing, and who receives
+      from all his fellow-men a special deference of manner and speech, is in
+      the nature of things prone to see the grocer's book and the butcher's bill
+      through the little end of the telescope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Wares at the outset had thought it right to trade as exclusively as
+      possible with members of their own church society. This loyalty became a
+      principal element of martyrdom. Theron had his creditors seated in serried
+      rows before him, Sunday after Sunday. Alice had her critics consolidated
+      among those whom it was her chief duty to visit and profess friendship
+      for. These situations now began, by regular gradations, to unfold their
+      terrors. At the first intimation of discontent, the Wares made what seemed
+      to them a sweeping reduction in expenditure. When they heard that Brother
+      Potter had spoken of them as &ldquo;poor pay,&rdquo; they dismissed their hired girl.
+      A little later, Theron brought himself to drop a laboriously casual
+      suggestion as to a possible increase of salary, and saw with sinking
+      spirits the faces of the stewards freeze with dumb disapprobation. Then
+      Alice paid a visit to her parents, only to find her brothers doggedly
+      hostile to the notion of her being helped, and her father so much under
+      their influence that the paltry sum he dared offer barely covered the
+      expenses of her journey. With another turn of the screw, they sold the
+      piano she had brought with her from home, and cut themselves down to the
+      bare necessities of life, neither receiving company nor going out. They
+      never laughed now, and even smiles grew rare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time Theron's sermons, preached under that stony glare of people
+      to whom he owed money, had degenerated to a pitiful level of commonplace.
+      As a consequence, the attendance became once more confined to the
+      insufficient membership of the church, and the trustees complained of
+      grievously diminished receipts. When the Wares, grown desperate, ventured
+      upon the experiment of trading outside the bounds of the congregation, the
+      trustees complained again, this time peremptorily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus the second year dragged itself miserably to an end. Nor was relief
+      possible, because the Presiding Elder knew something of the circumstances,
+      and felt it his duty to send Theron back for a third year, to pay his
+      debts, and drain the cup of disciplinary medicine to its dregs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The worst has been told. Beginning in utter blackness, this third year, in
+      the second month, brought a change as welcome as it was unlooked for. An
+      elderly and important citizen of Tyre, by name Abram Beekman, whom Theron
+      knew slightly, and had on occasions seen sitting in one of the back pews
+      near the door, called one morning at the parsonage, and electrified its
+      inhabitants by expressing a desire to wipe off all their old scores for
+      them, and give them a fresh start in life. As he put the suggestion, they
+      could find no excuse for rejecting it. He had watched them, and heard a
+      good deal about them, and took a fatherly sort of interest in them. He did
+      not deprecate their regarding the aid he proffered them in the nature of a
+      loan, but they were to make themselves perfectly easy about it, and never
+      return it at all unless they could spare it sometime with entire
+      convenience, and felt that they wanted to do so. As this amazing windfall
+      finally took shape, it enabled the Wares to live respectably through the
+      year, and to leave Tyre with something over one hundred dollars in hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It enabled them, too, to revive in a chastened form their old dream of
+      ultimate success and distinction for Theron. He had demonstrated clearly
+      enough to himself, during that brief season of unrestrained effulgence,
+      that he had within him the making of a great pulpit orator. He set to work
+      now, with resolute purpose, to puzzle out and master all the principles
+      which underlie this art, and all the tricks that adorn its superstructure.
+      He studied it, fastened his thoughts upon it, talked daily with Alice
+      about it. In the pulpit, addressing those people who had so darkened his
+      life and crushed the first happiness out of his home, he withheld himself
+      from any oratorical display which could afford them gratification. He put
+      aside, as well; the thought of attracting once more the non-Methodists of
+      Tyre, whose early enthusiasm had spread such pitfalls for his unwary feet.
+      He practised effects now by piecemeal, with an alert ear, and calculation
+      in every tone. An ambition, at once embittered and tearfully solicitous,
+      possessed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reflected now, this morning, with a certain incredulous interest, upon
+      that unworthy epoch in his life history, which seemed so far behind him,
+      and yet had come to a close only a few weeks ago. The opportunity had been
+      given him, there at the Tecumseh Conference, to reveal his quality. He had
+      risen to its full limit of possibilities, and preached a great sermon in a
+      manner which he at least knew was unapproachable. He had made his most
+      powerful bid for the prize place, had trebly deserved success&mdash;and
+      had been banished instead to Octavius!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The curious thing was that he did not resent his failure. Alice had taken
+      it hard, but he himself was conscious of a sense of spiritual gain. The
+      influence of the Conference, with its songs and seasons of prayer and high
+      pressure of emotional excitement, was still strong upon him. It seemed
+      years and years since the religious side of him had been so stirred into
+      motion. He felt, as he lay back in the chair, and folded his hands over
+      the book on his knee, that he had indeed come forth from the fire purified
+      and strengthened. The ministry to souls diseased beckoned him with a new
+      and urgent significance. He smiled to remember that Mr. Beekman, speaking
+      in his shrewd and pointed way, had asked him whether, looking it all over,
+      he didn't think it would be better for him to study law, with a view to
+      sliding out of the ministry when a good chance offered. It amazed him now
+      to recall that he had taken this hint seriously, and even gone to the
+      length of finding out what books law-students began upon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thank God! all that was past and gone now. The Call sounded, resonant and
+      imperative, in his ears, and there was no impulse of his heart, no fibre
+      of his being, which did not stir in devout response. He closed his eyes,
+      to be the more wholly alone with the Spirit, that moved him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The jangling of a bell in the hallway broke sharply upon his meditations,
+      and on the instant his wife thrust in her head from the kitchen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll have to go to the door, Theron!&rdquo; she warned him, in a loud, swift
+      whisper. &ldquo;I'm not fit to be seen. It is the trustees.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he said, and rose slowly from sprawling recumbency to his
+      feet. &ldquo;I'll go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And don't forget,&rdquo; she added strenuously; &ldquo;I believe in Levi Gorringe!
+      I've seen him go past here with his rod and fish-basket twice in eight
+      days, and that's a good sign. He's got a soft side somewhere. And just
+      keep a stiff upper lip about the gas, and don't you let them jew you down
+      a solitary cent on that sidewalk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said Theron, again, and moved reluctantly toward the hall
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When the three trustees had been shown in by the Rev. Mr. Ware, and had
+      taken seats, an awkward little pause ensued. The young minister looked
+      doubtingly from one face to another, the while they glanced with inquiring
+      interest about the room, noting the pictures and appraising the furniture
+      in their minds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The obvious leader of the party, Loren Pierce, a rich quarryman, was an
+      old man of medium size and mean attire, with a square, beardless face as
+      hard and impassive in expression as one of his blocks of limestone. The
+      irregular, thin-lipped mouth, slightly sunken, and shut with vice-like
+      firmness, the short snub nose, and the little eyes squinting from
+      half-closed lids beneath slightly marked brows, seemed scarcely to attain
+      to the dignity of features, but evaded attention instead, as if feeling
+      that they were only there at all from plain necessity, and ought not to be
+      taken into account. Mr. Pierce's face did not know how to smile&mdash;what
+      was the use of smiles?&mdash;but its whole surface radiated secretiveness.
+      Portrayed on canvas by a master brush, with a ruff or a red robe for
+      masquerade, generations of imaginative amateurs would have seen in it vast
+      reaching plots, the skeletons of a dozen dynastic cupboards, the guarded
+      mysteries of half a century's international diplomacy. The amateurs would
+      have been wrong again. There was nothing behind Mr. Pierce's juiceless
+      countenance more weighty than a general determination to exact seven per
+      cent for his money, and some specific notions about capturing certain
+      brickyards which were interfering with his quarry-sales. But Octavius
+      watched him shamble along its sidewalks quite as the Vienna of dead and
+      forgotten yesterday might have watched Metternich.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Erastus Winch was of a breezier sort&mdash;a florid, stout, and sandy man,
+      who spent most of his life driving over evil country roads in a buggy,
+      securing orders for dairy furniture and certain allied lines of farm
+      utensils. This practice had given him a loud voice and a deceptively
+      hearty manner, to which the other avocation of cheese-buyer, which he
+      pursued at the Board of Trade meetings every Monday afternoon, had added a
+      considerable command of persuasive yet non-committal language. To look at
+      him, still more to hear him, one would have sworn he was a good fellow, a
+      trifle rough and noisy, perhaps, but all right at bottom. But the County
+      Clerk of Dearborn County could have told you of agriculturists who knew
+      Erastus from long and unhappy experience, and who held him to be even a
+      tighter man than Loren Pierce in the matter of a mortgage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third trustee, Levi Gorringe, set one wondering at the very first
+      glance what on earth he was doing in that company. Those who had known him
+      longest had the least notion; but it may be added that no one knew him
+      well. He was a lawyer, and had lived in Octavius for upwards of ten years;
+      that is to say, since early manhood. He had an office on the main street,
+      just under the principal photograph gallery. Doubtless he was sometimes in
+      this office; but his fellow-townsmen saw him more often in the street
+      doorway, with the stairs behind him, and the flaring show-cases of the
+      photographer on either side, standing with his hands in his pockets and an
+      unlighted cigar in his mouth, looking at nothing in particular. About
+      every other day he went off after breakfast into the country roundabout,
+      sometimes with a rod, sometimes with a gun, but always alone. He was a
+      bachelor, and slept in a room at the back of his office, cooking some of
+      his meals himself, getting others at a restaurant close by. Though he had
+      little visible practice, he was understood to be well-to-do and even more,
+      and people tacitly inferred that he &ldquo;shaved notes.&rdquo; The Methodists of
+      Octavius looked upon him as a queer fish, and through nearly a dozen years
+      had never quite outgrown their hebdomadal tendency to surprise at seeing
+      him enter their church. He had never, it is true, professed religion, but
+      they had elected him as a trustee now for a number of terms, all the same&mdash;partly
+      because he was their only lawyer, partly because he, like both his
+      colleagues, held a mortgage on the church edifice and lot. In person, Mr.
+      Gorringe was a slender man, with a skin of a clear, uniform citron tint,
+      black waving hair, and dark gray eyes, and a thin, high-featured face. He
+      wore a mustache and pointed chin-tuft; and, though he was of New England
+      parentage and had never been further south than Ocean Grove, he presented
+      a general effect of old Mississippian traditions and tastes startlingly at
+      variance with the standards of Dearborn County Methodism. Nothing could
+      convince some of the elder sisters that he was not a drinking man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The three visitors had completed their survey of the room now; and Loren
+      Pierce emitted a dry, harsh little cough, as a signal that business was
+      about to begin. At this sound, Winch drew up his feet, and Gorringe untied
+      a parcel of account-books and papers that he held on his knee. Theron felt
+      that his countenance must be exhibiting to the assembled brethren an
+      unfortunate sense of helplessness in their hands. He tried to look more
+      resolute, and forced his lips into a smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brother Gorringe allus acts as Seckertary,&rdquo; said Erastus Winch, beaming
+      broadly upon the minister, as if the mere mention of the fact promoted
+      jollity. &ldquo;That's it, Brother Gorringe,&mdash;take your seat at Brother
+      Ware's desk. Mind the Dominie's pen don't play tricks on you, an' start
+      off writin' out sermons instid of figgers.&rdquo; The humorist turned to Theron
+      as the lawyer walked over to the desk at the window. &ldquo;I allus have to
+      caution him about that,&rdquo; he remarked with great joviality. &ldquo;An' do YOU
+      look out afterwards, Brother Ware, or else you'll catch that pen o' yours
+      scribblin' lawyer's lingo in place o' the Word.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron felt bound to exhibit a grin in acknowledgment of this pleasantry.
+      The lawyer's change of position had involved some shifting of the others'
+      chairs, and the young minister found himself directly confronted by
+      Brother Pierce's hard and colorless old visage. Its little eyes were
+      watching him, as through a mask, and under their influence the smile of
+      politeness fled from his lips. The lawyer on his right, the cheese-buyer
+      to the left, seemed to recede into distance as he for the moment returned
+      the gaze of the quarryman. He waited now for him to speak, as if the
+      others were of no importance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are a plain sort o' folks up in these parts,&rdquo; said Brother Pierce,
+      after a slight further pause. His voice was as dry and rasping as his
+      cough, and its intonations were those of authority. &ldquo;We walk here,&rdquo; he
+      went on, eying the minister with a sour regard, &ldquo;in a meek an' humble
+      spirit, in the straight an' narrow way which leadeth unto life. We ain't
+      gone traipsin' after strange gods, like some people that call themselves
+      Methodists in other places. We stick by the Discipline an' the ways of our
+      fathers in Israel. No new-fangled notions can go down here. Your wife'd
+      better take them flowers out of her bunnit afore next Sunday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Silence possessed the room for a few moments, the while Theron, pale-faced
+      and with brows knit, studied the pattern of the ingrain carpet. Then he
+      lifted his head, and nodded it in assent. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;we will do
+      nothing by which our 'brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made
+      weak.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Pierce's parchment face showed no sign of surprise or pleasure at
+      this easy submission. &ldquo;Another thing: We don't want no book-learnin' or
+      dictionary words in our pulpit,&rdquo; he went on coldly. &ldquo;Some folks may
+      stomach 'em; we won't. Them two sermons o' yours, p'r'aps they'd do down
+      in some city place; but they're like your wife's bunnit here, they're too
+      flowery to suit us. What we want to hear is the plain, old-fashioned Word
+      of God, without any palaver or 'hems and ha's. They tell me there's some
+      parts where hell's treated as played-out&mdash;where our ministers don't
+      like to talk much about it because people don't want to hear about it.
+      Such preachers ought to be put out. They ain't Methodists at all. What we
+      want here, sir, is straight-out, flat-footed hell&mdash;the burnin' lake
+      o' fire an' brim-stone. Pour it into 'em, hot an' strong. We can't have
+      too much of it. Work in them awful deathbeds of Voltaire an' Tom Paine,
+      with the Devil right there in the room, reachin' for 'em, an' they yellin'
+      for fright; that's what fills the anxious seat an' brings in souls hand
+      over fist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron's tongue dallied for an instant with the temptation to comment upon
+      these old-wife fables, which were so dear to the rural religious heart
+      when he and I were boys. But it seemed wiser to only nod again, and let
+      his mentor go on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We ain't had no trouble with the Free Methodists here,&rdquo; continued Brother
+      Pierce, &ldquo;jest because we kept to the old paths, an' seek for salvation in
+      the good old way. Everybody can shout 'Amen!' as loud and as long as the
+      Spirit moves him, with us. Some one was sayin' you thought we ought to
+      have a choir and an organ. No, sirree! No such tom-foolery for us! You'll
+      only stir up feelin' agin yourself by hintin' at such things. And then,
+      too, our folks don't take no stock in all that pack o' nonsense about
+      science, such as tellin' the age of the earth by crackin' up stones. I've
+      b'en in the quarry line all my life, an' I know it's all humbug! Why, they
+      say some folks are goin' round now preachin' that our grandfathers were
+      all monkeys. That comes from departin' from the ways of our forefathers,
+      an puttin' in organs an' choirs, an' deckin' our women-folks out with
+      gewgaws, an' apin' the fashions of the worldly. I shouldn't wonder if them
+      kind did have some monkey blood in 'em. You'll find we're a different sort
+      here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister preserved silence for a little, until it became
+      apparent that the old trustee had had his say out. Even then he raised his
+      head slowly, and at last made answer in a hesitating and irresolute way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been very frank,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I am obliged to you. A clergyman
+      coming to a new charge cannot be better served than by having laid before
+      him a clear statement of the views and&mdash;and spiritual tendencies&mdash;of
+      his new flock, quite at the outset. I feel it to be of especial value in
+      this case, because I am young in years and in my ministry, and am
+      conscious of a great weakness of the flesh. I can see how daily contact
+      with a people so attached to the old, simple, primitive Methodism of
+      Wesley and Asbury may be a source of much strength to me. I may take it,&rdquo;
+       he added upon second thought, with an inquiring glance at Mr. Winch, &ldquo;that
+      Brother Pierce's description of our charge, and its tastes and needs,
+      meets with your approval?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Erastus Winch nodded his head and smiled expansively. &ldquo;Whatever Brother
+      Pierce says, goes!&rdquo; he declared. The lawyer, sitting behind at the desk by
+      the window, said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The place is jest overrun with Irish,&rdquo; Brother Pierce began again.
+      &ldquo;They've got two Catholic churches here now to our one, and they do jest
+      as they blamed please at the Charter elections. It'd be a good idee to
+      pitch into Catholics in general whenever you can. You could make a hit
+      that way. I say the State ought to make 'em pay taxes on their church
+      property. They've no right to be exempted, because they ain't Christians
+      at all. They're idolaters, that's what they are! I know 'em! I've had 'em
+      in my quarries for years, an' they ain't got no idee of decency or fair
+      dealin'. Every time the price of stone went up, every man of 'em would
+      jine to screw more wages out o' me. Why, they used to keep account o' the
+      amount o' business I done, an' figger up my profits, an' have the face to
+      come an' talk to me about 'em, as if that had anything to do with wages.
+      It's my belief their priests put 'em up to it. People don't begin to
+      reelize&mdash;that church of idolatry 'll be the ruin o' this country, if
+      it ain't checked in time. Jest you go at 'em hammer 'n' tongs! I've got
+      Eyetalians in the quarries now. They're sensible fellows: they know when
+      they're well off&mdash;a dollar a day, an' they're satisfied, an'
+      everything goes smooth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they're Catholics, the same as the Irish,&rdquo; suddenly interjected the
+      lawyer, from his place by the window. Theron pricked up his ears at the
+      sound of his voice. There was an anti-Pierce note in it, so to speak,
+      which it did him good to hear. The consciousness of sympathy began on the
+      instant to inspire him with courage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know some people SAY they are,&rdquo; Brother Pierce guardedly retorted &ldquo;but
+      I've summered an' wintered both kinds, an' I hold to it they're different.
+      I grant ye, the Eyetalians ARE some given to jabbin' knives into each
+      other, but they never git up strikes, an' they don't grumble about wages.
+      Why, look at the way they live&mdash;jest some weeds an' yarbs dug up on
+      the roadside, an' stewed in a kettle with a piece o' fat the size o' your
+      finger, an' a loaf o' bread, an' they're happy as a king. There's some
+      sense in THAT; but the Irish, they've got to have meat an' potatoes an'
+      butter jest as if&mdash;as if&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As if they'd b'en used to 'em at home,&rdquo; put in Mr. Winch, to help his
+      colleague out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lawyer ostentatiously drew up his chair to the desk, and began turning
+      over the leaves of his biggest book. &ldquo;It's getting on toward noon,
+      gentlemen,&rdquo; he said, in an impatient voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The business meeting which followed was for a considerable time confined
+      to hearing extracts from the books and papers read in a swift and formal
+      fashion by Mr. Gorringe. If this was intended to inform the new pastor of
+      the exact financial situation in Octavius, it lamentably failed of its
+      purpose. Theron had little knowledge of figures; and though he tried hard
+      to listen, and to assume an air of comprehension, he did not understand
+      much of what he heard. In a general way he gathered that the church
+      property was put down at $12,000, on which there was a debt of $4,800. The
+      annual expenses were $2,250, of which the principal items were $800 for
+      his salary, $170 for the rent of the parsonage, and $319 for interest on
+      the debt. It seemed that last year the receipts had fallen just under
+      $2,000, and they now confronted the necessity of making good this deficit
+      during the coming year, as well as increasing the regular revenues.
+      Without much discussion, it was agreed that they should endeavor to secure
+      the services of a celebrated &ldquo;debt-raiser,&rdquo; early in the autumn, and
+      utilize him in the closing days of a revival.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron knew this &ldquo;debt-raiser,&rdquo; and had seen him at work&mdash;a burly,
+      bustling, vulgar man who took possession of the pulpit as if it were an
+      auctioneer's block, and pursued the task of exciting liberality in the
+      bosoms of the congregation by alternating prayer, anecdote, song, and
+      cheap buffoonery in a manner truly sickening. Would it not be preferable,
+      he feebly suggested, to raise the money by a festival, or fair, or some
+      other form of entertainment which the ladies could manage?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Pierce shook his head with contemptuous emphasis. &ldquo;Our women-folks
+      ain't that kind,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They did try to hold a sociable once, but
+      nobody came, and we didn't raise more 'n three or four dollars. It ain't
+      their line. They lack the worldly arts. As the Discipline commands, they
+      avoid the evil of putting on gold and costly apparel, and taking such
+      diversions as cannot be used in the name of the Lord Jesus.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;of course&mdash;if you prefer the 'debt-raiser'&mdash;&rdquo; Theron
+      began, and took the itemized account from Gorringe's knee as an excuse for
+      not finishing the hateful sentence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked down the foolscap sheet, line by line, with no special sense of
+      what it signified, until his eye caught upon this little section of the
+      report, bracketed by itself in the Secretary's neat hand:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     INTEREST CHARGE.
+
+     First mortgage (1873) .. $1,000 ... (E. Winch)    @7.. $ 70
+     Second mortgage (1776)..  1,700 ... (L. Gorringe) @6..  102
+     Third mortgage (1878)...  2,100 ... (L. Pierce)   @7..  147
+     &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;-                       &mdash;&mdash;-
+     $4,800                        $319
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It was no news to him that the three mortgages on the church property were
+      held by the three trustees. But as he looked once more, another feature of
+      the thing struck him as curious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I notice that the rates of interest vary,&rdquo; he remarked without thinking,
+      and then wished the words unsaid, for the two trustees in view moved
+      uneasily on their seats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that's nothing,&rdquo; exclaimed Erastus Winch, with a boisterous display
+      of jollity. &ldquo;It's only Brother Gorringe's pleasant little way of making a
+      contribution to our funds. You will notice that, at the date of all these
+      mortgages, the State rate of interest was seven per cent. Since then it's
+      b'en lowered to six. Well, when that happened, you see, Brother Gorringe,
+      not being a professin' member, and so not bound by our rules, he could
+      just as well as not let his interest down a cent. But Brother Pierce an'
+      me, we talked it over, an' we made up our minds we were tied hand an' foot
+      by our contract. You know how strong the Discipline lays it down that we
+      must be bound to the letter of our agreements. That bein' so, we seen it
+      in the light of duty not to change what we'd set our hands to. That's how
+      it is, Brother Ware.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand,&rdquo; said Theron, with an effort at polite calmness of tone.
+      &ldquo;And&mdash;is there anything else?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's this,&rdquo; broke in Brother Pierce: &ldquo;we're commanded to be
+      law-abiding people, an' seven per cent WAS the law an' would be now if
+      them ragamuffins in the Legislation&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely we needn't go further into that,&rdquo; interrupted the minister,
+      conscious of a growing stiffness in his moral spine. &ldquo;Have we any other
+      business before us?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Pierce's little eyes snapped, and the wrinkles in his forehead
+      deepened angrily. &ldquo;Business?&rdquo; he demanded. &ldquo;Yes, plenty of it. We've got
+      to reduce expenses. We're nigh onto $300 behind-hand this minute. Besides
+      your house-rent, you get $800 free an' clear&mdash;that is $15.38 every
+      week, an' only you an' your wife to keep out of it. Why, when I was your
+      age, young man, and after that too, I was glad to get $4 a week.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think my salary is under discussion, Mr. Pierce&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;BROTHER Pierce!&rdquo; suggested Winch, in a half-shuckling undertone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brother Pierce, then!&rdquo; echoed Theron, impatiently. &ldquo;The Quarterly
+      Conference and the Estimating Committee deal with that. The trustees have
+      no more to do with it than the man in the moon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come, Brother Ware,&rdquo; put in Erastus Winch, &ldquo;we mustn't have no hard
+      feelin's. Brotherly love is what we're all lookin' after. Brother Pierce's
+      meanin' wasn't agin your drawin' your full salary, every cent of it, only&mdash;only
+      there are certain little things connected with the parsonage here that we
+      feel you ought to bear. F'r instance, there's the new sidewalk we had to
+      lay in front of the house here only a month ago. Of course, if the
+      treasury was flush we wouldn't say a word about it. An' then there's the
+      gas bill here. Seein' as you get your rent for nothin', it don't seem much
+      to ask that you should see to lightin' the place yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I don't think that either is a proper charge upon me,&rdquo; interposed
+      Theron. &ldquo;I decline to pay them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can have the gas shut off,&rdquo; remarked Brother Pierce, coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As soon as you like,&rdquo; responded the minister, sitting erect and tapping
+      the carpet nervously with his foot. &ldquo;Only you must understand that I will
+      take the whole matter to the Quarterly Conference in July. I already see a
+      good many other interesting questions about the financial management of
+      this church which might be appropriately discussed there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, come, Brother Ware!&rdquo; broke in Trustee Winch, with a somewhat agitated
+      assumption of good-feeling. &ldquo;Surely these are matters we ought to settle
+      amongst ourselves. We never yet asked outsiders to meddle with our
+      business here. It's our motto, Brother Ware. I say, if you've got a motto,
+      stand by it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, my motto,&rdquo; said Theron, &ldquo;is to be behaved decently to by those with
+      whom I have to deal; and I also propose to stand by it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Pierce rose gingerly to his feet, with the hesitation of an old
+      man not sure about his knees. When he had straightened himself, he put on
+      his hat, and eyed the minister sternly from beneath its brim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Lord gives us crosses grievous to our natur',&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;an' we're
+      told to bear 'em cheerfully as long as they're on our backs; but there
+      ain't nothin' said agin our unloadin' 'em in the ditch the minute we git
+      the chance. I guess you won't last here more 'n a twelvemonth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He pulled his soft and discolored old hat down over his brows with a
+      significantly hostile nod, and, turning, stumped toward the hall-door
+      without offering to shake hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other trustees had risen likewise, in tacit recognition that the
+      meeting was over. Winch clasped the minister's hand in his own broad, hard
+      palm, and squeezed it in an exuberant grip. &ldquo;Don't mind his little ways,
+      Brother Ware,&rdquo; he urged in a loud, unctuous whisper, with a grinning
+      backward nod: &ldquo;he's a trifle skittish sometimes when you don't give him
+      free rein; but he's all wool an' a yard wide when it comes to right-down
+      hard-pan religion. My love to Sister Ware;&rdquo; and he followed the senior
+      trustee into the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gorringe had been tying up his books and papers. He came now with the
+      bulky parcel under his arm, and his hat and stick in the other hand. He
+      could give little but his thumb to Theron to shake. His face wore a grave
+      expression, and not a line relaxed as, catching the minister's look, he
+      slowly covered his left eye in a deliberate wink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&mdash;and how did it go off?&rdquo; asked Alice, from where she knelt by
+      the oven door, a few minutes later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For answer, Theron threw himself wearily into the big old farm
+      rocking-chair on the other side of the stove, and shook his head with a
+      lengthened sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it wasn't for that man Gorringe of yours,&rdquo; he said dejectedly, &ldquo;I
+      think I should feel like going off&mdash;and learning a trade.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On the following Sunday, young Mrs. Ware sat alone in the preacher's pew
+      through the morning service, and everybody noted that the roses had been
+      taken from her bonnet. In the evening she was absent, and after the
+      doxology and benediction several people, under the pretence of solicitude
+      for her health, tried to pump her husband as to the reason. He answered
+      their inquiries civilly enough, but with brevity: she had stayed at home
+      because she did not feel like coming out&mdash;this and nothing more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The congregation dispersed under a gossip-laden cloud of consciousness
+      that there must be something queer about Sister Ware. There was a
+      tolerably general agreement, however, that the two sermons of the day had
+      been excellent. Not even Loren Pierce's railing commentary on the pastor's
+      introduction of an outlandish word like &ldquo;epitome&rdquo;&mdash;clearly forbidden
+      by the Discipline's injunction to plain language understood of the people&mdash;availed
+      to sap the satisfaction of the majority.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron himself comprehended that he had pleased the bulk of his auditors;
+      the knowledge left him curiously hot and cold. On the one hand, there was
+      joy in the apparent prospect that the congregation would back him up in a
+      stand against the trustees, if worst came to worst. But, on the other
+      hand, the bonnet episode entered his soul. It had been a source of bitter
+      humiliation to him to see his wife sitting there beneath the pulpit, shorn
+      by despotic order of the adornments natural to her pretty head. But he had
+      even greater pain in contemplating the effect it had produced on Alice
+      herself. She had said not a word on the subject, but her every glance and
+      gesture seemed to him eloquent of deep feeling about it. He made sure that
+      she blamed him for having defended his own gas and sidewalk rights with
+      successful vigor, but permitted the sacrifice of her poor little
+      inoffensive roses without a protest. In this view of the matter, indeed,
+      he blamed himself. Was it too late to make the error good? He ventured a
+      hint on this Sunday evening, when he returned to the parsonage and found
+      her reading an old weekly newspaper by the light of the kitchen lamp, to
+      the effect that he fancied there would be no great danger in putting those
+      roses back into her bonnet. Without lifting her eyes from the paper, she
+      answered that she had no earthly desire to wear roses in her bonnet, and
+      went on with her reading.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At breakfast the next morning Theron found himself in command of an
+      unusual fund of humorous good spirits, and was at pains to make the most
+      of it, passing whimsical comments on subjects which the opening day
+      suggested, recalling quaint and comical memories of the past, and striving
+      his best to force Alice into a laugh. Formerly her merry temper had always
+      ignited at the merest spark of gayety. Now she gave his jokes only a
+      dutiful half-smile, and uttered scarcely a word in response to his running
+      fire of talk. When the meal was finished, she went silently to work to
+      clear away the dishes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron turned over in his mind the project of offering to help her, as he
+      had done so often in those dear old days when they laughingly began life
+      together. Something decided this project in the negative for him, and
+      after lingering moments he put on his hat and went out for a walk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not even the most doleful and trying hour of his bitter experience in Tyre
+      had depressed him like this. Looking back upon these past troubles, he
+      persuaded himself that he had borne them all with a light and cheerful
+      heart, simply because Alice had been one with him in every thought and
+      emotion. How perfect, how ideally complete, their sympathy had always
+      been! With what absolute unity of mind and soul they had trod that
+      difficult path together! And now&mdash;henceforth&mdash;was it to be
+      different? The mere suggestion of such a thing chilled his veins. He said
+      aloud to himself as he walked that life would be an intolerable curse if
+      Alice were to cease sharing it with him in every conceivable phase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had made his way out of town, and tramped along the country hill-road
+      for a considerable distance, before a merciful light began to lessen the
+      shadows in the picture of gloom with which his mind tortured itself. All
+      at once he stopped short, lifted his head, and looked about him. The broad
+      valley lay warm and tranquil in the May sunshine at his feet. In the
+      thicket up the side-hill above him a gray squirrel was chattering shrilly,
+      and the birds sang in a tireless choral confusion. Theron smiled, and drew
+      a long breath. The gay clamor of the woodland songsters, the placid
+      radiance of the landscape, were suddenly taken in and made a part of his
+      new mood. He listened, smiled once more, and then started in a leisurely
+      way back toward Octavius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How could he have been so ridiculous as to fancy that Alice&mdash;his
+      Alice&mdash;had been changed into someone else? He marvelled now at his
+      own perverse folly. She was overworked&mdash;tired out&mdash;that was all.
+      The task of moving in, of setting the new household to rights, had been
+      too much for her. She must have a rest. They must get in a hired girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once this decision about a servant fixed itself in the young minister's
+      mind, it drove out the last vestage of discomfort. He strode along now in
+      great content, revolving idly a dozen different plans for gilding and
+      beautifying this new life of leisure into which his sanguine thoughts
+      projected Alice. One of these particularly pleased him, and waxed in
+      definiteness as he turned it over and over. He would get another piano for
+      her, in place of that which had been sacrificed in Tyre. That beneficient
+      modern invention, the instalment plan, made this quite feasible&mdash;so
+      easy, in fact, that it almost seemed as if he should find his wife playing
+      on the new instrument when he got home. He would stop in at the music
+      store and see about it that very day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, now that these important resolutions had been taken, it would
+      be a good thing if he could do something to bring in some extra money.
+      This was by no means a new notion. He had mused over the possibility in a
+      formless way ever since that memorable discovery of indebtedness in Tyre,
+      and had long ago recognized the hopelessness of endeavor in every channel
+      save that of literature. Latterly his fancy had been stimulated by reading
+      an account of the profits which Canon Farrar had derived from his &ldquo;Life of
+      Christ.&rdquo; If such a book could command such a bewildering multitude of
+      readers, Theron felt there ought to be a chance for him. So clear did
+      constant rumination render this assumption that the young pastor in time
+      had come to regard this prospective book of his as a substantial asset,
+      which could be realized without trouble whenever he got around to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not, it is true, gone to the length of seriously considering what
+      should be the subject of his book. That had not seemed to him to matter
+      much, so long as it was scriptural. Familiarity with the process of
+      extracting a fixed amount of spiritual and intellectual meat from any
+      casual text, week after week, had given him an idea that any one of many
+      subjects would do, when the time came for him to make a choice. He
+      realized now that the time for a selection had arrived, and almost
+      simultaneously found himself with a ready-made decision in his mind. The
+      book should be about Abraham!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron Ware was extremely interested in the mechanism of his own brain,
+      and followed its workings with a lively curiosity. Nothing could be more
+      remarkable, he thought, than to thus discover that, on the instant of his
+      formulating a desire to know what he should write upon, lo, and behold!
+      there his mind, quite on its own initiative, had the answer waiting for
+      him! When he had gone a little further, and the powerful range of
+      possibilities in the son's revolt against the idolatry of his father, the
+      image-maker, in the exodus from the unholy city of Ur, and in the
+      influence of the new nomadic life upon the little deistic family group,
+      had begun to unfold itself before him, he felt that the hand of Providence
+      was plainly discernible in the matter. The book was to be blessed from its
+      very inception.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Walking homeward briskly now, with his eyes on the sidewalk and his mind
+      all aglow with crowding suggestions for the new work, and impatience to be
+      at it, he came abruptly upon a group of men and boys who occupied the
+      whole path, and were moving forward so noiselessly that he had not heard
+      them coming. He almost ran into the leader of this little procession, and
+      began a stammering apology, the final words of which were left unspoken,
+      so solemnly heedless of him and his talk were all the faces he saw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the centre of the group were four working-men, bearing between them an
+      extemporized litter of two poles and a blanket hastily secured across them
+      with spikes. Most of what this litter held was covered by another blanket,
+      rounded in coarse folds over a shapeless bulk. From beneath its farther
+      end protruded a big broom-like black beard, thrown upward at such an angle
+      as to hide everything beyond to those in front. The tall young minister,
+      stepping aside and standing tip-toe, could see sloping downward behind
+      this hedge of beard a pinched and chalk-like face, with wide-open, staring
+      eyes. Its lips, of a dull lilac hue, were moving ceaselessly, and made a
+      dry, clicking sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron instinctively joined himself to those who followed the litter&mdash;a
+      motley dozen of street idlers, chiefly boys. One of these in whispers
+      explained to him that the man was one of Jerry Madden's workmen in the
+      wagon-shops, who had been deployed to trim an elm-tree in front of his
+      employer's house, and, being unused to such work, had fallen from the top
+      and broken all his bones. They would have cared for him at Madden's house,
+      but he had insisted upon being taken home. His name was MacEvoy, and he
+      was Joey MacEvoy's father, and likewise Jim's and Hughey's and Martin's.
+      After a pause the lad, a bright-eyed, freckled, barefooted wee Irishman,
+      volunteered the further information that his big brother had run to bring
+      &ldquo;Father Forbess,&rdquo; on the chance that he might be in time to administer
+      &ldquo;extry munction.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The way of the silent little procession led through back streets&mdash;where
+      women hanging up clothes in the yards hurried to the gates, their aprons
+      full of clothes-pins, to stare open-mouthed at the passers-by&mdash;and
+      came to a halt at last in an irregular and muddy lane, before one of a
+      half dozen shanties reared among the ash-heaps and debris of the town's
+      most bedraggled outskirts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A stout, middle-aged, red-armed woman, already warned by some messenger of
+      calamity, stood waiting on the roadside bank. There were whimpering
+      children clinging to her skirts, and a surrounding cluster of women of the
+      neighborhood, some of the more elderly of whom, shrivelled little crones
+      in tidy caps, and with their aprons to their eyes, were beginning in a
+      low-murmured minor the wail which presently should rise into the keen of
+      death. Mrs. MacEvoy herself made no moan, and her broad ruddy face was
+      stern in expression rather than sorrowful. When the litter stopped beside
+      her, she laid a hand for an instant on her husband's wet brow, and looked&mdash;one
+      could have sworn impassively&mdash;into his staring eyes. Then, still
+      without a word, she waved the bearers toward the door, and led the way
+      herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron, somewhat wonderingly, found himself, a minute later, inside a dark
+      and ill-smelling room, the air of which was humid with the steam from a
+      boiler of clothes on the stove, and not in other ways improved by the
+      presence of a jostling score of women, all straining their gaze upon the
+      open door of the only other apartment&mdash;the bed-chamber. Through this
+      they could see the workmen laying MacEvoy on the bed, and standing
+      awkwardly about thereafter, getting in the way of the wife and old Maggie
+      Quirk as they strove to remove the garments from his crushed limbs. As the
+      neighbors watched what could be seen of these proceedings, they whispered
+      among themselves eulogies of the injured man's industry and good temper,
+      his habit of bringing his money home to his wife, and the way he kept his
+      Father Mathew pledge and attended to his religious duties. They admitted
+      freely that, by the light of his example, their own husbands and sons left
+      much to be desired, and from this wandered easily off into domestic
+      digressions of their own. But all the while their eyes were bent upon the
+      bedroom door; and Theron made out, after he had grown accustomed to the
+      gloom and the smell, that many of them were telling their beads even while
+      they kept the muttered conversation alive. None of them paid any attention
+      to him, or seemed to regard his presence there as unusual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently he saw enter through the sunlit street doorway a person of a
+      different class. The bright light shone for a passing instant upon a
+      fashionable, flowered hat, and upon some remarkably brilliant shade of red
+      hair beneath it. In another moment there had edged along through the
+      throng, to almost within touch of him, a tall young woman, the owner of
+      this hat and wonderful hair. She was clad in light and pleasing spring
+      attire, and carried a parasol with a long oxidized silver handle of a
+      quaint pattern. She looked at him, and he saw that her face was of a
+      lengthened oval, with a luminous rose-tinted skin, full red lips, and big
+      brown, frank eyes with heavy auburn lashes. She made a grave little
+      inclination of her head toward him, and he bowed in response. Since her
+      arrival, he noted, the chattering of the others had entirely ceased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I followed the others in, in the hope that I might be of some
+      assistance,&rdquo; he ventured to explain to her in a low murmur, feeling that
+      at last here was some one to whom an explanation of his presence in this
+      Romish house was due. &ldquo;I hope they won't feel that I have intruded.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded her head as if she quite understood. &ldquo;They'll take the will for
+      the deed,&rdquo; she whispered back. &ldquo;Father Forbes will be here in a minute. Do
+      you know is it too late?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Even as she spoke, the outer doorway was darkened by the commanding bulk
+      of a newcomer's figure. The flash of a silk hat, and the deferential way
+      in which the assembled neighbors fell back to clear a passage, made his
+      identity clear. Theron felt his blood tingle in an unaccustomed way as
+      this priest of a strange church advanced across the room&mdash;a
+      broad-shouldered, portly man of more than middle height, with a shapely,
+      strong-lined face of almost waxen pallor, and a firm, commanding tread. He
+      carried in his hands, besides his hat, a small leather-bound case. To this
+      and to him the women courtesied and bowed their heads as he passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come with me,&rdquo; whispered the tall girl with the parasol to Theron; and he
+      found himself pushing along in her wake until they intercepted the priest
+      just outside the bedroom door. She touched Father Forbes on the arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just to tell you that I am here,&rdquo; she said. The priest nodded with a
+      grave face, and passed into the other room. In a minute or two the
+      workmen, Mrs. MacEvoy, and her helper came out, and the door was shut
+      behind them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is making his confession,&rdquo; explained the young lady. &ldquo;Stay here for a
+      minute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved over to where the woman of the house stood, glum-faced and
+      tearless, and whispered something to her. A confused movement among the
+      crowd followed, and out of it presently resulted a small table, covered
+      with a white cloth, and bearing on it two unlighted candles, a basin of
+      water, and a spoon, which was brought forward and placed in readiness
+      before the closed door. Some of those nearest this cleared space were
+      kneeling now, and murmuring a low buzz of prayer to the click of beads on
+      their rosaries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door opened, and Theron saw the priest standing in the doorway with an
+      uplifted hand. He wore now a surplice, with a purple band over his
+      shoulders, and on his pale face there shone a tranquil and tender light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the workmen fetched from the stove a brand, lighted the two
+      candles, and bore the table with its contents into the bedroom. The young
+      woman plucked Theron's sleeve, and he dumbly followed her into the chamber
+      of death, making one of the group of a dozen, headed by Mrs. MacEvoy and
+      her children, which filled the little room, and overflowed now outward to
+      the street door. He found himself bowing with the others to receive the
+      sprinkled holy water from the priest's white fingers; kneeling with the
+      others for the prayers; following in impressed silence with the others the
+      strange ceremonial by which the priest traced crosses of holy oil with his
+      thumb upon the eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands, and feet of the dying
+      man, wiping off the oil with a piece of cotton-batting each time after he
+      had repeated the invocation to forgiveness for that particular sense. But
+      most of all he was moved by the rich, novel sound of the Latin as the
+      priest rolled it forth in the ASPERGES ME, DOMINE, and MISEREATUR VESTRI
+      OMNIPOTENS DEUS, with its soft Continental vowels and liquid R's. It
+      seemed to him that he had never really heard Latin before. Then the
+      astonishing young woman with the red hair declaimed the CONFITEOR,
+      vigorously and with a resonant distinctness of enunciation. It was a
+      different Latin, harsher and more sonorous; and while it still dominated
+      the murmured undertone of the other's prayers, the last moment came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had stood face to face with death at many other bedsides; no other
+      final scene had stirred him like this. It must have been the girl's Latin
+      chant, with its clanging reiteration of the great names&mdash;BEATUM
+      MICHAELEM ARCHANGELUM, BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, SANCTOS APOSTOLOS PETRUM
+      ET PAULUM&mdash;invoked with such proud confidence in this squalid little
+      shanty, which so strangely affected him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came out with the others at last&mdash;the candles and the folded hands
+      over the crucifix left behind&mdash;and walked as one in a dream. Even by
+      the time that he had gained the outer doorway, and stood blinking at the
+      bright light and filling his lungs with honest air once more, it had begun
+      to seem incredible to him that he had seen and done all this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      While Mr. Ware stood thus on the doorstep, through a minute of formless
+      musing, the priest and the girl came out, and, somewhat to his confusion,
+      made him one of their party. He felt himself flushing under the idea that
+      they would think he had waited for them&mdash;was thrusting himself upon
+      them. The notion prompted him to bow frigidly in response to Father
+      Forbes' pleasant &ldquo;I am glad to meet you, sir,&rdquo; and his outstretched hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dropped in by the&mdash;the merest accident,&rdquo; Theron said. &ldquo;I met them
+      bringing the poor man home, and&mdash;and quite without thinking, I obeyed
+      the impulse to follow them in, and didn't realize&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped short, annoyed by the reflection that this was his second
+      apology. The girl smiled placidly at him, the while she put up her
+      parasol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It did me good to see you there,&rdquo; she said, quite as if she had known him
+      all her life. &ldquo;And so it did the rest of us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes permitted himself a soft little chuckle, approving rather
+      than mirthful, and patted her on the shoulder with the air of being fifty
+      years her senior instead of fifteen. To the minister's relief, he changed
+      the subject as the three started together toward the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, again, no doctor was sent for!&rdquo; he exclaimed, as if resuming a
+      familiar subject with the girl. Then he turned to Theron. &ldquo;I dare-say you
+      have no such trouble; but with our poorer people it is very vexing. They
+      will not call in a physician, but hurry off first for the clergyman. I
+      don't know that it is altogether to avoid doctor's bills, but it amounts
+      to that in effect. Of course in this case it made no difference; but I
+      have had to make it a rule not to go out at night unless they bring me a
+      physician's card with his assurance that it is a genuine affair. Why, only
+      last winter, I was routed up after midnight, and brought off in the mud
+      and pelting rain up one of the new streets on the hillside there, simply
+      because a factory girl who was laced too tight had fainted at a dance. I
+      slipped and fell into a puddle in the darkness, ruined a new overcoat, and
+      got drenched to the skin; and when I arrived the girl had recovered and
+      was dancing away again, thirteen to the dozen. It was then that I made the
+      rule. I hope, Mr. Ware, that Octavius is producing a pleasant impression
+      upon you so far?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I scarcely know yet,&rdquo; answered Theron. The genial talk of the priest,
+      with its whimsical anecdote, had in truth passed over his head. His mind
+      still had room for nothing but that novel death-bed scene, with the winged
+      captain of the angelic host, the Baptist, the glorified Fisherman and the
+      Preacher, all being summoned down in the pomp of liturgical Latin to help
+      MacEvoy to die. &ldquo;If you don't mind my saying so,&rdquo; he added hesitatingly,
+      &ldquo;what I have just seen in there DID make a very powerful impression upon
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a very ancient ceremony,&rdquo; said the priest; &ldquo;probably Persian, like
+      the baptismal form, although, for that matter, we can never dig deep
+      enough for the roots of these things. They all turn up Turanian if we
+      probe far enough. Our ways separate here, I'm afraid. I am delighted to
+      have made your acquaintance, Mr. Ware. Pray look in upon me, if you can as
+      well as not. We are near neighbors, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes had shaken hands, and moved off up another street some
+      distance, before the voice of the girl recalled Theron to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course you knew HIM by name,&rdquo; she was saying, &ldquo;and he knew you by
+      sight, and had talked of you; but MY poor inferior sex has to be
+      introduced. I am Celia Madden. My father has the wagon-shops, and I&mdash;I
+      play the organ at the church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I am delighted to make your acquaintance,&rdquo; said Theron, conscious
+      as he spoke that he had slavishly echoed the formula of the priest. He
+      could think of nothing better to add than, &ldquo;Unfortunately, we have no
+      organ in our church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl laughed, as they resumed their walk down the street. &ldquo;I'm afraid
+      I couldn't undertake two,&rdquo; she said, and laughed again. Then she spoke
+      more seriously. &ldquo;That ceremony must have interested you a good deal, never
+      having seen it before. I saw that it was all new to you, and so I made
+      bold to take you under my wing, so to speak.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were very kind,&rdquo; said the young minister. &ldquo;It was really a great
+      experience for me. May&mdash;may I ask, is it a part of your functions, in
+      the church, I mean, to attend these last rites?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mercy, no!&rdquo; replied the girl, spinning the parasol on her shoulder and
+      smiling at the thought. &ldquo;No; it was only because MacEvoy was one of our
+      workmen, and really came by his death through father sending him up to
+      trim a tree. Ann MacEvoy will never forgive us that, the longest day she
+      lives. Did you notice her? She wouldn't speak to me. After you came out, I
+      tried to tell her that we would look out for her and the children; but all
+      she would say to me was: 'An' fwat would a wheelwright, an' him the father
+      of a family, be doin' up a tree?'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They had come now upon the main street of the village, with its flagstone
+      sidewalk overhung by a lofty canopy of elm-boughs. Here, for the space of
+      a block, was concentrated such fashionable elegance of mansions and
+      ornamental lawns as Octavius had to offer; and it was presented with the
+      irregularity so characteristic of our restless civilization. Two or three
+      of the houses survived untouched from the earlier days&mdash;prim,
+      decorous structures, each with its gabled centre and lower wings, each
+      with its row of fluted columns supporting the classical roof of a piazza
+      across its whole front, each vying with the others in the whiteness of
+      those wooden walls enveloping its bright green blinds. One had to look
+      over picket fences to see these houses, and in doing so caught the notion
+      that they thus railed themselves off in pride at being able to remember
+      before the railroad came to the village, or the wagon-works were thought
+      of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the neighboring properties the fences had been swept away, so that
+      one might stroll from the sidewalk straight across the well-trimmed sward
+      to any one of a dozen elaborately modern doorways. Some of the residences,
+      thus frankly proffering friendship to the passer-by, were of wood painted
+      in drabs and dusky reds, with bulging windows which marked the native
+      yearning for the mediaeval, and shingles that strove to be accounted
+      tiles. Others&mdash;a prouder, less pretentious sort&mdash;were of brick
+      or stone, with terra-cotta mouldings set into the walls, and with real
+      slates covering the riot of turrets and peaks and dormer peepholes
+      overhead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia Madden stopped in front of the largest and most important-looking of
+      these new edifices, and said, holding out her hand: &ldquo;Here I am, once more.
+      Good-morning, Mr. Ware.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron hoped that his manner did not betray the flash of surprise he felt
+      in discovering that his new acquaintance lived in the biggest house in
+      Octavius. He remembered now that some one had pointed it out as the abode
+      of the owner of the wagon factories; but it had not occurred to him before
+      to associate this girl with that village magnate. It was stupid of him, of
+      course, because she had herself mentioned her father. He looked at her
+      again with an awkward smile, as he formally shook the gloved hand she gave
+      him, and lifted his soft hat. The strong noon sunlight, forcing its way
+      down between the elms, and beating upon her parasol of lace-edged, creamy
+      silk, made a halo about her hair and face at once brilliant and tender. He
+      had not seen before how beautiful she was. She nodded in recognition of
+      his salute, and moved up the lawn walk, spinning the sunshade on her
+      shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though the parsonage was only three blocks away, the young minister had
+      time to think about a good many things before he reached home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First of all, he had to revise in part the arrangement of his notions
+      about the Irish. Save for an occasional isolated and taciturn figure among
+      the nomadic portion of the hired help in the farm country, Theron had
+      scarcely ever spoken to a person of this curiously alien race before. He
+      remembered now that there had been some dozen or more Irish families in
+      Tyre, quartered in the outskirts among the brickyards, but he had never
+      come in contact with any of them, or given to their existence even a
+      passing thought. So far as personal acquaintance went, the Irish had been
+      to him only a name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what a sinister and repellent name! His views on this general subject
+      were merely those common to his communion and his environment. He took it
+      for granted, for example, that in the large cities most of the poverty and
+      all the drunkenness, crime, and political corruption were due to the
+      perverse qualities of this foreign people&mdash;qualities accentuated and
+      emphasized in every evil direction by the baleful influence of a false and
+      idolatrous religion. It is hardly too much to say that he had never
+      encountered a dissenting opinion on this point. His boyhood had been spent
+      in those bitter days when social, political, and blood prejudices were
+      fused at white heat in the public crucible together. When he went to the
+      Church Seminary, it was a matter of course that every member of the
+      faculty was a Republican, and that every one of his classmates had come
+      from a Republican household. When, later on, he entered the ministry, the
+      rule was still incredulous of exceptions. One might as well have looked in
+      the Nedahma Conference for a divergence of opinion on the Trinity as for a
+      difference in political conviction. Indeed, even among the laity, Theron
+      could not feel sure that he had ever known a Democrat; that is, at all
+      closely. He understood very little about politics, it is true. If he had
+      been driven into a corner, and forced to attempt an explanation of this
+      tremendous partisan unity in which he had a share, he would probably have
+      first mentioned the War&mdash;the last shots of which were fired while he
+      was still in petticoats. Certainly his second reason, however, would have
+      been that the Irish were on the other side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had never before had occasion to formulate, even in his own thoughts,
+      this tacit race and religious aversion in which he had been bred. It rose
+      now suddenly in front of him, as he sauntered from patch to patch of
+      sunlight under the elms, like some huge, shadowy, and symbolic monument.
+      He looked at it with wondering curiosity, as at something he had heard of
+      all his life, but never seen before&mdash;an abhorrent spectacle, truly!
+      The foundations upon which its dark bulk reared itself were ignorance,
+      squalor, brutality and vice. Pigs wallowed in the mire before its base,
+      and burrowing into this base were a myriad of narrow doors, each bearing
+      the hateful sign of a saloon, and giving forth from its recesses of night
+      the sounds of screams and curses. Above were sculptured rows of lowering,
+      ape-like faces from Nast's and Keppler's cartoons, and out of these sprang
+      into the vague upper gloom&mdash;on the one side, lamp-posts from which
+      negroes hung by the neck, and on the other gibbets for dynamiters and
+      Molly Maguires, and between the two glowed a spectral picture of some
+      black-robed tonsured men, with leering satanic masks, making a bonfire of
+      the Bible in the public schools.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron stared this phantasm hard in the face, and recognized it for a very
+      tolerable embodiment of what he had heretofore supposed he thought about
+      the Irish. For an instant, the sight of it made him shiver, as if the
+      sunny May had of a sudden lapsed back into bleak December. Then he smiled,
+      and the bad vision went off into space. He saw instead Father Forbes, in
+      the white and purple vestments, standing by poor MacEvoy's bedside, with
+      his pale, chiselled, luminous, uplifted face, and he heard only the proud,
+      confident clanging of the girl's recital,&mdash;BEATUM MICHAELEM
+      ARCHANGELUM, BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, PETRUM ET PAULUM&mdash;EM!&mdash;AM!&mdash;UM!&mdash;like
+      strokes on a great resonant alarm-bell, attuned for the hearing of heaven.
+      He caught himself on the very verge of feeling that heaven must have
+      heard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he smiled again, and laid the matter aside, with a parting admission
+      that it had been undoubtedly picturesque and impressive, and that it had
+      been a valuable experience to him to see it. At least the Irish, with all
+      their faults, must have a poetic strain, or they would not have clung so
+      tenaciously to those curious and ancient forms. He recalled having heard
+      somewhere, or read, it might be, that they were a people much given to
+      songs and music. And the young lady, that very handsome and friendly Miss
+      Madden, had told him that she was a musician! He had a new pleasure in
+      turning this over in his mind. Of all the closed doors which his choice of
+      a career had left along his pathway, no other had for him such a magical
+      fascination as that on which was graven the lute of Orpheus. He knew not
+      even the alphabet of music, and his conceptions of its possibilities ran
+      but little beyond the best of the hymn-singing he had heard at
+      Conferences, yet none the less the longing for it raised on occasion such
+      mutiny in his soul that more than once he had specifically prayed against
+      it as a temptation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dangerous though some of its tendencies might be, there was no gainsaying
+      the fact that a love for music was in the main an uplifting influence&mdash;an
+      attribute of cultivation. The world was the sweeter and more gentle for
+      it. And this brought him to musing upon the odd chance that the two people
+      of Octavius who had given him the first notion of polish and intellectual
+      culture in the town should be Irish. The Romish priest must have been
+      vastly surprised at his intrusion, yet had been at the greatest pains to
+      act as if it were quite the usual thing to have Methodist ministers assist
+      at Extreme Unction. And the young woman&mdash;how gracefully, with what
+      delicacy, had she comprehended his position and robbed it of all its
+      possible embarrassments! It occurred to him that they must have passed,
+      there in front of her home, the very tree from which the luckless
+      wheelwright had fallen some hours before; and the fact that she had
+      forborne to point it out to him took form in his mind as an added proof of
+      her refinement of nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The midday dinner was a little more than ready when Theron reached home,
+      and let himself in by the front door. On Mondays, owing to the moisture
+      and &ldquo;clutter&rdquo; of the weekly washing in the kitchen, the table was laid in
+      the sitting-room, and as he entered from the hall the partner of his joys
+      bustled in by the other door, bearing the steaming platter of corned beef,
+      dumplings, cabbages, and carrots, with arms bared to the elbows, and a red
+      face. It gave him great comfort, however, to note that there were no signs
+      of the morning's displeasure remaining on this face; and he immediately
+      remembered again those interrupted projects of his about the piano and the
+      hired girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well! I'd just about begun to reckon that I was a widow,&rdquo; said Alice,
+      putting down her fragrant burden. There was such an obvious suggestion of
+      propitiation in her tone that Theron went around and kissed her. He
+      thought of saying something about keeping out of the way because it was
+      &ldquo;Blue Monday,&rdquo; but held it back lest it should sound like a reproach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what kind of a washerwoman does THIS one turn out to be?&rdquo; he asked,
+      after they were seated, and he had invoked a blessing and was cutting
+      vigorously into the meat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, so-so,&rdquo; replied Alice; &ldquo;she seems to be particular, but she's mortal
+      slow. If I hadn't stood right over her, we shouldn't have had the clothes
+      out till goodness knows when. And of course she's Irish!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what of THAT?&rdquo; asked the minister, with a fine unconcern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice looked up from her plate, with knife and fork suspended in air.
+      &ldquo;Why, you know we were talking only the other day of what a pity it was
+      that none of our own people went out washing,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;That Welsh woman
+      we heard of couldn't come, after all; and they say, too, that she presumes
+      dreadfully upon the acquaintance, being a church member, you know. So we
+      simply had to fall back on the Irish. And even if they do go and tell
+      their priest everything they see and hear, why, there's one comfort, they
+      can tell about US and welcome. Of course I see to it she doesn't snoop
+      around in here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron smiled. &ldquo;That's all nonsense about their telling such things to
+      their priests,&rdquo; he said with easy confidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, you told me so yourself,&rdquo; replied Alice, briskly. &ldquo;And I've always
+      understood so, too; they're bound to tell EVERYTHING in confession. That's
+      what gives the Catholic Church such a tremendous hold. You've spoken of it
+      often.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It must have been by way of a figure of speech,&rdquo; remarked Theron, not
+      with entire directness. &ldquo;Women are great hands to separate one's
+      observations from their context, and so give them meanings quite
+      unintended. They are also great hands,&rdquo; he added genially, &ldquo;or at least
+      one of them is, at making the most delicious dumplings in the world. I
+      believe these are the best even you ever made.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice was not unmindful of the compliment, but her thoughts were on other
+      things. &ldquo;I shouldn't like that woman's priest, for example,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;to
+      know that we had no piano.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if he comes and stands outside our house every night and listens&mdash;as
+      of course he will,&rdquo; said Theron, with mock gravity, &ldquo;it is only a question
+      of time when he must reach that conclusion for himself. Our only chance,
+      however, is that there are some sixteen hundred other houses for him to
+      watch, so that he may not get around to us for quite a spell. Why,
+      seriously, Alice, what on earth do you suppose Father Forbes knows or
+      cares about our poor little affairs, or those of any other Protestant
+      household in this whole village? He has his work to do, just as I have
+      mine&mdash;only his is ten times as exacting in everything except sermons&mdash;and
+      you may be sure he is only too glad when it is over each day, without
+      bothering about things that are none of his business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the same I'm afraid of them,&rdquo; said Alice, as if argument were
+      exhausted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On the following morning young Mr. Ware anticipated events by inscribing
+      in his diary for the day, immediately after breakfast, these remarks:
+      &ldquo;Arranged about piano. Began work upon book.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The date indeed deserved to be distinguished from its fellows. Theron was
+      so conscious of its importance that he not only prophesied in the little
+      morocco-bound diary which Alice had given him for Christmas, but returned
+      after he had got out upon the front steps of the parsonage to have his hat
+      brushed afresh by her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wonders will never cease,&rdquo; she said jocosely. &ldquo;With you getting
+      particular about your clothes, there isn't anything in this wide world
+      that can't happen now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One doesn't go out to bring home a piano every day,&rdquo; he made answer.
+      &ldquo;Besides, I want to make such an impression upon the man that he will deal
+      gently with that first cash payment down. Do you know,&rdquo; he added, watching
+      her turn the felt brim under the wisp-broom's strokes, &ldquo;I'm thinking some
+      of getting me a regular silk stove-pipe hat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don't you, then?&rdquo; she rejoined, but without any ring of glad
+      acquiescence in her tone. He fancied that her face lengthened a little,
+      and he instantly ascribed it to recollections of the way in which the
+      roses had been bullied out of her own headgear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are quite sure, now, pet,&rdquo; he made haste to change the subject, &ldquo;that
+      the hired girl can wait just as well as not until fall?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, MY, yes!&rdquo; Alice replied, putting the hat on his head, and smoothing
+      back his hair behind his ears. &ldquo;She'd only be in the way now. You see,
+      with hot weather coming on, there won't be much cooking. We'll take all
+      our meals out here, and that saves so much work that really what remains
+      is hardly more than taking care of a bird-cage. And, besides, not having
+      her will almost half pay for the piano.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But when cold weather comes, you're sure you'll consent?&rdquo; he urged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like a shot!&rdquo; she assured him, and, after a happy little caress, he
+      started out again on his momentous mission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thurston's&rdquo; was a place concerning which opinions differed in Octavius.
+      That it typified progress, and helped more than any other feature of the
+      village to bring it up to date, no one indeed disputed. One might move
+      about a great deal, in truth, and hear no other view expressed. But then
+      again one might stumble into conversation with one small storekeeper after
+      another, and learn that they united in resenting the existence of
+      &ldquo;Thurston's,&rdquo; as rival farmers might join to curse a protracted drought.
+      Each had his special flaming grievance. The little dry-goods dealers asked
+      mournfully how they could be expected to compete with an establishment
+      which could buy bankrupt stocks at a hundred different points, and make a
+      profit if only one-third of the articles were sold for more than they
+      would cost from the jobber? The little boot and shoe dealers, clothiers,
+      hatters, and furriers, the small merchants in carpets, crockery, and
+      furniture, the venders of hardware and household utensils, of leathern
+      goods and picture-frames, of wall-paper, musical instruments, and even
+      toys&mdash;all had the same pathetically unanswerable question to
+      propound. But mostly they put it to themselves, because the others were at
+      &ldquo;Thurston's.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Theron Ware had entertained rather strong views on this subject,
+      and that only a week or two ago. One of his first acquaintances in
+      Octavius had been the owner of the principal book-store in the place&mdash;a
+      gentle and bald old man who produced the complete impression of a
+      bibliophile upon what the slightest investigation showed to be only a
+      meagre acquaintance with publishers' circulars. But at least he had the
+      air of loving his business, and the young minister had enjoyed a long talk
+      with, or rather, at him. Out of this talk had come the information that
+      the store was losing money. Not even the stationery department now showed
+      a profit worth mentioning. When Octavius had contained only five thousand
+      inhabitants, it boasted four book-stores, two of them good ones. Now, with
+      a population more than doubled, only these latter two survived, and they
+      must soon go to the wall. The reason? It was in a nutshell. A book which
+      sold at retail for one dollar and a half cost the bookseller ninety cents.
+      If it was at all a popular book, &ldquo;Thurston's&rdquo; advertised it at eighty-nine
+      cents&mdash;and in any case at a profit of only two or three cents. Of
+      course it was done to widen the establishment's patronage&mdash;to bring
+      people into the store. Equally of course, it was destroying the book
+      business and debauching the reading tastes of the community. Without the
+      profits from the light and ephemeral popular literature of the season, the
+      book-store proper could not keep up its stock of more solid works, and
+      indeed could not long keep open at all. On the other hand, &ldquo;Thurston's&rdquo;
+       dealt with nothing save the demand of the moment, and offered only the
+      books which were the talk of the week. Thus, in plain words, the book
+      trade was going to the dogs, and it was the same with pretty nearly every
+      other trade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron was indignant at this, and on his return home told Alice that he
+      desired her to make no purchases whatever at &ldquo;Thurston's.&rdquo; He even
+      resolved to preach a sermon on the subject of the modern idea of admiring
+      the great for crushing the small, and sketched out some notes for it which
+      he thought solved the problem of flaying the local abuse without
+      mentioning it by name. They had lain on his desk now for ten days or more,
+      and on only the previous Friday he had speculated upon using them that
+      coming Sunday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On this bright and cheerful Tuesday morning he walked with a blithe step
+      unhesitatingly down the main street to &ldquo;Thurston's,&rdquo; and entered without
+      any show of repugnance the door next to the window wherein, flanked by
+      dangling banjos and key-bugles built in pyramids, was displayed the sign,
+      &ldquo;Pianos on the Instalment Plan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was recognized by some responsible persons, and treated with
+      distinguished deference. They were charmed with the intelligence that he
+      desired a piano, and fascinated by his wish to pay for it only a little at
+      a time. They had special terms for clergymen, and made him feel as if
+      these were being extended to him on a silver charger by kneeling admirers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was so easy to buy things here that he was a trifle disturbed to find
+      his flowing course interrupted by his own entire ignorance as to what kind
+      of piano he wanted. He looked at all they had in stock, and heard them
+      played upon. They differed greatly in price, and, so he fancied, almost as
+      much in tone. It discouraged him to note, however, that several of those
+      he thought the finest in tone were among the very cheapest in the lot.
+      Pondering this, and staring in hopeless puzzlement from one to another of
+      the big black shiny monsters, he suddenly thought of something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would rather not decide for myself,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I know so little about
+      it. If you don't mind, I will have a friend of mine, a skilled musician,
+      step in and make a selection. I have so much confidence in&mdash;in her
+      judgment.&rdquo; He added hurriedly, &ldquo;It will involve only a day or two's
+      delay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next moment he was sorry he had spoken. What would they think when
+      they saw the organist of the Catholic church come to pick out a piano for
+      the Methodist parsonage? And how could he decorously prefer the request to
+      her to undertake this task? He might not meet her again for ages, and to
+      his provincial notions writing would have seemed out of the question. And
+      would it not be disagreeable to have her know that he was buying a piano
+      by part payments? Poor Alice's dread of the washerwoman's gossip occurred
+      to him, at this, and he smiled in spite of himself. Then all at once the
+      difficulty vanished. Of course it would come all right somehow. Everything
+      did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was on firmer ground, buying the materials for the new book, over on
+      the stationery side. His original intention had been to bestow this
+      patronage upon the old bookseller, but these suavely smart people in
+      &ldquo;Thurston's&rdquo; had had the effect of putting him on his honor when they
+      asked, &ldquo;Would there be anything else?&rdquo; and he had followed them
+      unresistingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He indulged to the full his whim that everything entering into the
+      construction of &ldquo;Abraham&rdquo; should be spick-and-span. He watched with his
+      own eyes a whole ream of broad glazed white paper being sliced down by the
+      cutter into single sheets, and thrilled with a novel ecstasy as he laid
+      his hand upon the spotless bulk, so wooingly did it invite him to begin.
+      He tried a score of pens before the right one came to hand. When a box of
+      these had been laid aside, with ink and pen-holders and a little bronze
+      inkstand, he made a sign that the outfit was complete. Or no&mdash;there
+      must be some blotting-paper. He had always used those blotting-pads given
+      away by insurance companies&mdash;his congregations never failed to
+      contain one or more agents, who had these to bestow by the armful&mdash;but
+      the book deserved a virgin blotter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron stood by while all these things were being tied up together in a
+      parcel. The suggestion that they should be sent almost hurt him. Oh, no,
+      he would carry them home himself. So strongly did they appeal to his
+      sanguine imagination that he could not forbear hinting to the man who had
+      shown him the pianos and was now accompanying him to the door that this
+      package under his arm represented potentially the price of the piano he
+      was going to have. He did it in a roundabout way, with one of his droll,
+      hesitating smiles. The man did not understand at all, and Theron had not
+      the temerity to repeat the remark. He strode home with the precious bundle
+      as fast as he could.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought it best, after all, not to commit myself to a selection,&rdquo; he
+      explained about the piano at dinner-time. &ldquo;In such a matter as this, the
+      opinion of an expert is everything. I am going to have one of the
+      principal musicians of the town go and try them all, and tell me which we
+      ought to have.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And while he's about it,&rdquo; said Alice, &ldquo;you might ask him to make a little
+      list of some of the new music. I've got way behind the times, being
+      without a piano so long. Tell him not any VERY difficult pieces, you
+      know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I know,&rdquo; put in Theron, almost hastily, and began talking of other
+      things. His conversation was of the most rambling and desultory sort,
+      because all the while the two lobes of his brain, as it were, kept up a
+      dispute as to whether Alice ought to have been told that this &ldquo;principal
+      musician&rdquo; was of her own sex. It would certainly have been better, at the
+      outset, he decided; but to mention it now would be to invest the fact with
+      undue importance. Yes, that was quite clear; only the clearer it became,
+      from one point of view, the shadier it waxed from the other. The problem
+      really disturbed the young minister's mind throughout the meal, and his
+      abstraction became so marked at last that his wife commented upon it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A penny for your thoughts!&rdquo; she said, with cheerful briskness. This
+      ancient formula of the farm-land had always rather jarred on Theron. It
+      presented itself now to his mind as a peculiarly aggravating banality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to begin my book this afternoon,&rdquo; he remarked impressively.
+      &ldquo;There is a great deal to think about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It turned out that there was even more to think about than he had
+      imagined. After hours of solitary musing at his desk, or of pacing up and
+      down before his open book-shelves, Theron found the first shadows of a
+      May-day twilight beginning to fall upon that beautiful pile of white
+      paper, still unstained by ink. He saw the book he wanted to write before
+      him, in his mental vision, much more distinctly than ever, but the idea of
+      beginning it impetuously, and hurling it off hot and glowing week by week,
+      had faded away like a dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This long afternoon, spent face to face with a project born of his own
+      brain but yesterday, yet already so much bigger than himself, was really a
+      most fruitful time for the young clergyman. The lessons which cut most
+      deeply into our consciousness are those we learn from our children.
+      Theron, in this first day's contact with the offspring of his fancy, found
+      revealed to him an unsuspected and staggering truth. It was that he was an
+      extremely ignorant and rudely untrained young man, whose pretensions to
+      intellectual authority among any educated people would be laughed at with
+      deserved contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Strangely enough, after he had weathered the first shock, this discovery
+      did not dismay Theron Ware. The very completeness of the conviction it
+      carried with it, saturated his mind with a feeling as if the fact had
+      really been known to him all along. And there came, too, after a little,
+      an almost pleasurable sense of the importance of the revelation. He had
+      been merely drifting in fatuous and conceited blindness. Now all at once
+      his eyes were open; he knew what he had to do. Ignorance was a thing to be
+      remedied, and he would forthwith bend all his energies to cultivating his
+      mind till it should blossom like a garden. In this mood, Theron mentally
+      measured himself against the more conspicuous of his colleagues in the
+      Conference. They also were ignorant, clownishly ignorant: the difference
+      was that they were doomed by native incapacity to go on all their lives
+      without ever finding it out. It was obvious to him that his case was
+      better. There was bright promise in the very fact that he had discovered
+      his shortcomings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had begun the afternoon by taking down from their places the various
+      works in his meagre library which bore more or less relation to the task
+      in hand. The threescore books which constituted his printed possessions
+      were almost wholly from the press of the Book Concern; the few exceptions
+      were volumes which, though published elsewhere, had come to him through
+      that giant circulating agency of the General Conference, and wore the
+      stamp of its approval. Perhaps it was the sight of these half-filled
+      shelves which started this day's great revolution in Theron's opinions of
+      himself. He had never thought much before about owning books. He had been
+      too poor to buy many, and the conditions of canvassing about among one's
+      parishioners which the thrifty Book Concern imposes upon those who would
+      have without buying, had always repelled him. Now, suddenly, as he moved
+      along the two shelves, he felt ashamed at their beggarly showing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Land and the Book,&rdquo; in three portly volumes, was the most pretentious
+      of the aids which he finally culled from his collection. Beside it he laid
+      out &ldquo;Bible Lands,&rdquo; &ldquo;Rivers and Lakes of Scripture,&rdquo; &ldquo;Bible Manners and
+      Customs,&rdquo; the &ldquo;Genesis and Exodus&rdquo; volume of Whedon's Commentary, some old
+      numbers of the &ldquo;Methodist Quarterly Review,&rdquo; and a copy of &ldquo;Josephus&rdquo;
+       which had belonged to his grandmother, and had seen him through many a
+      weary Sunday afternoon in boyhood. He glanced casually through these, one
+      by one, as he took them down, and began to fear that they were not going
+      to be of so much use as he had thought. Then, seating himself, he read
+      carefully through the thirteen chapters of Genesis which chronicle the
+      story of the founder of Israel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course he had known this story from his earliest years. In almost every
+      chapter he came now upon a phrase or an incident which had served him as
+      the basis for a sermon. He had preached about Hagar in the wilderness,
+      about Lot's wife, about the visit of the angels, about the intended
+      sacrifice of Isaac, about a dozen other things suggested by the ancient
+      narrative. Somehow this time it all seemed different to him. The people he
+      read about were altered to his vision. Heretofore a poetic light had shone
+      about them, where indeed they had not glowed in a halo of sanctification.
+      Now, by some chance, this light was gone, and he saw them instead as
+      untutored and unwashed barbarians, filled with animal lusts and
+      ferocities, struggling by violence and foul chicanery to secure a foothold
+      in a country which did not belong to them&mdash;all rude tramps and
+      robbers of the uncivilized plain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The apparent fact that Abram was a Chaldean struck him with peculiar
+      force. How was it, he wondered, that this had never occurred to him
+      before? Examining himself, he found that he had supposed vaguely that
+      there had been Jews from the beginning, or at least, say, from the flood.
+      But, no, Abram was introduced simply as a citizen of the Chaldean town of
+      Ur, and there was no hint of any difference in race between him and his
+      neighbors. It was specially mentioned that his brother, Lot's father, died
+      in Ur, the city of his nativity. Evidently the family belonged there, and
+      were Chaldeans like the rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not cite this as at all a striking discovery, but it did have a
+      curious effect upon Theron Ware. Up to that very afternoon, his notion of
+      the kind of book he wanted to write had been founded upon a popular book
+      called &ldquo;Ruth the Moabitess,&rdquo; written by a clergyman he knew very well, the
+      Rev. E. Ray Mifflin. This model performance troubled itself not at all
+      with difficult points, but went swimmingly along through scented summer
+      seas of pretty rhetoric, teaching nothing, it is true, but pleasing a good
+      deal and selling like hot cakes. Now, all at once Theron felt that he
+      hated that sort of book. HIS work should be of a vastly different order.
+      He might fairly assume, he thought, that if the fact that Abram was a
+      Chaldean was new to him, it would fall upon the world in general as a
+      novelty. Very well, then, there was his chance. He would write a learned
+      book, showing who the Chaldeans were, and how their manners and beliefs
+      differed from, and influenced&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was at this psychological instant that the wave of self-condemnation
+      suddenly burst upon and submerged the young clergyman. It passed again,
+      leaving him staring fixedly at the pile of books he had taken down from
+      the shelves, and gasping a little, as if for breath. Then the humorous
+      side of the thing, perversely enough, appealed to him, and he grinned
+      feebly to himself at the joke of his having imagined that he could write
+      learnedly about the Chaldeans, or anything else. But, no, it shouldn't
+      remain a joke! His long mobile face grew serious under the new resolve. He
+      would learn what there was to be learned about the Chaldeans. He rose and
+      walked up and down the room, gathering fresh strength of purpose as this
+      inviting field of research spread out its vistas before him. Perhaps&mdash;yes,
+      he would incidentally explore the mysteries of the Moabitic past as well,
+      and thus put the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin to confusion on his own subject. That
+      would in itself be a useful thing, because Mifflin wore kid gloves at the
+      Conference, and affected an intolerable superiority of dress and demeanor,
+      and there would be general satisfaction among the plainer and worthier
+      brethren at seeing him taken down a peg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now for the first time there rose distinctly in Theron's mind that casual
+      allusion which Father Forbes had made to the Turanians. He recalled, too,
+      his momentary feeling of mortification at not knowing who the Turanians
+      were, at the time. Possibly, if he had probed this matter more deeply, now
+      as he walked and pondered in the little living-room, he might have traced
+      the whole of the afternoon's mental experiences to that chance remark of
+      the Romish priest. But this speculation did not detain him. He mused
+      instead upon the splendid library Father Forbes must have.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, how does the book come on? Have you got to 'my Lady Keturah' yet?'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Alice who spoke, opening the door from the kitchen, and putting in
+      her head with a pretence of great and solemn caution, but with a
+      correcting twinkle in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't got to anybody yet,&rdquo; answered Theron, absently. &ldquo;These big
+      things must be approached slowly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come out to supper, then, while the beans are hot,&rdquo; said Alice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister sat through this other meal, again in deep abstraction.
+      His wife pursued her little pleasantry about Keturah, the second wife,
+      urging him with mock gravity to scold her roundly for daring to usurp
+      Sarah's place, but Theron scarcely heard her, and said next to nothing. He
+      ate sparingly, and fidgeted in his seat, waiting with obvious impatience
+      for the finish of the meal. At last he rose abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got a call to make&mdash;something with reference to the book,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;I'll run out now, I think, before it gets dark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put on his hat, and strode out of the house as if his errand was of the
+      utmost urgency. Once upon the street, however, his pace slackened. There
+      was still a good deal of daylight outside, and he loitered aimlessly
+      about, walking with bowed head and hands clasped behind him, until dusk
+      fell. Then he squared his shoulders, and started straight as the crow
+      flies toward the residence of Father Forbes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The new Catholic church was the largest and most imposing public building
+      in Octavius. Even in its unfinished condition, with a bald roofing of
+      weather-beaten boards marking on the stunted tower the place where a spire
+      was to begin later on, it dwarfed every other edifice of the sort in the
+      town, just as it put them all to shame in the matter of the throngs it
+      drew, rain or shine, to its services.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These facts had not heretofore been a source of satisfaction to the Rev.
+      Theron Ware. He had even alluded to the subject in terms which gave his
+      wife the impression that he actively deplored the strength and size of the
+      Catholic denomination in this new home of theirs, and was troubled in his
+      mind about Rome generally. But this evening he walked along the extended
+      side of the big structure, which occupied nearly half the block, and then,
+      turning the corner, passed in review its wide-doored, looming front,
+      without any hostile emotions whatever. In the gathering dusk it seemed
+      more massive than ever before, but he found himself only passively
+      considering the odd statement he had heard that all Catholic Church
+      property was deeded absolutely in the name of the Bishop of the diocese.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only a narrow passage-way separated the church from the pastorate&mdash;a
+      fine new brick residence standing flush upon the street. Theron mounted
+      the steps, and looked about for a bell-pull. Search revealed instead a
+      little ivory button set in a ring of metal work. He picked at this for a
+      time with his finger-nail, before he made out the injunction, printed
+      across it, to push. Of course! how stupid of him! This was one of those
+      electric bells he had heard so much of, but which had not as yet made
+      their way to the class of homes he knew. For custodians of a mediaeval
+      superstition and fanaticism, the Catholic clergy seemed very much up to
+      date. This bell made him feel rather more a countryman than ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door was opened by a tall gaunt woman, who stood in black relief
+      against the radiance of the hall-way while Theron, choosing his words with
+      some diffidence, asked if the Rev. Mr. Forbes was in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is&rdquo; came the hush-voiced answer. &ldquo;He's at dinner, though.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It took the young minister a second or two to bring into association in
+      his mind this evening hour and this midday meal. Then he began to say that
+      he would call again&mdash;it was nothing special&mdash;but the woman
+      suddenly cut him short by throwing the door wide open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's Mr. Ware, is it not?&rdquo; she asked, in a greatly altered tone. &ldquo;Sure,
+      he'd not have you go away. Come inside&mdash;do, sir!&mdash;I'll tell
+      him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron, with a dumb show of reluctance, crossed the threshold. He noted
+      now that the woman, who had bustled down the hall on her errand, was
+      gray-haired and incredibly ugly, with a dark sour face, glowering black
+      eyes, and a twisted mouth. Then he saw that he was not alone in the
+      hall-way. Three men and two women, all poorly clad and obviously working
+      people, were seated in meek silence on a bench beyond the hat-rack. They
+      glanced up at him for an instant, then resumed their patient study of the
+      linoleum pattern on the floor at their feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And will you kindly step in, sir?&rdquo; the elderly Gorgon had returned to
+      ask. She led Mr. Ware along the hall-way to a door near the end, and
+      opened it for him to pass before her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He entered a room in which for the moment he could see nothing but a
+      central glare of dazzling light beating down from a great shaded lamp upon
+      a circular patch of white table linen. Inside this ring of illumination
+      points of fire sparkled from silver and porcelain, and two bars of burning
+      crimson tracked across the cloth in reflection from tall glasses filled
+      with wine. The rest of the room was vague darkness; but the gloom seemed
+      saturated with novel aromatic odors, the appetizing scent of which bore
+      clear relation to what Theron's blinking eyes rested upon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was able now to discern two figures at the table, outside the glowing
+      circle of the lamp. They had both risen, and one came toward him with
+      cordial celerity, holding out a white plump hand in greeting. He took this
+      proffered hand rather limply, not wholly sure in the half-light that this
+      really was Father Forbes, and began once more that everlasting apology to
+      which he seemed doomed in the presence of the priest. It was broken
+      abruptly off by the other's protesting laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Mr. Ware, I beg of you,&rdquo; the priest urged, chuckling with
+      hospitable mirth, &ldquo;don't, don't apologize! I give you my word, nothing in
+      the world could have pleased us better than your joining us here tonight.
+      It was quite dramatic, your coming in as you did. We were speaking of you
+      at that very moment. Oh, I forgot&mdash;let me make you acquainted with my
+      friend&mdash;my very particular friend, Dr. Ledsmar. Let me take your hat;
+      pray draw up a chair. Maggie will have a place laid for you in a minute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I assure you&mdash;I couldn't think of it&mdash;I've just eaten my&mdash;my&mdash;dinner,&rdquo;
+       expostulated Theron. He murmured more inarticulate remonstrances a moment
+      later, when the grim old domestic appeared with plates, serviette, and
+      tableware for his use, but she went on spreading them before him as if she
+      heard nothing. Thus committed against a decent show of resistance, the
+      young minister did eat a little here and there of what was set before him,
+      and was human enough to regret frankly that he could not eat more. It
+      seemed to him very remarkable cookery, transfiguring so simple a thing as
+      a steak, for example, quite out of recognition, and investing the humble
+      potato with a charm he had never dreamed of. He wondered from time to time
+      if it would be polite to ask how the potatoes were cooked, so that he
+      might tell Alice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation at the table was not continuous, or even enlivened. After
+      the lapses into silence became marked, Theron began to suspect that his
+      refusal to drink wine had annoyed them&mdash;the more so as he had
+      drenched a large section of table-cloth in his efforts to manipulate a
+      siphon instead. He was greatly relieved, therefore, when Father Forbes
+      explained in an incidental way that Dr. Ledsmar and he customarily ate
+      their meals almost without a word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a philosophic fad of his,&rdquo; the priest went on smilingly, &ldquo;and I have
+      fallen in with it for the sake of a quiet life; so that when we do have
+      company&mdash;that is to say, once in a blue moon&mdash;we display no
+      manners to speak of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had always supposed&mdash;that is, I've always heard&mdash;that it was
+      more healthful to talk at meals,&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;Of course&mdash;what I
+      mean&mdash;I took it for granted all physicians thought so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar laughed. &ldquo;That depends so much upon the quality of the meals!&rdquo;
+       he remarked, holding his glass up to the light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seemed a man of middle age and an equable disposition. Theron, stealing
+      stray glances at him around the lampshade, saw most distinctly of all a
+      broad, impressive dome of skull, which, though obviously the result of
+      baldness, gave the effect of quite belonging to the face. There were
+      gold-rimmed spectacles, through which shone now and again the vivid
+      sparkle of sharp, alert eyes, and there was a nose of some sort not easy
+      to classify, at once long and thick. The rest was thin hair and short
+      round beard, mouse-colored where the light caught them, but losing their
+      outlines in the shadows of the background. Theron had not heard of him
+      among the physicians of Octavius. He wondered if he might not be a doctor
+      of something else than medicine, and decided upon venturing the question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, it is medicine,&rdquo; replied Ledsmar. &ldquo;I am a doctor three or four
+      times over, so far as parchments can make one. In some other respects,
+      though, I should think I am probably less of a doctor than anybody else
+      now living. I haven't practised&mdash;that is, regularly&mdash;for many
+      years, and I take no interest whatever in keeping abreast of what the
+      profession regards as its progress. I know nothing beyond what was being
+      taught in the sixties, and that I am glad to say I have mostly forgotten.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear me!&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;I had always supposed that Science was the most
+      engrossing of pursuits&mdash;that once a man took it up he never left it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that would imply a connection between Science and Medicine!&rdquo;
+       commented the doctor. &ldquo;My dear sir, they are not even on speaking terms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall we go upstairs?&rdquo; put in the priest, rising from his chair. &ldquo;It will
+      be more comfortable to have our coffee there&mdash;unless indeed, Mr.
+      Ware, tobacco is unpleasant to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, my, no!&rdquo; the young minister exclaimed, eager to free himself from the
+      suggestion of being a kill-joy. &ldquo;I don't smoke myself; but I am very fond
+      of the odor, I assure you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes led the way out. It could be seen now that he wore a long
+      house-gown of black silk, skilfully moulded to his erect, shapely, and
+      rounded form. Though he carried this with the natural grace of a proud and
+      beautiful belle, there was no hint of the feminine in his bearing, or in
+      the contour of his pale, firm-set, handsome face. As he moved through the
+      hall-way, the five people whom Theron had seen waiting rose from their
+      bench, and two of the women began in humble murmurs, &ldquo;If you please,
+      Father,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Good-evening to your Riverence;&rdquo; but the priest merely
+      nodded and passed on up the staircase, followed by his guests. The people
+      sat down on their bench again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few minutes later, reclining at his ease in a huge low chair, and
+      feeling himself unaccountably at home in the most luxuriously appointed
+      and delightful little room he had ever seen, the Rev. Theron Ware sipped
+      his unaccustomed coffee and embarked upon an explanation of his errand.
+      Somehow the very profusion of scholarly symbols about him&mdash;the great
+      dark rows of encased and crowded book-shelves rising to the ceiling, the
+      classical engravings upon the wall, the revolving book-case, the
+      reading-stand, the mass of littered magazines, reviews, and papers at
+      either end of the costly and elaborate writing-desk&mdash;seemed to make
+      it the easier for him to explain without reproach that he needed
+      information about Abram. He told them quite in detail the story of his
+      book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two others sat watching him through a faint haze of scented smoke,
+      with polite encouragement on their faces. Father Forbes took the added
+      trouble to nod understandingly at the various points of the narrative, and
+      when it was finished gave one of his little approving chuckles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This skirts very closely upon sorcery,&rdquo; he said smilingly. &ldquo;Do you know,
+      there is perhaps not another man in the country who knows Assyriology so
+      thoroughly as our friend here, Dr. Ledsmar.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's putting it too strong,&rdquo; remarked the Doctor. &ldquo;I only follow at a
+      distance&mdash;a year or two behind. But I daresay I can help you. You are
+      quite welcome to anything I have: my books cover the ground pretty well up
+      to last year. Delitzsch is very interesting; but Baudissin's 'Studien zur
+      Semitischen Religionsgeschichte' would come closer to what you need. There
+      are several other important Germans&mdash;Schrader, Bunsen, Duncker,
+      Hommel, and so on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unluckily I&mdash;I don't read German readily,&rdquo; Theron explained with
+      diffidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's a pity,&rdquo; said the doctor, &ldquo;because they do the best work&mdash;not
+      only in this field, but in most others. And they do so much that the mass
+      defies translation. Well, the best thing outside of German of course is
+      Sayce. I daresay you know him, though.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head mournfully. &ldquo;I don't seem to know any
+      one,&rdquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The others exchanged glances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if I may ask, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; pursued the doctor, regarding their guest
+      with interest through his spectacles, &ldquo;why do you specially hit upon
+      Abraham? He is full of difficulties&mdash;enough, just now, at any rate,
+      to warn off the bravest scholar. Why not take something easier?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had recovered something of his confidence. &ldquo;Oh, no,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that
+      is just what attracts me to Abraham. I like the complexities and
+      contradictions in his character. Take for instance all that strange and
+      picturesque episode of Hagar: see the splendid contrast between the craft
+      and commercial guile of his dealings in Egypt and with Abimelech, and the
+      simple, straightforward godliness of his later years. No, all those
+      difficulties only attract me. Do you happen to know&mdash;of course you
+      would know&mdash;do those German books, or the others, give anywhere any
+      additional details of the man himself and his sayings and doings&mdash;little
+      things which help, you know, to round out one's conception of the
+      individual?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the priest and the doctor stole a furtive glance across the young
+      minister's head. It was Father Forbes who replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I fear that you are taking our friend Abraham too literally, Mr. Ware,&rdquo;
+       he said, in that gentle semblance of paternal tones which seemed to go so
+      well with his gown. &ldquo;Modern research, you know, quite wipes him out of
+      existence as an individual. The word 'Abram' is merely an eponym&mdash;it
+      means 'exalted father.' Practically all the names in the Genesis
+      chronologies are what we call eponymous. Abram is not a person at all: he
+      is a tribe, a sept, a clan. In the same way, Shem is not intended for a
+      man; it is the name of a great division of the human race. Heber is simply
+      the throwing back into allegorical substance, so to speak, of the Hebrews;
+      Heth of the Hittites; Asshur of Assyria.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this is something very new, this theory, isn't it?&rdquo; queried Theron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest smiled and shook his head. &ldquo;Bless you, no! My dear sir, there
+      is nothing new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian theory
+      more than two thousand years ago. As for this eponym thing, why Saint
+      Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago. In his 'De
+      Civitate Dei,' he expressly says of these genealogical names, 'GENTES NON
+      HOMINES;' that is, 'peoples, not persons.' It was as obvious to him&mdash;as
+      much a commonplace of knowledge&mdash;as it was to Ezekiel eight hundred
+      years before him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems passing strange that we should not know it now, then,&rdquo; commented
+      Theron; &ldquo;I mean, that everybody shouldn't know it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes gave a little purring chuckle. &ldquo;Ah, there we get upon
+      contentious ground,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;Why should 'everybody' be supposed to
+      know anything at all? What business is it of 'everybody's' to know things?
+      The earth was just as round in the days when people supposed it to be
+      flat, as it is now. So the truth remains always the truth, even though you
+      give a charter to ten hundred thousand separate numskulls to examine it by
+      the light of their private judgment, and report that it is as many
+      different varieties of something else. But of course that whole question
+      of private judgment versus authority is No-Man's-Land for us. We were
+      speaking of eponyms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Theron; &ldquo;it is very interesting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a curious phase of the subject which hasn't been worked out
+      much,&rdquo; continued the priest. &ldquo;Probably the Germans will get at that too,
+      sometime. They are doing the best Irish work in other fields, as it is. I
+      spoke of Heber and Heth, in Genesis, as meaning the Hebrews and the
+      Hittites. Now my own people, the Irish, have far more ancient legends and
+      traditions than any other nation west of Athens; and you find in their
+      myth of the Milesian invasion and conquest two principal leaders called
+      Heber and Ith, or Heth. That is supposed to be comparatively modern&mdash;about
+      the time of Solomon's Temple. But these independent Irish myths go back to
+      the fall of the Tower of Babel, and they have there an ancestor, grandson
+      of Japhet, named Fenius Farsa, and they ascribe to him the invention of
+      the alphabet. They took their ancient name of Feine, the modern Fenian,
+      from him. Oddly enough, that is the name which the Romans knew the
+      Phoenicians by, and to them also is ascribed the invention of the
+      alphabet. The Irish have a holy salmon of knowledge, just like the
+      Chaldean man-fish. The Druids' tree-worship is identical with that of the
+      Chaldeans&mdash;those pagan groves, you know, which the Jews were always
+      being punished for building. You see, there is nothing new. Everything is
+      built on the ruins of something else. Just as the material earth is made
+      up of countless billions of dead men's bones, so the mental world is all
+      alive with the ghosts of dead men's thoughts and beliefs, the wraiths of
+      dead races' faiths and imaginings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes paused, then added with a twinkle in his eye: &ldquo;That
+      peroration is from an old sermon of mine, in the days when I used to
+      preach. I remember rather liking it, at the time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you still preach?&rdquo; asked the Rev. Mr. Ware, with lifted brows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! no more! I only talk now and again,&rdquo; answered the priest, with what
+      seemed a suggestion of curtness. He made haste to take the conversation
+      back again. &ldquo;The names of these dead-and-gone things are singularly
+      pertinacious, though. They survive indefinitely. Take the modern name
+      Marmaduke, for example. It strikes one as peculiarly modern, up-to-date,
+      doesn't it? Well, it is the oldest name on earth&mdash;thousands of years
+      older than Adam. It is the ancient Chaldean Meridug, or Merodach. He was
+      the young god who interceded continually between the angry, omnipotent Ea,
+      his father, and the humble and unhappy Damkina, or Earth, who was his
+      mother. This is interesting from another point of view, because this
+      Merodach or Marmaduke is, so far as we can see now, the original prototype
+      of our 'divine intermediary' idea. I daresay, though, that if we could go
+      back still other scores of centuries, we should find whole receding series
+      of types of this Christ-myth of ours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron Ware sat upright at the fall of these words, and flung a swift,
+      startled look about the room&mdash;the instinctive glance of a man
+      unexpectedly confronted with peril, and casting desperately about for
+      means of defence and escape. For the instant his mind was aflame with this
+      vivid impression&mdash;that he was among sinister enemies, at the mercy of
+      criminals. He half rose under the impelling stress of this feeling, with
+      the sweat standing on his brow, and his jaw dropped in a scared and
+      bewildered stare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, quite as suddenly, the sense of shock was gone; and it was as if
+      nothing at all had happened. He drew a long breath, took another sip of
+      his coffee, and found himself all at once reflecting almost pleasurably
+      upon the charm of contact with really educated people. He leaned back in
+      the big chair again, and smiled to show these men of the world how much at
+      his ease he was. It required an effort, he discovered, but he made it
+      bravely, and hoped he was succeeding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It hasn't been in my power to at all lay hold of what the world keeps on
+      learning nowadays about its babyhood,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;All I have done is to try
+      to preserve an open mind, and to maintain my faith that the more we know,
+      the nearer we shall approach the Throne.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar abruptly scuffled his feet on the floor, and took out his
+      watch. &ldquo;I'm afraid&mdash;&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no! There's plenty of time,&rdquo; remarked the priest, with his soft
+      half-smile and purring tones. &ldquo;You finish your cigar here with Mr. Ware,
+      and excuse me while I run down and get rid of the people in the hall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes tossed his cigar-end into the fender. Then he took from the
+      mantel a strange three-cornered black-velvet cap, with a dangling silk
+      tassel at the side, put it on his head, and went out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron, being left alone with the doctor, hardly knew what to do or say.
+      He took up a paper from the floor beside him, but realized that it would
+      be impolite to go farther, and laid it on his knee. Some trace of that
+      earlier momentary feeling that he was in hostile hands came back, and
+      worried him. He lifted himself upright in the chair, and then became
+      conscious that what really disturbed him was the fact that Dr. Ledsmar had
+      turned in his seat, crossed his legs, and was contemplating him with a
+      gravely concentrated scrutiny through his spectacles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This uncomfortable gaze kept itself up a long way beyond the point of good
+      manners; but the doctor seemed not to mind that at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When Dr. Ledsmar finally spoke, it was in a kindlier tone than the young
+      minister had looked for. &ldquo;I had half a notion of going to hear you preach
+      the other evening,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;but at the last minute I backed out. I
+      daresay I shall pluck up the courage, sooner or later, and really go. It
+      must be fully twenty years since I last heard a sermon, and I had supposed
+      that that would suffice for the rest of my life. But they tell me that you
+      are worth while; and, for some reason or other, I find myself curious on
+      the subject.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Involved and dubious though the compliment might be, Theron felt himself
+      flushing with satisfaction. He nodded his acknowledgment, and changed the
+      topic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was surprised to hear Father Forbes say that he did not preach,&rdquo; he
+      remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should he?&rdquo; asked the doctor, indifferently. &ldquo;I suppose he hasn't
+      more than fifteen parishioners in a thousand who would understand him if
+      he did, and of these probably twelve would join in a complaint to his
+      Bishop about the heterodox tone of his sermon. There is no point in his
+      going to all that pains, merely to incur that risk. Nobody wants him to
+      preach, and he has reached an age where personal vanity no longer tempts
+      him to do so. What IS wanted of him is that he should be the paternal,
+      ceremonial, authoritative head and centre of his flock, adviser, monitor,
+      overseer, elder brother, friend, patron, seigneur&mdash;whatever you like&mdash;everything
+      except a bore. They draw the line at that. You see how diametrically
+      opposed this Catholic point of view is to the Protestant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The difference does seem extremely curious to me,&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;Now,
+      those people in the hall&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; put in the doctor, as the other faltered hesitatingly. &ldquo;I know
+      what you were going to say. It struck you as odd that he should let them
+      wait on the bench there, while he came up here to smoke.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron smiled faintly. &ldquo;I WAS thinking that my&mdash;my parishioners
+      wouldn't have taken it so quietly. But of course&mdash;it is all so
+      different!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As chalk from cheese!&rdquo; said Dr. Ledsmar, lighting a fresh cigar. &ldquo;I
+      daresay every one you saw there had come either to take the pledge, or see
+      to it that one of the others took it. That is the chief industry in the
+      hall, so far as I have observed. Now discipline is an important element in
+      the machinery here. Coming to take the pledge implies that you have been
+      drunk and are now ashamed. Both states have their values, but they are
+      opposed. Sitting on that bench tends to develop penitence to the prejudice
+      of alcoholism. But at no stage would it ever occur to the occupant of the
+      bench that he was the best judge of how long he was to sit there, or that
+      his priest should interrupt his dinner or general personal routine, in
+      order to administer that pledge. Now, I daresay you have no people at all
+      coming to 'swear off.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head. &ldquo;No; if a man with us got as bad as all
+      that, he wouldn't come near the church at all. He'd simply drop out, and
+      there would be an end to it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; interjected the doctor. &ldquo;That is the voluntary system. But
+      these fellows can't drop out. There's no bottom to the Catholic Church.
+      Everything that's in, stays in. If you don't mind my saying so&mdash;of
+      course I view you all impartially from the outside&mdash;but it seems
+      logical to me that a church should exist for those who need its help, and
+      not for those who by their own profession are so good already that it is
+      they who help the church. Now, you turn a man out of your church who
+      behaves badly: that must be on the theory that his remaining in would
+      injure the church, and that in turn involves the idea that it is the
+      excellent character of the parishioners which imparts virtue to the
+      church. The Catholics' conception, you see, is quite the converse. Such
+      virtue as they keep in stock is on tap, so to speak, here in the church
+      itself, and the parishioners come and get some for themselves according to
+      their need for it. Some come every day, some only once a year, some
+      perhaps never between their baptism and their funeral. But they all have a
+      right here, the professional burglar every whit as much as the speckless
+      saint. The only stipulation is that they oughtn't to come under false
+      pretences: the burglar is in honor bound not to pass himself off to his
+      priest as the saint. But that is merely a moral obligation, established in
+      the burglar's own interest. It does him no good to come unless he feels
+      that he is playing the rules of the game, and one of these is confession.
+      If he cheats there, he knows that he is cheating nobody but himself, and
+      might much better have stopped away altogether.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron nodded his head comprehendingly. He had a great many views about
+      the Romanish rite of confession which did not at all square with this
+      statement of the case, but this did not seem a specially fit time for
+      bringing them forth. There was indeed a sense of languid repletion in his
+      mind, as if it had been overfed and wanted to lie down for awhile. He
+      contented himself with nodding again, and murmuring reflectively, &ldquo;Yes, it
+      is all strangely different.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His tone was an invitation to silence; and the doctor turned his attention
+      to the cigar, studying its ash for a minute with an air of deep
+      meditation, and then solemnly blowing out a slow series of smoke-rings.
+      Theron watched him with an indolent, placid eye, wondering lazily if it
+      was, after all, so very pleasant to smoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There fell upon this silence&mdash;with a softness so delicate that it
+      came almost like a progression in the hush&mdash;the sound of sweet music.
+      For a little, strain and source were alike indefinite&mdash;an impalpable
+      setting to harmony of the mellowed light, the perfumed opalescence of the
+      air, the luxury and charm of the room. Then it rose as by a sweeping curve
+      of beauty, into a firm, calm, severe melody, delicious to the ear, but as
+      cold in the mind's vision as moonlit sculpture. It went on upward with
+      stately collectedness of power, till the atmosphere seemed all alive with
+      the trembling consciousness of the presence of lofty souls, sternly pure
+      and pitilessly great.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron found himself moved as he had never been before. He almost resented
+      the discovery, when it was presented to him by the prosaic, mechanical
+      side of his brain, that he was listening to organ-music, and that it came
+      through the open window from the church close by. He would fain have
+      reclined in his chair and closed his eyes, and saturated himself with the
+      uttermost fulness of the sensation. Yet, in absurd despite of himself, he
+      rose and moved over to the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only a narrow alley separated the pastorate from the church; Mr. Ware
+      could have touched with a walking-stick the opposite wall. Indirectly
+      facing him was the arched and mullioned top of a great window. A dim light
+      from within shone through the more translucent portions of the glass
+      below, throwing out faint little bars of party-colored radiance upon the
+      blackness of the deep passage-way. He could vaguely trace by these the
+      outlines of some sort of picture on the window. There were human figures
+      in it, and&mdash;yes&mdash;up here in the centre, nearest him, was a
+      woman's head. There was a halo about it, engirdling rich, flowing waves of
+      reddish hair, the lights in which glowed like flame. The face itself was
+      barely distinguishable, but its half-suggested form raised a curious sense
+      of resemblance to some other face. He looked at it closely, blankly, the
+      noble music throbbing through his brain meanwhile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's that Madden girl!&rdquo; he suddenly heard a voice say by his side. Dr.
+      Ledsmar had followed him to the window, and was close at his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron's thoughts were upon the puzzling shadowed lineaments on the
+      stained glass. He saw now in a flash the resemblance which had baffled
+      him. &ldquo;It IS like her, of course,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, unfortunately, it IS just like her,&rdquo; replied the doctor, with a
+      hostile note in his voice. &ldquo;Whenever I am dining here, she always goes in
+      and kicks up that racket. She knows I hate it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you mean that it is she who is playing,&rdquo; remarked Theron. &ldquo;I thought
+      you referred to&mdash;at least&mdash;I was thinking of&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His sentence died off in inconsequence. He had a feeling that he did not
+      want to talk with the doctor about the stained-glass likeness. The music
+      had sunk away now into fragmentary and unconnected passages, broken here
+      and there by abrupt stops. Dr. Ledsmar stretched an arm out past him and
+      shut the window. &ldquo;Let's hear as little of the row as we can,&rdquo; he said, and
+      the two went back to their chairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon me for the question,&rdquo; the Rev. Mr. Ware said, after a pause which
+      began to affect him as constrained, &ldquo;but something you said about dining&mdash;you
+      don't live here, then? In the house, I mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor laughed&mdash;a characteristically abrupt, dry little laugh,
+      which struck Theron at once as bearing a sort of black-sheep relationship
+      to the priest's habitual chuckle. &ldquo;That must have been puzzling you no
+      end,&rdquo; he said&mdash;&ldquo;that notion that the pastorate kept a devil's
+      advocate on the premises. No, Mr. Ware, I don't live here. I inhabit a
+      house of my own&mdash;you may have seen it&mdash;an old-fashioned place up
+      beyond the race-course, with a sort of tower at the back, and a big
+      garden. But I dine here three or four times a week. It is an old
+      arrangement of ours. Vincent and I have been friends for many years now.
+      We are quite alone in the world, we two&mdash;much to our mutual
+      satisfaction. You must come up and see me some time; come up and have a
+      look over the books we were speaking of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am much obliged,&rdquo; said Theron, without enthusiasm. The thought of the
+      doctor by himself did not attract him greatly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reservation in his tone seemed to interest the doctor. &ldquo;I suppose you
+      are the first man I have asked in a dozen years,&rdquo; he remarked, frankly
+      willing that the young minister should appreciate the favor extended him.
+      &ldquo;It must be fully that since anybody but Vincent Forbes has been under my
+      roof; that is, of my own species, I mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You live there quite alone,&rdquo; commented Theron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite&mdash;with my dogs and cats and lizards&mdash;and my Chinaman. I
+      mustn't forget him.&rdquo; The doctor noted the inquiry in the other's lifted
+      brows, and smilingly explained. &ldquo;He is my solitary servant. Possibly he
+      might not appeal to you much; but I can assure you he used to interest
+      Octavius a great deal when I first brought him here, ten years ago or so.
+      He afforded occupation for all the idle boys in the village for a
+      twelve-month at least. They used to lie in wait for him all day long, with
+      stones or horse-chestnuts or snowballs, according to the season. The
+      Irishmen from the wagon-works nearly killed him once or twice, but he
+      patiently lived it all down. The Chinaman has the patience to live
+      everything down&mdash;the Caucasian races included. He will see us all to
+      bed, will that gentleman with the pigtail!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The music over in the church had lifted itself again into form and
+      sequence, and defied the closed window. If anything, it was louder than
+      before, and the sonorous roar of the bass-pedals seemed to be shaking the
+      very walls. It was something with a big-lunged, exultant, triumphing swing
+      in it&mdash;something which ought to have been sung on the battlefield at
+      the close of day by the whole jubilant army of victors. It was impossible
+      to pretend not to be listening to it; but the doctor submitted with an
+      obvious scowl, and bit off the tip of his third cigar with an annoyed air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't seem to care much for music,&rdquo; suggested Mr. Ware, when a lull
+      came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar looked up, lighted match in hand. &ldquo;Say musicians!&rdquo; he growled.
+      &ldquo;Has it ever occurred to you,&rdquo; he went on, between puffs at the flame,
+      &ldquo;that the only animals who make the noises we call music are of the bird
+      family&mdash;a debased offshoot of the reptilian creation&mdash;the very
+      lowest types of the vertebrata now in existence? I insist upon the
+      parallel among humans. I have in my time, sir, had considerable
+      opportunities for studying close at hand the various orders of mammalia
+      who devote themselves to what they describe as the arts. It may sound a
+      harsh judgement, but I am convinced that musicians stand on the very
+      bottom rung of the ladder in the sub-cellar of human intelligence, even
+      lower than painters and actors.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This seemed such unqualified nonsense to the Rev. Mr. Ware that he offered
+      no comment whatever upon it. He tried instead to divert his thoughts to
+      the stormy strains which rolled in through the vibrating brickwork, and to
+      picture to himself the large, capable figure of Miss Madden seated in the
+      half-light at the organ-board, swaying to and fro in a splendid ecstasy of
+      power as she evoked at will this superb and ordered uproar. But the doctor
+      broke insistently in upon his musings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All art, so-called, is decay,&rdquo; he said, raising his voice. &ldquo;When a race
+      begins to brood on the beautiful&mdash;so-called&mdash;it is a sign of
+      rot, of getting ready to fall from the tree. Take the Jews&mdash;those
+      marvellous old fellows&mdash;who were never more than a handful, yet have
+      imposed the rule of their ideas and their gods upon us for fifteen hundred
+      years. Why? They were forbidden by their most fundamental law to make
+      sculptures or pictures. That was at a time when the Egyptians, when the
+      Assyrians, and other Semites, were running to artistic riot. Every great
+      museum in the world now has whole floors devoted to statues from the Nile,
+      and marvellous carvings from the palaces of Sargon and Assurbanipal. You
+      can get the artistic remains of the Jews during that whole period into a
+      child's wheelbarrow. They had the sense and strength to penalize art; they
+      alone survived. They saw the Egyptians go, the Assyrians go, the Greeks
+      go, the late Romans go, the Moors in Spain go&mdash;all the artistic
+      peoples perish. They remained triumphing over all. Now at last their
+      long-belated apogee is here; their decline is at hand. I am told that in
+      this present generation in Europe the Jews are producing a great lot of
+      young painters and sculptors and actors, just as for a century they have
+      been producing famous composers and musicians. That means the end of the
+      Jews!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! have you only got as far as that?&rdquo; came the welcome interruption of
+      a cheery voice. Father Forbes had entered the room, and stood looking down
+      with a whimsical twinkle in his eye from one to the other of his guests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must have been taken over the ground at a very slow pace, Mr. Ware,&rdquo;
+       he continued, chuckling softly, &ldquo;to have arrived merely at the collapse of
+      the New Jerusalem. I fancied I had given him time enough to bring you
+      straight up to the end of all of us, with that Chinaman of his gently
+      slapping our graves with his pigtail. That's where the doctor always winds
+      up, if he's allowed to run his course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has all been very interesting, extremely so, I assure you,&rdquo; faltered
+      Theron. It had become suddenly apparent to him that he desired nothing so
+      much as to make his escape&mdash;that he had indeed only been waiting for
+      the host's return to do so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose at this, and explained that he must be going. No special effort
+      being put forth to restrain him, he presently made his way out, Father
+      Forbes hospitably following him down to the door, and putting a very
+      gracious cordiality into his adieux.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The night was warm and black. Theron stood still in it the moment the
+      pastorate door had closed; the sudden darkness was so thick that it was as
+      if he had closed his eyes. His dominant sensation was of a deep relief and
+      rest after some undue fatigue. It crossed his mind that drunken men
+      probably felt like that as they leaned against things on their way home.
+      He was affected himself, he saw, by the weariness and half-nausea
+      following a mental intoxication. The conceit pleased him, and he smiled to
+      himself as he turned and took the first homeward steps. It must be growing
+      late, he thought. Alice would be wondering as she waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a street lamp at the corner, and as he walked toward it he noted
+      all at once that his feet were keeping step to the movement of the music
+      proceeding from the organ within the church&mdash;a vaguely processional
+      air, marked enough in measure, but still with a dreamy effect. It became a
+      pleasure to identify his progress with the quaint rhythm of sound as he
+      sauntered along. He discovered, as he neared the light, that he was
+      instinctively stepping over the seams in the flagstone sidewalk as he had
+      done as a boy. He smiled again at this. There was something exceptionally
+      juvenile and buoyant about his mood, now that he examined it. He set it
+      down as a reaction from that doctor's extravagant and incendiary talk. One
+      thing was certain&mdash;he would never be caught up at that house beyond
+      the race-course, with its reptiles and its Chinaman. Should he ever even
+      go to the pastorate again? He decided not to quite definitely answer THAT
+      in the negative, but as he felt now, the chances were all against it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning the corner, and walking off into the shadows along the side of the
+      huge church building, Theron noted, almost at the end of the edifice, a
+      small door&mdash;the entrance to a porch coming out to the sidewalk&mdash;which
+      stood wide open. A thin, pale, vertical line of light showed that the
+      inner door, too, was ajar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through this wee aperture the organ-music, reduced and mellowed by
+      distance, came to him again with that same curious, intimate, personal
+      relation which had so moved him at the start, before the doctor closed the
+      window. It was as if it was being played for him alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused for a doubting minute or two, with bowed head, listening to the
+      exquisite harmony which floated out to caress and soothe and enfold him.
+      There was no spiritual, or at least pious, effect in it now. He fancied
+      that it must be secular music, or, if not, then something adapted to
+      marriage ceremonies&mdash;rich, vivid, passionate, a celebration of beauty
+      and the glory of possession, with its ruling note of joy only heightened
+      by soft, wooing interludes, and here and there the tremor of a fond, timid
+      little sob.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron turned away irresolutely, half frightened at the undreamt-of
+      impression this music was making upon him. Then, all at once, he wheeled
+      and stepped boldly into the porch, pushing the inner door open and hearing
+      it rustle against its leathern frame as it swung to behind him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had never been inside a Catholic church before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Jeremiah Madden was supposed to be probably the richest man in Octavius.
+      There was no doubt at all about his being its least pretentious citizen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The huge and ornate modern mansion which he had built, putting to shame
+      every other house in the place, gave an effect of ostentation to the
+      Maddens as a family; it seemed only to accentuate the air of humility
+      which enveloped Jeremiah as with a garment. Everybody knew some version of
+      the many tales afloat which, in a kindly spirit, illustrated the
+      incongruity between him and his splendid habitation. Some had it that he
+      slept in the shed. Others told whimsical stories of his sitting alone in
+      the kitchen evenings, smoking his old clay pipe, and sorrowing because the
+      second Mrs. Madden would not suffer the pigs and chickens to come in and
+      bear him company. But no matter how comic the exaggeration, these legends
+      were invariably amiable. It lay in no man's mouth to speak harshly of
+      Jeremiah Madden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had been born a Connemara peasant, and he would die one. When he was
+      ten years old he had seen some of his own family, and most of his
+      neighbors, starve to death. He could remember looking at the stiffened
+      figure of a woman stretched on the stones by the roadside, with the green
+      stain of nettles on her white lips. A girl five years or so older than
+      himself, also a Madden and distantly related, had started in despair off
+      across the mountains to the town where it was said the poor-law officers
+      were dealing out food. He could recall her coming back next day, wild-eyed
+      with hunger and the fever; the officers had refused her relief because her
+      bare legs were not wholly shrunken to the bone. &ldquo;While there's a calf on
+      the shank, there's no starvation,&rdquo; they had explained to her. The girl
+      died without profiting by this official apothegm. The boy found it burned
+      ineffaceably upon his brain. Now, after a lapse of more than forty years,
+      it seemed the thing that he remembered best about Ireland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had drifted westward as an unconsidered, unresisting item in that vast
+      flight of the famine years. Others whom he rubbed against in that
+      melancholy exodus, and deemed of much greater promise than himself, had
+      done badly. Somehow he did well. He learned the wheelwright's trade, and
+      really that seemed all there was to tell. The rest had been calm and
+      sequent progression&mdash;steady employment as a journeyman first; then
+      marriage and a house and lot; the modest start as a master; the move to
+      Octavius and cheap lumber; the growth of his business, always marked of
+      late years stupendous&mdash;all following naturally, easily, one thing out
+      of another. Jeremiah encountered the idea among his fellows, now and
+      again, that he was entitled to feel proud of all this. He smiled to
+      himself at the thought, and then sent a sigh after the smile. What was it
+      all but empty and transient vanity? The score of other Connemara boys he
+      had known&mdash;none very fortunate, several broken tragically in prison
+      or the gutter, nearly all now gone the way of flesh&mdash;were as good as
+      he. He could not have it in his heart to take credit for his success; it
+      would have been like sneering over their poor graves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeremiah Madden was now fifty-three&mdash;a little man of a reddened,
+      weather-worn skin and a meditative, almost saddened, aspect. He had blue
+      eyes, but his scanty iron-gray hair showed raven black in its shadows. The
+      width and prominence of his cheek-bones dominated all one's recollections
+      of his face. The long vertical upper-lip and irregular teeth made, in
+      repose, an unshapely mouth; its smile, though, sweetened the whole
+      countenance. He wore a fringe of stiff, steel-colored beard, passing from
+      ear to ear under his chin. His week-day clothes were as simple as his
+      workaday manners, fitting his short black pipe and his steadfast devotion
+      to his business. On Sundays he dressed with a certain rigor of
+      respectability, all in black, and laid aside tobacco, at least to the
+      public view. He never missed going to the early Low Mass, quite alone. His
+      family always came later, at the ten o'clock High Mass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been, at one time or another, a good many members of this
+      family. Two wives had borne Jeremiah Madden a total of over a dozen
+      children. Of these there survived now only two of the first Mrs. Madden's
+      offspring&mdash;Michael and Celia&mdash;and a son of the present wife, who
+      had been baptized Terence, but called himself Theodore. This minority of
+      the family inhabited the great new house on Main Street. Jeremiah went
+      every Sunday afternoon by himself to kneel in the presence of the
+      majority, there where they lay in Saint Agnes' consecrated ground. If the
+      weather was good, he generally extended his walk through the fields to an
+      old deserted Catholic burial-field, which had been used only in the first
+      years after the famine invasion, and now was clean forgotten. The old
+      wagon-maker liked to look over the primitive, neglected stones which
+      marked the graves of these earlier exiles. Fully half of the inscriptions
+      mentioned his County Galway&mdash;there were two naming the very parish
+      adjoining his. The latest date on any stone was of the remoter 'fifties.
+      They had all been stricken down, here in this strange land with its bitter
+      winters, while the memory of their own soft, humid, gentle west-coast air
+      was fresh within them. Musing upon the clumsy sculpture, with its
+      &ldquo;R.I.P.,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Pray for the Soul of,&rdquo; half to be guessed under the stain
+      and moss of a generation, there would seem to him but a step from this
+      present to that heart-rending, awful past. What had happened between was a
+      meaningless vision&mdash;as impersonal as the passing of the planets
+      overhead. He rarely had an impulse to tears in the new cemetery, where his
+      ten children were. He never left this weed-grown, forsaken old God's-acre
+      dry-eyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One must not construct from all this the image of a melancholy man, as his
+      fellows met and knew him. Mr. Madden kept his griefs, racial and
+      individual, for his own use. To the men about him in the offices and the
+      shops he presented day after day, year after year, an imperturbable
+      cheeriness of demeanor. He had been always fortunate in the selection of
+      lieutenants and chief helpers. Two of these had grown now into partners,
+      and were almost as much a part of the big enterprise as Jeremiah himself.
+      They spoke often of their inability to remember any unjust or petulant
+      word of his&mdash;much less any unworthy deed. Once they had seen him in a
+      great rage, all the more impressive because he said next to nothing. A
+      thoughtless fellow told a dirty story in the presence of some apprentices;
+      and Madden, listening to this, drove the offender implacably from his
+      employ. It was years now since any one who knew him had ventured upon lewd
+      pleasantries in his hearing. Jokes of the sort which women might hear he
+      was very fond of though he had not much humor of his own. Of books he knew
+      nothing whatever, and he made only the most perfunctory pretence now and
+      again of reading the newspapers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The elder son Michael was very like his father&mdash;diligent, unassuming,
+      kindly, and simple&mdash;a plain, tall, thin red man of nearly thirty, who
+      toiled in paper cap and rolled-up shirt-sleeves as the superintendent in
+      the saw-mill, and put on no airs whatever as the son of the master. If
+      there was surprise felt at his not being taken into the firm as a partner,
+      he gave no hint of sharing it. He attended to his religious duties with
+      great zeal, and was President of the Sodality as a matter of course. This
+      was regarded as his blind side; and young employees who cultivated it, and
+      made broad their phylacteries under his notice, certainly had an added
+      chance of getting on well in the works. To some few whom he knew specially
+      well, Michael would confess that if he had had the brains for it, he
+      should have wished to be a priest. He displayed no inclination to marry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other son, Terence, was some eight years younger, and seemed the
+      product of a wholly different race. The contrast between Michael's sandy
+      skin and long gaunt visage and this dark boy's handsome, rounded face,
+      with its prettily curling black hair, large, heavily fringed brown eyes,
+      and delicately modelled features, was not more obvious than their
+      temperamental separation. This second lad had been away for years at
+      school,&mdash;indeed, at a good many schools, for no one seemed to manage
+      to keep him long. He had been with the Jesuits at Georgetown, with the
+      Christian Brothers at Manhattan; the sectarian Mt. St. Mary's and the
+      severely secular Annapolis had both been tried, and proved misfits. The
+      young man was home again now, and save that his name had become Theodore,
+      he appeared in no wise changed from the beautiful, wilful, bold, and showy
+      boy who had gone away in his teens. He was still rather small for his
+      years, but so gracefully moulded in form, and so perfectly tailored, that
+      the fact seemed rather an advantage than otherwise. He never dreamed of
+      going near the wagon-works, but he did go a good deal&mdash;in fact, most
+      of the time&mdash;to the Nedahma Club. His mother spoke often to her
+      friends about her fears for his health. He never spoke to his friends
+      about his mother at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second Mrs. Madden did not, indeed, appeal strongly to the family
+      pride. She had been a Miss Foley, a dress-maker, and an old maid. Jeremiah
+      had married her after a brief widowerhood, principally because she was the
+      sister of his parish priest, and had a considerable reputation for piety.
+      It was at a time when the expansion of his business was promising certain
+      wealth, and suggesting the removal to Octavius. He was conscious of a
+      notion that his obligations to social respectability were increasing; it
+      was certain that the embarrassments of a motherless family were. Miss
+      Foley had shown a good deal of attention to his little children. She was
+      not ill-looking; she bore herself with modesty; she was the priest's
+      sister&mdash;the niece once removed of a vicar-general. And so it came
+      about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although those most concerned did not say so, everybody could see from the
+      outset the pity of its ever having come about at all. The pious and
+      stiffly respectable priest's sister had been harmless enough as a
+      spinster. It made the heart ache to contemplate her as a wife. Incredibly
+      narrow-minded, ignorant, suspicious, vain, and sour-tempered, she must
+      have driven a less equable and well-rooted man than Jeremiah Madden to
+      drink or flight. He may have had his temptations, but they made no mark on
+      the even record of his life. He only worked the harder, concentrating upon
+      his business those extra hours which another sort of home-life would have
+      claimed instead. The end of twenty years found him a rich man, but still
+      toiling pertinaciously day by day, as if he had his wage to earn. In the
+      great house which had been built to please, or rather placate, his wife,
+      he kept to himself as much as possible. The popular story of his smoking
+      alone in the kitchen was more or less true; only Michael as a rule sat
+      with him, too weak-lunged for tobacco himself, but reading stray scraps
+      from the papers to the lonely old man, and talking with him about the
+      works, the while Jeremiah meditatively sucked his clay pipe. One or two
+      evenings in the week the twain spent up in Celia's part of the house,
+      listening with the awe of simple, honest mechanics to the music she played
+      for them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia was to them something indefinably less, indescribably more, than a
+      daughter and sister. They could not think there had ever been anything
+      like her before in the world; the notion of criticising any deed or word
+      of hers would have appeared to them monstrous and unnatural.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to have come up to this radiant and wise and marvellously
+      talented womanhood of hers, to their minds, quite spontaneously. There had
+      been a little Celia&mdash;a red-headed, sulky, mutinous slip of a girl,
+      always at war with her step-mother, and affording no special comfort or
+      hope to the rest of the family. Then there was a long gap, during which
+      the father, four times a year, handed Michael a letter he had received
+      from the superioress of a distant convent, referring with cold formality
+      to the studies and discipline by which Miss Madden might profit more if
+      she had been better brought up, and enclosing a large bill. Then all at
+      once they beheld a big Celia, whom they spoke of as being home again, but
+      who really seemed never to have been there before&mdash;a tall, handsome,
+      confident young woman, swift of tongue and apprehension, appearing to know
+      everything there was to be known by the most learned, able to paint
+      pictures, carve wood, speak in divers languages, and make music for the
+      gods, yet with it all a very proud lady, one might say a queen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The miracle of such a Celia as this impressed itself even upon the
+      step-mother. Mrs. Madden had looked forward with a certain grim tightening
+      of her combative jaws to the home-coming of the &ldquo;red-head.&rdquo; She felt
+      herself much more the fine lady now than she had been when the girl went
+      away. She had her carriage now, and the magnificent new house was nearly
+      finished, and she had a greater number of ailments, and spent far more
+      money on doctor's bills, than any other lady in the whole section. The
+      flush of pride in her greatest achievement up to date&mdash;having the
+      most celebrated of New York physicians brought up to Octavius by special
+      train&mdash;still prickled in her blood. It was in all the papers, and the
+      admiration of the flatterers and &ldquo;soft-sawdherers&rdquo;&mdash;wives of Irish
+      merchants and smaller professional men who formed her social circle&mdash;was
+      raising visions in her poor head of going next year with Theodore to
+      Saratoga, and fastening the attention of the whole fashionable republic
+      upon the variety and resources of her invalidism. Mrs. Madden's fancy did
+      not run to the length of seeing her step-daughter also at Saratoga; it
+      pictured her still as the sullen and hated &ldquo;red-head,&rdquo; moping defiantly in
+      corners, or courting by her insolence the punishments which leaped against
+      their leash in the step-mother's mind to get at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The real Celia, when she came, fairly took Mrs. Madden's breath away. The
+      peevish little plans for annoyance and tyranny, the resolutions born of
+      ignorant and jealous egotism, found themselves swept out of sight by the
+      very first swirl of Celia's dress-train, when she came down from her room
+      robed in peacock blue. The step-mother could only stare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, after two years of it, Mrs. Madden still viewed her step-daughter
+      with round-eyed uncertainty, not unmixed with wrathful fear. She still
+      drove about behind two magnificent horses; the new house had become almost
+      tiresome by familiarity; her pre-eminence in the interested minds of the
+      Dearborn County Medical Society was as towering as ever, but somehow it
+      was all different. There was a note of unreality nowadays in Mrs.
+      Donnelly's professions of wonder at her bearing up under her multiplied
+      maladies; there was almost a leer of mockery in the sympathetic smirk with
+      which the Misses Mangan listened to her symptoms. Even the doctors, though
+      they kept their faces turned toward her, obviously did not pay much
+      attention; the people in the street seemed no longer to look at her and
+      her equipage at all. Worst of all, something of the meaning of this
+      managed to penetrate her own mind. She caught now and again a dim glimpse
+      of herself as others must have been seeing her for years&mdash;as a
+      stupid, ugly, boastful, and bad-tempered old nuisance. And it was always
+      as if she saw this in a mirror held up by Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of open discord there had been next to none. Celia would not permit it,
+      and showed this so clearly from the start that there was scarcely need for
+      her saying it. It seemed hardly necessary for her to put into words any of
+      her desires, for that matter. All existing arrangements in the Madden
+      household seemed to shrink automatically and make room for her, whichever
+      way she walked. A whole quarter of the unfinished house set itself apart
+      for her. Partitions altered themselves; door-ways moved across to opposite
+      sides; a recess opened itself, tall and deep, for it knew not what statue&mdash;simply
+      because, it seemed, the Lady Celia willed it so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the family moved into this mansion, it was with a consciousness that
+      the only one who really belonged there was Celia. She alone could behave
+      like one perfectly at home. It seemed entirely natural to the others that
+      she should do just what she liked, shut them off from her portion of the
+      house, take her meals there if she felt disposed, and keep such hours as
+      pleased her instant whim. If she awakened them at midnight by her piano,
+      or deferred her breakfast to the late afternoon, they felt that it must be
+      all right, since Celia did it. She had one room furnished with only divans
+      and huge, soft cushions, its walls covered with large copies of statuary
+      not too strictly clothed, which she would suffer no one, not even the
+      servants, to enter. Michael fancied sometimes, when he passed the draped
+      entrance to this sacred chamber, that the portiere smelt of tobacco, but
+      he would not have spoken of it, even had he been sure. Old Jeremiah, whose
+      established habit it was to audit minutely the expenses of his household,
+      covered over round sums to Celia's separate banking account, upon the mere
+      playful hint of her holding her check-book up, without a dream of
+      questioning her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the step-mother had joy, or indeed anything but gall and wormwood,
+      out of all this is not to be pretended. There lingered along in the
+      recollection of the family some vague memories of her having tried to
+      assert an authority over Celia's comings and goings at the outset, but
+      they grouped themselves as only parts of the general disorder of moving
+      and settling, which a fort-night or so quite righted. Mrs. Madden still
+      permitted herself a certain license of hostile comment when her
+      step-daughter was not present, and listened with gratification to what the
+      women of her acquaintance ventured upon saying in the same spirit; but
+      actual interference or remonstrance she never offered nowadays. The two
+      rarely met, for that matter, and exchanged only the baldest and curtest
+      forms of speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia Madden interested all Octavius deeply. This she must have done in
+      any case, if only because she was the only daughter of its richest
+      citizen. But the bold, luxuriant quality of her beauty, the original and
+      piquant freedom of her manners, the stories told in gossip about her
+      lawlessness at home, her intellectual attainments, and artistic vagaries&mdash;these
+      were even more exciting. The unlikelihood of her marrying any one&mdash;at
+      least any Octavian&mdash;was felt to add a certain romantic zest to the
+      image she made on the local perceptions. There was no visible young
+      Irishman at all approaching the social and financial standard of the
+      Maddens; it was taken for granted that a mixed marriage was quite out of
+      the question in this case. She seemed to have more business about the
+      church than even the priest. She was always playing the organ, or drilling
+      the choir, or decorating the altars with flowers, or looking over the
+      robes of the acolytes for rents and stains, or going in or out of the
+      pastorate. Clearly this was not the sort of girl to take a Protestant
+      husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gossip of the town concerning her was, however, exclusively
+      Protestant. The Irish spoke of her, even among themselves, but seldom.
+      There was no occasion for them to pretend to like her: they did not know
+      her, except in the most distant and formal fashion. Even the members of
+      the choir, of both sexes, had the sense of being held away from her at
+      haughty arm's length. No single parishioner dreamed of calling her friend.
+      But when they referred to her, it was always with a cautious and
+      respectful reticence. For one thing, she was the daughter of their chief
+      man, the man they most esteemed and loved. For another, reservations they
+      may have had in their souls about her touched close upon a delicately sore
+      spot. It could not escape their notice that their Protestant neighbors
+      were watching her with vigilant curiosity, and with a certain tendency to
+      wink when her name came into conversation along with that of Father
+      Forbes. It had never yet got beyond a tendency&mdash;the barest fluttering
+      suggestion of a tempted eyelid&mdash;but the whole Irish population of the
+      place felt themselves to be waiting, with clenched fists but sinking
+      hearts, for the wink itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Theron Ware had not caught even the faintest hint of these
+      overtures to suspicion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he had entered the huge, dark, cool vault of the church, he could see
+      nothing at first but a faint light up over the gallery, far at the other
+      end. Then, little by little, his surroundings shaped themselves out of the
+      gloom. To his right was a rail and some broad steps rising toward a softly
+      confused mass of little gray vertical bars and the pale twinkle of tiny
+      spots of gilded reflection, which he made out in the dusk to be the
+      candles and trappings of the altar. Overhead the great arches faded away
+      from foundations of dimly discernible capitals into utter blackness. There
+      was a strange medicinal odor&mdash;as of cubeb cigarettes&mdash;in the
+      air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a little pause, he tiptoed noiselessly up the side aisle toward the
+      end of the church&mdash;toward the light above the gallery. This radiance
+      from a single gas-jet expanded as he advanced, and spread itself upward
+      over a burnished row of monster metal pipes, which went towering into the
+      darkness like giants. They were roaring at him now&mdash;a sonorous,
+      deafening, angry bellow, which made everything about him vibrate. The
+      gallery balustrade hid the keyboard and the organist from view. There were
+      only these jostling brazen tubes, as big round as trees and as tall,
+      trembling with their own furious thunder. It was for all the world as if
+      he had wandered into some vast tragical, enchanted cave, and was being
+      drawn against his will&mdash;like fascinated bird and python&mdash;toward
+      fate at the savage hands of these swollen and enraged genii.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stumbled in the obscure light over a kneeling-bench, making a
+      considerable racket. On the instant the noise from the organ ceased, and
+      he saw the black figure of a woman rise above the gallery-rail and look
+      down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is it?&rdquo; the indubitable voice of Miss Madden demanded sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had a sudden sheepish notion of turning and running. With the best
+      grace he could summon, he called out an explanation instead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait a minute. I'm through now. I'm coming down,&rdquo; she returned. He
+      thought there was a note of amusement in her tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She came to him a moment later, accompanied by a thin, tall man, whom
+      Theron could barely see in the dark, now that the organ-light too was
+      gone. This man lighted a match or two to enable them to make their way
+      out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they were on the sidewalk, Celia spoke: &ldquo;Walk on ahead, Michael!&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;I have some matters to speak of with Mr. Ware.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what did you think of Dr. Ledsmar?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl's abrupt question came as a relief to Theron. They were walking
+      along in a darkness so nearly complete that he could see next to nothing
+      of his companion. For some reason, this seemed to suggest a sort of
+      impropriety. He had listened to the footsteps of the man ahead&mdash;whom
+      he guessed to be a servant&mdash;and pictured him as intent upon getting
+      up early next morning to tell everybody that the Methodist minister had
+      stolen into the Catholic church at night to walk home with Miss Madden.
+      That was going to be very awkward&mdash;yes, worse than awkward! It might
+      mean ruin itself. She had mentioned aloud that she had matters to talk
+      over with him: that of course implied confidences, and the man might put
+      heaven only knew what construction on that. It was notorious that servants
+      did ascribe the very worst motives to those they worked for. The bare
+      thought of the delight an Irish servant would have in also dragging a
+      Protestant clergyman into the thing was sickening. And what could she want
+      to talk to him about, anyway? The minute of silence stretched itself out
+      upon his nerves into an interminable period of anxious unhappiness. Her
+      mention of the doctor at last somehow, seemed to lighten the situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I thought he was very smart.&rdquo; he made haste to answer. &ldquo;Wouldn't it
+      be better&mdash;to&mdash;keep close to your man? He&mdash;may&mdash;think
+      we've gone some other way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It wouldn't matter if he did,&rdquo; remarked Celia. She appeared to comprehend
+      his nervousness and take pity on it, for she added, &ldquo;It is my brother
+      Michael, as good a soul as ever lived. He is quite used to my ways.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware drew a long comforting breath. &ldquo;Oh, I see! He went with
+      you to&mdash;bring you home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To blow the organ,&rdquo; said the girl in the dark, correctingly. &ldquo;But about
+      that doctor; did you like him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; Theron began, &ldquo;'like' is rather a strong word for so short an
+      acquaintance. He talked very well; that is, fluently. But he is so
+      different from any other man I have come into contact with that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I wanted you to say was that you hated him,&rdquo; put in Celia, firmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't make a practice of saying that of anybody,&rdquo; returned Theron, so
+      much at his ease again that he put an effect of gentle, smiling reproof
+      into the words. &ldquo;And why specially should I make an exception for him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because he's a beast!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron fancied that he understood. &ldquo;I noticed that he seemed not to have
+      much of an ear for music,&rdquo; he commented, with a little laugh. &ldquo;He shut
+      down the window when you began to play. His doing so annoyed me, because I&mdash;I
+      wanted very much to hear it all. I never heard such music before. I&mdash;I
+      came into the church to hear more of it; but then you stopped!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will play for you some other time,&rdquo; Celia said, answering the reproach
+      in his tone. &ldquo;But tonight I wanted to talk with you instead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She kept silent, in spite of this, so long now that Theron was on the
+      point of jestingly asking when the talk was to begin. Then she put a
+      question abruptly&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a conventional way of putting it, but are you fond of poetry, Mr.
+      Ware?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, yes, I suppose I am,&rdquo; replied Theron, much mystified. &ldquo;I can't say
+      that I am any great judge; but I like the things that I like&mdash;and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Meredith,&rdquo; interposed Celia, &ldquo;makes one of his women, Emilia in England,
+      say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always
+      going to one end and back again. Does it impress you that way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know that it does,&rdquo; said he, dubiously. It seemed, however, to be
+      her whim to talk literature, and he went on: &ldquo;I've hardly read Meredith at
+      all. I once borrowed his 'Lucile,' but somehow I never got interested in
+      it. I heard a recitation of his once, though&mdash;a piece about a dead
+      wife, and the husband and another man quarrelling as to whose portrait was
+      in the locket on her neck, and of their going up to settle the dispute,
+      and finding that it was the likeness of a third man, a young priest&mdash;and
+      though it was very striking, it didn't give me a thirst to know his other
+      poems. I fancied I shouldn't like them. But I daresay I was wrong. As I
+      get older, I find that I take less narrow views of literature&mdash;that
+      is, of course, of light literature&mdash;and that&mdash;that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia mercifully stopped him. &ldquo;The reason I asked you was&mdash;&rdquo; she
+      began, and then herself paused. &ldquo;Or no,&mdash;never mind that&mdash;tell
+      me something else. Are you fond of pictures, statuary, the beautiful
+      things of the world? Do great works of art, the big achievements of the
+      big artists, appeal to you, stir you up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alas! that is something I can only guess at myself,&rdquo; answered Theron,
+      humbly. &ldquo;I have always lived in little places. I suppose, from your point
+      of view, I have never seen a good painting in my life. I can only say
+      this, though&mdash;that it has always weighed on my mind as a great and
+      sore deprivation, this being shut out from knowing what others mean when
+      they talk and write about art. Perhaps that may help you to get at what
+      you are after. If I ever went to New York, I feel that one of the first
+      things I should do would be to see all the picture galleries; is that what
+      you meant? And&mdash;would you mind telling me&mdash;why you&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why I asked you?&rdquo; Celia supplied his halting question. &ldquo;No, I DON'T mind.
+      I have a reason for wanting to know&mdash;to satisfy myself whether I had
+      guessed rightly or not&mdash;about the kind of man you are. I mean in the
+      matter of temperament and bent of mind and tastes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl seemed to be speaking seriously, and without intent to offend.
+      Theron did not find any comment ready, but walked along by her side,
+      wondering much what it was all about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I daresay you think me 'too familiar on short acquaintance,'&rdquo; she
+      continued, after a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Miss Madden!&rdquo; he protested perfunctorily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; it is a matter of a good deal of importance,&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;I can see
+      that you are going to be thrown into friendship, close contact, with
+      Father Forbes. He likes you, and you can't help liking him. There is
+      nobody else in this raw, overgrown, empty-headed place for you and him TO
+      like, nobody except that man, that Dr. Ledsmar. And if you like HIM, I
+      shall hate you! He has done mischief enough already. I am counting on you
+      to help undo it, and to choke him off from doing more. It would be
+      different if you were an ordinary Orthodox minister, all encased like a
+      terrapin in prejudices and nonsense. Of course, if you had been THAT kind,
+      we should never have got to know you at all. But when I saw you in
+      MacEvoy's cottage there, it was plain that you were one of US&mdash;I mean
+      a MAN, and not a marionette or a mummy. I am talking very frankly to you,
+      you see. I want you on my side, against that doctor and his heartless,
+      bloodless science.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel myself very heartily on your side,&rdquo; replied Theron. She had set
+      their progress at a slower pace, now that the lights of the main street
+      were drawing near, as if to prolong their talk. All his earlier
+      reservations had fled. It was almost as if she were a parishioner of his
+      own. &ldquo;I need hardly tell you that the doctor's whole attitude toward&mdash;toward
+      revelation&mdash;was deeply repugnant to me. It doesn't make it any the
+      less hateful to call it science. I am afraid, though,&rdquo; he went on
+      hesitatingly, &ldquo;that there are difficulties in the way of my helping, as
+      you call it. You see, the very fact of my being a Methodist minister, and
+      his being a Catholic priest, rather puts my interference out of the
+      question.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; that doesn't matter a button,&rdquo; said Celia, lightly. &ldquo;None of us think
+      of that at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is the other embarrassment, then,&rdquo; pursued Theron, diffidently,
+      &ldquo;that Father Forbes is a vastly broader and deeper scholar&mdash;in all
+      these matters&mdash;than I am. How could I possibly hope to influence him
+      by my poor arguments? I don't know even the alphabet of the language he
+      thinks in&mdash;on these subjects, I mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course you don't!&rdquo; interposed the girl, with a confidence which the
+      other, for all his meekness, rather winced under. &ldquo;That wasn't what I
+      meant at all. We don't want arguments from our friends: we want
+      sympathies, sensibilities, emotional bonds. The right person's silence is
+      worth more for companionship than the wisest talk in the world from
+      anybody else. It isn't your mind that is needed here, or what you know; it
+      is your heart, and what you feel. You are full of poetry, of ideals, of
+      generous, unselfish impulses. You see the human, the warm-blooded side of
+      things. THAT is what is really valuable. THAT is how you can help!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You overestimate me sadly,&rdquo; protested Theron, though with considerable
+      tolerance for her error in his tone. &ldquo;But you ought to tell me something
+      about this Dr. Ledsmar. He spoke of being an old friend of the pr&mdash;of
+      Father Forbes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, they've always known each other; that is, for many years. They
+      were professors together in a college once, heaven only knows how long
+      ago. Then they separated, I fancy they quarrelled, too, before they
+      parted. The doctor came here, where some relative had left him the place
+      he lives in. Then in time the Bishop chanced to send Father Forbes here&mdash;that
+      was about three years ago,&mdash;and the two men after a while renewed
+      their old relations. They dine together; that is the doctor's stronghold.
+      He knows more about eating than any other man alive, I believe. He studies
+      it as you would study a language. He has taught old Maggie, at the
+      pastorate there, to cook like the mother of all the Delmonicos. And while
+      they sit and stuff themselves, or loll about afterward like gorged snakes,
+      they think it is smart to laugh at all the sweet and beautiful things in
+      life, and to sneer at people who believe in ideals, and to talk about
+      mankind being merely a fortuitous product of fermentation, and twaddle of
+      that sort. It makes me sick!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can readily see,&rdquo; said Theron, with sympathy, &ldquo;how such a cold,
+      material, and infidel influence as that must shock and revolt an
+      essentially religious temperament like yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Madden looked up at him. They had turned into the main street, and
+      there was light enough for him to detect something startlingly like a grin
+      on her beautiful face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I'm not religious at all, you know,&rdquo; he heard her say. &ldquo;I'm as Pagan
+      as&mdash;anything! Of course there are forms to be observed, and so on; I
+      rather like them than otherwise. I can make them serve very well for my
+      own system; for I am myself, you know, an out-an-out Greek.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, I had supposed that you were full blooded Irish,&rdquo; the Rev. Mr. Ware
+      found himself remarking, and then on the instant was overwhelmed by the
+      consciousness that he had said a foolish thing. Precisely where the folly
+      lay he did not know, but it was impossible to mistake the gesture of
+      annoyance which his companion had instinctively made at his words. She had
+      widened the distance between them now, and quickened her step. They went
+      on in silence till they were within a block of her house. Several people
+      had passed them who Theron felt sure must have recognized them both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I meant was,&rdquo; the girl all at once began, drawing nearer again, and
+      speaking with patient slowness, &ldquo;that I find myself much more in sympathy
+      with the Greek thought, the Greek theology of the beautiful and the
+      strong, the Greek philosophy of life, and all that, than what is taught
+      nowadays. Personally, I take much more stock in Plato than I do in Peter.
+      But of course it is a wholly personal affair; I had no business to bother
+      you with it. And for that matter, I oughtn't to have troubled you with any
+      of our&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I assure you, Miss Madden!&rdquo; the young minister began, with fervor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she broke in, in a resigned and even downcast tone; &ldquo;let it all be
+      as if I hadn't spoken. Don't mind anything I have said. If it is to be, it
+      will be. You can't say more than that, can you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked into his face again, and her large eyes produced an impression
+      of deep melancholy, which Theron found himself somehow impelled to share.
+      Things seemed all at once to have become very sad indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is one of my unhappy nights,&rdquo; she explained, in gloomy confidence. &ldquo;I
+      get them every once in a while&mdash;as if some vicious planet or other
+      was crossing in front of my good star&mdash;and then I'm a caution to
+      snakes. I shut myself up&mdash;that's the only thing to do&mdash;and have
+      it out with myself I didn't know but the organ-music would calm me down,
+      but it hasn't. I shan't sleep a wink tonight, but just rage around from
+      one room to another, piling all the cushions from the divans on to the
+      floor, and then kicking them away again. Do YOU ever have fits like that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron was able to reply with a good conscience in the negative. It
+      occurred to him to add, with jocose intent: &ldquo;I am curious to know, do
+      these fits, as you call them, occupy a prominent part in Grecian
+      philosophy as a general rule?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia gave a little snort, which might have signified amusement, but did
+      not speak until they were upon her own sidewalk. &ldquo;There is my brother,
+      waiting at the gate,&rdquo; she said then, briefly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, I will bid you good-night here, I think,&rdquo; Theron remarked,
+      coming to a halt, and offering his hand. &ldquo;It must be getting very late,
+      and my&mdash;that is&mdash;I have to be up particularly early tomorrow. So
+      good-night; I hope you will be feeling ever so much better in spirits in
+      the morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that doesn't matter,&rdquo; replied the girl, listlessly. &ldquo;It's a very
+      paltry little affair, this life of ours, at the best of it. Luckily it's
+      soon done with&mdash;like a bad dream.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tut! Tut! I won't have you talk like that!&rdquo; interrupted Theron, with a
+      swift and smart assumption of authority. &ldquo;Such talk isn't sensible, and it
+      isn't good. I have no patience with it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, try and have a little patience with ME, anyway, just for tonight,&rdquo;
+       said Celia, taking the reproof with gentlest humility, rather to her
+      censor's surprise. &ldquo;I really am unhappy tonight, Mr. Ware, very unhappy.
+      It seems as if all at once the world had swelled out in size a
+      thousandfold, and that poor me had dwindled down to the merest wee little
+      red-headed atom&mdash;the most helpless and forlorn and lonesome of atoms
+      at that.&rdquo; She seemed to force a sorrowful smile on her face as she added:
+      &ldquo;But all the same it has done me good to be with you&mdash;I am sure it
+      has&mdash;and I daresay that by tomorrow I shall be quite out of the
+      blues. Good-night, Mr. Ware. Forgive my making such an exhibition of
+      myself I WAS going to be such a fine early Greek, you know, and I have
+      turned out only a late Milesian&mdash;quite of the decadence. I shall do
+      better next time. And good-night again, and ever so many thanks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was walking briskly away toward the gate now, where the shadowy
+      Michael still patiently stood. Theron strode off in the opposite
+      direction, taking long, deliberate steps, and bowing his head in thought.
+      He had his hands behind his back, as was his wont, and the sense of their
+      recent contact with her firm, ungloved hands was, curiously enough, the
+      thing which pushed itself uppermost in his mind. There had been a frank,
+      almost manly vigor in her grasp; he said to himself that of course that
+      came from her playing so much on the keyboard; the exercise naturally
+      would give her large, robust hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he remembered about the piano; he had quite forgotten to solicit
+      her aid in selecting it. He turned, upon the impulse, to go back. She had
+      not entered the gate as yet, but stood, shiningly visible under the street
+      lamp, on the sidewalk, and she was looking in his direction. He turned
+      again like a shot, and started homeward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The front door of the parsonage was unlocked, and he made his way on
+      tiptoe through the unlighted hall to the living-room. The stuffy air here
+      was almost suffocating with the evil smell of a kerosene lamp turned down
+      too low. Alice sat asleep in her old farmhouse rocking-chair, with an
+      inelegant darning-basket on the table by her side. The whole effect of the
+      room was as bare and squalid to Theron's newly informed eye as the
+      atmosphere was offensive to his nostrils. He coughed sharply, and his wife
+      sat up and looked at the clock. It was after eleven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where on earth have you been?&rdquo; she asked, with a yawn, turning up the
+      wick of her sewing-lamp again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ought never to turn down a light like that,&rdquo; said Theron, with a
+      complaining note in his voice. &ldquo;It smells up the whole place. I never
+      dreamed of your sitting up for me like this. You ought to have gone to
+      bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how could I guess that you were going to be so late?,&rdquo; she retorted.
+      &ldquo;And you haven't told me where you were. Is this book of yours going to
+      keep you up like this right along?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The episode of the book was buried in the young minister's mind beneath
+      such a mass of subsequent experiences that it required an effort for him
+      to grasp what she was talking about. It seemed as if months had elapsed
+      since he was in earnest about that book; and yet he had left the house
+      full of it only a few hours before. He shook his wits together, and made
+      answer&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, bless you, no! Only there arose a very curious question. You have no
+      idea, literally no conception, of the interesting and important problems
+      which are raised by the mere fact of Abraham leaving the city of Ur. It's
+      amazing, I assure you. I hadn't realized it myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; remarked Alice, rising&mdash;and with good-humor and petulance
+      struggling sleepily ill her tone&mdash;&ldquo;all I've got to say is, that if
+      Abraham hasn't anything better to do than to keep young ministers of the
+      gospel out, goodness knows where, till all hours of the night, I wish to
+      gracious he'd stayed in the city of Ur right straight along.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have no idea what a scholarly man Dr. Ledsmar is,&rdquo; Theron suddenly
+      found himself inspired to volunteer. &ldquo;He has the most marvellous
+      collection of books&mdash;a whole library devoted to this very subject&mdash;and
+      he has put them all quite freely at my disposal. Extremely kind of him,
+      isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ledsmar? Ledsmar?&rdquo; queried Alice. &ldquo;I don't seem to remember the name. He
+      isn't the little man with the birthmark, who sits in the pew behind the
+      Lovejoys, is he? I think some one said he was a doctor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, a horse doctor!&rdquo; said Theron, with a sniff. &ldquo;No; you haven't seen
+      this Dr. Ledsmar at all. I&mdash;I don't know that he attends any church
+      regularly. I scraped his acquaintance quite by accident. He is really a
+      character. He lives in the big house, just beyond the race-course, you
+      know&mdash;the one with the tower at the back&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I don't know. How should I? I've hardly poked my nose outside of the
+      yard since I have been here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you shall go,&rdquo; said the husband, consolingly. &ldquo;You HAVE been cooped
+      up here too much, poor girl. I must take you out more, really. I don't
+      know that I could take you to the doctor's place&mdash;without an
+      invitation, I mean. He is very queer about some things. He lives there all
+      alone, for instance, with only a Chinaman for a servant. He told me I was
+      almost the only man he had asked under his roof for years. He isn't a
+      practising physician at all, you know. He is a scientist; he makes
+      experiments with lizards&mdash;and things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Theron,&rdquo; the wife said, pausing lamp in hand on her way to the bedroom,
+      &ldquo;do you be careful, now! For all you know this doctor may be a loose man,
+      or pretty near an infidel. You've got to be mighty particular in such
+      matters, you know, or you'll have the trustees down on you like a
+      'thousand of bricks.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will thank the trustees to mind their own business,&rdquo; said Theron,
+      stiffly, and the subject dropped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bedroom window upstairs was open, and upon the fresh night air was
+      borne in the shrill, jangling sound of a piano, being played off somewhere
+      in the distance, but so vehemently that the noise imposed itself upon the
+      silence far and wide. Theron listened to this as he undressed. It
+      proceeded from the direction of the main street, and he knew, as by
+      instinct, that it was the Madden girl who was playing. The incongruity of
+      the hour escaped his notice. He mused instead upon the wild and tropical
+      tangle of moods, emotions, passions, which had grown up in that strange
+      temperament. He found something very pathetic in that picture she had
+      drawn of herself in forecast, roaming disconsolate through her rooms the
+      livelong night, unable to sleep. The woful moan of insomnia seemed to make
+      itself heard in every strain from her piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice heard it also, but being unillumined, she missed the romantic
+      pathos. &ldquo;I call it disgraceful,&rdquo; she muttered from her pillow, &ldquo;for folks
+      to be banging away on a piano at this time of night. There ought to be a
+      law to prevent it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It may be some distressed soul,&rdquo; said Theron, gently, &ldquo;seeking relief
+      from the curse of sleeplessness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The wife laughed, almost contemptuously. &ldquo;Distressed fiddlesticks!&rdquo; was
+      her only other comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The music went on for a long time&mdash;rising now to strident heights,
+      now sinking off to the merest tinkling murmur, and broken ever and again
+      by intervals of utter hush. It did not prevent Alice from at once falling
+      sound asleep; but Theron lay awake, it seemed to him, for hours, listening
+      tranquilly, and letting his mind wander at will through the pleasant
+      antechambers of Sleep, where are more unreal fantasies than Dreamland
+      itself affords.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART2" id="link2H_PART2">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For some weeks the Rev. Theron Ware saw nothing of either the priest or
+      the doctor, or the interesting Miss Madden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were, indeed, more urgent matters to think about. June had come; and
+      every succeeding day brought closer to hand the ordeal of his first
+      Quarterly Conference in Octavius. The waters grew distinctly rougher as
+      his pastoral bark neared this difficult passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would have approached the great event with an easier mind if he could
+      have made out just how he stood with his congregation. Unfortunately
+      nothing in his previous experiences helped him in the least to measure or
+      guess at the feelings of these curious Octavians. Their Methodism seemed
+      to be sound enough, and to stick quite to the letter of the Discipline, so
+      long as it was expressed in formulae. It was its spirit which he felt to
+      be complicated by all sorts of conditions wholly novel to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The existence of a line of street-cars in the town, for example, would not
+      impress the casual thinker as likely to prove a rock in the path of
+      peaceful religion. Theron, in his simplicity, had even thought, when he
+      first saw these bobtailed cars bumping along the rails in the middle of
+      the main street, that they must be a great convenience to people living in
+      the outskirts, who wished to get in to church of a Sunday morning. He was
+      imprudent enough to mention this in conversation with one of his new
+      parishioners. Then he learned, to his considerable chagrin, that when this
+      line was built, some years before, a bitter war of words had been fought
+      upon the question of its being worked on the Sabbath day. The then
+      occupant of the Methodist pulpit had so distinguished himself above the
+      rest by the solemnity and fervor of his protests against this insolent
+      desecration of God's day that the Methodists of Octavius still felt
+      themselves peculiarly bound to hold this horse-car line, its management,
+      and everything connected with it, in unbending aversion. At least once a
+      year they were accustomed to expect a sermon denouncing it and all its
+      impious Sunday patrons. Theron made a mental resolve that this year they
+      should be disappointed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another burning problem, which he had not been called upon before to
+      confront, he found now entangled with the mysterious line which divided a
+      circus from a menagerie. Those itinerant tent-shows had never come his way
+      heretofore, and he knew nothing of that fine balancing proportion between
+      ladies in tights on horseback and cages full of deeply educational
+      animals, which, even as the impartial rain, was designed to embrace alike
+      the just and the unjust. There had arisen inside the Methodist society of
+      Octavius some painful episodes, connected with members who took their
+      children &ldquo;just to see the animals,&rdquo; and were convicted of having also
+      watched the Rose-Queen of the Arena, in her unequalled flying leap through
+      eight hoops, with an ardent and unashamed eye. One of these cases still
+      remained on the censorial docket of the church; and Theron understood that
+      he was expected to name a committee of five to examine and try it. This he
+      neglected to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was no longer at all certain that the congregation as a whole liked his
+      sermons. The truth was, no doubt, that he had learned enough to cease
+      regarding the congregation as a whole. He could still rely upon carrying
+      along with him in his discourses from the pulpit a large majority of
+      interested and approving faces. But here, unhappily, was a case where the
+      majority did not rule. The minority, relatively small in numbers, was
+      prodigious in virile force.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More than twenty years had now elapsed since that minor schism in the
+      Methodist Episcopal Church, the result of which was the independent body
+      known as Free Methodists, had relieved the parent flock of its principal
+      disturbing element. The rupture came fittingly at that time when all the
+      &ldquo;isms&rdquo; of the argumentative fifties were hurled violently together into
+      the melting-pot of civil war. The great Methodist Church, South, had
+      broken bodily off on the question of State Rights. The smaller and
+      domestic fraction of Free Methodism separated itself upon an issue which
+      may be most readily described as one of civilization. The seceders
+      resented growth in material prosperity; they repudiated the introduction
+      of written sermons and organ-music; they deplored the increasing laxity in
+      meddlesome piety, the introduction of polite manners in the pulpit and
+      classroom, and the development of even a rudimentary desire among the
+      younger people of the church to be like others outside in dress and speech
+      and deportment. They did battle as long as they could, inside the fold, to
+      restore it to the severely straight and narrow path of primitive
+      Methodism. When the adverse odds became too strong for them, they quitted
+      the church and set up a Bethel for themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Octavius chanced to be one of the places where they were able to hold
+      their own within the church organization. The Methodism of the town had
+      gone along without any local secession. It still held in full fellowship
+      the radicals who elsewhere had followed their unbridled bent into the
+      strongest emotional vagaries&mdash;where excited brethren worked
+      themselves up into epileptic fits, and women whirled themselves about in
+      weird religious ecstasies, like dervishes of the Orient, till they fell
+      headlong in a state of trance. Octavian Methodism was spared extravagances
+      of this sort, it is true, but it paid a price for the immunity. The people
+      whom an open split would have taken away remained to leaven and dominate
+      the whole lump. This small advanced section, with its men of a type all
+      the more aggressive from its narrowness, and women who went about solemnly
+      in plain gray garments, with tight-fitting, unadorned, mouse-colored
+      sunbonnets, had not been able wholly to enforce its views upon the social
+      life of the church members, but of its controlling influence upon their
+      official and public actions there could be no doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The situation had begun to unfold itself to Theron from the outset. He had
+      recognized the episodes of the forbidden Sunday milk and of the flowers in
+      poor Alice's bonnet as typical of much more that was to come. No week
+      followed without bringing some new fulfilment of this foreboding. Now, at
+      the end of two months, he knew well enough that the hitherto dominant
+      minority was hostile to him and his ministry, and would do whatever it
+      could against him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though Theron at once decided to show fight, and did not at all waver in
+      that resolve, his courage was in the main of a despondent sort. Sometimes
+      it would flutter up to the point of confidence, or at least hopefulness,
+      when he met with substantial men of the church who obviously liked him,
+      and whom he found himself mentally ranging on his side, in the struggle
+      which was to come. But more often it was blankly apparent to him that, the
+      moment flags were flying and drums on the roll, these amiable fair-weather
+      friends would probably take to their heels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still, such as they were, his sole hope lay in their support. He must make
+      the best of them. He set himself doggedly to the task of gathering
+      together all those who were not his enemies into what, when the proper
+      time came, should be known as the pastor's party. There was plenty of
+      apostolic warrant for this. If there had not been, Theron felt that the
+      mere elementary demands of self-defence would have justified his use of
+      strategy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The institution of pastoral calling, particularly that inquisitorial form
+      of it laid down in the Discipline, had never attracted Theron. He and
+      Alice had gone about among their previous flocks in quite a haphazard
+      fashion, without thought of system, much less of deliberate purpose.
+      Theron made lists now, and devoted thought and examination to the personal
+      tastes and characteristics of the people to be cultivated. There were
+      some, for example, who would expect him to talk pretty much as the
+      Discipline ordained&mdash;that is, to ask if they had family prayer, to
+      inquire after their souls, and generally to minister grace to his hearers&mdash;and
+      these in turn subdivided themselves into classes, ranging from those who
+      would wish nothing else to those who needed only a mild spiritual flavor.
+      There were others whom he would please much better by not talking shop at
+      all. Although he could ill afford it, he subscribed now for a daily paper
+      that he might have a perpetually renewed source of good conversational
+      topics for these more worldly calls. He also bought several pounds of
+      candy, pleasing in color, but warranted to be entirely harmless, and he
+      made a large mysterious mark on the inside of his new silk hat to remind
+      him not to go out calling without some of this in his pocket for the
+      children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice, he felt, was not helping him in this matter as effectively as he
+      could have wished. Her attitude toward the church in Octavius might best
+      be described by the word &ldquo;sulky.&rdquo; Great allowance was to be made, he
+      realized, for her humiliation over the flowers in her bonnet. That might
+      justify her, fairly enough, in being kept away from meeting now and again
+      by headaches, or undefined megrims. But it ought not to prevent her from
+      going about and making friends among the kindlier parishioners who would
+      welcome such a thing, and whom he from time to time indicated to her. She
+      did go to some extent, it is true, but she produced, in doing so, an
+      effect of performing a duty. He did not find traces anywhere of her having
+      created a brilliant social impression. When they went out together, he was
+      peculiarly conscious of having to do the work unaided.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was not at all like the Alice of former years, of other charges. Why,
+      she had been, beyond comparison, the most popular young woman in Tyre.
+      What possessed her to mope like this in Octavius?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron looked at her attentively nowadays, when she was unaware of his
+      gaze, to try if her face offered any answer to the riddle. It could not be
+      suggested that she was ill. Never in her life had she been looking so
+      well. She had thrown herself, all at once, and with what was to him an
+      unaccountable energy, into the creation and management of a flower-garden.
+      She was out the better part of every day, rain or shine, digging,
+      transplanting, pruning, pottering generally about among her plants and
+      shrubs. This work in the open air had given her an aspect of physical
+      well-being which it was impossible to be mistaken about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband was glad, of course, that she had found some occupation which
+      at once pleased her and so obviously conduced to health. This was so much
+      a matter of course, in fact, that he said to himself over and over again
+      that he was glad. Only&mdash;only, sometimes the thought WOULD force
+      itself upon his attention that if she did not spend so much of her time in
+      her own garden, she would have more time to devote to winning friends for
+      them in the Garden of the Lord&mdash;friends whom they were going to need
+      badly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister, in taking anxious stock of the chances for and against
+      him, turned over often in his mind the fact that he had already won rank
+      as a pulpit orator. His sermons had attracted almost universal attention
+      at Tyre, and his achievement before the Conference at Tecumseh, if it did
+      fail to receive practical reward, had admittedly distanced all the other
+      preaching there. It was a part of the evil luck pursuing him that here in
+      this perversely enigmatic Octavius his special gift seemed to be of no use
+      whatever. There were times, indeed, when he was tempted to think that bad
+      preaching was what Octavius wanted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Somewhere he had heard of a Presbyterian minister, in charge of a big city
+      church, who managed to keep well in with a watchfully Orthodox
+      congregation, and at the same time establish himself in the affections of
+      the community at large, by simply preaching two kinds of sermons. In the
+      morning, when almost all who attended were his own communicants, he gave
+      them very cautious and edifying doctrinal discourses, treading loyally in
+      the path of the Westminster Confession. To the evening assemblages, made
+      up for the larger part of outsiders, he addressed broadly liberal sermons,
+      literary in form, and full of respectful allusions to modern science and
+      the philosophy of the day. Thus he filled the church at both services, and
+      put money in its treasury and his own fame before the world. There was of
+      course the obvious danger that the pious elders who in the forenoon heard
+      infant damnation vigorously proclaimed, would revolt when they heard after
+      supper that there was some doubt about even adults being damned at all.
+      But either because the same people did not attend both services, or
+      because the minister's perfect regularity in the morning was each week
+      regarded as a retraction of his latest vagaries of an evening, no trouble
+      ever came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had somewhat tentatively tried this on in Octavius. It was no good.
+      His parishioners were of the sort who would have come to church eight
+      times a day on Sunday, instead of two, if occasion offered. The hope that
+      even a portion of them would stop away, and that their places would be
+      taken in the evening by less prejudiced strangers who wished for
+      intellectual rather than theological food, fell by the wayside. The
+      yearned-for strangers did not come; the familiar faces of the morning
+      service all turned up in their accustomed places every evening. They were
+      faces which confused and disheartened Theron in the daytime. Under the
+      gaslight they seemed even harder and more unsympathetic. He timorously
+      experimented with them for an evening or two, then abandoned the effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once there had seemed the beginning of a chance. The richest banker in
+      Octavius&mdash;a fat, sensual, hog-faced old bachelor&mdash;surprised
+      everybody one evening by entering the church and taking a seat. Theron
+      happened to know who he was; even if he had not known, the suppressed
+      excitement visible in the congregation, the way the sisters turned round
+      to look, the way the more important brethren put their heads together and
+      exchanged furtive whispers&mdash;would have warned him that big game was
+      in view. He recalled afterward with something like self-disgust the eager,
+      almost tremulous pains he himself took to please this banker. There was a
+      part of the sermon, as it had been written out, which might easily give
+      offence to a single man of wealth and free notions of life. With the
+      alertness of a mental gymnast, Theron ran ahead, excised this portion, and
+      had ready when the gap was reached some very pretty general remarks, all
+      the more effective and eloquent, he felt, for having been extemporized.
+      People said it was a good sermon; and after the benediction and dispersion
+      some of the officials and principal pew-holders remained to talk over the
+      likelihood of a capture having been effected. Theron did not get away
+      without having this mentioned to him, and he was conscious of sharing
+      deeply the hope of the brethren&mdash;with the added reflection that it
+      would be a personal triumph for himself into the bargain. He was ashamed
+      of this feeling a little later, and of his trick with the sermon. But this
+      chastening product of introspection was all the fruit which the incident
+      bore. The banker never came again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron returned one afternoon, a little earlier than usual, from a group
+      of pastoral calls. Alice, who was plucking weeds in a border at the shady
+      side of the house, heard his step, and rose from her labors. He was
+      walking slowly, and seemed weary. He took off his high hat, as he saw her,
+      and wiped his brow. The broiling June sun was still high overhead.
+      Doubtless it was its insufferable heat which was accountable for the worn
+      lines in his face and the spiritless air which the wife's eye detected.
+      She went to the gate, and kissed him as he entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe if I were you,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I'd carry an umbrella such scorching
+      days as this. Nobody'd think anything of it. I don't see why a minister
+      shouldn't carry one as much as a woman carries a parasol.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron gave her a rueful, meditative sort of smile. &ldquo;I suppose people
+      really do think of us as a kind of hybrid female,&rdquo; he remarked. Then,
+      holding his hat in his hand, he drew a long breath of relief at finding
+      himself in the shade, and looked about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, you've got more posies here, on this one side of the house alone,
+      than mother had in her whole yard,&rdquo; he said, after a little. &ldquo;Let's see&mdash;I
+      know that one: that's columbine, isn't it? And that's London pride, and
+      that's ragged robin. I don't know any of the others.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice recited various unfamiliar names, as she pointed out the several
+      plants which bore them, and he listened with a kindly semblance of
+      interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They strolled thus to the rear of the house, where thick clumps of
+      fragrant pinks lined both sides of the path. She picked some of these for
+      him, and gave him more names with which to label the considerable number
+      of other plants he saw about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had no idea we were so well provided as all this,&rdquo; he commented at
+      last. &ldquo;Those Van Sizers must have been tremendous hands for flowers. You
+      were lucky in following such people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Van Sizers!&rdquo; echoed Alice, with contempt. &ldquo;All they left was old tomato
+      cans and clamshells. Why, I've put in every blessed one of these myself,
+      all except those peonies, there, and one brier on the side wall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good for you!&rdquo; exclaimed Theron, approvingly. Then it occurred to him to
+      ask, &ldquo;But where did you get them all? Around among our friends?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some few,&rdquo; responded Alice, with a note of hesitation in her voice.
+      &ldquo;Sister Bult gave me the verbenas, there, and the white pinks were a
+      present from Miss Stevens. But most of them Levi Gorringe was good enough
+      to send me&mdash;from his garden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know that Gorringe had a garden,&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;I thought he
+      lived over his law-office, in the brick block, there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I don't know that it's exactly HIS,&rdquo; explained Alice; &ldquo;but it's a
+      big garden somewhere outside, where he can have anything he likes.&rdquo; She
+      went on with a little laugh: &ldquo;I didn't like to question him too closely,
+      for fear he'd think I was looking a gift horse in the mouth&mdash;or else
+      hinting for more. It was quite his own offer, you know. He picked them all
+      out for me, and brought them here, and lent me a book telling me just what
+      to do with each one. And in a few days, now, I am to have another big
+      batch of plants&mdash;dahlias and zinnias and asters and so on; I'm almost
+      ashamed to take them. But it's such a change to find some one in this
+      Octavius who isn't all self!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Gorringe is a good fellow,&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;I wish he was a professing
+      member.&rdquo; Then some new thought struck him. &ldquo;Alice,&rdquo; he exclaimed, &ldquo;I
+      believe I'll go and see him this very afternoon. I don't know why it
+      hasn't occurred to me before: he's just the man whose advice I need most.
+      He knows these people here; he can tell me what to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren't you too tired now?&rdquo; suggested Alice, as Theron put on his hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, the sooner the better,&rdquo; he replied, moving now toward the gate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;if I were you, I wouldn't say too much about&mdash;that
+      is, I&mdash;but never mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; asked her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing whatever,&rdquo; replied Alice, positively. &ldquo;It was only some nonsense
+      of mine;&rdquo; and Theron, placidly accepting the feminine whim, went off down
+      the street again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware found Levi Gorringe's law-office readily enough, but its
+      owner was not in. He probably would be back again, though, in a quarter of
+      an hour or so, the boy said, and the minister at once decided to wait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron was interested in finding that this office-boy was no other than
+      Harvey&mdash;the lad who brought milk to the parsonage every morning. He
+      remembered now that he had heard good things of this urchin, as to the
+      hard work he did to help his mother, the Widow Semple, in her struggle to
+      keep a roof over her head; and also bad things, in that he did not come
+      regularly either to church or Sunday-school. The clergyman recalled, too,
+      that Harvey had impressed him as a character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, sonny, are you going to be a lawyer?&rdquo; he asked, as he seated
+      himself by the window, and looked about him, first at the dusty litter of
+      old papers, pamphlets, and tape-bound documents in bundles which crowded
+      the stuffy chamber, and then at the boy himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harvey was busy at a big box&mdash;a rough pine dry-goods box which bore
+      the flaring label of an express company, and also of a well-known seed
+      firm in a Western city, and which the boy had apparently just opened. He
+      was lifting from it, and placing on the table after he had shaken off the
+      sawdust and moss in which they were packed, small parcels of what looked
+      in the fading light to be half-dried plants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I don't know&mdash;I rather guess not,&rdquo; he made answer, as he
+      pursued his task. &ldquo;So far as I can make out, this wouldn't be the place to
+      start in at, if I WAS going to be a lawyer. A boy can learn here
+      first-rate how to load cartridges and clean a gun, and braid trout-flies
+      on to leaders, but I don't see much law laying around loose. Anyway,&rdquo; he
+      went on, &ldquo;I couldn't afford to read law, and not be getting any wages. I
+      have to earn money, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron felt that he liked the boy. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, with a kindly tone;
+      &ldquo;I've heard that you are a good, industrious youngster. I daresay Mr.
+      Gorringe will see to it that you get a chance to read law, and get wages
+      too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I can read all there is here and welcome,&rdquo; the boy explained,
+      stepping toward the window to decipher the label on a bundle of roots in
+      his hand, &ldquo;but that's no good unless there's regular practice coming into
+      the office all the while. THAT'S how you learn to be a lawyer. But
+      Gorringe don't have what I call a practice at all. He just sees men in the
+      other room there, with the door shut, and whatever there is to do he does
+      it all himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The minister remembered a stray hint somewhere that Mr. Gorringe was a
+      money-lender&mdash;what was colloquially called a &ldquo;note-shaver.&rdquo; To his
+      rustic sense, there was something not quite nice about that occupation. It
+      would be indecorous, he felt, to encourage further talk about it from the
+      boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing there?&rdquo; he inquired, to change the subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sorting out some plants,&rdquo; replied Harvey. &ldquo;I don't know what's got into
+      Gorringe lately. This is the third big box he's had since I've been here&mdash;that
+      is, in six weeks&mdash;besides two baskets full of rose-bushes. I don't
+      know what he does with them. He carries them off himself somewhere. I've
+      had kind of half a notion that he's figurin' on getting married. I can't
+      think of anything else that would make a man spend money like water&mdash;just
+      for flowers and bushes. They do get foolish, you know, when they've got
+      marriage on the brain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron found himself only imperfectly following the theories of the young
+      philosopher. It was his fact that monopolized the minister's attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But as I understand it,&rdquo; he remarked hesitatingly, &ldquo;Brother Gorringe&mdash;or
+      rather Mr. Gorringe&mdash;gets all the plants he wants, everything he
+      likes, from a big garden somewhere outside. I don't know that it is
+      exactly his; but I remember hearing something to that effect.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy slapped the last litter off his hands, and, as he came to the
+      window, shook his head. &ldquo;These don't come from no garden outside,&rdquo; he
+      declared. &ldquo;They come from the dealers', and he pays solid cash for 'em.
+      The invoice for this lot alone was thirty-one dollars and sixty cents.
+      There it is on the table. You can see it for yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Ware did not offer to look. &ldquo;Very likely these are for the garden I
+      was speaking of,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Of course you can't go on taking plants out of
+      a garden indefinitely without putting others in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know anything about any garden that he takes plants out of,&rdquo;
+       answered Harvey, and looked meditatively for a minute or two out upon the
+      street below. Then he turned to the minister. &ldquo;Your wife's doing a good
+      deal of gardening this spring, I notice,&rdquo; he said casually. &ldquo;You'd hardly
+      think it was the same place, she's fixed it up so. If she wants any extra
+      hoeing done, I can always get off Saturday afternoons.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will remember,&rdquo; said Theron. He also looked out of the window; and
+      nothing more was said until, a few moments later, Mr. Gorringe himself
+      came in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lawyer seemed both surprised and pleased at discovering the identity
+      of his visitor, with whom he shook hands in almost an excess of
+      cordiality. He spread a large newspaper over the pile of seedling plants
+      on the table, pushed the packing-box under the table with his foot, and
+      said almost peremptorily to the boy, &ldquo;You can go now!&rdquo; Then he turned
+      again to Theron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Mr. Ware, I'm glad to see you,&rdquo; he repeated, and drew up a chair by
+      the window. &ldquo;Things are going all right with you, I hope.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron noted again the waving black hair, the dark skin, and the carefully
+      trimmed mustache and chin-tuft which gave the lawyer's face a combined
+      effect of romance and smartness. No; it was the eyes, cool, shrewd,
+      dark-gray eyes, which suggested this latter quality. The recollection of
+      having seen one of them wink, in deliberate hostility of sarcasm, when
+      those other trustees had their backs turned, came mercifully at the moment
+      to recall the young minister to his errand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I would drop in and have a chat with you,&rdquo; he said, getting
+      better under way as he went on. &ldquo;Quarterly Conference is only a fortnight
+      off, and I am a good deal at sea about what is going to happen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not a church member, you know,&rdquo; interposed Gorringe. &ldquo;That shuts me
+      out of the Quarterly Conference.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alas, yes!&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;I wish it didn't. I'm afraid I'm not going to
+      have any friends to spare there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you afraid of?&rdquo; asked the lawyer, seeming now to be wholly at
+      his ease again &ldquo;They can't eat you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, they keep me too lean for that,&rdquo; responded Theron, with a pensive
+      smile. &ldquo;I WAS going to ask, you know, for an increase of salary, or an
+      extra allowance. I don't see how I can go on as it is. The sum fixed by
+      the last Quarterly Conference of the old year, and which I am getting now,
+      is one hundred dollars less than my predecessor had. That isn't fair, and
+      it isn't right. But so far from its looking as if I could get an increase,
+      the prospect seems rather that they will make me pay for the gas and that
+      sidewalk. I never recovered more than about half of my moving expenses, as
+      you know, and&mdash;and, frankly, I don't know which way to turn. It keeps
+      me miserable all the while.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's where you're wrong,&rdquo; said Mr. Gorringe. &ldquo;If you let things like
+      that worry you, you'll keep a sore skin all your life. You take my advice
+      and just go ahead your own gait, and let other folks do the worrying. They
+      ARE pretty close-fisted here, for a fact, but you can manage to rub along
+      somehow. If you should get into any real difficulties, why, I guess&mdash;&rdquo;
+       the lawyer paused to smile in a hesitating, significant way&mdash;&ldquo;I guess
+      some road out can be found all right. The main thing is, don't fret, and
+      don't allow your wife to&mdash;to fret either.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped abruptly. Theron nodded in recognition of his amiable tone, and
+      the found the nod lengthening itself out into almost a bow as the thought
+      spread through his mind that this had been nothing more nor less than a
+      promise to help him with money if worst came to worst. He looked at Levi
+      Gorringe, and said to himself that the intuition of women was wonderful.
+      Alice had picked him out as a friend of theirs merely by seeing him pass
+      the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I am specially anxious to keep my wife from worrying. She
+      was surrounded in her girlhood by a good deal of what, relatively, we
+      should call luxury, and that makes it all the harder for her to be a poor
+      minister's wife. I had quite decided to get her a hired girl, come what
+      might, but she thinks she'd rather get on without one. Her health is
+      better, I must admit, than it was when we came here. She works out in her
+      garden a great deal, and that seems to agree with her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Octavius is a healthy place&mdash;that's generally admitted,&rdquo; replied the
+      lawyer, with indifference. He seemed not to be interested in Mrs. Ware's
+      health, but looked intently out through the window at the buildings
+      opposite, and drummed with his fingers on the arms of his chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron made haste to revert to his errand. &ldquo;Of course, your not being in
+      the Quarterly Conference,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;renders certain things impossible.
+      But I didn't know but you might have some knowledge of how matters are
+      going, what plans the officials of the church had; they seem to have
+      agreed to tell me nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I HAVE heard this much,&rdquo; responded Gorringe. &ldquo;They're figuring on
+      getting the Soulsbys here to raise the debt and kind o' shake things up
+      generally. I guess that's about as good as settled. Hadn't you heard of
+      it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a breath!&rdquo; exclaimed Theron, mournfully. &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he added upon
+      reflection, &ldquo;I'm sorry, downright sorry. The debt-raiser seems to me about
+      the lowest-down thing we produce. I've heard of those Soulsbys; I think I
+      saw HIM indeed once at Conference, but I believe SHE is the head of the
+      firm.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; she wears the breeches, I understand,&rdquo; said Gorringe sententiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I HAD hoped,&rdquo; the young minister began with a rueful sigh, &ldquo;in fact, I
+      felt quite confident at the outset that I could pay off this debt, and put
+      the church generally on a new footing, by giving extra attention to my
+      pulpit work. It is hardly for me to say it, but in other places where I
+      have been, my preaching has been rather&mdash;rather a feature in the town
+      itself I have always been accustomed to attract to our services a good
+      many non-members, and that, as you know, helps tremendously from a money
+      point of view. But somehow that has failed here. I doubt if the average
+      congregations are a whit larger now than they were when I came in April. I
+      know the collections are not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; commented the lawyer, slowly; &ldquo;you'll never do anything in that line
+      in Octavius. You might, of course, if you were to stay here and work hard
+      at it for five or six years&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heaven forbid!&rdquo; groaned Mr. Ware.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; put in the other. &ldquo;The point is that the Methodists here are a
+      little set by themselves. I don't know that they like one another
+      specially, but I do know that they are not what you might call popular
+      with people outside. Now, a new preacher at the Presbyterian church, or
+      even the Baptist&mdash;he might have a chance to create talk, and make a
+      stir. But Methodist&mdash;no! People who don't belong won't come near the
+      Methodist church here so long as there's any other place with a roof on it
+      to go to. Give a dog a bad name, you know. Well, the Methodists here have
+      got a bad name; and if you could preach like Henry Ward Beecher himself
+      you wouldn't change it, or get folks to come and hear you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see what you mean,&rdquo; Theron responded. &ldquo;I'm not particularly surprised
+      myself that Octavius doesn't love us, or look to us for intellectual
+      stimulation. I myself leave that pulpit more often than otherwise feeling
+      like a wet rag&mdash;utterly limp and discouraged. But, if you don't mind
+      my speaking of it, YOU don't belong, and yet YOU come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was evident that the lawyer did not mind. He spoke freely in reply.
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, I've got into the habit of it. I began going when I first came
+      here, and&mdash;and so it grew to be natural for me to go. Then, of
+      course, being the only lawyer you have, a considerable amount of my
+      business is mixed up in one way or another with your membership; you see
+      those are really the things which settle a man in a rut, and keep him
+      there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose your people were Methodists,&rdquo; said Theron, to fill in the
+      pause, &ldquo;and that is how you originally started with us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Levi Gorringe shook his head. He leaned back, half closed his eyes, put
+      his finger-tips together, and almost smiled as if something in retrospect
+      pleased and moved him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I went to the church first to see a girl who used to go
+      there. It was long before your time. All her family moved away years ago.
+      You wouldn't know any of them. I was younger then, and I didn't know as
+      much as I do now. I worshipped the very ground that girl walked on, and
+      like a fool I never gave her so much as a hint of it. Looking back now, I
+      can see that I might have had her if I'd asked her. But I went instead and
+      sat around and looked at her at church and Sunday-school and
+      prayer-meetings Thursday nights, and class-meetings after the sermon. She
+      was devoted to religion and church work; and, thinking it would please
+      her, I joined the church on probation. Men can fool themselves easier than
+      they can other people. I actually believed at the time that I had
+      experienced religion. I felt myself full of all sorts of awakenings of the
+      soul and so forth. But it was really that girl. You see I'm telling you
+      the thing just as it was. I was very happy. I think it was the happiest
+      time of my life. I remember there was a love-feast while I was on
+      probation; and I sat down in front, right beside her, and we ate the
+      little square chunks of bread and drank the water together, and I held one
+      corner of her hymn-book when we stood up and sang. That was the nearest I
+      ever got to her, or to full membership in the church. That very next week,
+      I think it was, we learned that she had got engaged to the minister's son&mdash;a
+      young man who had just become a minister himself. They got married, and
+      went away&mdash;and I&mdash;somehow I never took up my membership when the
+      six months' probation was over. That's how it was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very interesting,&rdquo; remarked Theron, softly, after a little silence&mdash;&ldquo;and
+      very full of human nature.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, now you see,&rdquo; said the lawyer, &ldquo;what I mean when I say that there
+      hasn't been another minister here since, that I should have felt like
+      telling this story to. They wouldn't have understood it at all. They would
+      have thought it was blasphemy for me to say straight out that what I took
+      for experiencing religion was really a girl. But you are different. I felt
+      that at once, the first time I saw you. In a pulpit or out of it, what I
+      like in a human being is that he SHOULD be human.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It pleases me beyond measure that you should like me, then&rdquo; returned the
+      young minister, with frank gratification shining on his face. &ldquo;The world
+      is made all the sweeter and more lovable by these&mdash;these elements of
+      romance. I am not one of those who would wish to see them banished or
+      frowned upon. I don't mind admitting to you that there is a good deal in
+      Methodism&mdash;I mean the strict practice of its letter which you find
+      here in Octavius&mdash;that is personally distasteful to me. I read the
+      other day of an English bishop who said boldly, publicly, that no modern
+      nation could practise the principles laid down in the Sermon on the Mount
+      and survive for twenty-four hours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha, ha! That's good!&rdquo; laughed the lawyer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I felt that it was good, too,&rdquo; pursued Theron. &ldquo;I am getting to see a
+      great many things differently, here in Octavius. Our Methodist Discipline
+      is like the Beatitudes&mdash;very helpful and beautiful, if treated as
+      spiritual suggestion, but more or less of a stumbling-block if insisted
+      upon literally. I declare!&rdquo; he added, sitting up in his chair, &ldquo;I never
+      talked like this to a living soul before in all my life. Your confidences
+      were contagious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware rose as he spoke, and took up his hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Must you be going?&rdquo; asked the lawyer, also rising. &ldquo;Well, I'm glad I
+      haven't shocked you. Come in oftener when you are passing. And if you see
+      anything I can help you in, always tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men shook hands, with an emphatic and lingering clasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad,&rdquo; said Theron, &ldquo;that you didn't stop coming to church just
+      because you lost the girl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Levi Gorringe answered the minister's pleasantry with a smile which curled
+      his mustache upward, and expanded in little wrinkles at the ends of his
+      eyes. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said jestingly. &ldquo;I'm death on collecting debts; and I
+      reckon that the church still owes me a girl. I'll have one yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So, with merriment the echoes of which pleasantly accompanied Theron down
+      the stairway, the two men parted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Though time lagged in passing with a slowness which seemed born of studied
+      insolence, there did arrive at last a day which had something definitive
+      about it to Theron's disturbed and restless mind. It was a Thursday, and
+      the prayer-meeting to be held that evening would be the last before the
+      Quarterly Conference, now only four days off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some reason, the young minister found himself dwelling upon this fact,
+      and investing it with importance. But yesterday the Quarterly Conference
+      had seemed a long way ahead. Today brought it alarmingly close to hand. He
+      had not heretofore regarded the weekly assemblage for prayer and song as a
+      thing calling for preparation, or for any preliminary thought. Now on this
+      Thursday morning he went to his desk after breakfast, which was a sign
+      that he wanted the room to himself, quite as if he had the task of a
+      weighty sermon before him. He sat at the desk all the forenoon, doing no
+      writing, it is true, but remembering every once in a while, when his mind
+      turned aside from the book in his hands, that there was that
+      prayer-meeting in the evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes he reached the point of vaguely wondering why this strictly
+      commonplace affair should be forcing itself thus upon his attention. Then,
+      with a kind of mental shiver at the recollection that this was Thursday,
+      and that the great struggle came on Monday, he would go back to his book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were a half-dozen volumes on the open desk before him. He had taken
+      them out from beneath a pile of old &ldquo;Sunday-School Advocates&rdquo; and church
+      magazines, where they had lain hidden from Alice's view most of the week.
+      If there had been a locked drawer in the house, he would have used it
+      instead to hold these books, which had come to him in a neat parcel, which
+      also contained an amiable note from Dr. Ledsmar, recalling a pleasant
+      evening in May, and expressing the hope that the accompanying works would
+      be of some service. Theron had glanced at the backs of the uppermost two,
+      and discovered that their author was Renan. Then he had hastily put the
+      lot in the best place he could think of to escape his wife's observation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He realized now that there had been no need for this secrecy. Of the other
+      four books, by Sayce, Budge, Smith, and Lenormant, three indeed revealed
+      themselves to be published under religious auspices. As for Renan, he
+      might have known that the name would be meaningless to Alice. The feeling
+      that he himself was not much wiser in this matter than his wife may have
+      led him to pass over the learned text-books on Chaldean antiquity, and
+      even the volume of Renan which appeared to be devoted to Oriental
+      inscriptions, and take up his other book, entitled in the translation,
+      &ldquo;Recollections of my Youth.&rdquo; This he rather glanced through, at the
+      outset, following with a certain inattention the introductory sketches and
+      essays, which dealt with an unfamiliar, and, to his notion, somewhat
+      preposterous Breton racial type. Then, little by little, it dawned upon
+      him that there was a connected story in all this; and suddenly he came
+      upon it, out in the open, as it were. It was the story of how a deeply
+      devout young man, trained from his earliest boyhood for the sacred office,
+      and desiring passionately nothing but to be worthy of it, came to a point
+      where, at infinite cost of pain to himself and of anguish to those dearest
+      to him, he had to declare that he could no longer believe at all in
+      revealed religion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron Ware read this all with an excited interest which no book had ever
+      stirred in him before. Much of it he read over and over again, to make
+      sure that he penetrated everywhere the husk of French habits of thought
+      and Catholic methods in which the kernel was wrapped. He broke off midway
+      in this part of the book to go out to the kitchen to dinner, and began the
+      meal in silence. To Alice's questions he replied briefly that he was
+      preparing himself for the evening's prayer-meeting. She lifted her brows
+      in such frank surprise at this that he made a further and somewhat
+      rambling explanation about having again taken up the work on his book&mdash;the
+      book about Abraham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought you said you'd given that up altogether,&rdquo; she remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I WAS discouraged about it for a while. But a man never
+      does anything big without getting discouraged over and over again while
+      he's doing it. I don't say now that I shall write precisely THAT book&mdash;I'm
+      merely reading scientific works about the period, just now&mdash;but if
+      not that, I shall write some other book. Else how will you get that
+      piano?&rdquo; he added, with an attempt at a smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought you had given that up, too!&rdquo; she replied ruefully. Then before
+      he could speak, she went on: &ldquo;Never mind the piano; that can wait. What
+      I've got on my mind just now isn't piano; it's potatoes. Do you know, I
+      saw some the other day at Rasbach's, splendid potatoes&mdash;these are
+      some of them&mdash;and fifteen cents a bushel cheaper than those dried-up
+      old things Brother Barnum keeps, and so I bought two bushels. And Sister
+      Barnum met me on the street this morning, and threw it in my face that the
+      Discipline commands us to trade with each other. Is there any such
+      command?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the husband. &ldquo;It's Section 33. Don't you remember? I looked it
+      up in Tyre. We are to 'evidence our desire of salvation by doing good,
+      especially to them that are of the household of faith, or groaning so to
+      be; by employing them preferably to others; buying one of another; helping
+      each other in business'&mdash;and so on. Yes, it's all there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I told her I didn't believe it was,&rdquo; put in Alice, &ldquo;and I said that
+      even if it was, there ought to be another section about selling potatoes
+      to their minister for more than they're worth&mdash;potatoes that turn all
+      green when you boil them, too. I believe I'll read up that old Discipline
+      myself, and see if it hasn't got some things that I can talk back with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The very section before that, Number 32, enjoins members against
+      'uncharitable or unprofitable conversation&mdash;particularly speaking
+      evil of magistrates or ministers.' You'd have 'em there, I think.&rdquo; Theron
+      had begun cheerfully enough, but the careworn, preoccupied look returned
+      now to his face. &ldquo;I'm sorry if we've fallen out with the Barnums,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;His brother-in-law, Davis, the Sunday-school superintendent, is a
+      member of the Quarterly Conference, you know, and I've been hoping that he
+      was on my side. I've been taking a good deal of pains to make up to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He ended with a sigh, the pathos of which impressed Alice. &ldquo;If you think
+      it will do any good,&rdquo; she volunteered, &ldquo;I'll go and call on the Davises
+      this very afternoon. I'm sure to find her at home,&mdash;she's tied hand
+      and foot with that brood of hers&mdash;and you'd better give me some of
+      that candy for them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron nodded his approval and thanks, and relapsed into silence. When the
+      meal was over, he brought out the confectionery to his wife, and without a
+      word went back to that remarkable book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Alice returned toward the close of day, to prepare the simple tea
+      which was always laid a half-hour earlier on Thursdays and Sundays, she
+      found her husband where she had left him, still busy with those new
+      scientific works. She recounted to him some incidents of her call upon
+      Mrs. Davis, as she took off her hat and put on the big kitchen apron&mdash;how
+      pleased Mrs. Davis seemed to be; how her affection for her sister-in-law,
+      the grocer's wife, disclosed itself to be not even skin-deep; how the
+      children leaped upon the candy as if they had never seen any before; and
+      how, in her belief, Mr. Davis would be heart and soul on Theron's side at
+      the Conference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To her surprise, the young minister seemed not at all interested. He
+      hardly looked at her during her narrative, but reclined in the easy-chair
+      with his head thrown back, and an abstracted gaze wandering aimlessly
+      about the ceiling. When she avowed her faith in the Sunday-school
+      superintendent's loyal partisanship, which she did with a pardonable pride
+      in having helped to make it secure, her husband even closed his eyes, and
+      moved his head with a gesture which plainly bespoke indifference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I expected you'd be tickled to death,&rdquo; she remarked, with evident
+      disappointment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've a bad headache,&rdquo; he explained, after a minute's pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No wonder!&rdquo; Alice rejoined, sympathetically enough, but with a note of
+      reproof as well. &ldquo;What can you expect, staying cooped up in here all day
+      long, poring over those books? People are all the while remarking that you
+      study too much. I tell them, of course, that you're a great hand for
+      reading, and always were; but I think myself it would be better if you got
+      out more, and took more exercise, and saw people. You know lots and
+      slathers more than THEY do now, or ever will, if you never opened another
+      book.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron regarded her with an expression which she had never seen on his
+      face before. &ldquo;You don't realize what you are saying,&rdquo; he replied slowly.
+      He sighed as he added, with increased gravity, &ldquo;I am the most ignorant man
+      alive!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice began a little laugh of wifely incredulity, and then let it die away
+      as she recognized that he was really troubled and sad in his mind. She
+      bent over to kiss him lightly on the brow, and tiptoed her way out into
+      the kitchen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe I will let you make my excuses at the prayer-meeting this
+      evening,&rdquo; he said all at once, as the supper came to an end. He had eaten
+      next to nothing during the meal, and had sat in a sort of brown-study from
+      which Alice kindly forbore to arouse him. &ldquo;I don't know&mdash;I hardly
+      feel equal to it. They won't take it amiss&mdash;for once&mdash;if you
+      explain to them that I&mdash;I am not at all well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I do hope you're not coming down with anything!&rdquo; Alice had risen too,
+      and was gazing at him with a solicitude the tenderness of which at once
+      comforted, and in some obscure way jarred on his nerves. &ldquo;Is there
+      anything I can do&mdash;or shall I go for a doctor? We've got mustard in
+      the house, and senna&mdash;I think there's some senna left&mdash;and
+      Jamaica ginger.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron shook his head wearily at her. &ldquo;Oh, no,&mdash;no!&rdquo; he expostulated.
+      &ldquo;It isn't anything that needs drugs, or doctors either. It's just mental
+      worry and fatigue, that's all. An evening's quiet rest in the big chair,
+      and early to bed&mdash;that will fix me up all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you'll read; and that will make your head worse,&rdquo; said Alice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I won't read any more,&rdquo; he promised her, walking slowly into the
+      sitting-room, and settling himself in the big chair, the while she brought
+      out a pillow from the adjoining best bedroom, and adjusted it behind his
+      head. &ldquo;That's nice! I'll just lie quiet here, and perhaps doze a little
+      till you come back. I feel in the mood for the rest; it will do me all
+      sorts of good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He closed his eyes; and Alice, regarding his upturned face anxiously,
+      decided that already it looked more at peace than awhile ago.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I hope you'll be better when I get back,&rdquo; she said, as she began
+      preparations for the evening service. These consisted in combing stiffly
+      back the strands of light-brown hair which, during the day, had
+      exuberantly loosened themselves over her temples into something almost
+      like curls; in fastening down upon this rebellious hair a plain
+      brown-straw bonnet, guiltless of all ornament save a binding ribbon of
+      dull umber hue; and in putting on a thin dark-gray shawl and a pair of
+      equally subdued lisle-thread gloves. Thus attired, she made a mischievous
+      little grimace of dislike at her puritanical image in the looking-glass
+      over the mantel, and then turned to announce her departure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'm off,&rdquo; she said. Theron opened his eyes to take in this figure
+      of his wife dressed for prayer-meeting, and then closed them again
+      abruptly. &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he murmured, and then he heard the door shut behind
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although he had been alone all day, there seemed to be quite a unique
+      value and quality in this present solitude. He stretched out his legs on
+      the opposite chair, and looked lazily about him, with the feeling that at
+      last he had secured some leisure, and could think undisturbed to his
+      heart's content. There were nearly two hours of unbroken quiet before him;
+      and the mere fact of his having stepped aside from the routine of his duty
+      to procure it; marked it in his thoughts as a special occasion, which
+      ought in the nature of things to yield more than the ordinary harvest of
+      mental profit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron's musings were broken in upon from time to time by rumbling
+      outbursts of hymn-singing from the church next door. Surely, he said to
+      himself, there could be no other congregation in the Conference, or in all
+      Methodism, which sang so badly as these Octavians did. The noise, as it
+      came to him now and again, divided itself familiarly into a main strain of
+      hard, high, sharp, and tinny female voices, with three or four concurrent
+      and clashing branch strains of part-singing by men who did not know how.
+      How well he already knew these voices! Through two wooden walls he could
+      detect the conceited and pushing note of Brother Lovejoy, who tried always
+      to drown the rest out, and the lifeless, unmeasured weight of shrill
+      clamor which Sister Barnum hurled into every chorus, half closing her eyes
+      and sticking out her chin as she did so. They drawled their hymns too,
+      these people, till Theron thought he understood that injunction in the
+      Discipline against singing too slowly. It had puzzled him heretofore; now
+      he felt that it must have been meant in prophecy for Octavius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was impossible not to recall in contrast that other church music he had
+      heard, a month before, and the whole atmosphere of that other pastoral
+      sitting room, from which he had listened to it. The startled and crowded
+      impressions of that strange evening had been lying hidden in his mind all
+      this while, driven into a corner by the pressure of more ordinary,
+      everyday matters. They came forth now, and passed across his brain&mdash;no
+      longer confusing and distorted, but in orderly and intelligible sequence.
+      Their earlier effect had been one of frightened fascination. Now he looked
+      them over calmly as they lifted themselves, one by one, and found himself
+      not shrinking at all, or evading anything, but dwelling upon each in turn
+      as a natural and welcome part of the most important experience of his
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister had arrived, all at once, at this conclusion. He did
+      not question at all the means by which he had reached it. Nothing was
+      clearer to his mind than the conclusion itself&mdash;that his meeting,
+      with the priest and the doctor was the turning-point in his career. They
+      had lifted him bodily out of the slough of ignorance, of contact with low
+      minds and sordid, narrow things, and put him on solid ground. This book he
+      had been reading&mdash;this gentle, tender, lovable book, which had as
+      much true piety in it as any devotional book he had ever read, and yet,
+      unlike all devotional books, put its foot firmly upon everything which
+      could not be proved in human reason to be true&mdash;must be merely one of
+      a thousand which men like Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar knew by heart. The
+      very thought that he was on the way now to know them, too, made Theron
+      tremble. The prospect wooed him, and he thrilled in response, with the
+      wistful and delicate eagerness of a young lover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Somehow, the fact that the priest and the doctor were not religious men,
+      and that this book which had so impressed and stirred him was nothing more
+      than Renan's recital of how he, too, ceased to be a religious man, did not
+      take a form which Theron could look square in the face. It wore the shape,
+      instead, of a vague premise that there were a great many different kinds
+      of religions&mdash;the past and dead races had multiplied these in their
+      time literally into thousands&mdash;and that each no doubt had its central
+      support of truth somewhere for the good men who were in it, and that to
+      call one of these divine and condemn all the others was a part fit only
+      for untutored bigots. Renan had formally repudiated Catholicism, yet could
+      write in his old age with the deepest filial affection of the Mother
+      Church he had quitted. Father Forbes could talk coolly about the
+      &ldquo;Christ-myth&rdquo; without even ceasing to be a priest, and apparently a very
+      active and devoted priest. Evidently there was an intellectual world, a
+      world of culture and grace, of lofty thoughts and the inspiring communion
+      of real knowledge, where creeds were not of importance, and where men
+      asked one another, not &ldquo;Is your soul saved?&rdquo; but &ldquo;Is your mind well
+      furnished?&rdquo; Theron had the sensation of having been invited to become a
+      citizen of this world. The thought so dazzled him that his impulses were
+      dragging him forward to take the new oath of allegiance before he had had
+      time to reflect upon what it was he was abandoning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The droning of the Doxology from the church outside stirred Theron
+      suddenly out of his revery. It had grown quite dark, and he rose and lit
+      the gas. &ldquo;Blest be the Tie that Binds,&rdquo; they were singing. He paused, with
+      hand still in air, to listen. That well-worn phrase arrested his
+      attention, and gave itself a new meaning. He was bound to those people, it
+      was true, but he could never again harbor the delusion that the tie
+      between them was blessed. There was vaguely present in his mind the
+      consciousness that other ties were loosening as well. Be that as it might,
+      one thing was certain. He had passed definitely beyond pretending to
+      himself that there was anything spiritually in common between him and the
+      Methodist Church of Octavius. The necessity of his keeping up the pretence
+      with others rose on the instant like a looming shadow before his mental
+      vision. He turned away from it, and bent his brain to think of something
+      else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The noise of Alice opening the front door came as a pleasant digression. A
+      second later it became clear from the sound of voices that she had brought
+      some one back with her, and Theron hastily stretched himself out again in
+      the armchair, with his head back in the pillow, and his feet on the other
+      chair. He had come mighty near forgetting that he was an invalid, and he
+      protected himself the further now by assuming an air of lassitude verging
+      upon prostration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; there's a light burning. It's all right,&rdquo; he heard Alice say. She
+      entered the room, and Theron's head was too bad to permit him to turn it,
+      and see who her companion was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Theron dear,&rdquo; Alice began, &ldquo;I knew you'd be glad to see HER, even if you
+      were out of sorts; and I persuaded her just to run in for a minute. Let me
+      introduce you to Sister Soulsby. Sister Soulsby&mdash;my husband.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware sat upright with an energetic start, and fastened upon
+      the stranger a look which conveyed anything but the satisfaction his wife
+      had been so sure about. It was at the first blush an undisguised scowl,
+      and only some fleeting memory of that reflection about needing now to
+      dissemble, prevented him from still frowning as he rose to his feet, and
+      perfunctorily held out his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Delighted, I'm sure,&rdquo; he mumbled. Then, looking up, he discovered that
+      Sister Soulsby knew he was not delighted, and that she seemed not to mind
+      in the least.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As your good lady said, I just ran in for a moment,&rdquo; she remarked,
+      shaking his limp hand with a brisk, business-like grasp, and dropping it.
+      &ldquo;I hate bothering sick people, but as we're to be thrown together a good
+      deal this next week or so, I thought I'd like to lose no time in saying
+      'howdy.' I won't keep you up now. Your wife has been sweet enough to ask
+      me to move my trunk over here in the morning, so that you'll see enough of
+      me and to spare.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron looked falteringly into her face, as he strove for words which
+      should sufficiently mask the disgust this intelligence stirred within him.
+      A debt-raiser in the town was bad enough! A debt-raiser quartered in the
+      very parsonage!&mdash;he ground his teeth to think of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice read his hesitation aright. &ldquo;Sister Soulsby went to the hotel,&rdquo; she
+      hastily put in; &ldquo;and Loren Pierce was after her to come and stay at his
+      house, and I ventured to tell her that I thought we could make her more
+      comfortable here.&rdquo; She accompanied this by so daring a grimace and nod
+      that her husband woke up to the fact that a point in Conference politics
+      was involved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He squeezed a doubtful smile upon his features. &ldquo;We shall both do our
+      best,&rdquo; he said. It was not easy, but he forced increasing amiability into
+      his glance and tone. &ldquo;Is Brother Soulsby here, too?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The debt-raiser shook her head&mdash;again the prompt, decisive movement,
+      so like a busy man of affairs. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;He's doing supply down
+      on the Hudson this week, but he'll be here in time for the Sunday morning
+      love-feast. I always like to come on ahead, and see how the land lies.
+      Well, good-night! Your head will be all right in the morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Precisely what she meant by this assurance, Theron did not attempt to
+      guess. He received her adieu, noted the masterful manner in which she
+      kissed his wife, and watched her pass out into the hall, with the feeling
+      uppermost that this was a person who decidedly knew her way about. Much as
+      he was prepared to dislike her, and much as he detested the vulgar methods
+      her profession typified, he could not deny that she seemed a very capable
+      sort of woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This mental concession did not prevent his fixing upon Alice, when she
+      returned to the room, a glance of obvious disapproval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Theron,&rdquo; she broke forth, to anticipate his reproach, &ldquo;I did it for the
+      best. The Pierces would have got her if I hadn't cut in. I thought it
+      would help to have her on our side. And, besides, I like her. She's the
+      first sister I've seen since we've been in this hole that's had a kind
+      word for me&mdash;or&mdash;or sympathized with me! And&mdash;and&mdash;if
+      you're going to be offended&mdash;I shall cry!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There were real tears on her lashes, ready to make good the threat. &ldquo;Oh, I
+      guess I wouldn't,&rdquo; said Theron, with an approach to his old, half-playful
+      manner. &ldquo;If you like her, that's the chief thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice shook her tear-drops away. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she replied, with a wistful smile;
+      &ldquo;the chief thing is to have her like you. She's as smart as a steel trap&mdash;that
+      woman is&mdash;and if she took the notion, I believe she could help get us
+      a better place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The ensuing week went by with a buzz and whirl, circling about Theron
+      Ware's dizzy consciousness like some huge, impalpable teetotum sent
+      spinning under Sister Soulsby's resolute hands. Whenever his vagrant
+      memory recurred to it, in after months, he began by marvelling, and ended
+      with a shudder of repulsion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a week crowded with events, which seemed to him to shoot past so
+      swiftly that in effect they came all of a heap. He never essayed the task,
+      in retrospect, of arranging them in their order of sequence. They had,
+      however, a definite and interdependent chronology which it is worth the
+      while to trace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Soulsby brought her trunk round to the parsonage bright and early on
+      Friday morning, and took up her lodgement in the best bedroom, and her
+      headquarters in the house at large, with a cheerful and business-like
+      manner. She desired nothing so much, she said, as that people should not
+      put themselves out on her account, or allow her to get in their way. She
+      appeared to mean this, too, and to have very good ideas about securing its
+      realization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During both Friday and the following day, indeed, Theron saw her only at
+      the family meals. There she displayed a hearty relish for all that was set
+      before her which quite won Mrs. Ware's heart, and though she talked rather
+      more than Theron found himself expecting from a woman, he could not deny
+      that her conversation was both seemly and entertaining. She had evidently
+      been a great traveller, and referred to things she had seen in Savannah or
+      Montreal or Los Angeles in as matter-of-fact fashion as he could have
+      spoken of a visit to Tecumseh. Theron asked her many questions about these
+      and other far-off cities, and her answers were all so pat and showed so
+      keen and clear an eye that he began in spite of himself to think of her
+      with a certain admiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She in turn plied him with inquiries about the principal pew-holders and
+      members of his congregation&mdash;their means, their disposition, and the
+      measure of their devotion. She put these queries with such intelligence,
+      and seemed to assimilate his replies with such an alert understanding,
+      that the young minister was spurred to put dashes of character in his
+      descriptions, and set forth the idiosyncrasies and distinguishing earmarks
+      of his flock with what he felt afterward might have been too free a
+      tongue. But at the time her fine air of appreciation led him captive. He
+      gossiped about his parishioners as if he enjoyed it. He made a specially
+      happy thumb-nail sketch for her of one of his trustees, Erastus Winch, the
+      loud-mouthed, ostentatiously jovial, and really cold-hearted cheese-buyer.
+      She was particularly interested in hearing about this man. The personality
+      of Winch seemed to have impressed her, and she brought the talk back to
+      him more than once, and prompted Theron to the very threshold of
+      indiscretion in his confidences on the subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Save at meal-times, Sister Soulsby spent the two days out around among the
+      Methodists of Octavius. She had little or nothing to say about what she
+      thus saw and heard, but used it as the basis for still further inquiries.
+      She told more than once, however, of how she had been pressed here or
+      there to stay to dinner or supper, and how she had excused herself. &ldquo;I've
+      knocked about too much,&rdquo; she would explain to the Wares, &ldquo;not to fight shy
+      of random country cooking. When I find such a born cook as you are&mdash;well
+      I know when I'm well off.&rdquo; Alice flushed with pleased pride at this, and
+      Theron himself felt that their visitor showed great good sense. By
+      Saturday noon, the two women were calling each other by their first names.
+      Theron learned with a certain interest that Sister Soulsby's Christian
+      name was Candace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only natural that he should give even more thought to her than to
+      her quaint and unfamiliar old Ethiopian name. She was undoubtedly a very
+      smart woman. To his surprise she had never introduced in her talk any of
+      the stock religious and devotional phrases which official Methodists so
+      universally employed in mutual converse. She might have been an insurance
+      agent, or a school-teacher, visiting in a purely secular household, so
+      little parade of cant was there about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He caught himself wondering how old she was. She seemed to have been
+      pretty well over the whole American continent, and that must take years of
+      time. Perhaps, however, the exertion of so much travel would tend to age
+      one in appearance. Her eyes were still youthful&mdash;decidedly wise eyes,
+      but still juvenile. They had sparkled with almost girlish merriment at
+      some of his jokes. She turned them about a good deal when she spoke,
+      making their glances fit and illustrate the things she said. He had never
+      met any one whose eyes played so constant and prominent a part in their
+      owner's conversation. Theron had never seen a play; but he had encountered
+      the portraits of famous queens of the drama several times in illustrated
+      papers or shop windows, and it occurred to him that some of the more
+      marked contortions of Sister Soulsby's eyes&mdash;notably a trick she had
+      of rolling them swiftly round and plunging them, so to speak, into an
+      intent, yearning, one might almost say devouring, gaze at the speaker&mdash;were
+      probably employed by eminent actresses like Ristori and Fanny Davenport.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rest of Sister Soulsby was undoubtedly subordinated in interest to
+      those eyes of hers. Sometimes her face seemed to be reviving temporarily a
+      comeliness which had been constant in former days; then again it would
+      look decidedly, organically, plain. It was the worn and loose-skinned face
+      of a nervous, middle-aged woman, who had had more than her share of
+      trouble, and drank too much tea. She wore the collar of her dress rather
+      low; and Theron found himself wondering at this, because, though long and
+      expansive, her neck certainly showed more cords and cavities than
+      consorted with his vague ideal of statuesque beauty. Then he wondered at
+      himself for thinking about it, and abruptly reined up his fancy, only to
+      find that it was playing with speculations as to whether her yellowish
+      complexion was due to that tea-drinking or came to her as a legacy of
+      Southern blood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He knew that she was born in the South because she said so. From the same
+      source he learned that her father had been a wealthy planter, who was
+      ruined by the war, and sank into a premature grave under the weight of his
+      accumulated losses. The large dark rings around her eyes grew deeper still
+      in their shadows when she told about this, and her ordinarily sharp voice
+      took on a mellow cadence, with a soft, drawling accent, turning U's into
+      O's, and having no R's to speak of. Theron had imbibed somewhere in early
+      days the conviction that the South was the land of romance, of cavaliers
+      and gallants and black eyes flashing behind mantillas and outspread fans,
+      and somehow when Sister Soulsby used this intonation she suggested all
+      these things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But almost all her talk was in another key&mdash;a brisk, direct,
+      idiomatic manner of speech, with an intonation hinting at no section in
+      particular. It was merely that of the city-dweller as distinguished from
+      the rustic. She was of about Alice's height, perhaps a shade taller. It
+      did not escape the attention of the Wares that she wore clothes of a more
+      stylish cut and a livelier arrangement of hues than any Alice had ever
+      dared own, even in lax-minded Tyre. The two talked of this in their room
+      on Friday night; and Theron explained that congregations would tolerate
+      things of this sort with a stranger which would be sharply resented in the
+      case of local folk whom they controlled. It was on this occasion that
+      Alice in turn told Theron she was sure Mrs. Soulsby had false teeth&mdash;a
+      confidence which she immediately regretted as an act of treachery to her
+      sex.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Saturday afternoon, toward evening, Brother Soulsby arrived, and was
+      guided to the parsonage by his wife, who had gone to the depot to meet
+      him. They must have talked over the situation pretty thoroughly on the
+      way, for by the time the new-comer had washed his face and hands and put
+      on a clean collar, Sister Soulsby was ready to announce her plan of
+      campaign in detail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband was a man of small stature and, like herself, of uncertain
+      age. He had a gentle, if rather dry, clean-shaven face, and wore his
+      dust-colored hair long behind. His little figure was clad in black clothes
+      of a distinctively clerical fashion, and he had a white neck-cloth neatly
+      tied under his collar. The Wares noted that he looked clean and amiable
+      rather than intellectually or spiritually powerful, as he took the vacant
+      seat between theirs, and joined them in concentrating attention upon Mrs.
+      Soulsby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This lady, holding herself erect and alert on the edge of the low, big
+      easy-chair had the air of presiding over a meeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My idea is,&rdquo; she began, with an easy implication that no one else's idea
+      was needed, &ldquo;that your Quarterly Conference, when it meets on Monday, must
+      be adjourned to Tuesday. We will have the people all out tomorrow morning
+      to love-feast, and announcement can be made there, and at the morning
+      service afterward, that a series of revival meetings are to be begun that
+      same evening. Mr. Soulsby and I can take charge in the evening, and we'll
+      see to it that THAT packs the house&mdash;fills the church to overflowing
+      Monday evening. Then we'll quietly turn the meeting into a debt-raising
+      convention, before they know where they are, and we'll wipe off the best
+      part of the load. Now, don't you see,&rdquo; she turned her eyes full upon
+      Theron as she spoke, &ldquo;you want to hold your Quarterly Conference AFTER
+      this money's been raised, not before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see what you mean,&rdquo; Mr. Ware responded gravely. &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what!&rdquo; Sister Soulsby interjected, with vivacity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Theron, picking his words, &ldquo;in the first place, it rests with
+      the Presiding Elder to say whether an adjournment can be made until
+      Tuesday, not with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's all right. Leave that to me,&rdquo; said the lady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the second place,&rdquo; Theron went on, still more hesitatingly, &ldquo;there
+      seems a certain&mdash;what shall I say?&mdash;indirection in&mdash;in&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In getting them together for a revival, and springing a debt-raising on
+      them?&rdquo; Sister Soulsby put in. &ldquo;Why, man alive, that's the best part of it.
+      You ought to be getting some notion by this time what these Octavius folks
+      of yours are like. I've only been here two days, but I've got their
+      measure down to an allspice. Supposing you were to announce tomorrow that
+      the debt was to be raised Monday. How many men with bank-accounts would
+      turn up, do you think? You could put them all in your eye, sir&mdash;all
+      in your eye!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very possibly you're right,&rdquo; faltered the young minister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right? Why, of course I'm right,&rdquo; she said, with placid confidence.
+      &ldquo;You've got to take folks as you find them; and you've got to find them
+      the best way you can. One place can be worked, managed, in one way, and
+      another needs quite a different way, and both ways would be dead frosts&mdash;complete
+      failures&mdash;in a third.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Soulsby coughed softly here, and shuffled his feet for an instant
+      on the carpet. His wife resumed her remarks with slightly abated
+      animation, and at a slower pace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My experience,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;has shown me that the Apostle was right. To
+      properly serve the cause, one must be all things to all men. I have known
+      very queer things indeed turn out to be means of grace. You simply CAN'T
+      get along without some of the wisdom of the serpent. We are commanded to
+      have it, for that matter. And now, speaking of that, do you know when the
+      Presiding Elder arrives in town today, and where he is going to eat supper
+      and sleep?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron shook his head. &ldquo;All I know is he isn't likely to come here,&rdquo; he
+      said, and added sadly, &ldquo;I'm afraid he's not an admirer of mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps that's not all his fault,&rdquo; commented Sister Soulsby. &ldquo;I'll tell
+      you something. He came in on the same train as my husband, and that old
+      trustee Pierce of yours was waiting for him with his buggy, and I saw like
+      a flash what was in the wind, and the minute the train stopped I caught
+      the Presiding Elder, and invited him in your name to come right here and
+      stay; told him you and Alice were just set on his coming&mdash;wouldn't
+      take no for an answer. Of course he couldn't come&mdash;I knew well enough
+      he had promised old Pierce&mdash;but we got in our invitation anyway, and
+      it won't do you any harm. Now, that's what I call having some gumption&mdash;wisdom
+      of the serpent, and so on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sure,&rdquo; remarked Alice, &ldquo;I should have been mortified to death if he
+      had come. We lost the extension-leaf to our table in moving, and four is
+      all it'll seat decently.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby smiled winningly into the wife's honest face. &ldquo;Don't you
+      see, dear,&rdquo; she explained patiently, &ldquo;I only asked him because I knew he
+      couldn't come. A little butter spreads a long way, if it's only
+      intelligently warmed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was certainly very ingenious of you,&rdquo; Theron began almost stiffly.
+      Then he yielded to the humanities, and with a kindling smile added, &ldquo;And
+      it was as kind as kind could be. I'm afraid you're wrong about it's doing
+      me any good, but I can see how well you meant it, and I'm grateful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We COULD have sneaked in the kitchen table, perhaps, while he was out in
+      the garden, and put on the extra long tablecloth,&rdquo; interjected Alice,
+      musingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby smiled again at Sister Ware, but without any words this
+      time; and Alice on the instant rose, with the remark that she must be
+      going out to see about supper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to insist on coming out to help you,&rdquo; Mrs. Soulsby declared,
+      &ldquo;as soon as I've talked over one little matter with your husband. Oh, yes,
+      you must let me this time. I insist!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As the kitchen door closed behind Mrs. Ware, a swift and apparently
+      significant glance shot its way across from Sister Soulsby's roving,
+      eloquent eyes to the calmer and smaller gray orbs of her husband. He rose
+      to his feet, made some little explanation about being a gardener himself,
+      and desiring to inspect more closely some rhododendrons he had noticed in
+      the garden, and forthwith moved decorously out by the other door into the
+      front hall. They heard his footsteps on the gravel beneath the window
+      before Mrs. Soulsby spoke again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're right about the Presiding Elder, and you're wrong,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He
+      isn't what one might call precisely in love with you. Oh, I know the story&mdash;how
+      you got into debt at Tyre, and he stepped in and insisted on your being
+      denied Tecumseh and sent here instead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;HE was responsible for that, then, was he?&rdquo; broke in Theron, with
+      contracted brows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, don't you make any effort to find out anything at ALL?&rdquo; she asked
+      pertly enough, but with such obvious good-nature that he could not but
+      have pleasure in her speech. &ldquo;Why, of course he did it! Who else did you
+      suppose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the young minister, despondently, &ldquo;if he's as much against me
+      as all that, I might as well hang up my fiddle and go home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby gave a little involuntary groan of impatience. She bent
+      forward, and, lifting her eyes, rolled them at him in a curve of downward
+      motion which suggested to his fancy the image of two eagles in a concerted
+      pounce upon a lamb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My friend,&rdquo; she began, with a new note of impressiveness in her voice,
+      &ldquo;if you'll pardon my saying it, you haven't got the spunk of a mouse. If
+      you're going to lay down, and let everybody trample over you just as they
+      please, you're right! You MIGHT as well go home. But now here, this is
+      what I wanted to say to you: Do you just keep your hands off these next
+      few days, and leave this whole thing to me. I'll pull it into shipshape
+      for you. No&mdash;wait a minute&mdash;don't interrupt now. I have taken a
+      liking to you. You've got brains, and you've got human nature in you, and
+      heart. What you lack is SABE&mdash;common-sense. You'll get that, too, in
+      time, and meanwhile I'm not going to stand by and see you cut up and fed
+      to the dogs for want of it. I'll get you through this scrape, and put you
+      on your feet again, right-side-up-with care, because, as I said, I like
+      you. I like your wife, too, mind. She's a good, honest little soul, and
+      she worships the very ground you tread on. Of course, as long as people
+      WILL marry in their teens, the wrong people will get yoked up together.
+      But that's neither here nor there. She's a kind sweet little body, and
+      she's devoted to you, and it isn't every intellectual man that gets even
+      that much. But now it's a go, is it? You promise to keep quiet, do you,
+      and leave the whole show absolutely to me? Shake hands on it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby had risen, and stood now holding out her hand in a frank,
+      manly fashion. Theron looked at the hand, and made mental notes that there
+      were a good many veins discernible on the small wrist, and that the
+      forearm seemed to swell out more than would have been expected in a woman
+      producing such a general effect of leanness. He caught the shine of a thin
+      bracelet-band of gold under the sleeve. A delicate, significant odor just
+      hinted its presence in the air about this outstretched arm&mdash;something
+      which was not a perfume, yet deserved as gracious a name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose to his feet, and took the proffered hand with a deliberate
+      gesture, as if he had been cautiously weighing all the possible arguments
+      for and against this momentous compact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I promise,&rdquo; he said gravely, and the two palms squeezed themselves
+      together in an earnest clasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right you are,&rdquo; exclaimed the lady, once more with cheery vivacity.
+      &ldquo;Mind, when it's all over, I'm going to give you a good, serious,
+      downright talking to&mdash;a regular hoeing-over. I'm not sure I shan't
+      give you a sound shaking into the bargain. You need it. And now I'm going
+      out to help Alice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Reverend Mr. Ware remained standing after his new friend had left the
+      room, and his meditative face wore an even unusual air of abstraction. He
+      strolled aimlessly over, after a time, to the desk by the window, and
+      stood there looking out at the slight figure of Brother Soulsby, who was
+      bending over and attentively regarding some pink blossoms on a shrub
+      through what seemed to be a pocket magnifying-glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What remained uppermost in his mind was not this interesting woman's
+      confident pledge of championship in his material difficulties. He found
+      himself dwelling instead upon her remark about the incongruous results of
+      early marriages. He wondered idly if the little man in the white tie,
+      fussing out there over that rhododendron-bush, had figured in her thoughts
+      as an example of these evils. Then he reflected that they had been
+      mentioned in clear relation to talk about Alice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that he faced this question, it was as if he had been consciously
+      ignoring and putting it aside for a long time. How was it, he asked
+      himself now, that Alice, who had once seemed so bright and keen-witted,
+      who had in truth started out immeasurably his superior in swiftness of
+      apprehension and readiness in humorous quips and conceits, should have
+      grown so dull? For she was undoubtedly slow to understand things nowadays.
+      Her absurd lugging in of the extension-table problem, when the great
+      strategic point of that invitation foisted upon the Presiding Elder came
+      up, was only the latest sample of a score of these heavy-minded
+      exhibitions that recalled themselves to him. And outsiders were apparently
+      beginning to notice it. He knew by intuition what those phrases, &ldquo;good,
+      honest little soul&rdquo; and &ldquo;kind, sweet little body&rdquo; signified, when another
+      woman used them to a husband about his wife. The very employment of that
+      word &ldquo;little&rdquo; was enough, considering that there was scarcely more than a
+      hair's difference between Mrs. Soulsby and Alice, and that they were both
+      rather tall than otherwise, as the stature of women went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What she had said about the chronic misfortunes of intellectual men in
+      such matters gave added point to those meaning phrases. Nobody could deny
+      that geniuses and men of conspicuous talent had as a rule, all through
+      history, contracted unfortunate marriages. In almost every case where
+      their wives were remembered at all, it was on account of their abnormal
+      stupidity, or bad temper, or something of that sort. Take Xantippe, for
+      example, and Shakespeare's wife, and&mdash;and&mdash;well, there was
+      Byron, and Bulwer-Lytton, and ever so many others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course there was nothing to be done about it. These things happened,
+      and one could only put the best possible face on them, and live one's
+      appointed life as patiently and contentedly as might be. And Alice
+      undoubtedly merited all the praise which had been so generously bestowed
+      upon her. She was good and honest and kindly, and there could be no doubt
+      whatever as to her utter devotion to him. These were tangible, solid
+      qualities, which must always secure respect for her. It was true that she
+      no longer seemed to be very popular among people. He questioned whether
+      men, for instance, like Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar would care much
+      about her. Visions of the wifeless and academic calm in which these men
+      spent their lives&mdash;an existence consecrated to literature and
+      knowledge and familiarity with all the loftiest and noblest thoughts of
+      the past&mdash;rose and enveloped him in a cloud of depression. No such
+      lot would be his! He must labor along among ignorant and spiteful
+      narrow-minded people to the end of his days, pocketing their insults and
+      fawning upon the harsh hands of jealous nonentities who happened to be his
+      official masters, just to keep a roof over his head&mdash;or rather
+      Alice's. He must sacrifice everything to this, his ambitions, his
+      passionate desires to do real good in the world on a large scale, his
+      mental freedom, yes, even his chance of having truly elevating,
+      intellectual friendships. For it was plain enough that the men whose
+      friendship would be of genuine and stimulating profit to him would not
+      like her. Now that he thought of it, she seemed latterly to make no
+      friends at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly, as he watched in a blank sort of way Brother Soulsby take out a
+      penknife, and lop an offending twig from a rose-bush against the fence,
+      something occurred to him. There was a curious exception to that rule of
+      Alice's isolation. She had made at least one friend. Levi Gorringe seemed
+      to like her extremely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As if his mind had been a camera, Theron snapped a shutter down upon this
+      odd, unbidden idea, and turned away from the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sounds of an active, almost strenuous conversation in female voices
+      came from the kitchen. Theron opened the door noiselessly, and put in his
+      head, conscious of something furtive in his intention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must dreen every drop of water off the spinach, mind, before you put
+      it over, or else&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Sister Soulsby's sharp and penetrating tones which came to him.
+      Theron closed the door again, and surrendered himself once more to the
+      circling whirl of his thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A love-feast at nine in the morning opened the public services of a Sunday
+      still memorable in the annals of Octavius Methodism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This ceremony, which four times a year preceded the sessions of the
+      Quarterly Conference, was not necessarily an event of importance. It was
+      an occasion upon which the brethren and sisters who clung to the
+      old-fashioned, primitive ways of the itinerant circuit-riders, let
+      themselves go with emphasized independence, putting up more vehement
+      prayers than usual, and adding a special fervor of noise to their &ldquo;Amens!&rdquo;
+       and other interjections&mdash;and that was all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Theron's first love-feast in Octavius, and as the big class-room in
+      the church basement began to fill up, and he noted how the men with ultra
+      radical views and the women clad in the most ostentatious drabs and grays
+      were crowding into the front seats, he felt his spirits sinking. He had
+      literally to force himself from sentence to sentence, when the time came
+      for him to rise and open the proceedings with an exhortation. He had
+      eagerly offered this function to the Presiding Elder, the Rev. Aziel P.
+      Larrabee, who sat in severe silence on the little platform behind him, but
+      had been informed that the dignitary would lead off in giving testimony
+      later on. So Theron, feeling all the while the hostile eyes of the Elder
+      burning holes in his back, dragged himself somehow through the task. He
+      had never known any such difficulty of speech before. The relief was
+      almost overwhelming when he came to the customary part where all are
+      adjured to be as brief as possible in witnessing for the Lord, because the
+      time belongs to all the people, and the Discipline forbids the feast to
+      last more than ninety minutes. He delivered this injunction to brevity
+      with marked earnestness, and then sat down abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was some rather boisterous singing, during which the stewards,
+      beginning with the platform, passed plates of bread cut in small cubes,
+      and water in big plated pitchers and tumblers, about among the
+      congregation, threading their way between the long wooden benches
+      ordinarily occupied at this hour by the children of the Sunday-school, and
+      helping each brother and sister in turn. They held by the old custom, here
+      in Octavius, and all along the seats the sexes alternated, as they do at a
+      polite dinner-table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron impassively watched the familiar scene. The early nervousness had
+      passed away. He felt now that he was not in the least afraid of these
+      people, even with the Presiding Elder thrown in. Folks who sang with such
+      unintelligence, and who threw themselves with such undignified fervor into
+      this childish business of the bread and water, could not be formidable
+      antagonists for a man of intellect. He had never realized before what a
+      spectacle the Methodist love-feast probably presented to outsiders. What
+      must they think of it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had noticed that the Soulsbys sat together, in the centre and toward
+      the front. Next to Brother Soulsby sat Alice. He thought she looked pale
+      and preoccupied, and set it down in passing to her innate distaste for the
+      somber garments she was wearing, and for the company she perforce found
+      herself in. Another head was in the way, and for a time Theron did not
+      observe who sat beside Alice on the other side. When at last he saw that
+      it was Levi Gorringe, his instinct was to wonder what the lawyer must be
+      saying to himself about these noisy and shallow enthusiasts. A recurring
+      emotion of loyalty to the simple people among whom, after all, he had
+      lived his whole life, prompted him to feel that it wasn't wholly nice of
+      Gorringe to come and enjoy this revelation of their foolish side, as if it
+      were a circus. There was some vague memory in his mind which associated
+      Gorringe with other love-feasts, and with a cynical attitude toward them.
+      Oh, yes! he had told how he went to one just for the sake of sitting
+      beside the girl he admired&mdash;and was pursuing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stewards had completed their round, and the loud, discordant singing
+      came to an end. There ensued a little pause, during which Theron turned to
+      the Presiding Elder with a gesture of invitation to take charge of the
+      further proceedings. The Elder responded with another gesture, calling his
+      attention to something going on in front.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother and Sister Soulsby, to the considerable surprise of everybody, had
+      risen to their feet, and were standing in their places, quite motionless,
+      and with an air of professional self-assurance dimly discernible under a
+      large show of humility. They stood thus until complete silence had been
+      secured. Then the woman, lifting her head, began to sing. The words were
+      &ldquo;Rock of Ages,&rdquo; but no one present had heard the tune to which she wedded
+      them. Her voice was full and very sweet, and had in it tender cadences
+      which all her hearers found touching. She knew how to sing, and she put
+      forth the words so that each was distinctly intelligible. There came a
+      part where Brother Soulsby, lifting his head in turn, took up a tuneful
+      second to her air. Although the two did not, as one could hear by
+      listening closely, sing the same words at the same time, they produced
+      none the less most moving and delightful harmonies of sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The experience was so novel and charming that listeners ran ahead in their
+      minds to fix the number of verses there were in the hymn, and to hope that
+      none would be left out. Toward the end, when some of the intolerably
+      self-conceited local singers, fancying they had caught the tune, started
+      to join in, they were stopped by an indignant &ldquo;sh-h!&rdquo; which rose from all
+      parts of the class-room; and the Soulsbys, with a patient and pensive
+      kindliness written on their uplifted faces, gave that verse over again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What followed seemed obviously restrained and modified by the effect of
+      this unlooked-for and tranquillizing overture. The Presiding Elder was
+      known to enjoy visits to old-fashioned congregations like that of
+      Octavius, where he could indulge to the full his inner passion for
+      high-pitched passionate invocations and violent spiritual demeanor, but
+      this time he spoke temperately, almost soothingly. The most tempestuous of
+      the local witnesses for the Lord gave in their testimony in relatively
+      pacific tones, under the influence of the spell which good music had laid
+      upon the gathering. There was the deepest interest as to what the two
+      visitors would do in this way. Brother Soulsby spoke first, very briefly
+      and in well rounded and well-chosen, if conventional, phrases. His wife,
+      following him, delivered in a melodious monotone some equally hackneyed
+      remarks. The assemblage, listening in rapt attention, felt the suggestion
+      of reserved power in every sentence she uttered, and burst forth, as she
+      dropped into her seat, in a loud chorus of approving ejaculations. The
+      Soulsbys had captured Octavius with their first outer skirmish line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everything seemed to move forward now with a new zest and spontaneity.
+      Theron had picked out for the occasion the best of those sermons which he
+      had prepared in Tyre, at the time when he was justifying his ambition to
+      be accounted a pulpit orator. It was orthodox enough, but had been planned
+      as the framework for picturesque and emotional rhetoric rather than
+      doctrinal edification. He had never dreamed of trying it on Octavius
+      before, and only on the yesterday had quavered at his own daring in
+      choosing it now. Nothing but the desire to show Sister Soulsby what was in
+      him had held him to the selection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something of this same desire no doubt swayed and steadied him now in the
+      pulpit. The labored slowness of his beginning seemed to him to be due to
+      nervous timidity, until suddenly, looking down into those big eyes of
+      Sister Soulsby's, which were bent gravely upon him from where she sat
+      beside Alice in the minister's pew, he remembered that it was instead the
+      studied deliberation which art had taught him. He went on, feeling more
+      and more that the skill and histrionic power of his best days were
+      returning to him, were as marked as ever&mdash;nay, had never triumphed
+      before as they were triumphing now. The congregation watched and listened
+      with open, steadfast eyes and parted lips. For the first time in all that
+      weary quarter, their faces shone. The sustaining sparkle of their gaze
+      lifted him to a peroration unrivalled in his own recollection of himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down, and bent his head forward upon the open Bible, breathing
+      hard, but suffused with a glow of satisfaction. His ears caught the music
+      of that sighing rustle through the audience which bespeaks a profound
+      impression. He could scarcely keep the fingers of his hands, covering his
+      bowed face in a devotional posture as they were, from drumming a jubilant
+      tattoo. His pulses did this in every vein, throbbing with excited
+      exultation. The insistent whim seized him, as he still bent thus before
+      his people, to whisper to his own heart, &ldquo;At last!&mdash;The dogs!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The announcement that in the evening a series of revival meetings was to
+      be inaugurated, had been made at the love-feast, and it was repeated now
+      from the pulpit, with the added statement that for the once the
+      class-meetings usually following this morning service would be suspended.
+      Then Theron came down the steps, conscious after a fashion that the
+      Presiding Elder had laid a propitiatory hand on his shoulder and spoken
+      amiably about the sermon, and that several groups of more or less
+      important parishioners were waiting in the aisle and the vestibule to
+      shake hands and tell him how much they had enjoyed the sermon. His mind
+      perversely kept hold of the thought that all this came too late. He
+      politely smiled his way along out, and, overtaking the Soulsbys and his
+      wife near the parsonage gate, went in with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the cold, picked-up noonday meal which was the Sunday rule of the
+      house, Theron rather expected that his guests would talk about the sermon,
+      or at any rate about the events of the morning. A Sabbath chill seemed to
+      have settled upon both their tongues. They ate almost in silence, and
+      their sparse remarks touched upon topics far removed from church affairs.
+      Alice too, seemed strangely disinclined to conversation. The husband knew
+      her face and its varying moods so well that he could see she was laboring
+      under some very powerful and deep emotion. No doubt it was the sermon, the
+      oratorical swing of which still tingled in his own blood, that had so
+      affected her. If she had said so, it would have pleased him, but she said
+      nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After dinner, Brother Soulsby disappeared in his bedroom, with the remark
+      that he guessed he would lie down awhile. Sister Soulsby put on her
+      bonnet, and, explaining that she always prepared herself for an evening's
+      work by a long solitary walk, quitted the house. Alice, after she had put
+      the dinner things away, went upstairs, and stayed there. Left to himself,
+      Theron spent the afternoon in the easy-chair, and, in the intervals of
+      confused introspection, read &ldquo;Recollections of my Youth&rdquo; through again
+      from cover to cover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went through the remarkable experiences attending the opening of the
+      revival, when evening came, as one in a dream. Long before the hour for
+      the service arrived, the sexton came in to tell him that the church was
+      already nearly full, and that it was going to be impossible to present any
+      distinction in the matter of pews. When the party from the parsonage went
+      over&mdash;after another cold and mostly silent meal&mdash;it was to find
+      the interior of the church densely packed, and people being turned away
+      from the doors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron was supposed to preside over what followed, and he did sit on the
+      central chair in the pulpit, between the Presiding Elder and Brother
+      Soulsby, and on the several needful occasions did rise and perfunctorily
+      make the formal remarks required of him. The Elder preached a short, but
+      vigorously phrased sermon. The Soulsbys sang three or four times&mdash;on
+      each occasion with familiar hymnal words set to novel, concerted music&mdash;and
+      then separately exhorted the assemblage. The husband's part seemed well
+      done. If his speech lacked some of the fire of the divine girdings which
+      older Methodists recalled, it still led straight, and with kindling
+      fervency, up to a season of power. The wife took up the word as he sat
+      down. She had risen from one of the side-seats; and, speaking as she
+      walked, she moved forward till she stood within the altar-rail,
+      immediately under the pulpit, and from this place, facing the listening
+      throng, she delivered her harangue. Those who watched her words most
+      intently got the least sense of meaning from them. The phrases were all
+      familiar enough&mdash;&ldquo;Jesus a very present help,&rdquo; &ldquo;Sprinkled by the
+      Blood,&rdquo; &ldquo;Comforted by the Word,&rdquo; &ldquo;Sanctified by the Spirit,&rdquo; &ldquo;Born into
+      the Kingdom,&rdquo; and a hundred others&mdash;but it was as in the case of her
+      singing: the words were old; the music was new.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What Sister Soulsby said did not matter. The way she said it&mdash;the
+      splendid, searching sweep of her great eyes; the vibrating roll of her
+      voice, now full of tears, now scornful, now boldly, jubilantly triumphant;
+      the sympathetic swaying of her willowy figure under the stress of her
+      eloquence&mdash;was all wonderful. When she had finished, and stood,
+      flushed and panting, beneath the shadow of the pulpit, she held up a hand
+      deprecatingly as the resounding &ldquo;Amens!&rdquo; and &ldquo;Bless the Lords!&rdquo; began to
+      well up about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have heard us sing,&rdquo; she said, smiling to apologize for her shortness
+      of breath. &ldquo;Now we want to hear you sing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband had risen as she spoke, and on the instant, with a far greater
+      volume of voice than they had hitherto disclosed, the two began &ldquo;From
+      Greenland's Icy Mountains,&rdquo; in the old, familiar tune. It did not need
+      Sister Soulsby's urgent and dramatic gesture to lift people to their feet.
+      The whole assemblage sprang up, and, under the guidance of these two
+      powerful leading voices, thundered the hymn out as Octavius had never
+      heard it before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While its echoes were still alive, the woman began speaking again. &ldquo;Don't
+      sit down!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;You would stand up if the President of the United
+      States was going by, even if he was only going fishing. How much more
+      should you stand up in honor of living souls passing forward to find their
+      Saviour!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The psychological moment was upon them. Groans and cries arose, and a
+      palpable ferment stirred the throng. The exhortation to sinners to declare
+      themselves, to come to the altar, was not only on the revivalist's lips:
+      it seemed to quiver in the very air, to be borne on every inarticulate
+      exclamation in the clamor of the brethren. A young woman, with a dazed and
+      startled look in her eyes, rose in the body of the church tremblingly
+      hesitated for a moment, and then, with bowed head and blushing cheeks,
+      pressed her way out from the end of a crowded pew and down the aisle to
+      the rail. A triumphant outburst of welcoming ejaculations swelled to the
+      roof as she knelt there, and under its impetus others followed her
+      example. With interspersed snatches of song and shouted encouragements the
+      excitement reached its height only when twoscore people, mostly young,
+      were tightly clustered upon their knees about the rail, and in the space
+      opening upon the aisle. Above the confusion of penitential sobs and moans,
+      and the hysterical murmurings of members whose conviction of entire
+      sanctity kept them in their seats, could be heard the voices of the
+      Presiding Elder, the Soulsbys, and the elderly deacons of the church, who
+      moved about among the kneeling mourners, bending over them and patting
+      their shoulders, and calling out to them: &ldquo;Fasten your thoughts on Jesus!&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;Oh, the Precious Blood!&rdquo; &ldquo;Blessed be His Name!&rdquo; &ldquo;Seek Him, and you shall
+      find Him!&rdquo; &ldquo;Cling to Jesus, and Him Crucified!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Theron Ware did not, with the others, descend from the pulpit.
+      Seated where he could not see Sister Soulsby, he had failed utterly to be
+      moved by the wave of enthusiasm she had evoked. What he heard her say
+      disappointed him. He had expected from her more originality, more spice of
+      her own idiomatic, individual sort. He viewed with a cold sense of
+      aloofness the evidences of her success when they began to come forward and
+      abase themselves at the altar. The instant resolve that, come what might,
+      he would not go down there among them, sprang up ready-made in his mind.
+      He saw his two companions pass him and descend the pulpit stairs, and
+      their action only hardened his resolution. If an excuse were needed, he
+      was presiding, and the place to preside in was the pulpit. But he waived
+      in his mind the whole question of an excuse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a little, he put his hand over his face, leaning the elbow forward
+      on the reading-desk. The scene below would have thrilled him to the marrow
+      six months&mdash;yes, three months ago. He put a finger across his eyes
+      now, to half shut it out. The spectacle of these silly young &ldquo;mourners&rdquo;&mdash;kneeling
+      they knew not why, trembling at they could not tell what, pledging
+      themselves frantically to dogmas and mysteries they knew nothing of, under
+      the influence of a hubbub of outcries as meaningless in their way, and
+      inspiring in much the same way, as the racket of a fife and drum corps&mdash;the
+      spectacle saddened and humiliated him now. He was conscious of a dawning
+      sense of shame at being even tacitly responsible for such a thing. His
+      fancy conjured up the idea of Dr. Ledsmar coming in and beholding this
+      maudlin and unseemly scene, and he felt his face grow hot at the bare
+      thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking through his fingers, Theron all at once saw something which caught
+      at his breath with a sharp clutch. Alice had risen from the minister's pew&mdash;the
+      most conspicuous one in the church&mdash;and was moving down the aisle
+      toward the rail, her uplifted face chalk-like in its whiteness, and her
+      eyes wide-open, looking straight ahead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young pastor could scarcely credit his sight. He thrust aside his
+      hand, and bent forward, only to see his wife sink upon her knees among the
+      rest, and to hear this notable accession to the &ldquo;mourners&rdquo; hailed by a
+      tumult of approving shouts. Then, remembering himself, he drew back and
+      put up his hand, shutting out the strange scene altogether. To see nothing
+      at all was a relief, and under cover he closed his eyes, and bit his teeth
+      together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A fresh outburst of thanksgivings, spreading noisily through the
+      congregation, prompted him to peer through his fingers again. Levi
+      Gorringe was making his way down the aisle&mdash;was at the moment quite
+      in front. Theron found himself watching this man with the stern composure
+      of a fatalist. The clamant brethren down below were stirred to new
+      excitement by the thought that the sceptical lawyer, so long with them,
+      yet not of them, had been humbled and won by the outpourings of the
+      Spirit. Theron's perceptions were keener. He knew that Gorringe was coming
+      forward to kneel beside Alice; The knowledge left him curiously
+      undisturbed. He saw the lawyer advance, gently insinuate himself past the
+      form of some kneeling mourner who was in his way, and drop on his knees
+      close beside the bowed figure of Alice. The two touched shoulders as they
+      bent forward beneath Sister Soulsby's outstretched hands, held over them
+      as in a blessing. Theron looked fixedly at them, and professed to himself
+      that he was barely interested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little afterward, he was standing up in his place, and reading aloud a
+      list of names which one of the stewards had given him. They were the names
+      of those who had asked that evening to be taken into the church as members
+      on probation. The sounds of the recent excitement were all hushed now,
+      save as two or three enthusiasts in a corner raised their voices in abrupt
+      greeting of each name in its turn, but Theron felt somehow that this noise
+      had been transferred to the inside of his head. A continuous buzzing went
+      on there, so that the sound of his voice was far-off and unfamiliar in his
+      ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He read through the list&mdash;comprising some fifteen items&mdash;and
+      pronounced the names with great distinctness. It was necessary to take
+      pains with this, because the only name his blurred eyes seemed to see
+      anywhere on the foolscap sheet was that of Levi Gorringe. When he had
+      finished and was taking his seat, some one began speaking to him from the
+      body of the church. He saw that this was the steward, who was explaining
+      to him that the most important name of the lot&mdash;that of Brother
+      Gorringe&mdash;had not been read out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron smiled and shook his head. Then, when the Presiding Elder touched
+      him on the arm, and assured him that he had not mentioned the name in
+      question, he replied quite simply, and with another smile, &ldquo;I thought it
+      was the only name I did read out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he sat down abruptly, and let his head fall to one side. There were
+      hurried movements inside the pulpit, and people in the audience had begun
+      to stand up wonderingly, when the Presiding Elder, with uplifted hands,
+      confronted them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will omit the Doxology, and depart quietly after the benediction,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;Brother Ware seems to have been overcome by the heat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When Theron woke next morning, Alice seemed to have dressed and left the
+      room&mdash;a thing which had never happened before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This fact connected itself at once in his brain with the recollection of
+      her having made an exhibition of herself the previous evening&mdash;going
+      forward before all eyes to join the unconverted and penitent sinners, as
+      if she were some tramp or shady female, instead of an educated lady, a
+      professing member from her girlhood, and a minister's wife. It crossed his
+      mind that probably she had risen and got away noiselessly, for very shame
+      at looking him in the face, after such absurd behavior.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he remembered more, and grasped the situation. He had fainted in
+      church, and had been brought home and helped to bed. Dim memories of
+      unaccustomed faces in the bedroom, of nauseous drugs and hushed voices,
+      came to him out of the night-time. Now that he thought of it, he was a
+      sick man. Having settled this, he went off to sleep again, a feverish and
+      broken sleep, and remained in this state most of the time for the
+      following twenty-four hours. In the brief though numerous intervals of
+      waking, he found certain things clear in his mind. One was that he was
+      annoyed with Alice, but would dissemble his feelings. Another was that it
+      was much pleasanter to be ill than to be forced to attend and take part in
+      those revival meetings. These two ideas came and went in a lazy, drowsy
+      fashion, mixing themselves up with other vagrant fancies, yet always
+      remaining on top.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the evening the singing from the church next door filled his room. The
+      Soulsbys' part of it was worth keeping awake for. He turned over and
+      deliberately dozed when the congregation sang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice came up a number of times during the day to ask how he felt, and to
+      bring him broth or toast-water. On several occasions, when he heard her
+      step, the perverse inclination mastered him to shut his eyes, and pretend
+      to be asleep, so that she might tip-toe out again. She had a depressed and
+      thoughtful air, and spoke to him like one whose mind was on something
+      else. Neither of them alluded to what had happened the previous evening.
+      Toward the close of the long day, she came to ask him whether he would
+      prefer her to remain in the house, instead of attending the meeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go, by all means,&rdquo; he said almost curtly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Presiding Elder and the Sunday-school superintendent called early
+      Tuesday morning at the parsonage to make brotherly inquiries, and Theron
+      was feeling so much better that he himself suggested their coming upstairs
+      to see him. The Elder was in good spirits; he smiled approvingly, and even
+      put in a jocose word or two while the superintendent sketched for the
+      invalid in a cheerful way the leading incidents of the previous evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been an enormous crowd, even greater than that of Sunday night,
+      and everybody had been looking forward to another notable and exciting
+      season of grace. These expectations were especially heightened when Sister
+      Soulsby ascended the pulpit stairs and took charge of the proceedings. She
+      deferred to Paul's views about women preachers on Sundays, she said; but
+      on weekdays she had just as much right to snatch brands from the burning
+      as Paul, or Peter, or any other man. She went on like that, in a breezy,
+      off-hand fashion which tickled the audience immensely, and led to the
+      liveliest anticipations of what would happen when she began upon the
+      evening's harvest of souls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was something else that happened. At a signal from Sister Soulsby
+      the steward got up, and, in an unconcerned sort of way, went through the
+      throng to the rear of the church, locked the doors, and put the keys in
+      their pockets. The sister dryly explained now to the surprised
+      congregation that there was a season for all things, and that on the
+      present occasion they would suspend the glorious work of redeeming fallen
+      human nature, and take up instead the equally noble task of raising some
+      fifteen hundred dollars which the church needed in its business. The doors
+      would only be opened again when this had been accomplished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The brethren were much taken aback by this trick, and they permitted
+      themselves to exchange a good many scowling and indignant glances, the
+      while their professional visitors sang another of their delightfully novel
+      sacred duets. Its charm of harmony for once fell upon unsympathetic ears.
+      But then Sister Soulsby began another monologue, defending this way of
+      collecting money, chaffing the assemblage with bright-eyed impudence on
+      their having been trapped, and scoring, one after another, neat and jocose
+      little personal points on local characteristics, at which everybody but
+      the individual touched grinned broadly. She was so droll and cheeky, and
+      withal effective in her talk, that she quite won the crowd over. She told
+      a story about a woodchuck which fairly brought down the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man,&rdquo; she began, with a quizzical twinkle in her eye, &ldquo;told me once
+      about hunting a woodchuck with a pack of dogs, and they chased it so hard
+      that it finally escaped only by climbing a butternut-tree. 'But, my
+      friend,' I said to him, 'woodchucks can't climb trees&mdash;butternut-trees
+      or any other kind&mdash;and you know it!' All he said in reply to me was:
+      'This woodchuck had to climb a tree!' And that's the way with this
+      congregation. You think you can't raise $1,500, but you've GOT to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So it went on. She set them all laughing; and then, with a twist of the
+      eyes and a change of voice, lo, and behold, she had them nearly crying in
+      the same breath. Under the pressure of these jumbled emotions, brethren
+      began to rise up in their pews and say what they would give. The wonderful
+      woman had something smart and apt to say about each fresh contribution,
+      and used it to screw up the general interest a notch further toward
+      benevolent hysteria. With songs and jokes and impromptu exhortations and
+      prayers she kept the thing whirling, until a sort of duel of generosity
+      began between two of the most unlikely men&mdash;Erastus Winch and Levi
+      Gorringe. Everybody had been surprised when Winch gave his first $50; but
+      when he rose again, half an hour afterward, and said that, owing to the
+      high public position of some of the new members on probation, he foresaw a
+      great future for the church, and so felt moved to give another $25, there
+      was general amazement. Moved by a common instinct, all eyes were turned
+      upon Levi Gorringe, and he, without the slightest hesitation, stood up and
+      said he would give $100. There was something in his tone which must have
+      annoyed Brother Winch, for he shot up like a dart, and called out, &ldquo;Put me
+      down for fifty more;&rdquo; and that brought Gorringe to his feet with an added
+      $50, and then the two went on raising each other till the assemblage was
+      agape with admiring stupefaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This gladiatorial combat might have been going on till now, the
+      Sunday-school superintendent concluded, if Winch hadn't subsided. The
+      amount of the contributions hadn't been figured up yet, for Sister Soulsby
+      kept the list; but there had been a tremendous lot of money raised. Of
+      that there could be no doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Presiding Elder now told Theron that the Quarterly Conference had been
+      adjourned yesterday till today. He and Brother Davis were even now on
+      their way to attend the session in the church next door. The Elder added,
+      with an obvious kindly significance, that though Theron was too ill to
+      attend it, he guessed his absence would do him no harm. Then the two men
+      left the room, and Theron went to sleep again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another almost blank period ensued, this time lasting for forty-eight
+      hours. The young minister was enfolded in the coils of a fever of some
+      sort, which Brother Soulsby, who had dabbled considerably in medicine,
+      admitted that he was puzzled about. Sometimes he thought that it was
+      typhoid, and then again there were symptoms which looked suspiciously like
+      brain fever. The Methodists of Octavius counted no physician among their
+      numbers, and when, on the second day, Alice grew scared, and decided, with
+      Brother Soulsby's assent, to call in professional advice, the only
+      doctor's name she could recall was that of Ledsmar. She was conscious of
+      an instinctive dislike for the vague image of him her fancy had conjured
+      up, but the reflection that he was Theron's friend, and so probably would
+      be more moderate in his charges, decided her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Soulsby showed a most comforting tact and swiftness of
+      apprehension when Alice, in mentioning Dr. Ledsmar's name, disclosed by
+      her manner a fear that his being sent for would create talk among the
+      church people. He volunteered at once to act as messenger himself, and,
+      with no better guide than her dim hints at direction, found the doctor and
+      brought him back to the parsonage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar expressly disclaimed to Soulsby all pretence of professional
+      skill, and made him understand that he went along solely because he liked
+      Mr. Ware, and was interested in him, and in any case would probably be of
+      as much use as the wisest of strange physicians&mdash;a view which the
+      little revivalist received with comprehending nods of tacit acquiescence.
+      Ledsmar came, and was taken up to the sick-room. He sat on the bedside and
+      talked with Theron awhile, and then went downstairs again. To Alice's
+      anxious inquiries, he replied that it seemed to him merely a case of
+      over-work and over-worry, about which there was not the slightest occasion
+      for alarm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But he says the strangest things,&rdquo; the wife put in. &ldquo;He has been quite
+      delirious at times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That means only that his brain is taking a rest as well as his body,&rdquo;
+       remarked Ledsmar. &ldquo;That is Nature's way of securing an equilibrium of
+      repose&mdash;of recuperation. He will come out of it with his mind all the
+      fresher and clearer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe he knows shucks!&rdquo; was Alice's comment when she closed the
+      street door upon Dr. Ledsmar. &ldquo;Anybody could have come in and looked at a
+      sick man and said, 'Leave him alone.' You expect something more from a
+      doctor. It's his business to say what to do. And I suppose he'll charge
+      two dollars for just telling me that my husband was resting!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Brother Soulsby, &ldquo;he said he never practised, and that he would
+      come only as a friend.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it isn't my idea of a friend&mdash;not to prescribe a single
+      thing,&rdquo; protested Alice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet it seemed that no prescription was needed, after all. The next morning
+      Theron woke to find himself feeling quite restored in spirits and nerves.
+      He sat up in bed, and after an instant of weakly giddiness, recognized
+      that he was all right again. Greatly pleased, he got up, and proceeded to
+      dress himself. There were little recurring hints of faintness and vertigo,
+      while he was shaving, but he had the sense to refer these to the fact that
+      he was very, very hungry. He went downstairs, and smiled with the pleased
+      pride of a child at the surprise which his appearance at the door created.
+      Alice and the Soulsbys were at breakfast. He joined them, and ate
+      voraciously, declaring that it was worth a month's illness to have things
+      taste so good once more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You still look white as a sheet,&rdquo; said Alice, warningly. &ldquo;If I were you,
+      I'd be careful in my diet for a spell yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For answer, Theron let Sister Soulsby help him again to ham and eggs. He
+      talked exclusively to Sister Soulsby, or rather invited her by his manner
+      to talk to him, and listened and watched her with indolent content. There
+      was a sort of happy and purified languor in his physical and mental being,
+      which needed and appreciated just this&mdash;to sit next a bright and
+      attractive woman at a good breakfast, and be ministered to by her
+      sprightly conversation, by the flash of her informing and inspiring eyes,
+      and the nameless sense of support and repose which her near proximity
+      exhaled. He felt himself figuratively leaning against Sister Soulsby's
+      buoyant personality, and resting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Soulsby, like the intelligent creature he was, ate his breakfast
+      in peace; but Alice would interpose remarks from time to time. Theron was
+      conscious of a certain annoyance at this, and knew that he was showing it
+      by an exaggerated display of interest in everything Sister Soulsby said,
+      and persisted in it. There trembled in the background of his thoughts ever
+      and again the recollection of a grievance against his wife&mdash;an
+      offence which she had committed&mdash;but he put it aside as something to
+      be grappled and dealt with when he felt again like taking up the serious
+      and disagreeable things of life. For the moment, he desired only to be
+      amused by Sister Soulsby. Her casual mention of the fact that she and her
+      husband were taking their departure that very day, appealed to him as an
+      added reason for devoting his entire attention to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mustn't forget that famous talking-to you threatened me with&mdash;that
+      'regular hoeing-over,' you know,&rdquo; he reminded her, when he found himself
+      alone with her after breakfast. He smiled as he spoke, in frank enjoyment
+      of the prospect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby nodded, and aided with a roll of her eyes the effect of
+      mock-menace in her uplifted forefinger. &ldquo;Oh, never fear,&rdquo; she cried.
+      &ldquo;You'll catch it hot and strong. But that'll keep till afternoon. Tell me,
+      do you feel strong enough to go in next door and attend the trustees'
+      meeting this forenoon? It's rather important that you should be there, if
+      you can spur yourself up to it. By the way, you haven't asked what
+      happened at the Quarterly Conference yesterday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron sighed, and made a little grimace of repugnance. &ldquo;If you knew how
+      little I cared!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I did hope you'd forget all about mentioning
+      that&mdash;and everything else connected with&mdash;the next door. You
+      talk so much more interestingly about other things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here's gratitude for you!&rdquo; exclaimed Sister Soulsby, with a gay
+      simulation of despair. &ldquo;Why, man alive, do you know what I've done for
+      you? I got around on the Presiding Elder's blind side, I captured old
+      Pierce, I wound Winch right around my little finger, I worked two or three
+      of the class-leaders&mdash;all on your account. The result was you went
+      through as if you'd had your ears pinned back, and been greased all over.
+      You've got an extra hundred dollars added to your salary; do you hear? On
+      the sixth question of the order of business the Elder ruled that the
+      recommendation of the last conference's estimating committee could be
+      revised (between ourselves he was wrong, but that doesn't matter), and so
+      you're in clover. And very friendly things were said about you, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was very kind of you,&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;I am really extremely grateful to
+      you.&rdquo; He shook her by the hand to make up for what he realized to be a
+      lack of fervor in his tones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then,&rdquo; Sister Soulsby replied, &ldquo;you pull yourself together, and
+      take your place as chairman of the trustees' meeting, and see to it that,
+      whatever comes up, you side with old Pierce and Winch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, THEY'RE my friends now, are they?&rdquo; asked Theron, with a faint play of
+      irony about his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, that's your ticket this election,&rdquo; she answered briskly, &ldquo;and mind
+      you vote it straight. Don't bother about reasons now. Just take it from
+      me, as the song says, 'that things have changed since Willie died.' That's
+      all. And then come back here, and this afternoon we'll have a good
+      old-fashioned jaw.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware, walking with ostentatious feebleness, and forcing a
+      conventional smile upon his wan face, duly made his unexpected appearance
+      at the trustees' meeting in one of the smaller classrooms. He received
+      their congratulations gravely, and shook hands with all three. It required
+      an effort to do this impartially, because, upon sight of Levi Gorringe,
+      there rose up suddenly within him an emotion of fierce dislike and enmity.
+      In some enigmatic way his thoughts had kept themselves away from Gorringe
+      ever since Sunday evening. Now they concentrated with furious energy and
+      swiftness upon him. Theron seemed able in a flash of time to coordinate
+      many recollections of Gorringe&mdash;the early liking Alice had professed
+      for him, the mystery of those purchased plants in her garden, the story of
+      the girl he had lost in church, his offer to lend him money, the way in
+      which he had sat beside Alice at the love-feast and followed her to the
+      altar-rail in the evening. These raced abreast through the young
+      minister's brain, yet with each its own image, and its relation to the
+      others clearly defined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found the nerve, all the same, to take this third trustee by the hand,
+      and to thank him for his congratulations, and even to say, with a surface
+      smile of welcome, &ldquo;It is BROTHER Gorringe, now, I remember.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The work before the meeting was chiefly of a routine kind. In most places
+      this would have been transacted by the stewards; but in Octavius these
+      minor officials had degenerated into mere ceremonial abstractions, who
+      humbly ratified, or by arrangement anticipated, the will of the powerful,
+      mortgage-owning trustees. Theron sat languidly at the head of the table
+      while these common-place matters passed in their course, noting the
+      intonations of Gorringe's voice as he read from his secretary's book, and
+      finding his ear displeased by them. No issue arose upon any of these
+      trivial affairs, and the minister, feeling faint and weary in the heat,
+      wondered why Sister Soulsby had insisted on his coming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All at once he sat up straight, with an instinctive warning in his mind
+      that here was the thing. Gorringe had taken up the subject of the
+      &ldquo;debt-raising&rdquo; evening, and read out its essentials as they had been
+      embodied in a report of the stewards. The gross sum obtained, in cash and
+      promises, was $1,860. The stewards had collected of this a trifle less
+      than half, but hoped to get it all in during the ensuing quarter. There
+      were, also, the bill of Mr. and Mrs. Soulsby for $150, and the increases
+      of $100 in the pastor's salary and $25 in the apportioned contribution of
+      the charge toward the Presiding Elder's maintenance, the two latter items
+      of which the Quarterly Conference had sanctioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to hear the names of the subscribers and their amounts read out,&rdquo;
+       put in Brother Pierce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When this was done, it became apparent that much more than half of the
+      entire amount had been offered by two men. Levi Gorringe's $450 and
+      Erastus Winch's $425 left only $985 to be divided up among some seventy or
+      eighty other members of the congregation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Pierce speedily stopped the reading of these subordinate names.
+      &ldquo;They're of no concern whatever,&rdquo; he said, despite the fact that his own
+      might have been reached in time. &ldquo;Those first names are what I was getting
+      at. Have those two first amounts, the big ones, be'n paid?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One has&mdash;the other not,&rdquo; replied Gorringe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;PRE-cisely,&rdquo; remarked the senior trustee. &ldquo;And I'm goin' to move that it
+      needn't be paid, either. When Brother Winch, here, began hollerin' out
+      those extra twenty-fives and fifties, that evening, it was under a
+      complete misapprehension. He'd be'n on the Cheese Board that same Monday
+      afternoon, and he'd done what he thought was a mighty big stroke of
+      business, and he felt liberal according. I know just what that feelin' is
+      myself. If I'd be'n makin' a mint o' money, instead o' losin' all the
+      while, as I do, I'd 'a' done just the same. But the next day, lo, and
+      behold, Brother Winch found that it was all a mistake&mdash;he hadn't made
+      a single penny.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fact is, I lost by the whole transaction,&rdquo; put in Erastus Winch,
+      defiantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just so,&rdquo; Brother Pierce went on. &ldquo;He lost money. You have his own word
+      for it. Well, then, I say it would be a burning shame for us to consent to
+      touch one penny of what he offered to give, in the fullness of his heart,
+      while he was laborin' under that delusion. And I move he be not asked for
+      it. We've got quite as much as we need, without it. I put my motion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is, YOU don't put it,&rdquo; suggested Winch, correctingly. &ldquo;You move it,
+      and Brother Ware, whom we're all so glad to see able to come and preside&mdash;he'll
+      put it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a moment's silence. &ldquo;You've heard the motion,&rdquo; said Theron,
+      tentatively, and then paused for possible remarks. He was not going to
+      meddle in this thing himself, and Gorringe was the only other who might
+      have an opinion to offer. The necessities of the situation forced him to
+      glance at the lawyer inquiringly. He did so, and turned his eyes away
+      again like a shot. Gorringe was looking him squarely in the face, and the
+      look was freighted with satirical contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister spoke between clinched teeth. &ldquo;All those in favor will
+      say aye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brothers Pierce and Winch put up a simultaneous and confident &ldquo;Aye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you don't!&rdquo; interposed the lawyer, with deliberate, sneering
+      emphasis. &ldquo;I decidedly protest against Winch's voting. He's directly
+      interested, and he mustn't vote. Your chairman knows that perfectly well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I think Brother Winch ought not to vote,&rdquo; decided Theron, with great
+      calmness. He saw now what was coming, and underneath his surface composure
+      there were sharp flutterings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, then,&rdquo; said Gorringe. &ldquo;I vote no, and it's a tie. It rests
+      with the chairman now to cast the deciding vote, and say whether this
+      interesting arrangement shall go through or not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Me?&rdquo; said Theron, eying the lawyer with a cool self-control which had
+      come all at once to him. &ldquo;Me? Oh, I vote Aye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I did what you told me to do,&rdquo; Theron Ware remarked to Sister
+      Soulsby, when at last they found themselves alone in the sitting-room
+      after the midday meal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had taken not a little strategic skirmishing to secure the room to
+      themselves for the hospitable Alice, much touched by the thought of her
+      new friend's departure that very evening had gladly proposed to let all
+      the work stand over until night, and devote herself entirely to Sister
+      Soulsby. When, finally, Brother Soulsby conceived and deftly executed the
+      coup of interesting her in the budding of roses, and then leading her off
+      into the garden to see with her own eyes how it was done, Theron had a
+      sense of being left alone with a conspirator. The notion impelled him to
+      plunge at once into the heart of their mystery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did what you told me to do,&rdquo; he repeated, looking up from his low
+      easy-chair to where she sat by the desk; &ldquo;and I dare say you won't be
+      surprised when I add that I have no respect for myself for doing it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet you would go and do it right over again, eh?&rdquo; the woman said, in
+      bright, pert tones, nodding her head, and smiling at him with roguish,
+      comprehending eyes. &ldquo;Yes, that's the way we're built. We spend our lives
+      doing that sort of thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know that you would precisely grasp my meaning,&rdquo; said the young
+      minister, with a polite effort in his words to mask the untoward side of
+      the suggestion. &ldquo;It is a matter of conscience with me; and I am pained and
+      shocked at myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby drummed for an absent moment with her thin, nervous fingers
+      on the desk-top. &ldquo;I guess maybe you'd better go and lie down again,&rdquo; she
+      said gently. &ldquo;You're a sick man, still, and it's no good your worrying
+      your head just now with things of this sort. You'll see them differently
+      when you're quite yourself again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; pleaded Theron. &ldquo;Do let us have our talk out! I'm all right. My
+      mind is clear as a bell. Truly, I've really counted on this talk with
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there's something else to talk about, isn't there, besides&mdash;besides
+      your conscience?&rdquo; she asked. Her eyes bent upon him a kindly pressure as
+      she spoke, which took all possible harshness from her meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron answered the glance rather than her words. &ldquo;I know that you are my
+      friend,&rdquo; he said simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby straightened herself, and looked down upon him with a new
+      intentness. &ldquo;Well, then,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;let's thrash this thing out right
+      now, and be done with it. You say it's hurt your conscience to do just one
+      little hundredth part of what there was to be done here. Ask yourself what
+      you mean by that. Mind, I'm not quarrelling, and I'm not thinking about
+      anything except just your own state of mind. You think you soiled your
+      hands by doing what you did. That is to say, you wanted ALL the dirty work
+      done by other people. That's it, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Rev. Mr. Ware sat up, in turn, and looked doubtingly into his
+      companion's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, we were going to be frank, you know,&rdquo; she added, with a pleasant play
+      of mingled mirth and honest liking in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, picking his words, &ldquo;my point would rather be that&mdash;that
+      there ought not to have been any of what you yourself call this&mdash;this
+      'dirty work.' THAT is my feeling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now we're getting at it,&rdquo; said Sister Soulsby, briskly. &ldquo;My dear friend,
+      you might just as well say that potatoes are unclean and unfit to eat
+      because manure is put into the ground they grow in. Just look at the case.
+      Your church here was running behind every year. Your people had got into a
+      habit of putting in nickels instead of dimes, and letting you sweat for
+      the difference. That's a habit, like tobacco, or biting your fingernails,
+      or anything else. Either you were all to come to smash here, or the people
+      had to be shaken up, stood on their heads, broken of their habit. It's my
+      business&mdash;mine and Soulsby's&mdash;to do that sort of thing. We came
+      here and we did it&mdash;did it up brown, too. We not only raised all the
+      money the church needs, and to spare, but I took a personal shine to you,
+      and went out of my way to fix up things for you. It isn't only the extra
+      hundred dollars, but the whole tone of the congregation is changed toward
+      you now. You'll see that they'll be asking to have you back here, next
+      spring. And you're solid with your Presiding Elder, too. Well, now, tell
+      me straight&mdash;is that worth while, or not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've told you that I am very grateful,&rdquo; answered the minister, &ldquo;and I say
+      it again, and I shall never be tired of repeating it. But&mdash;but it was
+      the means I had in mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; rejoined the sister, patiently. &ldquo;If you saw the way a hotel
+      dinner was cooked, you wouldn't be able to stomach it. Did you ever see a
+      play? In a theatre, I mean. I supposed not. But you'll understand when I
+      say that the performance looks one way from where the audience sit, and
+      quite a different way when you are behind the scenes. THERE you see that
+      the trees and houses are cloth, and the moon is tissue paper, and the
+      flying fairy is a middle-aged woman strung up on a rope. That doesn't
+      prove that the play, out in front, isn't beautiful and affecting, and all
+      that. It only shows that everything in this world is produced by machinery&mdash;by
+      organization. The trouble is that you've been let in on the stage, behind
+      the scenes, so to speak, and you're so green&mdash;if you'll pardon me&mdash;that
+      you want to sit down and cry because the trees ARE cloth, and the moon IS
+      a lantern. And I say, don't be such a goose!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see what you mean,&rdquo; Theron said, with an answering smile. He added,
+      more gravely, &ldquo;All the same, the Winch business seems to me&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now the Winch business is my own affair,&rdquo; Sister Soulsby broke in
+      abruptly. &ldquo;I take all the responsibility for that. You need know nothing
+      about it. You simply voted as you did on the merits of the case as he
+      presented them&mdash;that's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo; Theron began, and then paused. Something had occurred to him,
+      and he knitted his brows to follow its course of expansion in his mind.
+      Suddenly he raised his head. &ldquo;Then you arranged with Winch to make those
+      bogus offers&mdash;just to lead others on?&rdquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby's large eyes beamed down upon him in reply, at first in
+      open merriment, then more soberly, till their regard was almost pensive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us talk of something else,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;All that is past and gone. It
+      has nothing to do with you, anyway. I've got some advice to give you about
+      keeping up this grip you've got on your people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister had risen to his feet while she spoke. He put his hands
+      in his pockets, and with rounded shoulders began slowly pacing the room.
+      After a turn or two he came to the desk, and leaned against it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I doubt if it's worth while going into that,&rdquo; he said, in the solemn tone
+      of one who feels that an irrevocable thing is being uttered. She waited to
+      hear more, apparently. &ldquo;I think I shall go away&mdash;give up the
+      ministry,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby's eyes revealed no such shock of consternation as he,
+      unconsciously, had looked for. They remained quite calm; and when she
+      spoke, they deepened, to fit her speech, with what he read to be a gaze of
+      affectionate melancholy&mdash;one might say pity. She shook her head
+      slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;don't let any one else hear you say that,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;My poor
+      young friend, it's no good to even think it. The real wisdom is to school
+      yourself to move along smoothly, and not fret, and get the best of what's
+      going. I've known others who felt as you do&mdash;of course there are
+      times when every young man of brains and high notions feels that way&mdash;but
+      there's no help for it. Those who tried to get out only broke themselves.
+      Those who stayed in, and made the best of it&mdash;well, one of them will
+      be a bishop in another ten years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had started walking again. &ldquo;But the moral degradation of it!&rdquo; he
+      snapped out at her over his shoulder. &ldquo;I'd rather earn the meanest living,
+      at an honest trade, and be free from it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That may all be,&rdquo; responded Sister Soulsby. &ldquo;But it isn't a question of
+      what you'd rather do. It's what you can do. How could you earn a living?
+      What trade or business do you suppose you could take up now, and get a
+      living out of? Not one, my man, not one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron stopped and stared at her. This view of his capabilities came upon
+      him with the force and effect of a blow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't discover, myself,&rdquo; he began stumblingly, &ldquo;that I'm so
+      conspicuously inferior to the men I see about me who do make livings, and
+      very good ones, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course you're not,&rdquo; she replied with easy promptness; &ldquo;you're greatly
+      the other way, or I shouldn't be taking this trouble with you. But you're
+      what you are because you're where you are. The moment you try on being
+      somewhere else, you're done for. In all this world nobody else comes to
+      such unmerciful and universal grief as the unfrocked priest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The phrase sent Theron's fancy roving. &ldquo;I know a Catholic priest,&rdquo; he said
+      irrelevantly, &ldquo;who doesn't believe an atom in&mdash;in things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very likely,&rdquo; said Sister Soulsby. &ldquo;Most of us do. But you don't hear him
+      talking about going and earning his living, I'll bet! Or if he does, he
+      takes powerful good care not to go, all the same. They've got horse-sense,
+      those priests. They're artists, too. They know how to allow for the
+      machinery behind the scenes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it's all so different,&rdquo; urged the young minister; &ldquo;the same things
+      are not expected of them. Now I sat the other night and watched those
+      people you got up around the altar-rail, groaning and shouting and crying,
+      and the others jumping up and down with excitement, and Sister Lovejoy&mdash;did
+      you see her?&mdash;coming out of her pew and regularly waltzing in the
+      aisle, with her eyes shut, like a whirling dervish&mdash;I positively
+      believe it was all that made me ill. I couldn't stand it. I can't stand it
+      now. I won't go back to it! Nothing shall make me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh-h, yes, you will,&rdquo; she rejoined soothingly. &ldquo;There's nothing else to
+      do. Just put a good face on it, and make up your mind to get through by
+      treading on as few corns as possible, and keeping your own toes well in,
+      and you'll be surprised how easy it'll all come to be. You were speaking
+      of the revival business. Now that exemplifies just what I was saying&mdash;it's
+      a part of our machinery. Now a church is like everything else,&mdash;it's
+      got to have a boss, a head, an authority of some sort, that people will
+      listen to and mind. The Catholics are different, as you say. Their church
+      is chuck-full of authority&mdash;all the way from the Pope down to the
+      priest&mdash;and accordingly they do as they're told. But the Protestants&mdash;your
+      Methodists most of all&mdash;they say 'No, we won't have any authority, we
+      won't obey any boss.' Very well, what happens? We who are responsible for
+      running the thing, and raising the money and so on&mdash;we have to put on
+      a spurt every once in a while, and work up a general state of excitement;
+      and while it's going, don't you see that THAT is the authority, the motive
+      power, whatever you like to call it, by which things are done? Other
+      denominations don't need it. We do, and that's why we've got it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the mean dishonesty of it all!&rdquo; Theron broke forth. He moved about
+      again, his bowed face drawn as with bodily suffering. &ldquo;The low-born
+      tricks, the hypocrisies! I feel as if I could never so much as look at
+      these people here again without disgust.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, now that's where you make your mistake,&rdquo; Sister Soulsby put in
+      placidly. &ldquo;These people of yours are not a whit worse than other people.
+      They've got their good streaks and their bad streaks, just like the rest
+      of us. Take them by and large, they're quite on a par with other folks the
+      whole country through.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe there's another congregation in the Conference where&mdash;where
+      this sort of thing would have been needed, or, I might say, tolerated,&rdquo;
+       insisted Theron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps you're right,&rdquo; the other assented; &ldquo;but that only shows that your
+      people here are different from the others&mdash;not that they're worse.
+      You don't seem to realize: Octavius, so far as the Methodists are
+      concerned, is twenty or thirty years behind the times. Now that has its
+      advantages and its disadvantages. The church here is tough and coarse, and
+      full of grit, like a grindstone; and it does ministers from other more
+      niminy-piminy places all sorts of good to come here once in a while and
+      rub themselves up against it. It scours the rust and mildew off from their
+      piety, and they go back singing and shouting. But of course it's had a
+      different effect with you. You're razor-steel instead of scythe-steel, and
+      the grinding's been too rough and violent for you. But you see what I
+      mean. These people here really take their primitive Methodism seriously.
+      To them the profession of entire sanctification is truly a genuine thing.
+      Well, don't you see, when people just know that they're saved, it doesn't
+      seem to them to matter so much what they do. They feel that ordinary rules
+      may well be bent and twisted in the interest of people so supernaturally
+      good as they are. That's pure human nature. It's always been like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron paused in his walk to look absently at her. &ldquo;That thought,&rdquo; he
+      said, in a vague, slow way, &ldquo;seems to be springing up in my path,
+      whichever way I turn. It oppresses me, and yet it fascinates me&mdash;this
+      idea that the dead men have known more than we know, done more than we do;
+      that there is nothing new anywhere; that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind the dead men,&rdquo; interposed Sister Soulsby. &ldquo;Just you come and
+      sit down here. I hate to have you straddling about the room when I'm
+      trying to talk to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron obeyed, and as he sank into the low seat, Sister Soulsby drew up
+      her chair, and put her hand on his shoulder. Her gaze rested upon his with
+      impressive steadiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now I want to talk seriously to you, as a friend,&rdquo; she began. &ldquo;You
+      mustn't breathe to any living soul the shadow of a hint of this nonsense
+      about leaving the ministry. I could see how you were feeling&mdash;I saw
+      the book you were reading the first time I entered this room&mdash;and
+      that made me like you; only I expected to find you mixing up more worldly
+      gumption with your Renan. Well, perhaps I like you all the better for not
+      having it&mdash;for being so delightfully fresh. At any rate, that made me
+      sail in and straighten your affairs for you. And now, for God's sake, keep
+      them straight. Just put all notions of anything else out of your head.
+      Watch your chief men and women, and be friends with them. Keep your eye
+      open for what they think you ought to do, and do it. Have your own ideas
+      as much as you like, read what you like, say 'Damn' under your breath as
+      much as you like, but don't let go of your job. I've knocked about too
+      much, and I've seen too many promising young fellows cut their own throats
+      for pure moonshine, not to have a right to say that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron could not be insensible to the friendly hand on his shoulder, or to
+      the strenuous sincerity of the voice which thus adjured him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said vaguely, smiling up into her earnest eyes, &ldquo;if we agree
+      that it IS moonshine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See here!&rdquo; she exclaimed, with renewed animation, patting his shoulder in
+      a brisk, automatic way, to point the beginnings of her confidences: &ldquo;I'll
+      tell you something. It's about myself. I've got a religion of my own, and
+      it's got just one plank in it, and that is that the time to separate the
+      sheep from the goats is on Judgment Day, and that it can't be done a
+      minute before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister took in the thought, and turned it about in his mind,
+      and smiled upon it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that brings me to what I'm going to tell you,&rdquo; Sister Soulsby
+      continued. She leaned back in her chair, and crossed her knees so that one
+      well-shaped and artistically shod foot poised itself close to Theron's
+      hand. Her eyes dwelt upon his face with an engaging candor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I began life,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;as a girl by running away from a stupid home
+      with a man that I knew was married already. After that, I supported myself
+      for a good many years&mdash;generally, at first, on the stage. I've been a
+      front-ranker in Amazon ballets, and I've been leading lady in comic opera
+      companies out West. I've told fortunes in one room of a mining-camp hotel
+      where the biggest game of faro in the Territory went on in another. I've
+      been a professional clairvoyant, and I've been a professional medium, and
+      I've been within one vote of being indicted by a grand jury, and the money
+      that bought that vote was put up by the smartest and most famous
+      train-gambler between Omaha and 'Frisco, a gentleman who died in his boots
+      and took three sheriff's deputies along with him to Kingdom-Come. Now,
+      that's MY record.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron looked earnestly at her, and said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now take Soulsby,&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;Of course I take it for granted
+      there's a good deal that he has never felt called upon to mention. He
+      hasn't what you may call a talkative temperament. But there is also a good
+      deal that I do know. He's been an actor, too, and to this day I'd back him
+      against Edwin Booth himself to recite 'Clarence's Dream.' And he's been a
+      medium, and then he was a travelling phrenologist, and for a long time he
+      was advance agent for a British Blondes show, and when I first saw him he
+      was lecturing on female diseases&mdash;and he had HIS little turn with a
+      grand jury too. In fact, he was what you may call a regular bad old
+      rooster.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again Theron suffered the pause to lapse without comment&mdash;save for an
+      amorphous sort of conversation which he felt to be going on between his
+      eyes and those of Sister Soulsby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then,&rdquo; she resumed, &ldquo;so much for us apart. Now about us together.
+      We liked each other from the start. We compared notes, and we found that
+      we had both soured on living by fakes, and that we were tired of the road,
+      and wanted to settle down and be respectable in our old age. We had a
+      little money&mdash;enough to see us through a year or two. Soulsby had
+      always hungered and longed to own a garden and raise flowers, and had
+      never been able to stay long enough in one place to see so much as a
+      bean-pod ripen. So we took a little place in a quiet country village down
+      on the Southern Tier, and he planted everything three deep all over the
+      place, and I bought a roomful of cheap good books, and we started in. We
+      took to it like ducks to water for a while, and I don't say that we
+      couldn't have stood it out, just doing nothing, to this very day; but as
+      luck would have it, during the first winter there was a revival at the
+      local Methodist church, and we went every evening&mdash;at first just to
+      kill time, and then because we found we liked the noise and excitement and
+      general racket of the thing. After it was all over each of us found that
+      the other had been mighty near going up to the rail and joining the
+      mourners. And another thing had occurred to each of us, too&mdash;that is,
+      what tremendous improvements there were possible in the way that amateur
+      revivalist worked up his business. This stuck in our crops, and we figured
+      on it all through the winter.&mdash;Well, to make a long story short, we
+      finally went into the thing ourselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me one thing,&rdquo; interposed Theron. &ldquo;I'm anxious to understand it all
+      as we go along. Were you and he at any time sincerely converted?&mdash;that
+      is, I mean, genuinely convicted of sin and conscious of&mdash;you know
+      what I mean!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, bless you, yes,&rdquo; responded Sister Soulsby. &ldquo;Not only once&mdash;dozens
+      of times&mdash;I may say every time. We couldn't do good work if we
+      weren't. But that's a matter of temperament&mdash;of emotions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely. That was what I was getting at,&rdquo; explained Theron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, hear what I was getting at,&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;You were talking
+      very loudly here about frauds and hypocrisies and so on, a few minutes
+      ago. Now I say that Soulsby and I do good, and that we're good fellows.
+      Now take him, for example. There isn't a better citizen in all Chemung
+      County than he is, or a kindlier neighbor, or a better or more charitable
+      man. I've known him to stay up a whole winter's night in a poor Irishman's
+      stinking and freezing stable, trying to save his cart-horse for him, that
+      had been seized with some sort of fit. The man's whole livelihood, and his
+      family's, was in that horse; and when it died, Soulsby bought him another,
+      and never told even ME about it. Now that I call real piety, if you like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So do I,&rdquo; put in Theron, cordially.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this question of fraud,&rdquo; pursued his companion,&mdash;&ldquo;look at it in
+      this light. You heard us sing. Well, now, I was a singer, of course, but
+      Soulsby hardly knew one note from another. I taught him to sing, and he
+      went at it patiently and diligently, like a little man. And I invented
+      that scheme of finding tunes which the crowd didn't know, and so couldn't
+      break in on and smother. I simply took Chopin&mdash;he is full of sixths,
+      you know&mdash;and I got all sorts of melodies out of his waltzes and
+      mazurkas and nocturnes and so on, and I trained Soulsby just to sing those
+      sixths so as to make the harmony, and there you are. He couldn't sing by
+      himself any more than a crow, but he's got those sixths of his down to a
+      hair. Now that's machinery, management, organization. We take these tunes,
+      written by a devil-may-care Pole who was living with George Sand openly at
+      the time, and pass 'em off on the brethren for hymns. It's a fraud, yes;
+      but it's a good fraud. So they are all good frauds. I say frankly that I'm
+      glad that the change and the chance came to help Soulsby and me to be good
+      frauds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the point is that I'm to be a good fraud, too,&rdquo; commented the young
+      minister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had risen, and he got to his feet as well. He instinctively sought for
+      her hand, and pressed it warmly, and held it in both his, with an
+      exuberance of gratitude and liking in his manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby danced her eyes at him with a saucy little shake of the
+      head. &ldquo;I'm afraid you'll never make a really GOOD fraud,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You
+      haven't got it in you. Your intentions are all right, but your execution
+      is hopelessly clumsy. I came up to your bedroom there twice while you were
+      sick, just to say 'howdy,' and you kept your eyes shut, and all the while
+      a blind horse could have told that you were wide awake.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must have thought it was my wife,&rdquo; said Theron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART3" id="link2H_PART3">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When the lingering dusk finally settled down upon this long summer
+      evening, the train bearing the Soulsbys homeward was already some score of
+      miles on its way, and the Methodists of Octavius had nearly finished their
+      weekly prayer-meeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the stirring events of the revival, it was only to be expected that
+      this routine, home-made affair should suffer from a reaction. The
+      attendance was larger than usual, perhaps, but the proceedings were
+      spiritless and tame. Neither the pastor nor his wife was present at the
+      beginning, and the class-leader upon whom control devolved made but feeble
+      headway against the spell of inertia which the hot night-air laid upon the
+      gathering. Long pauses intervened between the perfunctory praise-offerings
+      and supplications, and the hymns weariedly raised from time to time fell
+      again in languor by the wayside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice came in just as people were beginning to hope that some one would
+      start the Doxology, and bring matters to a close. Her appearance
+      apparently suggested this to the class-leader, for in a few moments the
+      meeting had been dismissed, and some of the members, on their way out,
+      were shaking hands with their minister's wife, and expressing the polite
+      hope that he was better. The worried look in her face, and the obvious
+      stains of recent tears upon her cheeks imparted an added point and fervor
+      to these inquiries, but she replied to all in tones of studied
+      tranquillity that, although not feeling well enough to attend
+      prayer-meeting, Brother Ware was steadily recovering strength, and
+      confidently expected to be in complete health by Sunday. They left her,
+      and could hardly wait to get into the vestibule to ask one another in
+      whispers what on earth she could have been crying about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile Brother Ware improved his convalescent state by pacing slowly up
+      and down under the elms on the side of the street opposite the Catholic
+      church. There were no houses here for a block and more; the sidewalk was
+      broken in many places, so that passers-by avoided it; the overhanging
+      boughs shrouded it all in obscurity; it was preeminently a place to be
+      alone in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had driven to the depot with his guests an hour before, and after a
+      period of pleasant waiting on the platform, had said good-bye to them as
+      the train moved away. Then he turned to Alice, who had also accompanied
+      them in the carriage, and was conscious of a certain annoyance at her
+      having come. That long familiar talk of the afternoon had given him the
+      feeling that he was entitled to bid farewell to Sister Soulsby&mdash;to
+      both the Soulsbys&mdash;by himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid folks will think it strange&mdash;neither of us attending the
+      prayer-meeting,&rdquo; he said, with a suggestion of reproof in his tone, as
+      they left the station-yard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If we get back in time, I'll run in for a minute,&rdquo; answered Alice, with
+      docility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;no,&rdquo; he broke in. &ldquo;I'm not equal to walking so fast. You run on
+      ahead, and explain matters, and I will come along slowly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The hack we came in is still there in the yard,&rdquo; the wife suggested. &ldquo;We
+      could drive home in that. I don't believe it would cost more than a
+      quarter&mdash;and if you're feeling badly&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I am NOT feeling badly,&rdquo; Theron replied, with frank impatience. &ldquo;Only
+      I feel&mdash;I feel that being alone with my thoughts would be good for
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, certainly&mdash;by all means!&rdquo; Alice had said, and turned sharply on
+      her heel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Being alone with these thoughts, Theron strolled aimlessly about, and did
+      not think at all. The shadows gathered, and fireflies began to disclose
+      their tiny gleams among the shrubbery in the gardens. A lamp-lighter came
+      along, and passed him, leaving in his wake a straggling double line of
+      lights, glowing radiantly against the black-green of the trees. This
+      recalled to Theron that he had heard that the town council lit the street
+      lamps by the almanac, and economized gas when moonshine was due. The idea
+      struck him as droll, and he dwelt upon it in various aspects, smiling at
+      some of its comic possibilities. Looking up in the middle of one of these
+      whimsical conceits, the sportive impulse died suddenly within him. He
+      realized that it was dark, and that the massive black bulk reared against
+      the sky on the other side of the road was the Catholic church. The other
+      fact, that he had been there walking to and fro for some time, was borne
+      in upon him more slowly. He turned, and resumed the pacing up and down
+      with a still more leisurely step, musing upon the curious way in which
+      people's minds all unconsciously follow about where instincts and
+      intuitions lead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt it was what Sister Soulsby had said about Catholics which had
+      insensibly guided his purposeless stroll in this direction. What a woman
+      that was! Somehow the purport of her talk&mdash;striking, and even
+      astonishing as he had found it&mdash;did not stand out so clearly in his
+      memory as did the image of the woman herself. She must have been extremely
+      pretty once. For that matter she still was a most attractive-looking
+      woman. It had been a genuine pleasure to have her in the house&mdash;to
+      see her intelligent responsive face at the table&mdash;to have it in one's
+      power to make drafts at will upon the fund of sympathy and appreciation,
+      of facile mirth and ready tenderness in those big eyes of hers. He liked
+      that phrase she had used about herself&mdash;&ldquo;a good fellow.&rdquo; It seemed to
+      fit her to a &ldquo;t.&rdquo; And Soulsby was a good fellow too. All at once it
+      occurred to him to wonder whether they were married or not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But really that was no affair of his, he reflected. A citizen of the
+      intellectual world should be above soiling his thoughts with mean
+      curiosities of that sort, and he drove the impertinent query down again
+      under the surface of his mind. He refused to tolerate, as well, sundry
+      vagrant imaginings which rose to cluster about and literalize the romance
+      of her youth which Sister Soulsby had so frankly outlined. He would think
+      upon nothing but her as he knew her,&mdash;the kindly, quick-witted,
+      capable and charming woman who had made such a brilliant break in the
+      monotony of life at that dull parsonage of his. The only genuine happiness
+      in life must consist in having bright, smart, attractive women like that
+      always about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lights were visible now in the upper rooms of Father Forbes' pastorate
+      across the way. Theron paused for a second to consider whether he wanted
+      to go over and call on the priest. He decided that mentally he was too
+      fagged and flat for such an undertaking. He needed another sort of
+      companionship&mdash;some restful, soothing human contact, which should
+      exact nothing from him in return, but just take charge of him, with soft,
+      wise words and pleasant plays of fancy, and jokes and&mdash;and&mdash;something
+      of the general effect created by Sister Soulsby's eyes. The thought
+      expanded itself, and he saw that he had never realized before&mdash;nay,
+      never dreamt before&mdash;what a mighty part the comradeship of talented,
+      sweet-natured and beautiful women must play in the development of genius,
+      the achievement of lofty aims, out in the great world of great men. To
+      know such women&mdash;ah, that would never fall to his hapless lot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest's lamps blinked at him through the trees. He remembered that
+      priests were supposed to be even further removed from the possibilities of
+      such contact than he was himself. His memory reverted to that horribly
+      ugly old woman whom Father Forbes had spoken of as his housekeeper. Life
+      under the same roof with such a hag must be even worse than&mdash;worse
+      than&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister did not finish the comparison, even in the privacy of
+      his inner soul. He stood instead staring over at the pastorate, in a kind
+      of stupor of arrested thought. The figure of a woman passed in view at the
+      nearest window&mdash;a tall figure with pale summer clothes of some sort,
+      and a broad summer hat&mdash;a flitting effect of diaphanous shadow
+      between him and the light which streamed from the casement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron felt a little shiver run over him, as if the delicate coolness of
+      the changing night-air had got into his blood. The window was open, and
+      his strained hearing thought it caught the sound of faint laughter. He
+      continued to gaze at the place where the vision had appeared, the while a
+      novel and strange perception unfolded itself upon his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had come there in the hope of encountering Celia Madden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that he looked this fact in the face, there was nothing remarkable
+      about it. In truth, it was simplicity itself. He was still a sick man,
+      weak in body and dejected in spirits. The thought of how unhappy and
+      unstrung he was came to him now with an insistent pathos that brought
+      tears to his eyes. He was only obeying the universal law of nature&mdash;the
+      law which prompts the pallid spindling sprout of the potato in the cellar
+      to strive feebly toward the light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From where he stood in the darkness he stretched out his hands in the
+      direction of that open window. The gesture was his confession to the
+      overhanging boughs, to the soft night-breeze, to the stars above&mdash;and
+      it bore back to him something of the confessional's vague and wistful
+      solace. He seemed already to have drawn down into his soul a taste of the
+      refreshment it craved. He sighed deeply, and the hot moisture smarted
+      again upon his eyelids, but this time not all in grief. With his tender
+      compassion for himself there mingled now a flutter of buoyant prescience,
+      of exquisite expectancy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fate walked abroad this summer night. The street door of the pastorate
+      opened, and in the flood of illumination which spread suddenly forth over
+      the steps and sidewalk, Theron saw again the tall form, with the
+      indefinitely light-hued flowing garments and the wide straw hat. He heard
+      a tuneful woman's voice call out &ldquo;Good-night, Maggie,&rdquo; and caught no
+      response save the abrupt closing of the door, which turned everything
+      black again with a bang. He listened acutely for another instant, and then
+      with long, noiseless strides made his way down his deserted side of the
+      street. He moderated his pace as he turned to cross the road at the
+      corner, and then, still masked by the trees, halted altogether, in a
+      momentary tumult of apprehension. No&mdash;yes&mdash;it was all right. The
+      girl sauntered out from the total darkness into the dim starlight of the
+      open corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, bless me, is that you, Miss Madden?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia seemed to discern readily enough, through the accents of surprise,
+      the identity of the tall, slim man who addressed her from the shadows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-evening, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; she said, with prompt affability. &ldquo;I'm so glad
+      to find you out again. We heard you were ill.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been very ill,&rdquo; responded Theron, as they shook hands and walked
+      on together. He added, with a quaver in his voice, &ldquo;I am still far from
+      strong. I really ought not to be out at all. But&mdash;but the longing for&mdash;for&mdash;well,
+      I COULDN'T stay in any longer. Even if it kills me, I shall be glad I came
+      out tonight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, we won't talk of killing,&rdquo; said Celia. &ldquo;I don't believe in illnesses
+      myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you believe in collapses of the nerves,&rdquo; put in Theron, with gentle
+      sadness, &ldquo;in moral and spiritual and mental breakdowns. I remember how I
+      was touched by the way you told me YOU suffered from them. I had to take
+      what you said then for granted. I had had no experience of it myself. But
+      now I know what it is.&rdquo; He drew a long, pathetic sigh. &ldquo;Oh, DON'T I know
+      what it is!&rdquo; he repeated gloomily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, my friend, cheer up,&rdquo; Celia purred at him, in soothing tones. He
+      felt that there was a deliciously feminine and sisterly intuition in her
+      speech, and in the helpful, nurse-like way in which she drew his arm
+      through hers. He leaned upon this support, and was glad of it in every
+      fibre of his being.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you remember? You promised&mdash;that last time I saw you&mdash;to
+      play for me,&rdquo; he reminded her. They were passing the little covered
+      postern door at the side and rear of the church as he spoke, and he made a
+      half halt to point the coincidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, there's no one to blow the organ,&rdquo; she said, divining his suggestion.
+      &ldquo;And I haven't the key&mdash;and, besides, the organ is too heavy and
+      severe for an invalid. It would overwhelm you tonight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not as you would know how to play it for me,&rdquo; urged Theron, pensively. &ldquo;I
+      feel as if good music to-night would make me well again. I am really very
+      ill and weak&mdash;and unhappy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl seemed moved by the despairing note in his voice. She invited him
+      by a sympathetic gesture to lean even more directly on her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come home with me, and I'll play Chopin to you,&rdquo; she said, in
+      compassionate friendliness. &ldquo;He is the real medicine for bruised and
+      wounded nerves. You shall have as much of him as you like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea thus unexpectedly thrown forth spread itself like some vast and
+      inexpressibly alluring vista before Theron's imagination. The spice of
+      adventure in it fascinated his mind as well, but for a shrinking moment
+      the flesh was weak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid your people would&mdash;would think it strange,&rdquo; he faltered&mdash;and
+      began also to recall that he had some people of his own who would be even
+      more amazed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense,&rdquo; said Celia, in fine, bold confidence, and with a reassuring
+      pressure on his arm. &ldquo;I allow none of my people to question what I do.
+      They never dream of such a preposterous thing. Besides, you will see none
+      of them. Mrs. Madden is at the seaside, and my father and brother have
+      their own part of the house. I shan't listen for a minute to your not
+      coming. Come, I'm your doctor. I'm to make you well again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was further conversation, and Theron more or less knew that he was
+      bearing a part in it, but his whole mind seemed concentrated, in a sort of
+      delicious terror, upon the wonderful experience to which every footstep
+      brought him nearer. His magnetized fancy pictured a great spacious parlor,
+      such as a mansion like the Maddens' would of course contain, and there
+      would be a grand piano, and lace curtains, and paintings in gold frames,
+      and a chandelier, and velvet easy-chairs, and he would sit in one of
+      these, surrounded by all the luxury of the rich, while Celia played to
+      him. There would be servants about, he presumed, and very likely they
+      would recognize him, and of course they would talk about it to Tom, Dick
+      and Harry afterward. But he said to himself defiantly that he didn't care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He withdrew his arm from hers as they came upon the well-lighted main
+      street. He passed no one who seemed to know him. Presently they came to
+      the Madden place, and Celia, without waiting for the gravelled walk,
+      struck obliquely across the lawn. Theron, who had been lagging behind with
+      a certain circumspection, stepped briskly to her side now. Their progress
+      over the soft, close-cropped turf in the dark together, with the scent of
+      lilies and perfumed shrubs heavy on the night air, and the majestic bulk
+      of the big silent house rising among the trees before them, gave him a
+      thrilling sense of the glory of individual freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel a new man already,&rdquo; he declared, as they swung along on the grass.
+      He breathed a long sigh of content, and drew nearer, so that their
+      shoulders touched now and again as they walked. In a minute more they were
+      standing on the doorstep, and Theron heard the significant jingle of a
+      bunch of keys which his companion was groping for in her elusive pocket.
+      He was conscious of trembling a little at the sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed that, unlike other people, the Maddens did not have their parlor
+      on the ground-floor, opening off the front hall. Theron stood in the
+      complete darkness of this hall, till Celia had lit one of several candles
+      which were in their hand-sticks on a sort of sideboard next the hat-rack.
+      She beckoned him with a gesture of her head, and he followed her up a
+      broad staircase, magnificent in its structural appointments of inlaid
+      woods, and carpeted with what to his feet felt like down. The tiny light
+      which his guide bore before her half revealed, as they passed in their
+      ascent, tall lengths of tapestry, and the dull glint of armor and brazen
+      discs in shadowed niches on the nearer wall. Over the stair-rail lay an
+      open space of such stately dimensions, bounded by terminal lines of
+      decoration so distant in the faint candle-flicker, that the young country
+      minister could think of no word but &ldquo;palatial&rdquo; to fit it all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the head of the flight, Celia led the way along a wide corridor to
+      where it ended. Here, stretched from side to side, and suspended from
+      broad hoops of a copper-like metal, was a thick curtain, of a uniform
+      color which Theron at first thought was green, and then decided must be
+      blue. She pushed its heavy folds aside, and unlocked another door. He
+      passed under the curtain behind her, and closed the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room into which he had made his way was not at all after the fashion
+      of any parlor he had ever seen. In the obscure light it was difficult to
+      tell what it resembled. He made out what he took to be a painter's easel,
+      standing forth independently in the centre of things. There were rows of
+      books on rude, low shelves. Against one of the two windows was a big, flat
+      writing-table&mdash;or was it a drawing-table?&mdash;littered with papers.
+      Under the other window was a carpenter's bench, with a large mound of
+      something at one end covered with a white cloth. On a table behind the
+      easel rose a tall mechanical contrivance, the chief feature of which was a
+      thick upright spiral screw. The floor was of bare wood stained brown. The
+      walls of this queer room had photographs and pictures, taken apparently
+      from illustrated papers, pinned up at random for their only ornament.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia had lighted three or four other candles on the mantel. She caught
+      the dumfounded expression with which her guest was surveying his
+      surroundings, and gave a merry little laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is my workshop,&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;I keep this for the things I do
+      badly&mdash;things I fool with. If I want to paint, or model in clay, or
+      bind books, or write, or draw, or turn on the lathe, or do some
+      carpentering, here's where I do it. All the things that make a mess which
+      has to be cleaned up&mdash;they are kept out here&mdash;because this is as
+      far as the servants are allowed to come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She unlocked still another door as she spoke&mdash;a door which was also
+      concealed behind a curtain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; she said, holding up the candle so that its reddish flare rounded
+      with warmth the creamy fulness of her chin and throat, and glowed upon her
+      hair in a flame of orange light&mdash;&ldquo;now I will show you what is my very
+      own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Theron Ware looked about him with frankly undisguised astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room in which he found himself was so dark at first that it yielded
+      little to the eye, and that little seemed altogether beyond his
+      comprehension. His gaze helplessly followed Celia and her candle about as
+      she busied herself in the work of illumination. When she had finished, and
+      pinched out the taper, there were seven lights in the apartment&mdash;lights
+      beaming softly through half-opaque alternating rectangles of blue and
+      yellow glass. They must be set in some sort of lanterns around against the
+      wall, he thought, but the shape of these he could hardly make out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gradually his sight adapted itself to this subdued light, and he began to
+      see other things. These queer lamps were placed, apparently, so as to shed
+      a special radiance upon some statues which stood in the corners of the
+      chamber, and upon some pictures which were embedded in the walls. Theron
+      noted that the statues, the marble of which lost its aggressive whiteness
+      under the tinted lights, were mostly of naked men and women; the pictures,
+      four or five in number, were all variations of a single theme&mdash;the
+      Virgin Mary and the Child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A less untutored vision than his would have caught more swiftly the scheme
+      of color and line in which these works of art bore their share. The walls
+      of the room were in part of flat upright wooden columns, terminating high
+      above in simple capitals, and they were all painted in pale amber and
+      straw and primrose hues, irregularly wavering here and there toward
+      suggestions of white. Between these pilasters were broader panels of
+      stamped leather, in gently varying shades of peacock blue. These
+      contrasted colors vaguely interwove and mingled in what he could see of
+      the shadowed ceiling far above. They were repeated in the draperies and
+      huge cushions and pillows of the low, wide divan which ran about three
+      sides of the room. Even the floor, where it revealed itself among the
+      scattered rugs, was laid in a mosaic pattern of matched woods, which, like
+      the rugs, gave back these same shifting blues and uncertain yellows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fourth side of the apartment was broken in outline at one end by the
+      door through which they had entered, and at the other by a broad, square
+      opening, hung with looped-back curtains of a thin silken stuff. Between
+      the two apertures rose against the wall what Theron took at first glance
+      to be an altar. There were pyramidal rows of tall candles here on either
+      side, each masked with a little silken hood; below, in the centre, a
+      shelf-like projection supported what seemed a massive, carved casket, and
+      in the beautiful intricacies of this, and the receding canopy of delicate
+      ornamentation which depended above it, the dominant color was white,
+      deepening away in its shadows, by tenderly minute gradations, to the tints
+      which ruled the rest of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia lighted some of the high, thick tapers in these candelabra, and
+      opened the top of the casket. Theron saw with surprise that she had
+      uncovered the keyboard of a piano. He viewed with much greater amazement
+      her next proceeding&mdash;which was to put a cigarette between her lips,
+      and, bending over one of the candles with it for an instant, turn to him
+      with a filmy, opalescent veil of smoke above her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make yourself comfortable anywhere,&rdquo; she said, with a gesture which
+      comprehended all the divans and pillows in the place. &ldquo;Will you smoke?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never tried since I was a little boy,&rdquo; said Theron, &ldquo;but I think I
+      could. If you don't mind, I should like to see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lounging at his ease on the oriental couch, Theron experimented cautiously
+      upon the unaccustomed tobacco, and looked at Celia with what he felt to be
+      the confident quiet of a man of the world. She had thrown aside her hat,
+      and in doing so had half released some of the heavy strands of hair coiled
+      at the back of her head. His glance instinctively rested upon this
+      wonderful hair of hers. There was no mistaking the sudden fascination its
+      disorder had for his eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood before him with the cigarette poised daintily between thumb and
+      finger of a shapely hand, and smiled comprehendingly down on her guest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suffered the horrors of the damned with this hair of mine when I was a
+      child,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I daresay all children have a taste for persecuting
+      red-heads; but it's a specialty with Irish children. They get hold somehow
+      of an ancient national superstition, or legend, that red hair was brought
+      into Ireland by the Danes. It's been a term of reproach with us since
+      Brian Boru's time to call a child a Dane. I used to be pursued and baited
+      with it every day of my life, until the one dream of my ambition was to
+      get old enough to be a Sister of Charity, so that I might hide my hair
+      under one of their big beastly white linen caps. I've got rather away from
+      that ideal since, I'm afraid,&rdquo; she added, with a droll downward curl of
+      her lip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your hair is very beautiful,&rdquo; said Theron, in the calm tone of a
+      connoisseur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like it myself,&rdquo; Celia admitted, and blew a little smoke-ring toward
+      him. &ldquo;I've made this whole room to match it. The colors, I mean,&rdquo; she
+      explained, in deference to his uplifted brows. &ldquo;Between us, we make up
+      what Whistler would call a symphony. That reminds me&mdash;I was going to
+      play for you. Let me finish the cigarette first.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron felt grateful for her reticence about the fact that he had laid his
+      own aside. &ldquo;I have never seen a room at all like this,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;You
+      are right; it does fit you perfectly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded her sense of his appreciation. &ldquo;It is what I like,&rdquo; she said.
+      &ldquo;It expresses ME. I will not have anything about me&mdash;or anybody
+      either&mdash;that I don't like. I suppose if an old Greek could see it, it
+      would make him sick, but it represents what I mean by being a Greek. It is
+      as near as an Irishman can get to it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember your puzzling me by saying that you were a Greek.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia laughed, and tossed the cigarette-end away. &ldquo;I'd puzzle you more,
+      I'm afraid, if I tried to explain to you what I really meant by it. I
+      divide people up into two classes, you know&mdash;Greeks and Jews. Once
+      you get hold of that principle, all other divisions and classifications,
+      such as by race or language or nationality, seem pure foolishness. It is
+      the only true division there is. It is just as true among negroes or wild
+      Indians who never heard of Greece or Jerusalem, as it is among white
+      folks. That is the beauty of it. It works everywhere, always.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Try it on me,&rdquo; urged Theron, with a twinkling eye. &ldquo;Which am I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Both,&rdquo; said the girl, with a merry nod of the head. &ldquo;But now I'll play. I
+      told you you were to hear Chopin. I prescribe him for you. He is the
+      Greekiest of the Greeks. THERE was a nation where all the people were
+      artists, where everybody was an intellectual aristocrat, where the
+      Philistine was as unknown, as extinct, as the dodo. Chopin might have
+      written his music for them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am interested in Shopang,&rdquo; put in Theron, suddenly recalling Sister
+      Soulsby's confidences as to the source of her tunes. &ldquo;He lived with&mdash;what's
+      his name&mdash;George something. We were speaking about him only this
+      afternoon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia looked down into her visitor's face at first inquiringly, then with
+      a latent grin about her lips. &ldquo;Yes&mdash;George something,&rdquo; she said, in a
+      tone which mystified him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Ware was sitting up, a minute afterward, in a ferment of
+      awakened consciousness that he had never heard the piano played before.
+      After a little, he noiselessly rearranged the cushions, and settled
+      himself again in a recumbent posture. It was beyond his strength to follow
+      that first impulse, and keep his mind abreast with what his ears took in.
+      He sighed and lay back, and surrendered his senses to the mere unthinking
+      charm of it all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the Fourth Prelude that was singing in the air about him&mdash;a
+      simple, plaintive strain wandering at will over a surface of steady
+      rhythmic movement underneath, always creeping upward through mysteries of
+      sweetness, always sinking again in cadences of semi-tones. With only a
+      moment's pause, there came the Seventh Waltz&mdash;a rich, bold confusion
+      which yet was not confused. Theron's ears dwelt with eager delight upon
+      the chasing medley of swift, tinkling sounds, but it left his thoughts
+      free.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From where he reclined, he turned his head to scrutinize, one by one, the
+      statues in the corners. No doubt they were beautiful&mdash;for this was a
+      department in which he was all humility&mdash;and one of them, the figure
+      of a broad-browed, stately, though thick-waisted woman, bending slightly
+      forward and with both arms broken off, was decently robed from the hips
+      downward. The others were not robed at all. Theron stared at them with the
+      erratic, rippling jangle of the waltz in his ears, and felt that he
+      possessed a new and disturbing conception of what female emancipation
+      meant in these later days. Roving along the wall, his glance rested again
+      upon the largest of the Virgin pictures&mdash;a full-length figure in
+      sweeping draperies, its radiant, aureoled head upturned in rapt adoration,
+      its feet resting on a crescent moon which shone forth in bluish silver
+      through festooned clouds of cherubs. The incongruity between the unashamed
+      statues and this serene incarnation of holy womanhood jarred upon him for
+      the instant. Then his mind went to the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without a break the waltz had slowed and expanded into a passage of what
+      might be church music, an exquisitely modulated and gently solemn chant,
+      through which a soft, lingering song roved capriciously, forcing the
+      listener to wonder where it was coming out, even while it caressed and
+      soothed to repose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked from the Madonna to Celia. Beyond the carelessly drooping braids
+      and coils of hair which blazed between the candles, he could see the
+      outline of her brow and cheek, the noble contour of her lifted chin and
+      full, modelled throat, all pink as the most delicate rose leaf is pink,
+      against the cool lights of the altar-like wall. The sight convicted him in
+      the court of his own soul as a prurient and mean-minded rustic. In the
+      presence of such a face, of such music, there ceased to be any such thing
+      as nudity, and statues no more needed clothes than did those slow, deep,
+      magnificent chords which came now, gravely accumulating their spell upon
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is all singing!&rdquo; the player called out to him over her shoulder, in a
+      minute of rest. &ldquo;That is what Chopin does&mdash;he sings!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She began, with an effect of thinking of something else, the Sixth
+      Nocturne, and Theron at first thought she was not playing anything in
+      particular, so deliberately, haltingly, did the chain of charm unwind
+      itself into sequence. Then it came closer to him than the others had done.
+      The dreamy, wistful, meditative beauty of it all at once oppressed and
+      inspired him. He saw Celia's shoulders sway under the impulse of the
+      RUBATO license&mdash;the privilege to invest each measure with the stress
+      of the whole, to loiter, to weep, to run and laugh at will&mdash;and the
+      music she made spoke to him as with a human voice. There was the wooing
+      sense of roses and moonlight, of perfumes, white skins, alluring
+      languorous eyes, and then&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know this part, of course,&rdquo; he heard her say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the instant they had stepped from the dark, scented, starlit garden,
+      where the nightingale sang, into a great cathedral. A sombre and lofty
+      anthem arose, and filled the place with the splendor of such dignified
+      pomp of harmony and such suggestions of measureless choral power and
+      authority that Theron sat abruptly up, then was drawn resistlessly to his
+      feet. He stood motionless in the strange room, feeling most of all that
+      one should kneel to hear such music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This you'll know too&mdash;the funeral march from the Second Sonata,&rdquo; she
+      was saying, before he realized that the end of the other had come. He sank
+      upon the divan again, bending forward and clasping his hands tight around
+      his knees. His heart beat furiously as he listened to the weird, mediaeval
+      processional, with its wild, clashing chords held down in the bondage of
+      an orderly sadness. There was a propelling motion in the thing&mdash;a
+      sense of being borne bodily along&mdash;which affected him like dizziness.
+      He breathed hard through the robust portions of stern, vigorous noise, and
+      rocked himself to and fro when, as rosy morn breaks upon a storm-swept
+      night, the drums are silenced for the sweet, comforting strain of solitary
+      melody. The clanging minor harmonies into which the march relapses came to
+      their abrupt end. Theron rose once more, and moved with a hesitating step
+      to the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to rest a little,&rdquo; he said, with his hand on her shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whew! so do I,&rdquo; exclaimed Celia, letting her hands fall with an
+      exaggerated gesture of weariness. &ldquo;The sonatas take it out of one! They
+      are hideously difficult, you know. They are rarely played.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know,&rdquo; remarked Theron. She seemed not to mind his hand upon her
+      shoulder, and he kept it there. &ldquo;I didn't know anything about music at
+      all. What I do know now is that&mdash;that this evening is an event in my
+      life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up at him and smiled. He read unsuspected tendernesses and
+      tolerances of friendship in the depths of her eyes, which emboldened him
+      to stir the fingers of that audacious hand in a lingering, caressing trill
+      upon her shoulder. The movement was of the faintest, but having ventured
+      it, he drew his hand abruptly away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are getting on,&rdquo; she said to him. There was an enigmatic twinkle in
+      the smile with which she continued to regard him. &ldquo;We are Hellenizing you
+      at a great rate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden thought seemed to strike her. She shifted her eyes toward vacancy
+      with a swift, abstracted glance, reflected for a moment, then let a
+      sparkling half-wink and the dimpling beginnings of an almost roguish smile
+      mark her assent to the conceit, whatever it might be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will be with you in a moment,&rdquo; he heard her say; and while the words
+      were still in his ears she had risen and passed out of sight through the
+      broad, open doorway to the right. The looped curtains fell together behind
+      her. Presently a mellow light spread over their delicately translucent
+      surface&mdash;a creamy, undulating radiance which gave the effect of
+      moving about among the myriad folds of the silk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron gazed at these curtains for a little, then straightened his
+      shoulders with a gesture of decision, and, turning on his heel, went over
+      and examined the statues in the further corners minutely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you would like some more, I will play you the Berceuse now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice came to him with a delicious shock. He wheeled round and beheld
+      her standing at the piano, with one hand resting, palm upward, on the
+      keys. She was facing him. Her tall form was robed now in some shapeless,
+      clinging drapery, lustrous and creamy and exquisitely soft, like the
+      curtains. The wonderful hair hung free and luxuriant about her neck and
+      shoulders, and glowed with an intensity of fiery color which made all the
+      other hues of the room pale and vague. A fillet of faint, sky-like blue
+      drew a gracious span through the flame of red above her temples, and from
+      this there rose the gleam of jewels. Her head inclined gently, gravely,
+      toward him&mdash;with the posture of that armless woman in marble he had
+      been studying&mdash;and her brown eyes, regarding him from the shadows,
+      emitted light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a lullaby&mdash;the only one he wrote,&rdquo; she said, as Theron,
+      pale-faced and with tightened lips, approached her. &ldquo;No&mdash;you mustn't
+      stand there,&rdquo; she added, sinking into the seat before the instrument; &ldquo;go
+      back and sit where you were.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The most perfect of lullabies, with its swaying abandonment to cooing
+      rhythm, ever and again rising in ripples to the point of insisting on
+      something, one knows not what, and then rocking, melting away once more,
+      passed, so to speak, over Theron's head. He leaned back upon the cushions,
+      and watched the white, rounded forearm which the falling folds of this
+      strange, statue-like drapery made bare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was more that appealed to his mood in the Third Ballade. It seemed
+      to him that there were words going along with it&mdash;incoherent and
+      impulsive yet very earnest words, appealing to him in strenuous argument
+      and persuasion. Each time he almost knew what they said, and strained
+      after their meaning with a passionate desire, and then there would come a
+      kind of cuckoo call, and everything would swing dancing off again into a
+      mockery of inconsequence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon the silence there fell the pure, liquid, mellifluous melody of a
+      soft-throated woman singing to her lover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is like Heine&mdash;simply a love-poem,&rdquo; said the girl, over her
+      shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron followed now with all his senses, as she carried the Ninth Nocturne
+      onward. The stormy passage, which she banged finely forth, was in truth a
+      lover's quarrel; and then the mild, placid flow of sweet harmonies into
+      which the furore sank, dying languorously away upon a silence all alive
+      with tender memories of sound&mdash;was that not also a part of love?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They sat motionless through a minute&mdash;the man on the divan, the girl
+      at the piano&mdash;and Theron listened for what he felt must be the
+      audible thumping of his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, throwing back her head, with upturned face, Celia began what she had
+      withheld for the last&mdash;the Sixteenth Mazurka. This strange foreign
+      thing she played with her eyes closed, her head tilted obliquely so that
+      Theron could see the rose-tinted, beautiful countenance, framed as if
+      asleep in the billowing luxuriance of unloosed auburn hair. He fancied her
+      beholding visions as she wrought the music&mdash;visions full of barbaric
+      color and romantic forms. As his mind swam along with the gliding, tricksy
+      phantom of a tune, it seemed as if he too could see these visions&mdash;as
+      if he gazed at them through her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It could not be helped. He lifted himself noiselessly to his feet, and
+      stole with caution toward her. He would hear the rest of this weird,
+      voluptuous fantasy standing thus, so close behind her that he could look
+      down upon her full, uplifted lace&mdash;so close that, if she moved, that
+      glowing nimbus of hair would touch him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been some curious and awkward pauses in this last piece, which
+      Theron, by some side cerebration, had put down to her not watching what
+      her fingers did. There came another of these pauses now&mdash;an odd,
+      unaccountable halt in what seemed the middle of everything. He stared
+      intently down upon her statuesque, dreaming face during the hush, and
+      caught his breath as he waited. There fell at last a few faltering
+      ascending notes, making a half-finished strain, and then again there was
+      silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia opened her eyes, and poured a direct, deep gaze into the face above
+      hers. Its pale lips were parted in suspense, and the color had faded from
+      its cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is the end,&rdquo; she said, and, with a turn of her lithe body, stood
+      swiftly up, even while the echoes of the broken melody seemed panting in
+      the air about her for completion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron put his hands to his face, and pressed them tightly against eyes
+      and brow for an instant. Then, throwing them aside with an expansive
+      downward sweep of the arms, and holding them clenched, he returned Celia's
+      glance. It was as if he had never looked into a woman's eyes before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It CAN'T be the end!&rdquo; he heard himself saying, in a low voice charged
+      with deep significance. He held her gaze in the grasp of his with
+      implacable tenacity. There was a trouble about breathing, and the mosaic
+      floor seemed to stir under his feet. He clung defiantly to the one idea of
+      not releasing her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How COULD it be the end?&rdquo; he demanded, lifting an uncertain hand to his
+      breast as he spoke, and spreading it there as if to control the tumultuous
+      fluttering of his heart. &ldquo;Things don't end that way!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sharp, blinding spasm of giddiness closed upon and shook him, while the
+      brave words were on his lips. He blinked and tottered under it, as it
+      passed, and then backed humbly to his divan and sat down, gasping a
+      little, and patting his hand on his heart. There was fright written all
+      over his whitened face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We&mdash;we forgot that I am a sick man,&rdquo; he said feebly, answering
+      Celia's look of surprised inquiry with a forced, wan smile. &ldquo;I was afraid
+      my heart had gone wrong.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She scrutinized him for a further moment, with growing reassurance in her
+      air. Then, piling up the pillows and cushions behind him for support, for
+      all the world like a big sister again, she stepped into the inner room,
+      and returned with a flagon of quaint shape and a tiny glass. She poured
+      this latter full to the brim of a thick yellowish, aromatic liquid, and
+      gave it him to drink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This Benedictine is all I happen to have,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Swallow it down. It
+      will do you good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron obeyed her. It brought tears to his eyes; but, upon reflection, it
+      was grateful and warming. He did feel better almost immediately. A great
+      wave of comfort seemed to enfold him as he settled himself back on the
+      divan. For that one flashing instant he had thought that he was dying. He
+      drew a long grateful breath of relief, and smiled his content.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia had seated herself beside him, a little away. She sat with her head
+      against the wall, and one foot curled under her, and almost faced him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare say we forced the pace a little,&rdquo; she remarked, after a pause,
+      looking down at the floor, with the puckers of a ruminating amusement
+      playing in the corners of her mouth. &ldquo;It doesn't do for a man to get to be
+      a Greek all of a sudden. He must work along up to it gradually.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He remembered the music. &ldquo;Oh, if I only knew how to tell you,&rdquo; he murmured
+      ecstatically, &ldquo;what a revelation your playing has been to me! I had never
+      imagined anything like it. I shall think of it to my dying day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to remember as well the spirit that was in the air when the music
+      ended. The details of what he had felt and said rose vaguely in his mind.
+      Pondering them, his eye roved past Celia's white-robed figure to the
+      broad, open doorway beyond. The curtains behind which she had disappeared
+      were again parted and fastened back. A dim light was burning within, out
+      of sight, and its faint illumination disclosed a room filled with white
+      marbles, white silks, white draperies of varying sorts, which shaped
+      themselves, as he looked, into the canopy and trappings of an
+      extravagantly over-sized and sumptuous bed. He looked away again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you would tell me what you really mean by that Greek idea of
+      yours,&rdquo; he said with the abruptness of confusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia did not display much enthusiasm in the tone of her answer. &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; she
+      said almost indifferently, &ldquo;lots of things. Absolute freedom from moral
+      bugbears, for one thing. The recognition that beauty is the only thing in
+      life that is worth while. The courage to kick out of one's life everything
+      that isn't worth while; and so on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; said Theron, watching the mingled delicacy and power of the bared
+      arm and the shapely grace of the hand which she had lifted to her face, &ldquo;I
+      am going to get you to teach it ALL to me.&rdquo; The memories began crowding in
+      upon him now, and the baffling note upon which the mazurka had stopped
+      short chimed like a tuning-fork in his ears. &ldquo;I want to be a Greek myself,
+      if you're one. I want to get as close to you&mdash;to your ideal, that is,
+      as I can. You open up to me a whole world that I had not even dreamed
+      existed. We swore our friendship long ago, you know: and now, after
+      tonight&mdash;you and the music have decided me. I am going to put the
+      things out of MY life that are not worthwhile. Only you must help me; you
+      must tell me how to begin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked up as he spoke, to enforce the almost tender entreaty of his
+      words. The spectacle of a yawn, only fractionally concealed behind those
+      talented fingers, chilled his soft speech, and sent a flush over his face.
+      He rose on the instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia was nothing abashed at his discovery. She laughed gayly in
+      confession of her fault, and held her hand out to let him help her
+      disentangle her foot from her draperies, and get off the divan. It seemed
+      to be her meaning that he should continue holding her hand after she was
+      also standing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You forgive me, don't you?&rdquo; she urged smilingly. &ldquo;Chopin always first
+      excites me, then sends me to sleep. You see how YOU sleep tonight!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The brown, velvety eyes rested upon him, from under their heavy lids, with
+      a languorous kindliness. Her warm, large palm clasped his in frank liking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to sleep at all,&rdquo; Mr. Ware was impelled to say. &ldquo;I want to
+      lie awake and think about&mdash;about everything all over again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled drowsily. &ldquo;And you're sure you feel strong enough to walk
+      home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he replied, with a lingering dilatory note, which deepened upon
+      reflection into a sigh. &ldquo;Oh, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He followed her and her candle down the magnificent stairway again. She
+      blew the light out in the hall, and, opening the front door, stood with
+      him for a silent moment on the threshold. Then they shook hands once more,
+      and with a whispered good-night, parted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia, returning to the blue and yellow room, lighted a cigarette and
+      helped herself to some Benedictine in the glass which Theron had used. She
+      looked meditatively at this little glass for a moment, turning it about in
+      her fingers with a smile. The smile warmed itself suddenly into a joyous
+      laugh. She tossed the glass aside, and, holding out her flowing skirts
+      with both hands, executed a swinging pirouette in front of the gravely
+      beautiful statue of the armless woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was apparent to the Rev. Theron Ware, from the very first moment of
+      waking next morning, that both he and the world had changed over night.
+      The metamorphosis, in the harsh toils of which he had been laboring
+      blindly so long, was accomplished. He stood forth, so to speak, in a new
+      skin, and looked about him, with perceptions of quite an altered kind,
+      upon what seemed in every way a fresh existence. He lacked even the
+      impulse to turn round and inspect the cocoon from which he had emerged.
+      Let the past bury the past. He had no vestige of interest in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The change was not premature. He found himself not in the least confused
+      by it, or frightened. Before he had finished shaving, he knew himself to
+      be easily and comfortably at home in his new state, and master of all its
+      requirements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed as if Alice, too, recognized that he had become another man,
+      when he went down and took his chair at the breakfast table. They had
+      exchanged no words since their parting in the depot-yard the previous
+      evening&mdash;an event now faded off into remote vagueness in Theron's
+      mind. He smiled brilliantly in answer to the furtive, half-sullen,
+      half-curious glance she stole at him, as she brought the dishes in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! potatoes warmed up in cream!&rdquo; he said, with hearty pleasure in his
+      tone. &ldquo;What a mind-reader you are, to be sure!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm glad you're feeling so much better,&rdquo; she said briefly, taking her
+      seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better?&rdquo; he returned. &ldquo;I'm a new being!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She ventured to look him over more freely, upon this assurance. He
+      perceived and catalogued, one by one, the emotions which the small brain
+      was expressing through those shallow blue eyes of hers. She was turning
+      over this, that, and the other hostile thought and childish grievance&mdash;most
+      of all she was dallying with the idea of asking him where he had been till
+      after midnight. He smiled affably in the face of this scattering fire of
+      peevish glances, and did not dream of resenting any phase of them all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going down to Thurston's this morning, and order that piano sent up
+      today,&rdquo; he announced presently, in a casual way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, Theron, can we afford it?&rdquo; the wife asked, regarding him with
+      surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, easily enough,&rdquo; he replied light-heartedly. &ldquo;You know they've
+      increased my salary.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head. &ldquo;No, I didn't. How should I? You don't realize it,&rdquo;
+       she went on, dolefully, &ldquo;but you're getting so you don't tell me the least
+      thing about your affairs nowadays.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron laughed aloud. &ldquo;You ought to be grateful&mdash;such melancholy
+      affairs as mine have been till now,&rdquo; he declared&mdash;&ldquo;that is, if it
+      weren't absurd to think such a thing.&rdquo; Then, more soberly, he explained:
+      &ldquo;No, my girl, it is you who don't realize. I am carrying big projects in
+      my mind&mdash;big, ambitious thoughts and plans upon which great things
+      depend. They no doubt make me seem preoccupied and absent-minded; but it
+      is a wife's part to understand, and make allowances, and not intrude
+      trifles which may throw everything out of gear. Don't think I'm scolding,
+      my girl. I only speak to reassure you and&mdash;and help you to
+      comprehend. Of course I know that you wouldn't willingly embarrass my&mdash;my
+      career.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course not,&rdquo; responded Alice, dubiously; &ldquo;but&mdash;but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what? Theron felt compelled by civility to say, though on the instant
+      he reproached himself for the weakness of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;I hardly know how to say it,&rdquo; she faltered, &ldquo;but it was nicer
+      in the old days, before you bothered your head about big projects, and
+      your career, as you call it, and were just a good, earnest, simple young
+      servant of the Lord. Oh, Theron!&rdquo; she broke forth suddenly, with tearful
+      zeal, &ldquo;I get sometimes lately almost scared lest you should turn out to be
+      a&mdash;a BACKSLIDER!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The husband sat upright, and hardened his countenance. But yesterday the
+      word would have had in it all sorts of inherited terrors for him. This
+      morning's dawn of a new existence revealed it as merely an empty and
+      stupid epithet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These are things not to be said,&rdquo; he admonished her, after a moment's
+      pause, and speaking with carefully measured austerity. &ldquo;Least of all are
+      they to be said to a clergyman&mdash;by his wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was on the tip of Alice's tongue to retort, &ldquo;Better by his wife than by
+      outsiders!&rdquo; but she bit her lips, and kept the gibe back. A rebuke of this
+      form and gravity was a novelty in their relations. The fear that it had
+      been merited troubled, even while it did not convince, her mind, and the
+      puzzled apprehension was to be read plainly enough on her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron, noting it, saw a good deal more behind. Really, it was amazing how
+      much wiser he had grown all at once. He had been married for years, and it
+      was only this morning that he suddenly discovered how a wife ought to be
+      handled. He continued to look sternly away into space for a little. Then
+      his brows relaxed slowly and under the visible influence of melting
+      considerations. He nodded his head, turned toward her abruptly, and broke
+      the silence with labored amiability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come&mdash;the day began so pleasantly&mdash;it was so good to feel
+      well again&mdash;let us talk about the piano instead. That is,&rdquo; he added,
+      with an obvious overture to playfulness, &ldquo;if the thought of having a piano
+      is not too distasteful to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice yielded almost effusively to his altered mood. They went together
+      into the sitting-room, to measure and decide between the two available
+      spaces which were at their disposal, and he insisted with resolute
+      magnanimity on her settling this question entirely by herself. When at
+      last he mentioned the fact that it was Friday, and he would look over some
+      sermon memoranda before he went out, Alice retired to the kitchen in
+      openly cheerful spirits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron spread some old manuscript sermons before him on his desk, and took
+      down his scribbling-book as well. But there his application flagged, and
+      he surrendered himself instead, chin on hand, to staring out at the
+      rhododendron in the yard. He recalled how he had seen Soulsby patiently
+      studying this identical bush. The notion of Soulsby, not knowing at all
+      how to sing, yet diligently learning those sixths, brought a smile to his
+      mind; and then he seemed to hear Celia calling out over her shoulder,
+      &ldquo;That's what Chopin does&mdash;he sings!&rdquo; The spirit of that wonderful
+      music came back to him, enfolded him in its wings. It seemed to raise
+      itself up&mdash;a palpable barrier between him and all that he had known
+      and felt and done before. That was his new birth&mdash;that marvellous
+      night with the piano. The conceit pleased him&mdash;not the less because
+      there flashed along with it the thought that it was a poet that had been
+      born. Yes; the former country lout, the narrow zealot, the untutored slave
+      groping about in the dark after silly superstitions, cringing at the scowl
+      of mean Pierces and Winches, was dead. There was an end of him, and good
+      riddance. In his place there had been born a Poet&mdash;he spelled the
+      word out now unabashed&mdash;a child of light, a lover of beauty and sweet
+      sounds, a recognizable brother to Renan and Chopin&mdash;and Celia!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of the soothing, tenderly grateful revery, a practical suggestion
+      suddenly took shape. He acted upon it without a moment's delay, getting
+      out his letter-pad, and writing hurriedly&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear Miss Madden,&mdash;Life will be more tolerable to me if before
+      nightfall I can know that there is a piano under my roof. Even if it
+      remains dumb, it will be some comfort to have it here and look at it, and
+      imagine how a great master might make it speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would it be too much to beg you to look in at Thurston's, say at eleven
+      this forenoon, and give me the inestimable benefit of your judgment in
+      selecting an instrument?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not trouble to answer this, for I am leaving home now, but shall call
+      at Thurston's at eleven, and wait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanking you in anticipation,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here Theron's fluency came to a sharp halt. There were adverbs enough and
+      to spare on the point of his pen, but the right one was not easy to come
+      at. &ldquo;Gratefully,&rdquo; &ldquo;faithfully,&rdquo; &ldquo;sincerely,&rdquo; &ldquo;truly&rdquo;&mdash;each in turn
+      struck a false note. He felt himself not quite any of these things. At
+      last he decided to write just the simple word &ldquo;yours,&rdquo; and then wavered
+      between satisfaction at his boldness, dread lest he had been over-bold,
+      and, worst of the lot, fear that she would not notice it one way or the
+      other&mdash;all the while he sealed and addressed the letter, put it
+      carefully in an inner pocket, and got his hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a moment's hesitation as to notifying the kitchen of his
+      departure. The interests of domestic discipline seemed to point the other
+      way. He walked softly through the hall, and let himself out by the front
+      door without a sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Down by the canal bridge he picked out an idle boy to his mind&mdash;a lad
+      whose aspect appeared to promise intelligence as a messenger, combined
+      with large impartiality in sectarian matters. He was to have ten cents on
+      his return; and he might report himself to his patron at the bookstore
+      yonder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron was grateful to the old bookseller for remaining at his desk in the
+      rear. There was a tacit compliment in the suggestion that he was not a
+      mere customer, demanding instant attention. Besides, there was no keeping
+      &ldquo;Thurston's&rdquo; out of conversations in this place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Loitering along the shelves, the young minister's eye suddenly found
+      itself arrested by a name on a cover. There were a dozen narrow volumes in
+      uniform binding, huddled together under a cardboard label of &ldquo;Eminent
+      Women Series.&rdquo; Oddly enough, one of these bore the title &ldquo;George Sand.&rdquo;
+       Theron saw there must be some mistake, as he took the book down, and
+      opened it. His glance hit by accident upon the name of Chopin. Then he
+      read attentively until almost the stroke of eleven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have to make ourselves acquainted with all sorts of queer phases of
+      life,&rdquo; he explained in self-defence to the old bookseller, then counting
+      out the money for the book from his lean purse. He smiled as he added,
+      &ldquo;There seems something almost wrong about taking advantage of the
+      clergyman's discount for a life of George Sand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; answered the other, pleasantly. &ldquo;Guess she wasn't so much
+      different from the rest of 'em&mdash;except that she didn't mind
+      appearances. We know about her. We don't know about the others.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must hurry,&rdquo; said Theron, turning on his heel. The haste with which he
+      strode out of the store, crossed the street, and made his way toward
+      Thurston's, did not prevent his thinking much upon the astonishing things
+      he had encountered in this book. Their relation to Celia forced itself
+      more and more upon his mind. He could recall the twinkle in her eye, the
+      sub-mockery in her tone, as she commented with that half-contemptuous &ldquo;Yes&mdash;George
+      something!&rdquo; upon his blundering ignorance. His mortification at having
+      thus exposed his dull rusticity was swallowed up in conjectures as to just
+      what her tolerant familiarity with such things involved. He had never
+      before met a young unmarried woman who would have confessed to him any
+      such knowledge. But then, of course, he had never known a girl who
+      resembled Celia in any other way. He recognized vaguely that he must
+      provide himself with an entire new set of standards by which to measure
+      and comprehend her. But it was for the moment more interesting to wonder
+      what her standards were. Did she object to George Sand's behavior? Or did
+      she sympathize with that sort of thing? Did those statues, and the
+      loose-flowing diaphonous toga and unbound hair, the cigarettes, the fiery
+      liqueur, the deliberately sensuous music&mdash;was he to believe that they
+      signified&mdash;?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-morning, Mr. Ware. You have managed by a miracle to hit on one of my
+      punctual days,&rdquo; said Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was standing on the doorstep, at the entrance to the musical
+      department of Thurston's. He had not noticed before the fact that the sun
+      was shining. The full glare of its strong light, enveloping her figure as
+      she stood, and drawing the dazzled eye for relief to the bower of softened
+      color, close beneath her parasol of creamy silk and lace, was what struck
+      him now first of all. It was as if Celia had brought the sun with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron shook hands with her, and found joy in the perception, that his own
+      hand trembled. He put boldly into words the thought that came to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was generous of you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to wait for me out here, where all
+      might delight in the sight of you, instead of squandering the privilege on
+      a handful of clerks inside.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Madden beamed upon him, and nodded approval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alcibiades never turned a prettier compliment,&rdquo; she remarked. They went
+      in together at this, and Theron made a note of the name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the ensuing half-hour, the young minister followed about even more
+      humbly than the clerks in Celia's commanding wake. There were a good many
+      pianos in the big show-room overhead, and Theron found himself almost awed
+      by their size and brilliancy of polish, and the thought of the tremendous
+      sum of money they represented altogether. Not so with the organist. She
+      ordered them rolled around this way or that, as if they had been so many
+      checkers on a draught-board. She threw back their covers with the scant
+      ceremony of a dispensary dentist opening paupers' mouths. She exploited
+      their several capacities with masterful hands, not deigning to seat
+      herself, but just slightly bending forward, and sweeping her fingers up
+      and down their keyboards&mdash;able, domineering fingers which pounded,
+      tinkled, meditated, assented, condemned, all in a flash, and amid what
+      affected the layman's ears as a hopelessly discordant hubbub.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron moved about in the group, nursing her parasol in his arms, and
+      watching her. The exaggerated deference which the clerks and salesmen
+      showed to her as the rich Miss Madden, seemed to him to be mixed with a
+      certain assertion of the claims of good-fellowship on the score of her
+      being a musician. There undoubtedly was a sense of freemasonry between
+      them. They alluded continually in technical terms to matters of which he
+      knew nothing, and were amused at remarks of hers which to him carried no
+      meaning whatever. It was evident that the young men liked her, and that
+      their liking pleased her. It thrilled him to think that she knew he liked
+      her, too, and to recall what abundant proofs she had given that here,
+      also, she had pleasure in the fact. He clung insistently to the memory of
+      these evidences. They helped him to resist a disagreeable tendency to feel
+      himself an intruder, an outsider, among these pianoforte experts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When it was all over, Celia waved the others aside, and talked with
+      Theron. &ldquo;I suppose you want me to tell you the truth,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;There's
+      nothing here really good. It is always much better to buy of the makers
+      direct.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do they sell on the instalment plan?&rdquo; he asked. There was a wistful
+      effect in his voice which caught her attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked away&mdash;out through the window on the street below&mdash;for
+      a moment. Then her eyes returned to his, and regarded him with a
+      comforting, friendly, half-motherly glance, recalling for all the world
+      the way Sister Soulsby had looked at him at odd times.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you want it at once&mdash;I see,&rdquo; she remarked softly. &ldquo;Well, this
+      Adelberger is the best value for the money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Ware followed her finger, and beheld with dismay that it pointed
+      toward the largest instrument in the room&mdash;a veritable leviathan
+      among pianos. The price of this had been mentioned as $600. He turned over
+      the fact that this was two-thirds his yearly salary, and found the courage
+      to shake his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be too large&mdash;much too large&mdash;for the room,&rdquo; he
+      explained. &ldquo;And, besides, it is more than I like to pay&mdash;or CAN pay,
+      for that matter.&rdquo; It was pitiful to be explaining such details, but there
+      was no help for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They picked out a smaller one, which Celia said was at least of fair
+      quality. &ldquo;Now leave all the bargaining to me,&rdquo; she adjured him. &ldquo;These
+      prices that they talk about in the piano trade are all in the air. There
+      are tremendous discounts, if one knows how to insist upon them. All you
+      have to do is to tell them to send it to your house&mdash;you wanted it
+      today, you said?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;in memory of yesterday,&rdquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She herself gave the directions, and Thurston's people, now all salesmen
+      again, bowed grateful acquiescence. Then she sailed regally across the
+      room and down the stairs, drawing Theron in her train. The hirelings made
+      salaams to him as well; it would have been impossible to interpose
+      anything so trivial and squalid as talk about terms and dates of payment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am ever so much obliged to you,&rdquo; he said fervently, in the comparative
+      solitude of the lower floor. She had paused to look at something in the
+      book-department.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I was entirely at your service; don't mention it,&rdquo; she replied,
+      reaching forth her hand in an absent way for her parasol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He held up instead the volume he had purchased. &ldquo;Guess what that is! You
+      never would guess in this wide world!&rdquo; His manner was surcharged with a
+      sense of the surreptitious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, there's no good trying, IS there?&rdquo; commented Celia, her
+      glance roving again toward the shelves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a life of George Sand,&rdquo; whispered Theron. &ldquo;I've been reading it
+      this morning&mdash;all the Chopin part&mdash;while I was waiting for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To his surprise, there was an apparently displeased contraction of her
+      brows as he made this revelation. For the instant, a dreadful fear of
+      having offended her seized upon and sickened him. But then her face
+      cleared, as by magic. She smiled, and let her eyes twinkle in laughter at
+      him, and lifted a forefinger in the most winning mockery of admonition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naughty! naughty!&rdquo; she murmured back, with a roguishly solemn wink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had no response ready for this, but mutely handed her the parasol. The
+      situation had suddenly grown too confused for words, or even sequent
+      thoughts. Uppermost across the hurly-burly of his mind there scudded the
+      singular reflection that he should never hear her play on that new piano
+      of his. Even as it flashed by out of sight, he recognized it for one of
+      the griefs of his life; and the darkness which followed seemed nothing but
+      a revolt against the idea of having a piano at all. He would countermand
+      the order. He would&mdash;but she was speaking again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had strolled toward the door, and her voice was as placidly
+      conventional as if the talk had never strayed from the subject of pianos.
+      Theron with an effort pulled himself together, and laid hold of her words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you will be going the other way,&rdquo; she was saying. &ldquo;I shall have
+      to be at the church all day. We have just got a new Mass over from Vienna,
+      and I'm head over heels in work at it. I can have Father Forbes to myself
+      today, too. That bear of a doctor has got the rheumatism, and can't come
+      out of his cave, thank Heaven!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then she was receding from view, up the sunlit, busy sidewalk, and
+      Theron, standing on the doorstep, ruefully rubbed his chin. She had said
+      he was going the other way, and, after a little pause, he made her words
+      good, though each step he took seemed all in despite of his personal
+      inclinations. Some of the passers-by bowed to him, and one or two paused
+      as if to shake hands and exchange greetings. He nodded responses
+      mechanically, but did not stop. It was as if he feared to interrupt the
+      process of lifting his reluctant feet and propelling them forward, lest
+      they should wheel and scuttle off in the opposite direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Deliberate as his progress was, the diminishing number of store-fronts
+      along the sidewalk, and the increasing proportion of picket-fences
+      enclosing domestic lawns, forced upon Theron's attention the fact that he
+      was nearing home. It was a trifle past the hour for his midday meal. He
+      was not in the least hungry; still less did he feel any desire just now to
+      sit about in that library living-room of his. Why should he go home at
+      all? There was no reason whatever&mdash;save that Alice would be expecting
+      him. Upon reflection, that hardly amounted to a reason. Wives, with their
+      limited grasp of the realities of life, were always expecting their
+      husbands to do things which it turned out not to be feasible for them to
+      do. The customary male animal spent a considerable part of his life in
+      explaining to his mate why it had been necessary to disappoint or upset
+      her little plans for his comings and goings. It was in the very nature of
+      things that it should be so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sustained by these considerations, Mr. Ware slackened his steps, then
+      halted irresolutely, and after a minute's hesitation, entered the small
+      temperance restaurant before which, as by intuition, he had paused. The
+      elderly woman who placed on the tiny table before him the tea and rolls he
+      ordered, was entirely unknown to him, he felt sure, yet none the less she
+      smiled at him, and spoke almost familiarly&mdash;&ldquo;I suppose Mrs. Ware is
+      at the seaside, and you are keeping bachelor's hall?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not quite that,&rdquo; he responded stiffly, and hurried through the meagre and
+      distasteful repast, to avoid any further conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an idea underlying her remark, however, which recurred to him
+      when he had paid his ten cents and got out on the street again. There was
+      something interesting in the thought of Alice at the seaside. Neither of
+      them had ever laid eyes on salt water, but Theron took for granted the
+      most extravagant landsman's conception of its curative and invigorating
+      powers. It was apparent to him that he was going to pay much greater
+      attention to Alice's happiness and well-being in the future than he had
+      latterly done. He had bought her, this very day, a superb new piano. He
+      was going to simply insist on her having a hired girl. And this seaside
+      notion&mdash;why, that was best of all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His fancy built up pleasant visions of her feasting her delighted eyes
+      upon the marvel of a great ocean storm, or roaming along a beach strewn
+      with wonderful marine shells, exhibiting an innocent joy in their beauty.
+      The fresh sea-breeze blew through her hair, as he saw her in mind's eye,
+      and brought the hardy flush of health back upon her rather pallid cheeks.
+      He was prepared already hardly to know her, so robust and revivified would
+      she have become, by the time he went down to the depot to meet her on her
+      return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For his imagination stopped short of seeing himself at the seaside. It
+      sketched instead pictures of whole weeks of solitary academic calm, alone
+      with his books and his thoughts. The facts that he had no books, and that
+      nobody dreamed of interfering with his thoughts, subordinated themselves
+      humbly to his mood. The prospect, as he mused fondly upon it, expanded to
+      embrace the priest's and the doctor's libraries; the thoughts which he
+      longed to be alone with involved close communion with their thoughts. It
+      could not but prove a season of immense mental stimulation and ethical
+      broadening. It would have its lofty poetic and artistic side as well; the
+      languorous melodies of Chopin stole over his revery, as he dwelt upon
+      these things, and soft azure and golden lights modelled forth the
+      exquisite outlines of tall marble forms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He opened the gate leading to Dr. Ledsmar's house. His walk had brought
+      him quite out of the town, and up, by a broad main highway which yet took
+      on all sorts of sylvan charms, to a commanding site on the hillside.
+      Below, in the valley, lay Octavius, at one end half-hidden in factory
+      smoke, at the other, where narrow bands of water gleamed upon the surface
+      of a broad plain piled symmetrically with lumber, presenting an oddly
+      incongruous suggestion of forest odors and the simplicity of the
+      wilderness. In the middle distance, on gradually rising ground, stretched
+      a wide belt of dense, artificial foliage, peeping through which tiled
+      turrets and ornamented chimneys marked the polite residences of those who,
+      though they neither stoked the furnace fires to the west, nor sawed the
+      lumber on the east, lived in purple and fine linen from the profits of
+      this toil. Nearer at hand, pastures with grazing cows on the one side of
+      the road, and the nigh, weather-stained board fence of the race-course on
+      the other, completed the jumble of primitive rusticity and urban
+      complications characterizing the whole picture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar's house, toward which Theron's impulses had been secretly
+      leading him ever since Celia's parting remark about the rheumatism, was of
+      that spacious and satisfying order of old-fashioned houses which men of
+      leisure and means built for themselves while the early traditions of a
+      sparse and contented homogeneous population were still strong in the
+      Republic. There was a hospitable look about its wide veranda, its broad,
+      low bulk, and its big, double front door, which did not fit at all with
+      the sketch of a man-hating recluse that the doctor had drawn of himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had prepared his mind for the effect of being admitted by a
+      Chinaman, and was taken somewhat aback when the door was opened by the
+      doctor himself. His reception was pleasant enough, almost cordial, but the
+      sense of awkwardness followed him into his host's inner room and rested
+      heavily upon his opening speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard, quite by accident, that you were ill,&rdquo; he said, laying aside his
+      hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's nothing at all,&rdquo; replied Ledsmar. &ldquo;Merely a stiff shoulder that I
+      wear from time to time in memory of my father. It ought to be quite gone
+      by nightfall. It was good of you to come, all the same. Sit down if you
+      can find a chair. As usual, we are littered up to our eyes here. That's it&mdash;throw
+      those things on the floor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Ware carefully deposited an armful of pamphlets on the rug at his
+      feet, and sat down. Litter was indeed the word for what he saw about him.
+      Bookcases, chairs, tables, the corners of the floor, were all buried deep
+      under disorderly strata of papers, diagrams, and opened books. One could
+      hardly walk about without treading on them. The dust which danced up into
+      the bar of sunshine streaming in from the window, as the doctor stepped
+      across to another chair, gave Theron new ideas about the value of Chinese
+      servants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must thank you, first of all, doctor,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;for your kindness in
+      coming when I was ill. 'I was sick, and ye visited me.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mustn't think of it that way,&rdquo; said Ledsmar; &ldquo;your friend came for
+      me, and of course I went; and gladly too. There was nothing that I could
+      do, or that anybody could do. Very interesting man, that friend of yours.
+      And his wife, too&mdash;both quite out of the common. I don't know when
+      I've seen two such really genuine people. I should like to have known more
+      of them. Are they still here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They went yesterday,&rdquo; Theron replied. His earlier shyness had worn off,
+      and he felt comfortably at his ease. &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;that the
+      word 'genuine' is just what would have occurred to me to describe the
+      Soulsbys. They are very interesting people, as you say&mdash;MOST
+      interesting&mdash;and there was a time, I dare say, when I should have
+      believed in their sincerity. But of course I saw them and their
+      performance from the inside&mdash;like one on the stage of a theatre, you
+      know, instead of in the audience, and&mdash;well, I understand things
+      better than I used to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor looked over his spectacles at him with a suggestion of inquiry
+      in his glance, and Theron continued: &ldquo;I had several long talks with her;
+      she told me very frankly the whole story of her life&mdash;and and it was
+      decidedly queer, I can assure you! I may say to you&mdash;you will
+      understand what I mean&mdash;that since my talk with you, and the books
+      you lent me, I see many things differently. Indeed, when I think upon it
+      sometimes my old state of mind seems quite incredible to me. I can use no
+      word for my new state short of illumination.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar continued to regard his guest with that calm, interrogatory
+      scrutiny of his. He did not seem disposed to take up the great issue of
+      illumination. &ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; he said after a little, &ldquo;no woman can come in
+      contact with a priest for any length of time WITHOUT telling him the
+      'story of her life,' as you call it. They all do it. The thing amounts to
+      a law.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young minister's veins responded with a pleasurable thrill to the use
+      of the word &ldquo;priest&rdquo; in obvious allusion to himself. &ldquo;Perhaps in fairness
+      I ought to explain,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that in her case it was only done in the
+      course of a long talk about myself. I might say that it was by way of
+      kindly warning to me. She saw how I had become unsettled in many&mdash;many
+      of my former views&mdash;and she was nervous lest this should lead me to&mdash;to&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To throw up the priesthood,&rdquo; the doctor interposed upon his hesitation.
+      &ldquo;Yes, I know the tribe. Why, my dear sir, your entire profession would
+      have perished from the memory of mankind, if it hadn't been for women. It
+      is a very curious subject. Lots of thinkers have dipped into it, but no
+      one has gone resolutely in with a search-light and exploited the whole
+      thing. Our boys, for instance, traverse in their younger years all the
+      stages of the childhood of the race. They have terrifying dreams of awful
+      monsters and giant animals of which they have never so much as heard in
+      their waking hours; they pass through the lust for digging caves, building
+      fires, sleeping out in the woods, hunting with bows and arrows&mdash;all
+      remote ancestral impulses; they play games with stones, marbles, and so on
+      at regular stated periods of the year which they instinctively know, just
+      as they were played in the Bronze Age, and heaven only knows how much
+      earlier. But the boy goes through all this, and leaves it behind him&mdash;so
+      completely that the grown man feels himself more a stranger among boys of
+      his own place who are thinking and doing precisely the things he thought
+      and did a few years before, than he would among Kurds or Esquimaux. But
+      the woman is totally different. She is infinitely more precocious as a
+      girl. At an age when her slow brother is still stubbing along somewhere in
+      the neolithic period, she has flown way ahead to a kind of mediaeval
+      stage, or dawn of mediaevalism, which is peculiarly her own. Having got
+      there, she stays there; she dies there. The boy passes her, as the
+      tortoise did the hare. He goes on, if he is a philosopher, and lets her
+      remain in the dark ages, where she belongs. If he happens to be a fool,
+      which is customary, he stops and hangs around in her vicinity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron smiled. &ldquo;We priests,&rdquo; he said, and paused again to enjoy the words&mdash;&ldquo;I
+      suppose I oughtn't to inquire too closely just where we belong in the
+      procession.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are considering the question impersonally,&rdquo; said the doctor. &ldquo;First of
+      all, what you regard as religion is especially calculated to attract
+      women. They remain as superstitious today, down in the marrow of their
+      bones, as they were ten thousand years ago. Even the cleverest of them are
+      secretly afraid of omens, and respect auguries. Think of the broadest
+      women you know. One of them will throw salt over her shoulder if she
+      spills it. Another drinks money from her cup by skimming the bubbles in a
+      spoon. Another forecasts her future by the arrangement of tea-grounds.
+      They make the constituency to which an institution based on mysteries,
+      miracles, and the supernatural generally, would naturally appeal.
+      Secondly, there is the personality of the priest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; assented Ware. There rose up before him, on the instant, the
+      graceful, portly figure and strong, comely face of Father Forbes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Women are not a metaphysical people. They do not easily follow
+      abstractions. They want their dogmas and religious sentiments embodied in
+      a man, just as they do their romantic fancies. Of course you Protestants,
+      with your married clergy, see less of the effects of this than celibates
+      do, but even with you there is a great deal in it. Why, the very
+      institution of celibacy itself was forced upon the early Christian Church
+      by the scandal of rich Roman ladies loading bishops and handsome priests
+      with fabulous gifts until the passion for currying favor with women of
+      wealth, and marrying them or wheedling their fortunes from them, debauched
+      the whole priesthood. You should read your Jerome.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will&mdash;certainly,&rdquo; said the listener, resolving to remember the
+      name and refer it to the old bookseller.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, whatever laws one sect or another makes, the woman's attitude
+      toward the priest survives. She desires to see him surrounded by
+      flower-pots and candles, to have him smelling of musk. She would like to
+      curl his hair, and weave garlands in it. Although she is not learned
+      enough to have ever heard of such things, she intuitively feels in his
+      presence a sort of backwash of the old pagan sensuality and lascivious
+      mysticism which enveloped the priesthood in Greek and Roman days. Ugh! It
+      makes one sick!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar rose, as he spoke, and dismissed the topic with a dry little
+      laugh. &ldquo;Come, let me show you round a bit,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;My shoulder is
+      easier walking than sitting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you never written a book yourself?&rdquo; asked Theron, getting to his
+      feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a thing on serpent-worship,&rdquo; the scientist replied&mdash;&ldquo;written
+      years ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't tell you how I should enjoy reading it,&rdquo; urged the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor laughed again. &ldquo;You'll have to learn German, then, I 'm afraid.
+      It is still in circulation in Germany, I believe, on its merits as a
+      serious book. I haven't a copy of the edition in English. THAT was all
+      exhausted by collectors who bought it for its supposed obscenity, like
+      Burton's 'Arabian Nights.' Come this way, and I will show you my
+      laboratory.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They moved out of the room, and through a passage, Ledsmar talking as he
+      led the way. &ldquo;I took up that subject, when I was at college, by a curious
+      chance. I kept a young monkey in my rooms, which had been born in
+      captivity. I brought home from a beer hall&mdash;it was in Germany&mdash;some
+      pretzels one night, and tossed one toward the monkey. He jumped toward it,
+      then screamed and ran back shuddering with fright. I couldn't understand
+      it at first. Then I saw that the curled pretzel, lying there on the floor,
+      was very like a little coiled-up snake. The monkey had never seen a snake,
+      but it was in his blood to be afraid of one. That incident changed my
+      whole life for me. Up to that evening, I had intended to be a lawyer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron did not feel sure that he had understood the point of the anecdote.
+      He looked now, without much interest, at some dark little tanks containing
+      thick water, a row of small glass cases with adders and other lesser
+      reptiles inside, and a general collection of boxes, jars, and similar
+      receptacles connected with the doctor's pursuits. Further on was a smaller
+      chamber, with a big empty furnace, and shelves bearing bottles and
+      apparatus like a drugstore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was pleasanter in the conservatory&mdash;a low, spacious structure with
+      broad pathways between the plants, and an awning over the sunny side of
+      the roof. The plants were mostly orchids, he learned. He had read of them,
+      but never seen any before. No doubt they were curious; but he discovered
+      nothing to justify the great fuss made about them. The heat grew
+      oppressive inside, and he was glad to emerge into the garden. He paused
+      under the grateful shade of a vine-clad trellis, took off his hat, and
+      looked about him with a sigh of relief. Everything seemed old-fashioned
+      and natural and delightfully free from pretence in the big, overgrown
+      field of flowers and shrubs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron recalled with some surprise Celia's indictment of the doctor as a
+      man with no poetry in his soul. &ldquo;You must be extremely fond of flowers,&rdquo;
+       he remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar shrugged his well shoulder. &ldquo;They have their points,&rdquo; he said
+      briefly. &ldquo;These are all dioecious here. Over beyond are monoecious
+      species. My work is to test the probabilities for or against Darwin's
+      theory that hermaphroditism in plants is a late by-product of these
+      earlier forms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And is his theory right?&rdquo; asked Mr. Ware, with a polite show of interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We may know in the course of three or four hundred years,&rdquo; replied
+      Ledsmar. He looked up into his guest's face with a quizzical half-smile.
+      &ldquo;That is a very brief period for observation when such a complicated
+      question as sex is involved,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;We have been studying the female
+      of our own species for some hundreds of thousands of years, and we haven't
+      arrived at the most elementary rules governing her actions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They had moved along to a bed of tall plants, the more forward of which
+      were beginning to show bloom. &ldquo;Here another task will begin next month,&rdquo;
+       the doctor observed. &ldquo;These are salvias, pentstemons, and antirrhinums, or
+      snapdragons, planted very thick for the purpose. Humble-bees bore holes
+      through their base, to save the labor of climbing in and out of the
+      flowers, and we don't quite know yet why some hive-bees discover and
+      utilize these holes at once, while others never do. It may be merely the
+      old-fogy conservatism of the individual, or there may be a law in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These seemed very paltry things for a man of such wisdom to bother his
+      head about. Theron looked, as he was bidden, at the rows of hives shining
+      in the hot sun on a bench along the wall, but offered no comment beyond a
+      casual, &ldquo;My mother was always going to keep bees, but somehow she never
+      got around to it. They say it pays very well, though.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The discovery of the reason why no bee will touch the nectar of the
+      EPIPACTIS LATIFOLIA, though it is sweet to our taste, and wasps are greedy
+      for it, WOULD pay,&rdquo; commented the doctor. &ldquo;Not like a blue rhododendron,
+      in mere money, but in recognition. Lots of men have achieved a half-column
+      in the 'Encyclopedia Britannica' on a smaller basis than that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood now at the end of the garden, before a small, dilapidated
+      summer-house. On the bench inside, facing him, Theron saw a strange
+      recumbent figure stretched at full length, apparently sound asleep, or it
+      might be dead. Looking closer, with a startled surprise, he made out the
+      shaven skull and outlandish garb of a Chinaman. He turned toward his guide
+      in the expectation of a scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor had already taken out a note-book and pencil, and was drawing
+      his watch from his pocket. He stepped into the summer-house, and, lifting
+      the Oriental's limp arm, took account of his pulse. Then, with head bowed
+      low, side-wise, he listened for the heart-action. Finally, he somewhat
+      brusquely pushed back one of the Chinaman's eyelids, and made a minute
+      inspection of what the operation disclosed. Returning to the light, he
+      inscribed some notes in his book, put it back in his pocket, and came out.
+      In answer to Theron's marvelling stare, he pointed toward a pipe of odd
+      construction lying on the floor beneath the sleeper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is one of my regular afternoon duties,&rdquo; he explained, again with the
+      whimsical half-smile. &ldquo;I am increasing his dose monthly by regular stages,
+      and the results promise to be rather remarkable. Heretofore, observations
+      have been made mostly on diseased or morbidly deteriorated subjects. This
+      fellow of mine is strong as an ox, perfectly nourished, and watched over
+      intelligently. He can assimilate opium enough to kill you and me and every
+      other vertebrate creature on the premises, without turning a hair, and he
+      hasn't got even fairly under way yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing was unpleasant, and the young minister turned away. They walked
+      together up the path toward the house. His mind was full now of the
+      hostile things which Celia had said about the doctor. He had vaguely
+      sympathized with her then, upon no special knowledge of his own. Now he
+      felt that his sentiments were vehemently in accord with hers. The doctor
+      WAS a beast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet&mdash;as they moved slowly along through the garden the thought
+      took sudden shape in his mind&mdash;it would be only justice for him to
+      get also the doctor's opinion of Celia. Even while they offended and
+      repelled him, he could not close his eyes to the fact that the doctor's
+      experiments and occupations were those of a patient and exact man of
+      science&mdash;a philosopher. And what he had said about women&mdash;there
+      was certainly a great deal of acumen and shrewd observation in that. If he
+      would only say what he really thought about Celia, and about her relations
+      with the priest! Yes, Theron recognized now there was nothing else that he
+      so much needed light upon as those puzzling ties between Celia and Father
+      Forbes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, with a simulated curiosity, about one of the flower-beds.
+      &ldquo;Speaking of women and religion&rdquo;&mdash;he began, in as casual a tone as he
+      could command&mdash;&ldquo;I notice curiously enough in my own case, that as I
+      develop in what you may call the&mdash;the other direction, my wife, who
+      formerly was not especially devote, is being strongly attracted by the
+      most unthinking and hysterical side of&mdash;of our church system.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor looked at him, nodded, and stooped to nip some buds from a
+      stalk in the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And another case,&rdquo; Theron went on&mdash;&ldquo;of course it was all so new and
+      strange to me&mdash;but the position which Miss Madden seems to occupy
+      about the Catholic Church here&mdash;I suppose you had her in mind when
+      you spoke.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ledsmar stood up. &ldquo;My mind has better things to busy itself with than mad
+      asses of that description,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;She is not worth talking about&mdash;a
+      mere bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed lewdness. If she were
+      even a type, she might be worth considering; but she is simply an abnormal
+      sport, with a little brain addled by notions that she is like Hypatia, and
+      a large impudence rendered intolerable by the fact that she has money. Her
+      father is a decent man. He ought to have her whipped.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Ware drew himself erect, as he listened to these outrageous words. It
+      would be unmanly, he felt, to allow such comments upon an absent friend to
+      pass unrebuked. Yet there was the courtesy due to a host to be considered.
+      His mind, fluttering between these two extremes, alighted abruptly upon a
+      compromise. He would speak so as to show his disapproval, yet not so as to
+      prevent his finding out what he wanted to know. The desire to hear Ledsmar
+      talk about Celia and the priest seemed now to have possessed him for a
+      long time, to have dictated his unpremeditated visit out here, to have
+      been growing in intensity all the while he pretended to be interested in
+      orchids and bees and the drugged Chinaman. It tugged passionately at his
+      self-control as he spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot in the least assent to your characterization of the lady,&rdquo; he
+      began with rhetorical dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bless me!&rdquo; interposed the doctor, with deceptive cheerfulness, &ldquo;that is
+      not required of you at all. It is a strictly personal opinion, offered
+      merely as a contribution to the general sum of hypotheses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; Theron went on, feeling his way, &ldquo;of course, I gathered that
+      evening that you had prejudices in the matter; but these are rather apart
+      from the point I had in view. We were speaking, you will remember, of the
+      traditional attitude of women toward priests&mdash;wanting to curl their
+      hair and put flowers in it, you know, and that suggested to me some
+      individual illustrations, and it occurred to me to wonder just what were
+      the relations between Miss Madden and&mdash;and Father Forbes. She said
+      this morning, for instance&mdash;I happened to meet her, quite by accident&mdash;that
+      she was going to the church to practise a new piece, and that she could
+      have Father Forbes to herself all day. Now that would be quite an
+      impossible remark in our&mdash;that is, in any Protestant circles&mdash;and
+      purely as a matter of comparison, I was curious to ask you just how much
+      there was in it. I ask you, because going there so much you have had
+      exceptional opportunities for&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sharp exclamation from his companion interrupted the clergyman's
+      hesitating monologue. It began like a high-pitched, violent word, but
+      dwindled suddenly into a groan of pain. The doctor's face, too, which had
+      on the flash of Theron's turning seemed given over to unmixed anger, took
+      on an expression of bodily suffering instead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My shoulder has grown all at once excessively painful,&rdquo; he said hastily.
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid I must ask you to excuse me, Mr. Ware.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Carrying the afflicted side with ostentatious caution, he led the way
+      without ado round the house to the front gate on the road. He had put his
+      left hand under his coat to press it against his aching shoulder, and his
+      right hung palpably helpless. This rendered it impossible for him to shake
+      hands with his guest in parting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're sure there's nothing I can do,&rdquo; said Theron, lingering on the
+      outer side of the gate. &ldquo;I used to rub my father's shoulders and back; I'd
+      gladly&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, not for worlds!&rdquo; groaned the doctor. His anguish was so impressive
+      that Theron, as he walked down the road, quite missed the fact that there
+      had been no invitation to come again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Ledsmar stood for a minute or two, his gaze meditatively following the
+      retreating figure. Then he went in, opening the front door with his right
+      hand, and carrying himself once more as if there were no such thing as
+      rheumatism in the world. He wandered on through the hall into the
+      laboratory, and stopped in front of the row of little tanks full of water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some deliberation was involved in whatever his purpose might be, for he
+      looked from one tank to another with a pondering, dilatory gaze. At last
+      he plunged his hand into the opaque fluid and drew forth a long, slim,
+      yellowish-green lizard, with a coiling, sinuous tail and a pointed, evil
+      head. The reptile squirmed and doubled itself backward around his wrist,
+      darting out and in with dizzy swiftness its tiny forked tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor held the thing up to the light, and, scrutinizing it through
+      his spectacles, nodded his head in sedate approval. A grim smile curled in
+      his beard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you are the type,&rdquo; he murmured to it, with evident enjoyment in the
+      conceit. &ldquo;Your name isn't Johnny any more. It's the Rev. Theron Ware.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The annual camp-meeting of the combined Methodist districts of Octavius
+      and Thessaly was held this year in the second half of September, a little
+      later than usual. Of the nine days devoted to this curious survival of
+      primitive Wesleyanism, the fifth fell upon a Saturday. On the noon of that
+      day the Rev. Theron Ware escaped for some hours from the burden of work
+      and incessant observation which he shared with twenty other preachers, and
+      walked alone in the woods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The scene upon which he turned his back was one worth looking at. A
+      spacious, irregularly defined clearing in the forest lay level as a
+      tennis-court, under the soft haze of autumn sunlight. In the centre was a
+      large, roughly constructed frame building, untouched by paint, but stained
+      and weather-beaten with time. Behind it were some lines of horse-sheds,
+      and still further on in that direction, where the trees began, the eye
+      caught fragmentary glimpses of low roofs and the fronts of tiny cottages,
+      withdrawn from full view among the saplings and underbrush. At the other
+      side of the clearing, fully fourscore tents were pitched, some gray and
+      mended, others dazzlingly white in their newness. The more remote of these
+      tents fell into an orderly arrangement of semi-circular form, facing that
+      part of the engirdling woods where the trees were largest, and their
+      canopy of overhanging foliage was lifted highest from the ground. Inside
+      this half-ring of tents were many rounded rows of benches, which followed
+      in narrowing lines the idea of an amphitheatre cut in two. In the centre,
+      just under the edge of the roof of boughs, rose a wooden pagoda, in form
+      not unlike an open-air stand for musicians. In front of this, and leading
+      from it on the level of its floor, there projected a platform, railed
+      round with aggressively rustic woodwork. The nearest benches came close
+      about this platform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the hour when Theron started away, there were few enough signs of life
+      about this encampment. The four or five hundred people who were in
+      constant residence were eating their dinners in the big boarding-house, or
+      the cottages or the tents. It was not the time of day for strangers. Even
+      when services were in progress by daylight, the regular attendants did not
+      make much of a show, huddled in a gray-black mass at the front of the
+      auditorium, by comparison with the great green and blue expanses of nature
+      about them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The real spectacle was in the evening when, as the shadows gathered, big
+      clusters of kerosene torches, hung on the trees facing the audience were
+      lighted. The falling darkness magnified the glow of the lights, and the
+      size and importance of what they illumined. The preacher, bending forward
+      over the rails of the platform, and fastening his eyes upon the abashed
+      faces of those on the &ldquo;anxious seat&rdquo; beneath him, borrowed an effect of
+      druidical mystery from the wall of blackness about him, from the
+      flickering reflections on the branches far above, from the cool night air
+      which stirred across the clearing. The change was in the blood of those
+      who saw and heard him, too. The decorum and half-heartedness of their
+      devotions by day deepened under the glare of the torches into a fervent
+      enthusiasm, even before the services began. And if there was in the rustic
+      pulpit a man whose prayers or exhortations could stir their pulses, they
+      sang and groaned and bellowed out their praises with an almost barbarous
+      license, such as befitted the wilderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the evening not all were worshippers. For a dozen miles round on
+      the country-side, young farm-workers and their girls regarded the
+      camp-meeting as perhaps the chief event of the year&mdash;no more to be
+      missed than the country fair or the circus, and offering, from many points
+      of view, more opportunities for genuine enjoyment than either. Their
+      behavior when they came was pretty bad&mdash;not the less so because all
+      the rules established by the Presiding Elders for the regulation of
+      strangers took it for granted that they would act as viciously as they
+      knew how. These sight-seers sometimes ventured to occupy the back benches
+      where the light was dim. More often they stood outside, in the circular
+      space between the tents and the benches, and mingled cat-calls, drovers'
+      yelps, and all sorts of mocking cries and noises with the &ldquo;Amens&rdquo; of the
+      earnest congregation. Their rough horse-play on the fringe of the
+      sanctified gathering was grievous enough; everybody knew that much worse
+      things went on further out in the surrounding darkness. Indeed, popular
+      report gave to these external phases of the camp-meeting an even more evil
+      fame than attached to the later moonlight husking-bees, or the least
+      reputable of the midwinter dances at Dave Randall's low halfway house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cynics said that the Methodists found consolation for this scandal in the
+      large income they derived from their unruly visitors' gate-money. This was
+      unfair. No doubt the money played its part, but there was something else
+      far more important. The pious dwellers in the camp, intent upon reviving
+      in their poor modern way the character and environment of the heroic early
+      days, felt the need of just this hostile and scoffing mob about them to
+      bring out the spirit they sought. Theirs was pre-eminently a fighting
+      religion, which languished in peaceful fair weather, but flamed high in
+      the storm. The throng of loafers and light-minded worldlings of both
+      sexes, with their jeering interruptions and lewd levity of conduct,
+      brought upon the scene a kind of visible personal devil, with whom the
+      chosen could do battle face to face. The daylight services became more and
+      more perfunctory, as the sojourn in the woods ran its course, and interest
+      concentrated itself upon the night meetings, for the reason that THEN came
+      the fierce wrestle with a Beelzebub of flesh and blood. And it was not so
+      one-sided a contest, either!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No evening passed without its victories for the pulpit. Careless or
+      mischievous young people who were pushed into the foremost ranks of the
+      mockers, and stood grinning and grimacing under the lights, would of a
+      sudden feel a spell clamped upon them. They would hear a strange,
+      quavering note in the preacher's voice, catch the sense of a piercing,
+      soul-commanding gleam in his eye&mdash;not at all to be resisted. These
+      occult forces would take control of them, drag them forward as in a dream
+      to the benches under the pulpit, and abase them there like worms in the
+      dust. And then the preacher would descend, and the elders advance, and the
+      torch-fires would sway and dip before the wind of the mighty roar that
+      went up in triumph from the brethren.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These combats with Satan at close quarters, if they made the week-day
+      evenings exciting, reacted with an effect of crushing dulness upon the
+      Sunday services. The rule was to admit no strangers to the grounds from
+      Saturday night to Monday morning. Every year attempts were made to rescind
+      or modify this rule, and this season at least three-fourths of the laymen
+      in attendance had signed a petition in favor of opening the gates. The two
+      Presiding Elders, supported by a dozen of the older preachers, resisted
+      the change, and they had the backing of the more bigoted section of the
+      congregation from Octavius. The controversy reached a point where Theron's
+      Presiding Elder threatened to quit the grounds, and the leaders of the
+      open-Sunday movement spoke freely of the ridiculous figure which its
+      cranks and fanatics made poor Methodism cut in the eyes of modern go-ahead
+      American civilization. Then Theron Ware saw his opportunity, and preached
+      an impromptu sermon upon the sanctity of the Sabbath, which ended all
+      discussion. Sometimes its arguments seemed to be on one side, sometimes on
+      the other, but always they were clothed with so serene a beauty of
+      imagery, and moved in such a lofty and rarefied atmosphere of spiritual
+      exaltation, that it was impossible to link them to so sordid a thing as
+      this question of gate-money. When he had finished, nobody wanted the gates
+      opened. The two factions found that the difference between them had melted
+      out of existence. They sat entranced by the charm of the sermon; then,
+      glancing around at the empty benches, glaringly numerous in the afternoon
+      sunlight, they whispered regrets that ten thousand people had not been
+      there to hear that marvellous discourse. Theron's conquest was of
+      exceptional dimensions. The majority, whose project he had defeated, were
+      strangers who appreciated and admired his effort most. The little minority
+      of his own flock, though less susceptible to the influence of graceful
+      diction and delicately balanced rhetoric, were proud of the distinction he
+      had reflected upon them, and delighted with him for having won their
+      fight. The Presiding Elders wrung his hand with a significant grip. The
+      extremists of his own charge beamed friendship upon him for the first
+      time. He was the veritable hero of the week.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prestige of this achievement made it the easier for Theron to get away
+      by himself next day, and walk in the woods. A man of such power had a
+      right to solitude. Those who noted his departure from the camp remembered
+      with pleasure that he was to preach again on the morrow. He was going to
+      commune with God in the depths of the forest, that the Message next day
+      might be clearer and more luminous still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron strolled for a little, with an air of aimlessness, until he was
+      well outside the more or less frequented neighborhood of the camp. Then he
+      looked at the sun and the lay of the land with that informing scrutiny of
+      which the farm-bred boy never loses the trick, turned, and strode at a
+      rattling pace down the hillside. He knew nothing personally of this piece
+      of woodland&mdash;a spur of the great Adirondack wilderness thrust
+      southward into the region of homesteads and dairies and hop-fields&mdash;but
+      he had prepared himself by a study of the map, and he knew where he wanted
+      to go. Very Soon he hit upon the path he had counted upon finding, and at
+      this he quickened his gait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three months of the new life had wrought changes in Theron. He bore
+      himself more erectly, for one thing; his shoulders were thrown back, and
+      seemed thicker. The alteration was even more obvious in his face. The
+      effect of lank, wistful, sallow juvenility had vanished. It was the
+      countenance of a mature, well-fed, and confident man, firmer and more
+      rounded in its outlines, and with a glow of health on its whole surface.
+      Under the chin were the suggestions of fulness which bespeak an easy mind.
+      His clothes were new; the frock-coat fitted him, and the thin,
+      dark-colored autumn overcoat, with its silk lining exposed at the breast,
+      gave a masculine bulk and shape to his figure. He wore a shining tall hat,
+      and, in haste though he was, took pains not to knock it against
+      low-hanging branches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All had gone well&mdash;more than well&mdash;with him. The second
+      Quarterly Conference had passed without a ripple. Both the attendance and
+      the collections at his church were larger than ever before, and the tone
+      of the congregation toward him was altered distinctly for the better. As
+      for himself, he viewed with astonished delight the progress he had made in
+      his own estimation. He had taken Sister Soulsby's advice, and the results
+      were already wonderful. He had put aside, once and for all, the thousand
+      foolish trifles and childish perplexities which formerly had racked his
+      brain, and worried him out of sleep and strength. He borrowed all sorts of
+      books boldly now from the Octavius public library, and could swim with a
+      calm mastery and enjoyment upon the deep waters into which Draper and
+      Lecky and Laing and the rest had hurled him. He dallied pleasurably, a
+      little languorously, with a dozen aspects of the case against revealed
+      religion, ranging from the mild heterodoxy of Andover's qualms to the rude
+      Ingersoll's rollicking negation of God himself, as a woman of coquetry
+      might play with as many would-be lovers. They amused him; they were all
+      before him to choose; and he was free to postpone indefinitely the act of
+      selection. There was a sense of the luxurious in this position which
+      softened bodily as well as mental fibres. He ceased to grow indignant at
+      things below or outside his standards, and he bought a small book which
+      treated of the care of the hand and finger nails.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice had accepted with deference his explanation that shapely hands
+      played so important a part in pulpit oratory. For that matter, she now
+      accepted whatever he said or did with admirable docility. It was months
+      since he could remember her venturing upon a critical attitude toward him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had not wished to leave home, for the seaside or any other resort,
+      during the summer, but had worked outside in her garden more than usual.
+      This was inexpensive, and it seemed to do her as much good as a holiday
+      could have done. Her new devotional zeal was now quite an odd thing; it
+      had not slackened at all from the revival pitch. At the outset she had
+      tried several times to talk with her husband upon this subject. He had
+      discouraged conversation about her soul and its welfare, at first
+      obliquely, then, under compulsion, with some directness. His thoughts were
+      absorbed, he said, by the contemplation of vast, abstract schemes of
+      creation and the government of the universe, and it only diverted and
+      embarrassed his mind to try to fasten it upon the details of personal
+      salvation. Thereafter the topic was not broached between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She bestowed a good deal of attention, too, upon her piano. The knack of a
+      girlish nimbleness of touch had returned to her after a few weeks, and she
+      made music which Theron supposed was very good&mdash;for her. It pleased
+      him, at all events, when he sat and listened to it; but he had a far
+      greater pleasure, as he listened, in dwelling upon the memories of the
+      yellow and blue room which the sounds always brought up. Although three
+      months had passed, Thurston's had never asked for the first payment on the
+      piano, or even sent in a bill. This impressed him as being peculiarly
+      graceful behavior on his part, and he recognized its delicacy by not going
+      near Thurston's at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An hour's sharp walk, occasionally broken by short cuts across open
+      pastures, but for the most part on forest paths, brought Theron to the
+      brow of a small knoll, free from underbrush, and covered sparsely with
+      beech-trees. The ground was soft with moss and the powdered remains of
+      last year's foliage; the leaves above him were showing the first yellow
+      stains of autumn. A sweet smell of ripening nuts was thick upon the air,
+      and busy rustlings and chirpings through the stillness told how the
+      chipmunks and squirrels were attending to their harvest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had no ears for these noises of the woodland. He had halted, and
+      was searching through the little vistas offered between the stout gray
+      trunks of the beeches for some sign of a more sophisticated sort. Yes!
+      there were certainly voices to be heard, down in the hollow. And now,
+      beyond all possibility of mistake, there came up to him the low, rhythmic
+      throb of music. It was the merest faint murmur of music, made up almost
+      wholly of groaning bass notes, but it was enough. He moved down the slope,
+      swiftly at first, then with increasing caution. The sounds grew louder as
+      he advanced, until he could hear the harmony of the other strings in its
+      place beside the uproar of the big fiddles, and distinguish from both the
+      measured noise of many feet moving as one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reached a place from which, himself unobserved, he could overlook much
+      of what he had come to see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bottom of the glade below him lay out in the full sunshine, as flat
+      and as velvety in its fresh greenness as a garden lawn. Its open expanse
+      was big enough to accommodate several distinct crowds, and here the crowds
+      were&mdash;one massed about an enclosure in which young men were playing
+      at football, another gathered further off in a horse-shoe curve at the end
+      of a baseball diamond, and a third thronging at a point where the shade of
+      overhanging woods began, focussed upon a centre of interest which Theron
+      could not make out. Closer at hand, where a shallow stream rippled along
+      over its black-slate bed, some little boys, with legs bared to the thighs,
+      were paddling about, under the charge of two men clad in long black gowns.
+      There were others of these frocked monitors scattered here and there upon
+      the scene&mdash;pallid, close-shaven, monkish figures, who none the less
+      wore modern hats, and superintended with knowledge the games of the
+      period. Theron remembered that these were the Christian Brothers, the
+      semi-monastic teachers of the Catholic school.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this was the picnic of the Catholics of Octavius. He gazed in mingled
+      amazement and exhilaration upon the spectacle. There seemed to be
+      literally thousands of people on the open fields before him, and
+      apparently there were still other thousands in the fringes of the woods
+      round about. The noises which arose from this multitude&mdash;the shouts
+      of the lads in the water, the playful squeals of the girls in the swings,
+      the fused uproar of the more distant crowds, and above all the diligent,
+      ordered strains of the dance-music proceeding from some invisible distance
+      in the greenwood&mdash;charmed his ears with their suggestion of universal
+      merriment. He drew a long breath&mdash;half pleasure, half wistful regret&mdash;as
+      he remembered that other gathering in the forest which he had left behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At any rate, it should be well behind him today, whatever the morrow might
+      bring! Evidently he was on the wrong side of the circle for the
+      headquarters of the festivities. He turned and walked to the right through
+      the beeches, making a detour, under cover, of the crowds at play. At last
+      he rounded the long oval of the clearing, and found himself at the very
+      edge of that largest throng of all, which had been too far away for
+      comprehension at the beginning. There was no mystery now. A rough, narrow
+      shed, fully fifty feet in length, imposed itself in an arbitrary line
+      across the face of this crowd, dividing it into two compact halves. Inside
+      this shed, protected all round by a waist-high barrier of boards, on top
+      of which ran a flat, table-like covering, were twenty men in their
+      shirt-sleeves, toiling ceaselessly to keep abreast of the crowd's thirst
+      for beer. The actions of these bartenders greatly impressed Theron. They
+      moved like so many machines, using one hand, apparently, to take money and
+      give change, and with the other incessantly sweeping off rows of empty
+      glasses, and tossing forward in their place fresh, foaming glasses five at
+      a time. Hundreds of arms and hands were continually stretched out, on both
+      sides of the shed, toward this streaming bar, and through the babel of
+      eager cries rose without pause the racket of mallets tapping new kegs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had never seen any considerable number of his fellow-citizens
+      engaged in drinking lager beer before. His surprise at the facility of
+      those behind the bar began to yield, upon observation, to a profound
+      amazement at the thirst of those before it. The same people seemed to be
+      always in front, emptying the glasses faster than the busy men inside
+      could replenish them, and clamoring tirelessly for more. Newcomers had to
+      force their way to the bar by violent efforts, and once there they stayed
+      until pushed bodily aside. There were actually women to be seen here and
+      there in the throng, elbowing and shoving like the rest for a place at the
+      front. Some of the more gallant young men fought their way outward, from
+      time to time, carrying for safety above their heads glasses of beer which
+      they gave to young and pretty girls standing on the fringe of the crowd,
+      among the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everywhere a remarkable good-humor prevailed. Once a sharp fight broke
+      out, just at the end of the bar nearest Theron, and one young man was
+      knocked down. A rush of the onlookers confused everything before the
+      minister's eyes for a minute, and then he saw the aggrieved combatant up
+      on his legs again, consenting under the kindly pressure of the crowd to
+      shake hands with his antagonist, and join him in more beer. The incident
+      caught his fancy. There was something very pleasingly human, he thought,
+      in this primitive readiness to resort to fisticuffs, and this frank and
+      genial reconciliation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps there was something contagious in this wholesale display of
+      thirst, for the Rev. Mr. Ware became conscious of a notion that he should
+      like to try a glass of beer. He recalled having heard that lager was
+      really a most harmless beverage. Of course it was out of the question that
+      he should show himself at the bar. Perhaps some one would bring him out a
+      glass, as if he were a pretty girl. He looked about for a possible
+      messenger. Turning, he found himself face to face with two smiling people,
+      into whose eyes he stared for an instant in dumfounded blankness. Then his
+      countenance flashed with joy, and he held out both hands in greeting. It
+      was Father Forbes and Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We stole down upon you unawares,&rdquo; said the priest, in his cheeriest
+      manner. He wore a brown straw hat, and loose clothes hardly at all
+      clerical in form, and had Miss Madden's arm drawn lightly within his own.
+      &ldquo;We could barely believe our eyes&mdash;that it could be you whom we saw,
+      here among the sinners!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am in love with your sinners,&rdquo; responded Theron, as he shook hands with
+      Celia, and trusted himself to look fully into her eyes. &ldquo;I've had five
+      days of the saints, over in another part of the woods, and they've bored
+      the head off me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At the command of Father Forbes, a lad who was loitering near them went
+      down through the throng to the bar, and returned with three glasses of
+      beer. It pleased the Rev. Mr. Ware that the priest should have taken it
+      for granted that he would do as the others did. He knocked his glass
+      against theirs in compliance with a custom strange to him, but which they
+      seemed to understand very well. The beer itself was not so agreeable to
+      the taste as he had expected, but it was cold and refreshing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the boy had returned with the glasses, the three stood for a moment
+      in silence, meditatively watching the curious scene spread below them.
+      Beyond the bar, Theron could catch now through the trees regularly
+      recurring glimpses of four or five swings in motion. These were nearest
+      him, and clearest to the vision as well, at the instant when they reached
+      their highest forward point. The seats were filled with girls, some of
+      them quite grown young women, and their curving upward sweep through the
+      air was disclosing at its climax a remarkable profusion of white skirts
+      and black stockings. The sight struck him as indecorous in the extreme,
+      and he turned his eyes away. They met Celia's; and there was something
+      latent in their brown depths which prompted him, after a brief dalliance
+      of interchanging glances, to look again at the swings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That old maid Curran is really too ridiculous, with those white stockings
+      of hers,&rdquo; remarked Celia; &ldquo;some friend ought to tell her to dye them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or pad them,&rdquo; suggested Father Forbes, with a gay little chuckle. &ldquo;I
+      daresay the question of swings and ladies' stockings hardly arises with
+      you, over at the camp-meeting, Mr. Ware?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron laughed aloud at the conceit. &ldquo;I should say not!&rdquo; he replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm just dying to see a camp-meeting!&rdquo; said Celia. &ldquo;You hear such racy
+      accounts of what goes on at them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't go, I beg of you!&rdquo; urged Theron, with doleful emphasis. &ldquo;Don't
+      let's even talk about them. I should like to feel this afternoon as if
+      there was no such thing within a thousand miles of me as a camp-meeting.
+      Do you know, all this interests me enormously. It is a revelation to me to
+      see these thousands of good, decent, ordinary people, just frankly
+      enjoying themselves like human beings. I suppose that in this whole huge
+      crowd there isn't a single person who will mention the subject of his soul
+      to any other person all day long.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think the assumption was a safe one,&rdquo; said the priest,
+      smilingly, &ldquo;unless,&rdquo; he added on afterthought, &ldquo;it be by way of a genial
+      profanity. There used to be some old Clare men who said 'Hell to my soul!'
+      when they missed at quoits, but I haven't heard it for a long time. I
+      daresay they're all dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall never forget that death-bed&mdash;where I saw you first,&rdquo;
+       remarked Theron, musingly. &ldquo;I date from that experience a whole new life.
+      I have been greatly struck lately, in reading our 'Northern Christian
+      Advocate' to see in the obituary notices of prominent Methodists how over
+      and over again it is recorded that they got religion in their youth
+      through being frightened by some illness of their own, or some epidemic
+      about them. The cholera year of 1832 seems to have made Methodists hand
+      over fist. Even to this day our most successful revivalists, those who
+      work conversions wholesale wherever they go, do it more by frightful
+      pictures of hell-fire surrounding the sinner's death-bed than anything
+      else. You could hear the same thing at our camp-meeting tonight, if you
+      were there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There isn't so much difference as you think,&rdquo; said Father Forbes,
+      dispassionately. &ldquo;Your people keep examining their souls, just as children
+      keep pulling up the bulbs they have planted to see are there any roots
+      yet. Our people are more satisfied to leave their souls alone, once they
+      have been planted, so to speak, by baptism. But fear of hell governs them
+      both, pretty much alike. As I remember saying to you once before, there is
+      really nothing new under the sun. Even the saying isn't new. Though there
+      seem to have been the most tremendous changes in races and civilizations
+      and religions, stretching over many thousands of years, yet nothing is in
+      fact altered very much. Where religions are concerned, the human race are
+      still very like savages in a dangerous wood in the dark, telling one
+      another ghost stories around a camp-fire. They have always been like
+      that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What nonsense!&rdquo; cried Celia. &ldquo;I have no patience with such gloomy
+      rubbish. The Greeks had a religion full of beauty and happiness and
+      light-heartedness, and they weren't frightened of death at all. They made
+      the image of death a beautiful boy, with a torch turned down. Their
+      greatest philosophers openly preached and practised the doctrine of
+      suicide when one was tired of life. Our own early Church was full of these
+      broad and beautiful Greek ideas. You know that yourself! And it was only
+      when your miserable Jeromes and Augustines and Cyrils brought in the
+      abominable meannesses and cruelties of the Jewish Old Testament, and
+      stamped out the sane and lovely Greek elements in the Church, that
+      Christians became the poor, whining, cowardly egotists they are, troubling
+      about their little tin-pot souls, and scaring themselves in their churches
+      by skulls and crossbones.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Celia,&rdquo; interposed the priest, patting her shoulder gently, &ldquo;we
+      will have no Greek debate today. Mr. Ware has been permitted to taboo
+      camp-meetings, and I claim the privilege to cry off on Greeks. Look at
+      those fellows down there, trampling over one another to get more beer.
+      What have they to do with Athens, or Athens with them? I take it, Mr.
+      Ware,&rdquo; he went on, with a grave face but a twinkling eye, &ldquo;that what we
+      are observing here in front of us is symbolical of a great ethical and
+      theological revolution, which in time will modify and control the destiny
+      of the entire American people. You see those young Irishmen there,
+      struggling like pigs at a trough to get their fill of German beer. That
+      signifies a conquest of Teuton over Kelt more important and far-reaching
+      in its results than the landing of Hengist and Horsa. The Kelt has come to
+      grief heretofore&mdash;or at least been forced to play second fiddle to
+      other races&mdash;because he lacked the right sort of a drink. He has in
+      his blood an excess of impulsive, imaginative, even fantastic qualities.
+      It is much easier for him to make a fool of himself, to begin with, than
+      it is for people of slower wits and more sluggish temperaments. When you
+      add whiskey to that, or that essence of melancholia which in Ireland they
+      call 'porther,' you get the Kelt at his very weakest and worst. These
+      young men down there are changing all that. They have discovered lager.
+      Already many of them can outdrink the Germans at their own beverage. The
+      lager-drinking Irishman in a few generations will be a new type of
+      humanity&mdash;the Kelt at his best. He will dominate America. He will be
+      THE American. And his church&mdash;with the Italian element thrown clean
+      out of it, and its Pope living, say, in Baltimore or Georgetown&mdash;will
+      be the Church of America.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us have some more lager at once,&rdquo; put in Celia. &ldquo;This revolution
+      can't be hurried forward too rapidly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron could not feel sure how much of the priest's discourse was in jest,
+      how much in earnest. &ldquo;It seems to me,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that as things are going,
+      it doesn't look much as if the America of the future will trouble itself
+      about any kind of a church. The march of science must very soon produce a
+      universal scepticism. It is in the nature of human progress. What all
+      intelligent men recognize today, the masses must surely come to see in
+      time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes laughed outright this time. &ldquo;My dear Mr. Ware,&rdquo; he said, as
+      they touched glasses again, and sipped the fresh beer that had been
+      brought them, &ldquo;of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless and
+      empty as this idea that humanity progresses. The savage's natural
+      impression is that the world he sees about him was made for him, and that
+      the rest of the universe is subordinated to him and his world, and that
+      all the spirits and demons and gods occupy themselves exclusively with him
+      and his affairs. That idea was the basis of every pagan religion, and it
+      is the basis of the Christian religion, simply because it is the
+      foundation of human nature. That foundation is just as firm and unshaken
+      today as it was in the Stone Age. It will always remain, and upon it will
+      always be built some kind of a religious superstructure. 'Intelligent
+      men,' as you call them, really have very little influence, even when they
+      all pull one way. The people as a whole soon get tired of them. They give
+      too much trouble. The most powerful forces in human nature are
+      self-protection and inertia. The middle-aged man has found out that the
+      chief wisdom in life is to bend to the pressures about him, to shut up and
+      do as others do. Even when he thinks he has rid his own mind of
+      superstitions, he sees that he will best enjoy a peaceful life by leaving
+      other peoples' superstitions alone. That is always the ultimate view of
+      the crowd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don't see,&rdquo; observed Theron, &ldquo;granting that all this is true, how
+      you think the Catholic Church will come out on top. I could understand it
+      of Unitarianism, or Universalism, or the Episcopal Church, where nobody
+      seems to have to believe particularly in anything except the beauty of its
+      burial service, but I should think the very rigidity of the Catholic creed
+      would make it impossible. There everything is hard and fast; nothing is
+      elastic; there is no room for compromise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Church is always compromising,&rdquo; explained the priest, &ldquo;only it does
+      it so slowly that no one man lives long enough to quite catch it at the
+      trick. No; the great secret of the Catholic Church is that it doesn't
+      debate with sceptics. No matter what points you make against it, it is
+      never betrayed into answering back. It simply says these things are sacred
+      mysteries, which you are quite free to accept and be saved, or reject and
+      be damned. There is something intelligible and fine about an attitude like
+      that. When people have grown tired of their absurd and fruitless wrangling
+      over texts and creeds which, humanly speaking, are all barbaric nonsense,
+      they will come back to repose pleasantly under the Catholic roof, in that
+      restful house where things are taken for granted. There the manners are
+      charming, the service excellent, the decoration and upholstery most
+      acceptable to the eye, and the music&rdquo;&mdash;he made a little mock bow here
+      to Celia&mdash;&ldquo;the music at least is divine. There you have nothing to do
+      but be agreeable, and avoid scandal, and observe the convenances. You are
+      no more expected to express doubts about the Immaculate Conception than
+      you are to ask the lady whom you take down to dinner how old she is. Now
+      that is, as I have said, an intelligent and rational church for people to
+      have. As the Irish civilize themselves&mdash;you observe them diligently
+      engaged in the process down below there&mdash;and the social roughness of
+      their church becomes softened and ameliorated, Americans will inevitably
+      be attracted toward it. In the end, it will embrace them all, and be
+      modified by them, and in turn influence their development, till you will
+      have a new nation and a new national church, each representative of the
+      other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And all this is to be done by lager beer!&rdquo; Theron ventured to comment,
+      jokingly. He was conscious of a novel perspiration around the bridge of
+      his nose, which was obviously another effect of the drink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest passed the pleasantry by. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said seriously; &ldquo;what you
+      must see is that there must always be a church. If one did not exist, it
+      would be necessary to invent it. It is needed, first and foremost, as a
+      police force. It is needed, secondly, so to speak, as a fire insurance. It
+      provides the most even temperature and pure atmosphere for the growth of
+      young children. It furnishes the best obtainable social machinery for
+      marrying off one's daughters, getting to know the right people, patching
+      up quarrels, and so on. The priesthood earn their salaries as the agents
+      for these valuable social arrangements. Their theology is thrown in as a
+      sort of intellectual diversion, like the ritual of a benevolent
+      organization. There are some who get excited about this part of it, just
+      as one hears of Free-Masons who believe that the sun rises and sets to
+      exemplify their ceremonies. Others take their duties more quietly, and,
+      understanding just what it all amounts to, make the best of it, like you
+      and me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron assented to the philosophy and the compliment by a grave bow. &ldquo;Yes,
+      that is the idea&mdash;to make the best of it,&rdquo; he said, and fastened his
+      regard boldly this time upon the swings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were both ordained by our bishops,&rdquo; continued the priest, &ldquo;at an age
+      when those worthy old gentlemen would not have trusted our combined wisdom
+      to buy a horse for them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I was married,&rdquo; broke in Theron, with an eagerness almost vehement,
+      &ldquo;when I had only just been ordained! At the worst, YOU had only the Church
+      fastened upon your back, before you were old enough to know what you
+      wanted. It is easy enough to make the best of THAT, but it is different
+      with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A marked silence followed this outburst. The Rev. Mr. Ware had never
+      spoken of his marriage to either of these friends before; and something in
+      their manner seemed to suggest that they did not find the subject
+      inviting, now that it had been broached. He himself was filled with a
+      desire to say more about it. He had never clearly realized before what a
+      genuine grievance it was. The moisture at the top of his nose merged
+      itself into tears in the corners of his eyes, as the cruel enormity of the
+      sacrifice he had made in his youth rose before him. His whole life had
+      been fettered and darkened by it. He turned his gaze from the swings
+      toward Celia, to claim the sympathy he knew she would feel for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Celia was otherwise engaged. A young man had come up to her&mdash;a
+      tall and extremely thin young man, soberly dressed, and with a long,
+      gaunt, hollow-eyed face, the skin of which seemed at once florid and pale.
+      He had sandy hair and the rough hands of a workman; but he was speaking to
+      Miss Madden in the confidential tones of an equal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can do nothing at all with him,&rdquo; this newcomer said to her. &ldquo;He'll not
+      be said by me. Perhaps he'd listen to you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's likely I'll go down there!&rdquo; said Celia. &ldquo;He may do what he likes for
+      all me! Take my advice, Michael, and just go your way, and leave him to
+      himself. There was a time when I would have taken out my eyes for him, but
+      it was love wasted and thrown away. After the warnings he's had, if he
+      WILL bring trouble on himself, let's make it no affair of ours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had found himself exchanging glances of inquiry with this young
+      man. &ldquo;Mr. Ware,&rdquo; said Celia, here, &ldquo;let me introduce you to my brother
+      Michael&mdash;my full brother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Ware remembered him now, and began, in response to the other's formal
+      bow, to say something about their having met in the dark, inside the
+      church. But Celia held up her hand. &ldquo;I'm afraid, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; she said
+      hurriedly, &ldquo;that you are in for a glimpse of the family skeleton. I will
+      apologize for the infliction in advance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Wonderingly, Theron followed her look, and saw another young man who had
+      come up the path from the crowd below, and was close upon them. The
+      minister recognized in him a figure which had seemed to be the centre of
+      almost every group about the bar that he had studied in detail. He was a
+      small, dapper, elegantly attired youth, with dark hair, and the handsome,
+      regularly carved face of an actor. He advanced with a smiling countenance
+      and unsteady step&mdash;his silk hat thrust back upon his head, his
+      frock-coat and vest unbuttoned, and his neckwear disarranged&mdash;and
+      saluted the company with amiability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw you up here, Father Forbes,&rdquo; he said, with a thickened and erratic
+      utterance. &ldquo;Whyn't you come down and join us? I'm setting 'em up for
+      everybody. You got to take care of the boys, you know. I'll blow in the
+      last cent I've got in the world for the boys, every time, and they know
+      it. They're solider for me than they ever were for anybody. That's how it
+      is. If you stand by the boys, the boys'll stand by you. I'm going to the
+      Assembly for this district, and they ain't nobody can stop me. The boys
+      are just red hot for me. Wish you'd come down, Father Forbes, and address
+      a few words to the meeting&mdash;just mention that I'm a candidate, and
+      say I'm bound to win, hands down. That'll make you solid with the boys,
+      and we'll be all good fellows together. Come on down!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest affably disengaged his arm from the clutch which the speaker
+      had laid upon it, and shook his head in gentle deprecation. &ldquo;No, no; you
+      must excuse me, Theodore,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;We mustn't meddle in politics, you
+      know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Politics be damned!&rdquo; urged Theodore, grabbing the priest's other arm, and
+      tugging at it stoutly to pull him down the path. &ldquo;I say, boys&rdquo; he shouted
+      to those below, &ldquo;here's Father Forbes, and he's going to come down and
+      address the meeting. Come on, Father! Come down, and have a drink with the
+      boys!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Celia who sharply pulled his hand away from the priest's arm this
+      time. &ldquo;Go away with you!&rdquo; she snapped in low, angry tones at the intruder.
+      &ldquo;You should be ashamed of yourself! If you can't keep sober yourself, you
+      can at least keep your hands off the priest. I should think you'd have
+      more decency, when you're in such a state as this, than to come where I
+      am. If you've no respect for yourself, you might have that much respect
+      for me! And before strangers, too!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I mustn't come where YOU are, eh?&rdquo; remarked the peccant Theodore,
+      straightening himself with an elaborate effort. &ldquo;You've bought these
+      woods, have you? I've got a hundred friends here, all the same, for every
+      one you'll ever have in your life, Red-head, and don't you forget it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go and spend your money with them, then, and don't come insulting decent
+      people,&rdquo; said Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before strangers, too!&rdquo; the young man called out, with beery sarcasm.
+      &ldquo;Oh, we'll take care of the strangers all right.&rdquo; He had not seemed to be
+      aware of Theron's presence, much less his identity, before; but he turned
+      to him now with a knowing grin. &ldquo;I'm running for the Assembly, Mr. Ware,&rdquo;
+       he said, speaking loudly and with deliberate effort to avoid the drunken
+      elisions and comminglings to which his speech tended, &ldquo;and I want you to
+      fix up the Methodists solid for me. I'm going to drive over to the
+      camp-meeting tonight, me and some of the boys in a barouche, and I'll put
+      a twenty-dollar bill on their plate. Here it is now, if you want to see
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As the young man began fumbling in a vest-pocket, Theron gathered his wits
+      together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd better not go this evening,&rdquo; he said, as convincingly as he knew
+      how; &ldquo;because the gates will be closed very early, and the
+      Saturday-evening services are of a particularly special nature, quite
+      reserved for those living on the grounds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rats!&rdquo; said Theodore, raising his head, and abandoning the search for the
+      bill. &ldquo;Why don't you speak out like a man, and say you think I'm too
+      drunk?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think that is a question which need arise between us, Mr.
+      Madden,&rdquo; murmured Theron, confusedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, don't you make any mistake! A hell of a lot of questions arise
+      between us, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; cried Theodore, with a sudden accession of vigor in
+      tone and mien. &ldquo;And one of 'em is&mdash;go away from me, Michael!&mdash;one
+      of 'em is, I say, why don't you leave our girls alone? They've got their
+      own priests to make fools of themselves over, without any sneak of a
+      Protestant parson coming meddling round them. You're a married man into
+      the bargain; and you've got in your house this minute a piano that my
+      sister bought and paid for. Oh, I've seen the entry in Thurston's books!
+      You have the cheek to talk to me about being drunk&mdash;why&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These remarks were never concluded, for Father Forbes here clapped a hand
+      abruptly over the offending mouth, and flung his free arm in a tight grip
+      around the young man's waist. &ldquo;Come with me, Michael!&rdquo; he said, and the
+      two men led the reluctant and resisting Theodore at a sharp pace off into
+      the woods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron and Celia stood and watched them disappear among the undergrowth.
+      &ldquo;It's the dirty Foley blood that's in him,&rdquo; he heard her say, as if
+      between clenched teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl's big brown eyes, when Theron looked into them again, were still
+      fixed upon the screen of foliage, and dilated like those of a Medusa mask.
+      The blood had gone away, and left the fair face and neck as white, it
+      seemed to him, as marble. Even her lips, fiercely bitten together,
+      appeared colorless. The picture of consuming and powerless rage which she
+      presented, and the shuddering tremor which ran over her form, as visible
+      as the quivering track of a gust of wind across a pond, awed and
+      frightened him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tenderness toward her helpless state came too, and uppermost. He drew her
+      arm into his, and turned their backs upon the picnic scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us walk a little up the path into the woods,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and get away
+      from all this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The further away the better,&rdquo; she answered bitterly, and he felt the
+      shiver run through her again as she spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The methodical waltz-music from that unseen dancing platform rose again
+      above all other sounds. They moved up the woodland path, their steps
+      insensibly falling into the rhythm of its strains, and vanished from sight
+      among the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Theron and Celia walked in silence for some minutes, until the noises of
+      the throng they had left behind were lost. The path they followed had
+      grown indefinite among the grass and creepers of the forest carpet; now it
+      seemed to end altogether in a little copse of young birches, the
+      delicately graceful stems of which were clustered about a parent stump,
+      long since decayed and overgrown with lichens and layers of thick moss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the two paused, the girl suddenly sank upon her knees, then threw
+      herself face forward upon the soft green bark which had formed itself
+      above the roots of the ancient mother-tree. Her companion looked down in
+      pained amazement at what he saw. Her body shook with the violence of
+      recurring sobs, or rather gasps of wrath and grief Her hands, with
+      stiffened, claw-like fingers, dug into the moss and tangle of tiny vines,
+      and tore them by the roots. The half-stifled sounds of weeping that arose
+      from where her face grovelled in the leaves were terrible to his ears. He
+      knew not what to say or do, but gazed in resourceless suspense at the
+      strange figure she made. It seemed a cruelly long time that she lay there,
+      almost at his feet, struggling fiercely with the fury that was in her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All at once the paroxysms passed away, the sounds of wild weeping ceased.
+      Celia sat up, and with her handkerchief wiped the tears and leafy
+      fragments from her face. She rearranged her hat and the braids of her hair
+      with swift, instinctive touches, brushed the woodland debris from her
+      front, and sprang to her feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm all right now,&rdquo; she said briskly. There was palpable effort in her
+      light tone, and in the stormy sort of smile which she forced upon her
+      blotched and perturbed countenance, but they were only too welcome to
+      Theron's anxious mood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank God!&rdquo; he blurted out, all radiant with relief. &ldquo;I feared you were
+      going to have a fit&mdash;or something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia laughed, a little artificially at first, then with a genuine
+      surrender to the comic side of his visible fright. The mirth came back
+      into the brown depths of her eyes again, and her face cleared itself of
+      tear-stains and the marks of agitation. &ldquo;I AM a nice quiet party for a
+      Methodist minister to go walking in the woods with, am I not?&rdquo; she cried,
+      shaking her skirts and smiling at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not a Methodist minister&mdash;please!&rdquo; answered Theron&mdash;&ldquo;at
+      least not today&mdash;and here&mdash;with you! I am just a man&mdash;nothing
+      more&mdash;a man who has escaped from lifelong imprisonment, and feels for
+      the first time what it is to be free!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, my friend,&rdquo; Celia said, shaking her head slowly, &ldquo;I'm afraid you
+      deceive yourself. You are not by any means free. You are only looking out
+      of the window of your prison, as you call it. The doors are locked, just
+      the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will smash them!&rdquo; he declared, with confidence. &ldquo;Or for that matter, I
+      HAVE smashed them&mdash;battered them to pieces. You don't realize what
+      progress I have made, what changes there have been in me since that night,
+      you remember that wonderful night! I am quite another being, I assure you!
+      And really it dates from way beyond that&mdash;why, from the very first
+      evening, when I came to you in the church. The window in Father Forbes'
+      room was open, and I stood by it listening to the music next door, and I
+      could just faintly see on the dark window across the alley-way a
+      stained-glass picture of a woman. I suppose it was the Virgin Mary. She
+      had hair like yours, and your face, too; and that is why I went into the
+      church and found you. Yes, that is why.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia regarded him with gravity. &ldquo;You will get yourself into great
+      trouble, my friend,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's where you're wrong,&rdquo; put in Theron. &ldquo;Not that I'd mind any trouble
+      in this wide world, so long as you called me 'my friend,' but I'm not
+      going to get into any at all. I know a trick worth two of that. I've
+      learned to be a showman. I can preach now far better than I used to, and I
+      can get through my work in half the time, and keep on the right side of my
+      people, and get along with perfect smoothness. I was too green before. I
+      took the thing seriously, and I let every mean-fisted curmudgeon and crazy
+      fanatic worry me, and keep me on pins and needles. I don't do that any
+      more. I've taken a new measure of life. I see now what life is really
+      worth, and I'm going to have my share of it. Why should I deliberately
+      deny myself all possible happiness for the rest of my days, simply because
+      I made a fool of myself when I was in my teens? Other men are not
+      eternally punished like that, for what they did as boys, and I won't
+      submit to it either. I will be as free to enjoy myself as&mdash;as Father
+      Forbes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia smiled softly, and shook her head again. &ldquo;Poor man, to call HIM
+      free!&rdquo; she said: &ldquo;why, he is bound hand and foot. You don't in the least
+      realize how he is hedged about, the work he has to do, the thousand
+      suspicious eyes that watch his every movement, eager to bring the Bishop
+      down upon him. And then think of his sacrifice&mdash;the great sacrifice
+      of all&mdash;to never know what love means, to forswear his manhood, to
+      live a forlorn, celibate life&mdash;you have no idea how sadly that
+      appeals to a woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us sit down here for a little,&rdquo; said Theron; &ldquo;we seem at the end of
+      the path.&rdquo; She seated herself on the root-based mound, and he reclined at
+      her side, with an arm carelessly extended behind her on the moss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can see what you mean,&rdquo; he went on, after a pause. &ldquo;But to me, do you
+      know, there is an enormous fascination in celibacy. You forget that I know
+      the reverse of the medal. I know how the mind can be cramped, the nerves
+      harassed, the ambitions spoiled and rotted, the whole existence darkened
+      and belittled, by&mdash;by the other thing. I have never talked to you
+      before about my marriage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think we'd better talk about it now,&rdquo; observed Celia. &ldquo;There must
+      be many more amusing topics.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He missed the spirit of her remark. &ldquo;You are right,&rdquo; he said slowly. &ldquo;It
+      is too sad a thing to talk about. But there! it is my load, and I bear it,
+      and there's nothing more to be said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron drew a heavy sigh, and let his fingers toy abstractedly with a
+      ribbon on the outer edge of Celia's penumbra of apparel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We mustn't snivel, and we mustn't sulk. When I get into a
+      rage it makes me ill, and I storm my way through it and tear things, but
+      it doesn't last long, and I come out of it feeling all the better. I don't
+      know that I've ever seen your wife. I suppose she hasn't got red hair?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think it's a kind of light brown,&rdquo; answered Theron, with an effect of
+      exerting his memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems that you only take notice of hair in stained-glass windows,&rdquo; was
+      Celia's comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh-h!&rdquo; he murmured reproachfully, &ldquo;as if&mdash;as if&mdash;but I won't
+      say what I was going to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's not fair!&rdquo; she said. The little touch of whimsical mockery which
+      she gave to the serious declaration was delicious to him. &ldquo;You have me at
+      such a disadvantage! Here am I rattling out whatever comes into my head,
+      exposing all my lightest emotions, and laying bare my very heart in
+      candor, and you meditate, you turn things over cautiously in your mind,
+      like a second Machiavelli. I grow afraid of you; you are so subtle and
+      mysterious in your reserves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron gave a tug at the ribbon, to show the joy he had in her delicate
+      chaff. &ldquo;No, it is you who are secretive,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You never told me
+      about&mdash;about the piano.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The word was out! A minute before it had seemed incredible to him that he
+      should ever have the courage to utter it&mdash;but here it was. He laid
+      firm hold upon the ribbon, which it appeared hung from her waist, and drew
+      himself a trifle nearer to her. &ldquo;I could never have consented to take it,
+      I'm afraid,&rdquo; he went on in a low voice, &ldquo;if I had known. And even as it
+      is, I fear it won't be possible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you afraid of?&rdquo; asked Celia. &ldquo;Why shouldn't you take it? People
+      in your profession never do get anything unless it's given to them, do
+      they? I've always understood it was like that. I've often read of donation
+      parties&mdash;that's what they're called, isn't it?&mdash;where everybody
+      is supposed to bring some gift to the minister. Very well, then, I've
+      simply had a donation party of my own, that's all. Unless you mean that my
+      being a Catholic makes a difference. I had supposed you were quite free
+      from that kind of prejudice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I am! Believe me, I am!&rdquo; urged Theron. &ldquo;When I'm with you, it seems
+      impossible to realize that there are people so narrow and contracted in
+      their natures as to take account of such things. It is another atmosphere
+      that I breathe near you. How could you imagine that such a thought&mdash;about
+      our difference of creed&mdash;would enter my head? In fact,&rdquo; he concluded
+      with a nervous half-laugh, &ldquo;there isn't any such difference. Whatever your
+      religion is, it's mine too. You remember&mdash;you adopted me as a Greek.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did I?&rdquo; she rejoined. &ldquo;Well, if that's the case, it leaves you without a
+      leg to stand on. I challenge you to find any instance where a Greek made
+      any difficulties about accepting a piano from a friend. But seriously&mdash;while
+      we are talking about it&mdash;you introduced the subject: I didn't&mdash;I
+      might as well explain to you that I had no such intention, when I picked
+      the instrument out. It was later, when I was talking to Thurston's people
+      about the price, that the whim seized me. Now it is the one fixed rule of
+      my life to obey my whims. Whatever occurs to me as a possibly pleasant
+      thing to do, straight like a hash, I go and do it. It is the only way that
+      a person with means, with plenty of money, can preserve any freshness of
+      character. If they stop to think what it would be prudent to do, they get
+      crusted over immediately. That is the curse of rich people&mdash;they
+      teach themselves to distrust and restrain every impulse toward unusual
+      actions. They get to feel that it is more necessary for them to be
+      cautious and conventional than it is for others. I would rather work at a
+      wash-tub than occupy that attitude toward my bank account. I fight against
+      any sign of it that I detect rising in my mind. The instant a wish occurs
+      to me, I rush to gratify it. That is my theory of life. That accounts for
+      the piano; and I don't see that you've anything to say about it at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed very convincing, this theory of life. Somehow, the thought of
+      Miss Madden's riches had never before assumed prominence in Theron's mind.
+      Of course her father was very wealthy, but it had not occurred to him that
+      the daughter's emancipation might run to the length of a personal fortune.
+      He knew so little of rich people and their ways!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted his head, and looked up at Celia with an awakened humility and
+      awe in his glance. The glamour of a separate banking-account shone upon
+      her. Where the soft woodland light played in among the strands of her
+      disordered hair, he saw the veritable gleam of gold. A mysterious new
+      suggestion of power blended itself with the beauty of her face, was
+      exhaled in the faint perfume of her garments. He maintained a timorous
+      hold upon the ribbon, wondering at his hardihood in touching it, or being
+      near her at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What surprises me,&rdquo; he heard himself saying, &ldquo;is that you are contented
+      to stay in Octavius. I should think that you would travel&mdash;go abroad&mdash;see
+      the beautiful things of the world, surround yourself with the luxuries of
+      big cities&mdash;and that sort of thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia regarded the forest prospect straight in front of her with a pensive
+      gaze. &ldquo;Sometime&mdash;no doubt I will sometime,&rdquo; she said abstractedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One reads so much nowadays,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;of American heiresses going to
+      Europe and marrying dukes and noblemen. I suppose you will do that too.
+      Princes would fight one another for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The least touch of a smile softened for an instant the impassivity of her
+      countenance. Then she stared harder than ever at the vague, leafy
+      distance. &ldquo;That is the old-fashioned idea,&rdquo; she said, in a musing tone,
+      &ldquo;that women must belong to somebody, as if they were curios, or statues,
+      or race-horses. You don't understand, my friend, that I have a different
+      view. I am myself, and I belong to myself, exactly as much as any man. The
+      notion that any other human being could conceivably obtain the slightest
+      property rights in me is as preposterous, as ridiculous, as&mdash;what
+      shall I say?&mdash;as the notion of your being taken out with a chain on
+      your neck and sold by auction as a slave, down on the canal bridge. I
+      should be ashamed to be alive for another day, if any other thought were
+      possible to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is not the generally accepted view, I should think,&rdquo; faltered
+      Theron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No more is it the accepted view that young married Methodist ministers
+      should sit out alone in the woods with red-headed Irish girls. No, my
+      friend, let us find what the generally accepted views are, and as fast as
+      we find them set our heels on them. There is no other way to live like
+      real human beings. What on earth is it to me that other women crawl about
+      on all-fours, and fawn like dogs on any hand that will buckle a collar
+      onto them, and toss them the leavings of the table? I am not related to
+      them. I have nothing to do with them. They cannot make any rules for me.
+      If pride and dignity and independence are dead in them, why, so much the
+      worse for them! It is no affair of mine. Certainly it is no reason why I
+      should get down and grovel also. No; I at least stand erect on my legs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Ware sat up, and stared confusedly, with round eyes and parted lips,
+      at his companion. Instinctively his brain dragged forth to the surface
+      those epithets which the doctor had hurled in bitter contempt at her&mdash;&ldquo;mad
+      ass, a mere bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed lewdness.&rdquo; The
+      words rose in their order on his memory, hard and sharp-edged, like
+      arrow-heads. But to sit there, quite at her side; to breathe the same air,
+      and behold the calm loveliness of her profile; to touch the ribbon of her
+      dress&mdash;and all the while to hold these poisoned darts of abuse
+      levelled in thought at her breast&mdash;it was monstrous. He could have
+      killed the doctor at that moment. With an effort, he drove the foul things
+      from his mind&mdash;scattered them back into the darkness. He felt that he
+      had grown pale, and wondered if she had heard the groan that seemed to
+      have been forced from him in the struggle. Or was the groan imaginary?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia continued to sit unmoved, composedly looking upon vacancy. Theron's
+      eyes searched her face in vain for any sign of consciousness that she had
+      astounded and bewildered him. She did not seem to be thinking of him at
+      all. The proud calm of her thoughtful countenance suggested instead
+      occupation with lofty and remote abstractions and noble ideals.
+      Contemplating her, he suddenly perceived that what she had been saying was
+      great, wonderful, magnificent. An involuntary thrill ran through his veins
+      at recollection of her words. His fancy likened it to the sensation he
+      used to feel as a youth, when the Fourth of July reader bawled forth that
+      opening clause: &ldquo;When, in the course of human events, it becomes
+      necessary,&rdquo; etc. It was nothing less than another Declaration of
+      Independence he had been listening to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sank again recumbent at her side, and stretched the arm behind her,
+      nearer than before. &ldquo;Apparently, then, you will never marry.&rdquo; His voice
+      trembled a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Most certainly not!&rdquo; said Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You spoke so feelingly a little while ago,&rdquo; he ventured along, with
+      hesitation, &ldquo;about how sadly the notion of a priest's sacrificing himself&mdash;never
+      knowing what love meant&mdash;appealed to a woman. I should think that the
+      idea of sacrificing herself would seem to her even sadder still.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't remember that we mentioned THAT,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;How do you mean&mdash;sacrificing
+      herself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron gathered some of the outlying folds of her dress in his hand, and
+      boldly patted and caressed them. &ldquo;You, so beautiful and so free, with such
+      fine talents and abilities,&rdquo; he murmured; &ldquo;you, who could have the whole
+      world at your feet&mdash;are you, too, never going to know what love
+      means? Do you call that no sacrifice? To me it is the most terrible that
+      my imagination can conceive.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia laughed&mdash;a gentle, amused little laugh, in which Theron's ears
+      traced elements of tenderness. &ldquo;You must regulate that imagination of
+      yours,&rdquo; she said playfully. &ldquo;It conceives the thing that is not. Pray,
+      when&rdquo;&mdash;and here, turning her head, she bent down upon his face a gaze
+      of arch mock-seriousness&mdash;&ldquo;pray, when did I describe myself in these
+      terms? When did I say that I should never know what love meant?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For answer Theron laid his head down upon his arm, and closed his eyes,
+      and held his face against the draperies encircling her. &ldquo;I cannot think!&rdquo;
+       he groaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing that came uppermost in his mind, as it swayed and rocked in the
+      tempest of emotion, was the strange reminiscence of early childhood in it
+      all. It was like being a little boy again, nestling in an innocent,
+      unthinking transport of affection against his mother's skirts. The tears
+      he felt scalding his eyes were the spontaneous, unashamed tears of a
+      child; the tremulous and exquisite joy which spread, wave-like, over him,
+      at once reposeful and yearning, was full of infantile purity and
+      sweetness. He had not comprehended at all before what wellsprings of
+      spiritual beauty, what limpid depths of idealism, his nature contained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were speaking of our respective religions,&rdquo; he heard Celia say, as
+      imperturbably as if there had been no digression worth mentioning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he assented, and moved his head so that he looked up at her back
+      hair, and the leaves high above, mottled against the sky. The wish to lie
+      there, where now he could just catch the rose-leaf line of her under-chin
+      as well, was very strong upon him. &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo; he repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot talk to you like that,&rdquo; she said; and he sat up again
+      shamefacedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;I think we were speaking of religions&mdash;some time ago,&rdquo; he
+      faltered, to relieve the situation. The dreadful thought that she might be
+      annoyed began to oppress him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you said whatever my religion was, it was yours too. That entitles
+      you at least to be told what the religion is. Now, I am a Catholic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron, much mystified, nodded his head. Could it be possible&mdash;was
+      there coming a deliberate suggestion that he should become a convert? &ldquo;Yes&mdash;I
+      know,&rdquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I should explain that I am only a Catholic in the sense that its
+      symbolism is pleasant to me. You remember what Schopenhauer said&mdash;you
+      cannot have the water by itself: you must also have the jug that it is in.
+      Very well; the Catholic religion is my jug. I put into it the things I
+      like. They were all there long ago, thousands of years ago. The Jews threw
+      them out; we will put them back again. We will restore art and poetry and
+      the love of beauty, and the gentle, spiritual, soulful life. The Greeks
+      had it; and Christianity would have had it too, if it hadn't been for
+      those brutes they call the Fathers. They loved ugliness and dirt and the
+      thought of hell-fire. They hated women. In all the earlier stages of the
+      Church, women were very prominent in it. Jesus himself appreciated women,
+      and delighted to have them about him, and talk with them and listen to
+      them. That was the very essence of the Greek spirit; and it breathed into
+      Christianity at its birth a sweetness and a grace which twenty generations
+      of cranks and savages like Paul and Jerome and Tertullian weren't able to
+      extinguish. But the very man, Cyril, who killed Hypatia, and thus began
+      the dark ages, unwittingly did another thing which makes one almost
+      forgive him. To please the Egyptians, he secured the Church's acceptance
+      of the adoration of the Virgin. It is that idea which has kept the Greek
+      spirit alive, and grown and grown, till at last it will rule the world. It
+      was only epileptic Jews who could imagine a religion without sex in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember the pictures of the Virgin in your room,&rdquo; said Theron, feeling
+      more himself again. &ldquo;I wondered if they quite went with the statues.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The remark won a smile from Celia's lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They get along together better than you suppose,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;Besides,
+      they are not all pictures of Mary. One of them, standing on the moon, is
+      of Isis with the infant Horus in her arms. Another might as well be
+      Mahamie, bearing the miraculously born Buddha, or Olympias with her child
+      Alexander, or even Perictione holding her babe Plato&mdash;all these were
+      similar cases, you know. Almost every religion had its Immaculate
+      Conception. What does it all come to, except to show us that man turns
+      naturally toward the worship of the maternal idea? That is the deepest of
+      all our instincts&mdash;love of woman, who is at once daughter and wife
+      and mother. It is that that makes the world go round.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brave thoughts shaped themselves in Theron's mind, and shone forth in a
+      confident yet wistful smile on his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a pity you cannot change estates with me for one minute,&rdquo; he said,
+      in steady, low tone. &ldquo;Then you would realize the tremendous truth of what
+      you have been saying. It is only your intellect that has reached out and
+      grasped the idea. If you were in my place, you would discover that your
+      heart was bursting with it as well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia turned and looked at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I myself,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;would not have known, half an hour ago, what you
+      meant by the worship of the maternal idea. I am much older than you. I am
+      a strong, mature man. But when I lay down there, and shut my eyes&mdash;because
+      the charm and marvel of this whole experience had for the moment overcome
+      me&mdash;the strangest sensation seized upon me. It was absolutely as if I
+      were a boy again, a good, pure-minded, fond little child, and you were the
+      mother that I idolized.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia had not taken her eyes from his face. &ldquo;I find myself liking you
+      better at this moment,&rdquo; she said, with gravity, &ldquo;than I have ever liked
+      you before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, as by a sudden impulse, she sprang to her feet. &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; she cried,
+      her voice and manner all vivacity once more, &ldquo;we have been here long
+      enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon the instant, as Theron was more laboriously getting up, it became
+      apparent to them both that perhaps they had been there too long.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A boy with a gun under his arm, and two gray squirrels tied by the tails
+      slung across his shoulder, stood at the entrance to the glade, some dozen
+      paces away, regarding them with undisguised interest. Upon the discovery
+      that he was in turn observed, he resumed his interrupted progress through
+      the woods, whistling softly as he went, and vanished among the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heavens above!&rdquo; groaned Theron, shudderingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Know him?&rdquo; he went on, in answer to the glance of inquiry on his
+      companion's face. &ldquo;I should think I did! He spades my&mdash;my wife's
+      garden for her. He used to bring our milk. He works in the law office of
+      one of my trustees&mdash;the one who isn't friendly to me, but is very
+      friendly indeed with my&mdash;with Mrs. Ware. Oh, what shall I do? It may
+      easily mean my ruin!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia looked at him attentively. The color had gone out of his face, and
+      with it the effect of earnestness and mental elevation which, a minute
+      before, had caught her fancy. &ldquo;Somehow, I fear that I do not like you
+      quite so much just now, my friend,&rdquo; she remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In God's name, don't say that!&rdquo; urged Theron. He raised his voice in
+      agitated entreaty. &ldquo;You don't know what these people are&mdash;how they
+      would leap at the barest hint of a scandal about me. In my position I am a
+      thousand times more defenceless than any woman. Just a single whisper, and
+      I am done for!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me point out to you, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; said Celia, slowly, &ldquo;that to be seen
+      sitting and talking with me, whatever doubts it may raise as to a
+      gentleman's intellectual condition, need not necessarily blast his social
+      reputation beyond all hope whatever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron stared at her, as if he had not grasped her meaning. Then he winced
+      visibly under it, and put out his hands to implore her. &ldquo;Forgive me!
+      Forgive me!&rdquo; he pleaded. &ldquo;I was beside myself for the moment with the
+      fright of the thing. Oh, say you do forgive me, Celia!&rdquo; He made haste to
+      support this daring use of her name. &ldquo;I have been so happy today&mdash;so
+      deeply, so vastly happy&mdash;like the little child I spoke of&mdash;and
+      that is so new in my lonely life&mdash;that&mdash;the suddenness of the
+      thing&mdash;it just for the instant unstrung me. Don't be too hard on me
+      for it! And I had hoped, too&mdash;I had had such genuine heartfelt
+      pleasure in the thought&mdash;that, an hour or two ago, when you were
+      unhappy, perhaps it had been some sort of consolation to you that I was
+      with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia was looking away. When he took her hand she did not withdraw it, but
+      turned and nodded in musing general assent to what he had said. &ldquo;Yes, we
+      have both been unstrung, as you call it, today,&rdquo; she said, decidedly out
+      of pitch. &ldquo;Let each forgive the other, and say no more about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took his arm, and they retraced their steps along the path, again in
+      silence. The labored noise of the orchestra, as it were, returned to meet
+      them. They halted at an intersecting footpath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I go back to my slavery&mdash;my double bondage,&rdquo; said Theron, letting
+      his voice sink to a sigh. &ldquo;But even if I am put on the rack for it, I
+      shall have had one day of glory.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you may kiss me, in memory of that one day&mdash;or of a few
+      minutes in that day,&rdquo; said Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their lips brushed each other in a swift, almost perfunctory caress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron went his way at a hurried pace, the sobered tones of her &ldquo;good-bye&rdquo;
+       beating upon his brain with every measure of the droning waltz-music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART4" id="link2H_PART4">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The memory of the kiss abode with Theron. Like Aaron's rod, it swallowed
+      up one by one all competing thoughts and recollections, and made his brain
+      its slave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even as he strode back through the woods to the camp-meeting, it was the
+      kiss that kept his feet in motion, and guided their automatic course. All
+      along the watches of the restless night, it was the kiss that bore him
+      sweet company, and wandered with him from one broken dream of bliss to
+      another. Next day, it was the kiss that made of life for him a sort of
+      sunlit wonderland. He preached his sermon in the morning, and took his
+      appointed part in the other services of afternoon and evening, apparently
+      to everybody's satisfaction: to him it was all a vision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the beautiful full moon rose, this Sunday evening, and glorified the
+      clearing and the forest with its mellow harvest radiance, he could have
+      groaned with the burden of his joy. He went out alone into the light, and
+      bared his head to it, and stood motionless for a long time. In all his
+      life, he had never been impelled as powerfully toward earnest and soulful
+      thanksgiving. The impulse to kneel, there in the pure, tender moonlight,
+      and lift up offerings of praise to God, kept uppermost in his mind. Some
+      formless resignation restrained him from the act itself, but the spirit of
+      it hallowed his mood. He gazed up at the broad luminous face of the
+      satellite. &ldquo;You are our God,&rdquo; he murmured. &ldquo;Hers and mine! You are the
+      most beautiful of heavenly creatures, as she is of the angels on earth. I
+      am speechless with reverence for you both.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not until the camp-meeting broke up, four days later, and Theron
+      with the rest returned to town, that the material aspects of what had
+      happened, and might be expected to happen, forced themselves upon his
+      mind. The kiss was a child of the forest. So long as Theron remained in
+      the camp, the image of the kiss, which was enshrined in his heart and
+      ministered to by all his thoughts, continued enveloped in a haze of sylvan
+      mystery, like a dryad. Suggestions of its beauty and holiness came to him
+      in the odors of the woodland, at the sight of wild flowers and
+      water-lilies. When he walked alone in unfamiliar parts of the forest, he
+      carried about with him the half-conscious idea of somewhere coming upon a
+      strange, hidden pool which mortal eye had not seen before&mdash;a deep,
+      sequestered mere of spring-fed waters, walled in by rich, tangled growths
+      of verdure, and bearing upon its virgin bosom only the shadows of the
+      primeval wilderness, and the light of the eternal skies. His fancy dwelt
+      upon some such nook as the enchanted home of the fairy that possessed his
+      soul. The place, though he never found it, became real to him. As he
+      pictured it, there rose sometimes from among the lily-pads, stirring the
+      translucent depths and fluttering over the water's surface drops like
+      gems, the wonderful form of a woman, with pale leaves wreathed in her
+      luxuriant red hair, and a skin which gave forth light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the homecoming to Octavius, his dreams began to take more account of
+      realities. In a day or two he was wide awake, and thinking hard. The kiss
+      was as much as ever the ceaseless companion of his hours, but it no longer
+      insisted upon shrouding itself in vines and woodland creepers, or
+      outlining itself in phosphorescent vagueness against mystic backgrounds of
+      nymph-haunted glades. It advanced out into the noonday, and assumed
+      tangible dimensions and substance. He saw that it was related to the facts
+      of his daily life, and had, in turn, altered his own relations to all
+      these facts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What ought he to do? What COULD he do? Apparently, nothing but wait. He
+      waited for a week&mdash;then for another week. The conclusion that the
+      initiative had been left to him began to take shape in his mind. From this
+      it seemed but a step to the passionate resolve to act at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning the situation over and over in his anxious thoughts, two things
+      stood out in special prominence. One was that Celia loved him. The other
+      was that the boy in Gorringe's law office, and possibly Gorringe, and
+      heaven only knew how many others besides, had reasons for suspecting this
+      to be true.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And what about Celia? Side by side with the moving rapture of thinking
+      about her as a woman, there rose the substantial satisfaction of
+      contemplating her as Miss Madden. She had kissed him, and she was very
+      rich. The things gradually linked themselves before his eyes. He tried a
+      thousand varying guesses at what she proposed to do, and each time reined
+      up his imagination by the reminder that she was confessedly a creature of
+      whims, who proposed to do nothing, but was capable of all things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as to the boy. If he had blabbed what he saw, it was incredible that
+      somebody should not take the subject up, and impart a scandalous twist to
+      it, and send it rolling like a snowball to gather up exaggeration and foul
+      innuendo till it was big enough to overwhelm him. What would happen to him
+      if a formal charge were preferred against him? He looked it up in the
+      Discipline. Of course, if his accusers magnified their mean suspicions and
+      calumnious imaginings to the point of formulating a charge, it would be
+      one of immorality. They could prove nothing; there was nothing to prove.
+      At the worst, it was an indiscretion, which would involve his being
+      admonished by his Presiding Elder. Or if these narrow bigots confused
+      slanders with proofs, and showed that they intended to convict him, then
+      it would be open to him to withdraw from the ministry, in advance of his
+      condemnation. His relation to the church would be the same as if he had
+      been expelled, but to the outer world it would be different. And supposing
+      he did withdraw from the ministry?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes; this was the important point. What if he did abandon this mistaken
+      profession of his? On its mental side the relief would be prodigious,
+      unthinkable. But on the practical side, the bread-and-butter side? For
+      some days Theron paused with a shudder when he reached this question. The
+      thought of the plunge into unknown material responsibilities gave him a
+      sinking heart. He tried to imagine himself lecturing, canvassing for books
+      or insurance policies, writing for newspapers&mdash;and remained
+      frightened. But suddenly one day it occurred to him that these qualms and
+      forebodings were sheer folly. Was not Celia rich? Would she not with
+      lightning swiftness draw forth that check-book, like the flashing sword of
+      a champion from its scabbard, and run to his relief? Why, of course. It
+      was absurd not to have thought of that before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He recalled her momentary anger with him, that afternoon in the woods,
+      when he had cried out that discovery would mean ruin to him. He saw
+      clearly enough now that she had been grieved at his want of faith in her
+      protection. In his flurry of fright, he had lost sight of the fact that,
+      if exposure and trouble came to him, she would naturally feel that she had
+      been the cause of his martyrdom. It was plain enough now. If he got into
+      hot water, it would be solely on account of his having been seen with her.
+      He had walked into the woods with her&mdash;&ldquo;the further the better&rdquo; had
+      been her own words&mdash;out of pure kindliness, and the desire to lead
+      her away from the scene of her brother's and her own humiliation. But why
+      amplify arguments? Her own warm heart would tell her, on the instant, how
+      he had been sacrificed for her sake, and would bring her, eager and
+      devoted, to his succor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was all right, then. Slowly, from this point, suggestions expanded
+      themselves. The future could be, if he willed it, one long serene triumph
+      of love, and lofty intellectual companionship, and existence softened and
+      enriched at every point by all that wealth could command, and the most
+      exquisite tastes suggest. Should he will it! Ah! the question answered
+      itself. But he could not enter upon this beckoning heaven of a future
+      until he had freed himself. When Celia said to him, &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; he must not be
+      in the position to reply, &ldquo;I should like to, but unfortunately I am tied
+      by the leg.&rdquo; He should have to leave Octavius, leave the ministry, leave
+      everything. He could not begin too soon to face these contingencies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very likely Celia had not thought it out as far as this. With her, it was
+      a mere vague &ldquo;sometime I may.&rdquo; But the harder masculine sense, Theron
+      felt, existed for the very purpose of correcting and giving point to these
+      loose feminine notions of time and space. It was for him to clear away the
+      obstacles, and map the plans out with definite decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One warm afternoon, as he lolled in his easy-chair under the open window
+      of his study, musing upon the ever-shifting phases of this vast,
+      complicated, urgent problem, some chance words from the sidewalk in front
+      came to his ears, and, coming, remained to clarify his thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two ladies whose voices were strange to him had stopped&mdash;as so many
+      people almost daily stopped&mdash;to admire the garden of the parsonage.
+      One of them expressed her pleasure in general terms. Said the other&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My husband declares those dahlias alone couldn't be matched for thirty
+      dollars, and that some of those gladiolus must have cost three or four
+      dollars apiece. I know we've spent simply oceans of money on our garden,
+      and it doesn't begin to compare with this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems like a sinful waste to me,&rdquo; said her companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No-o,&rdquo; the other hesitated. &ldquo;No, I don't think quite that&mdash;if you
+      can afford it just as well as not. But it does seem to me that I'd rather
+      live in a little better house, and not spend it ALL on flowers. Just LOOK
+      at that cactus!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The voices died away. Theron sat up, with a look of arrested thought upon
+      his face, then sprang to his feet and moved hurriedly through the parlor
+      to an open front window. Peering out with caution he saw that the two
+      women receding from view were fashionably dressed and evidently came from
+      homes of means. He stared after them in a blank way until they turned a
+      corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went into the hall then, put on his frock-coat and hat, and stepped out
+      into the garden. He was conscious of having rather avoided it heretofore&mdash;not
+      altogether without reasons of his own, lying unexamined somewhere in the
+      recesses of his mind. Now he walked slowly about, and examined the flowers
+      with great attentiveness. The season was advancing, and he saw that many
+      plants had gone out of bloom. But what a magnificent plenitude of blossoms
+      still remained!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thirty dollars' worth of dahlias&mdash;that was what the stranger had
+      said. Theron hardly brought himself to credit the statement; but all the
+      same it was apparent to even his uninformed eye that these huge,
+      imbricated, flowering masses, with their extraordinary half-colors, must
+      be unusual. He remembered that the boy in Gorringe's office had spoken of
+      just one lot of plants costing thirty-one dollars and sixty cents, and
+      there had been two other lots as well. The figures remained surprisingly
+      distinct in his memory. It was no good deceiving himself any longer: of
+      course these were the plants that Gorringe had spent his money upon, here
+      all about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he surveyed them with a sour regard, a cool breeze stirred across the
+      garden. The tall, over-laden flower-spikes of gladioli bent and nodded at
+      him; the hollyhocks and flaming alvias, the clustered blossoms on the
+      standard roses, the delicately painted lilies on their stilt-like stems,
+      fluttered in the wind, and seemed all bowing satirically to him. &ldquo;Yes,
+      Levi Gorringe paid for us!&rdquo; He almost heard their mocking declaration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out in the back-yard, where a longer day of sunshine dwelt, there were
+      many other flowers, and notably a bed of geraniums which literally made
+      the eye ache. Standing at this rear corner of the house, he caught the
+      droning sound of Alice's voice, humming a hymn to herself as she went
+      about her kitchen work. He saw her through the open window. She was
+      sweeping, and had a sort of cap on her head which did not add to the
+      graces of her appearance. He looked at her with a hard glance, recalling
+      as a fresh grievance the ten days of intolerable boredom he had spent
+      cooped up in a ridiculous little tent with her, at the camp-meeting. She
+      must have realized at the time how odious the enforced companionship was
+      to him. Yes, beyond doubt she did. It came back to him now that they had
+      spoken but rarely to each other. She had not even praised his sermon upon
+      the Sabbath-question, which every one else had been in raptures over. For
+      that matter she no longer praised anything he did, and took obvious pains
+      to preserve toward him a distant demeanor. So much the better, he felt
+      himself thinking. If she chose to behave in that offish and unwifely
+      fashion, she could blame no one but herself for its results.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had seen him, and came now to the window, watering-pot and broom in
+      hand. She put her head out, to breathe a breath of dustless air, and began
+      as if she would smile on him. Then her face chilled and stiffened, as she
+      caught his look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall you be home for supper?&rdquo; she asked, in her iciest tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not thought of going out before. The question, and the manner of
+      it, gave immediate urgency to the idea of going somewhere. &ldquo;I may or I may
+      not,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;It is quite impossible for me to say.&rdquo; He turned on his
+      heel with this, and walked briskly out of the yard and down the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the most natural thing that presently he should be strolling past
+      the Madden house, and letting a covert glance stray over its front and the
+      grounds about it, as he loitered along. Every day since his return from
+      the woods he had given the fates this chance of bringing Celia to meet
+      him, without avail. He had hung about in the vicinity of the Catholic
+      church on several evenings as well, but to no purpose. The organ inside
+      was dumb, and he could detect no signs of Celia's presence on the curtains
+      of the pastorate next door. This day, too, there was no one visible at the
+      home of the Maddens, and he walked on, a little sadly. It was weary work
+      waiting for the signal that never came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there were compensations. His mind reverted doggedly to the flowers in
+      his garden, and to Alice's behavior toward him. They insisted upon
+      connecting themselves in his thoughts. Why should Levi Gorringe, a
+      money-lender, and therefore the last man in the world to incur reckless
+      expenditure, go and buy perhaps a hundred dollars, worth of flowers for
+      his wife's garden? It was time&mdash;high time&mdash;to face this
+      question. And his experiencing religion afterward, just when Alice did,
+      and marching down to the rail to kneel beside her&mdash;that was a thing
+      to be thought of, too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meditation, it is true, hardly threw fresh light upon the matter. It was
+      incredible, of course, that there should be anything wrong. To even shape
+      a thought of Alice in connection with gallantry would be wholly
+      impossible. Nor could it be said that Gorringe, in his new capacity as a
+      professing church-member, had disclosed any sign of ulterior motives, or
+      of insincerity. Yet there the facts were. While Theron pondered them,
+      their mystery, if they involved a mystery, baffled him altogether. But
+      when he had finished, he found himself all the same convinced that neither
+      Alice nor Gorringe would be free to blame him for anything he might do. He
+      had grounds for complaint against them. If he did not himself know just
+      what these grounds were, it was certain enough that THEY knew. Very well,
+      then, let them take the responsibility for what happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was indeed awkward that at the moment, as Theron chanced to emerge
+      temporarily from his brown-study, his eyes fell full upon the spare,
+      well-knit form of Levi Gorringe himself, standing only a few feet away, in
+      the staircase entrance to his law office. His lean face, browned by the
+      summer's exposure, had a more Arabian aspect than ever. His hands were in
+      his pockets, and he held an unlighted cigar between his teeth. He looked
+      the Rev. Mr. Ware over calmly, and nodded recognition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had halted instinctively. On the instant he would have given a
+      great deal not to have stopped at all. It was stupid of him to have
+      paused, but it would not do now to go on without words of some sort. He
+      moved over to the door-way, and made a half-hearted pretence of looking at
+      the photographs in one of the show-cases at its side. As Mr. Gorringe did
+      not take his hands from his pockets, there was no occasion for any formal
+      greeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had no idea that they took such good pictures in Octavius,&rdquo; Theron
+      remarked after a minute's silence, still bending in examination of the
+      photographs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They ought to; they charge New York prices,&rdquo; observed the lawyer,
+      sententiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron found in the words confirmation of his feeling that Gorringe was
+      not naturally a lavish or extravagant man. Rather was he a careful and
+      calculating man, who spent money only for a purpose. Though the minister
+      continued gazing at the stiff presentments of local beauties and swains,
+      his eyes seemed to see salmon-hued hollyhocks and spotted lilies instead.
+      Suddenly a resolve came to him. He stood erect, and faced his trustee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Speaking of the price of things,&rdquo; he said, with an effort of arrogance in
+      his measured tone, &ldquo;I have never had an opportunity before of mentioning
+      the subject of the flowers you have so kindly furnished for my&mdash;for
+      MY garden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why mention it now?&rdquo; queried Gorringe, with nonchalance. He turned his
+      cigar about with a movement of his lips, and worked it into the corner of
+      his mouth. He did not find it necessary to look at Theron at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because&mdash;&rdquo; began Mr. Ware, and then hesitated&mdash;&ldquo;because&mdash;well,
+      it raises a question of my being under obligation, which I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no, sir,&rdquo; said the lawyer; &ldquo;put that out of your mind. You are no
+      more under obligation to me than I am to you. Oh, no, make yourself easy
+      about that. Neither of us owes the other anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not even good-will&mdash;I take that to be your meaning,&rdquo; retorted
+      Theron, with some heat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The words are yours, sir,&rdquo; responded Gorringe, coolly. &ldquo;I do not object
+      to them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As you like,&rdquo; put in the other. &ldquo;If it be so, why, then all the more
+      reason why I should, under the circumstances&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Under what circumstances?&rdquo; interposed the lawyer. &ldquo;Let us be clear about
+      this thing as we go along. To what circumstances do you refer?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had turned his eyes now, and looked Theron in the face. A slight
+      protrusion of his lower jaw had given the cigar an upward tilt under the
+      black mustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The circumstances are that you have brought or sent to my garden a great
+      many very expensive flower-plants and bushes and so on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you object? I had not supposed that clergymen in general&mdash;and
+      you in particular&mdash;were so sensitive. Have donation parties, then,
+      gone out of date?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand your sneer well enough,&rdquo; retorted Theron, &ldquo;but that can
+      pass. The main point is, that you did me the honor to send these plants&mdash;or
+      to smuggle them in&mdash;but never once deigned to hint to me that you had
+      done so. No one told me. Except by mere accident, I should not have known
+      to this day where they came from.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gorringe twisted the cigar at another angle, with lines of grim
+      amusement about the corner of his mouth. &ldquo;I should have thought,&rdquo; he said
+      with dry deliberation, &ldquo;that possibly this fact might have raised in your
+      mind the conceivable hypothesis that the plants might not be intended for
+      you at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is precisely it, sir,&rdquo; said Theron. There were people passing, and
+      he was forced to keep his voice down. It would have been a relief, he
+      felt, to shout. &ldquo;That is it&mdash;they were not intended for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, what are you talking about?&rdquo; The lawyer's speech had become
+      abrupt almost to incivility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think my remarks have been perfectly clear,&rdquo; said the minister, with
+      dignity. It was a new experience to be addressed in that fashion. It
+      occurred to him to add, &ldquo;Please remember that I am not in the witness-box,
+      to be bullied or insulted by a professional.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gorringe studied Theron's face attentively with a cold, searching
+      scrutiny. &ldquo;You may thank your stars you're not!&rdquo; he said, with
+      significance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What on earth could he mean? The words and the menacing tone greatly
+      impressed Theron. Indeed, upon reflection, he found that they frightened
+      him. The disposition to adopt a high tone with the lawyer was melting
+      away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not see,&rdquo; he began, and then deliberately allowed his voice to take
+      on an injured and plaintive inflection&mdash;&ldquo;I do not see why you should
+      adopt this tone toward me&mdash;Brother Gorringe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lawyer scowled, and bit sharply into the cigar, but said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I have unconsciously offended you in any way,&rdquo; Theron went on, &ldquo;I beg
+      you to tell me how. I liked you from the beginning of my pastorate here,
+      and the thought that latterly we seemed to be drifting apart has given me
+      much pain. But now it is still more distressing to find you actually
+      disposed to quarrel with me. Surely, Brother Gorringe, between a pastor
+      and a probationer who&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; Gorringe broke in; &ldquo;quarrel isn't the word for it. There isn't any
+      quarrel, Mr. Ware.&rdquo; He stepped down from the door-stone to the sidewalk as
+      he spoke, and stood face to face with Theron. Working-men with
+      dinner-pails, and factory girls, were passing close to them, and he
+      lowered his voice to a sharp, incisive half-whisper as he added, &ldquo;It
+      wouldn't be worth any grown man's while to quarrel with so poor a creature
+      as you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron stood confounded, with an empty stare of bewilderment on his face.
+      It rose in his mind that the right thing to feel was rage, righteous
+      indignation, fury; but for the life of him, he could not muster any manly
+      anger. The character of the insult stupefied him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not know that I have anything to say to you in reply,&rdquo; he remarked,
+      after what seemed to him a silence of minutes. His lips framed the words
+      automatically, but they expressed well enough the blank vacancy of his
+      mind. The suggestion that anybody deemed him a &ldquo;poor creature&rdquo; grew more
+      astounding, incomprehensible, as it swelled in his brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I suppose not,&rdquo; snapped Gorringe. &ldquo;You're not the sort to stand up to
+      men; your form is to go round the corner and take it out of somebody
+      weaker than yourself&mdash;a defenceless woman, for instance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;ho!&rdquo; said Theron. The exclamation had uttered itself. The sound
+      of it seemed to clarify his muddled thoughts; and as they ranged
+      themselves in order, he began to understand. &ldquo;Oh&mdash;ho!&rdquo; he said again,
+      and nodded his head in token of comprehension.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lawyer, chewing his cigar with increased activity, glared at him.
+      &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; he demanded peremptorily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mean?&rdquo; said the minister. &ldquo;Oh, nothing that I feel called upon to explain
+      to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was passing strange, but his self-possession had all at once returned
+      to him. As it became more apparent that the lawyer was losing his temper,
+      Theron found the courage to turn up the corners of his lips in show of a
+      bitter little smile of confidence. He looked into the other's dusky face,
+      and flaunted this smile at it in contemptuous defiance. &ldquo;It is not a
+      subject that I can discuss with propriety&mdash;at this stage,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damn you! Are you talking about those flowers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I am not talking about anything in particular,&rdquo; returned Theron, &ldquo;not
+      even the curious choice of language which my latest probationer seems to
+      prefer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go and strike my name off the list!&rdquo; said Gorringe, with rising passion.
+      &ldquo;I was a fool to ever have it there. To think of being a probationer of
+      yours&mdash;my God!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That will be a pity&mdash;from one point of view,&rdquo; remarked Theron, still
+      with the ironical smile on his lips. &ldquo;You seemed to enter upon the new
+      life with such deliberation and fixity of purpose, too! I can imagine the
+      regrets your withdrawal will cause, in certain quarters. I only hope that
+      it will not discourage those who accompanied you to the altar, and shared
+      your enthusiasm at the time.&rdquo; He had spoken throughout with studied
+      slowness and an insolent nicety of utterance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had better go away!&rdquo; broke forth Gorringe. &ldquo;If you don't, I shall
+      forget myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the first time?&rdquo; asked Theron. Then, warned by the flash in the
+      lawyer's eye, he turned on his heel and sauntered, with a painstaking
+      assumption of a mind quite at ease, up the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gorringe's own face twitched and his veins tingled as he looked after him.
+      He spat the shapeless cigar out of his mouth into the gutter, and, drawing
+      forth another from his pocket, clenched it between his teeth, his gaze
+      following the tall form of the Methodist minister till it was merged in
+      the crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'm damned!&rdquo; he said aloud to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The photographer had come down to take in his showcases for the night. He
+      looked up from his task at the exclamation, and grinned inquiringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've just been talking to a man,&rdquo; said the lawyer, &ldquo;who's so much meaner
+      than any other man I ever heard of that it takes my breath away. He's got
+      a wife that's as pure and good as gold, and he knows it, and she worships
+      the ground he walks on, and he knows that too. And yet the scoundrel is
+      around trying to sniff out some shadow of a pretext for misusing her worse
+      than he's already done. Yes, sir; he'd be actually tickled to death if he
+      could nose up some hint of a scandal about her&mdash;something that he
+      could pretend to believe, and work for his own advantage to levy
+      blackmail, or get rid of her, or whatever suited his book. I didn't think
+      there was such an out-and-out cur on this whole footstool. I almost wish,
+      by God, I'd thrown him into the canal!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you lawyers must run against some pretty snide specimens,&rdquo; remarked
+      the photographer, lifting one of the cases from its sockets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0026" id="link2HCH0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Theron spent half an hour in aimless strolling about the streets. From
+      earliest boyhood his mind had always worked most clearly when he walked
+      alone. Every mental process which had left a mark upon his memory and his
+      career&mdash;the daydreams of future academic greatness and fame which had
+      fashioned themselves in his brain as a farm lad; the meditations,
+      raptures, and high resolves of his student period at the seminary; the
+      more notable sermons and powerful discourse by which he had revealed the
+      genius that was in him to astonished and delighted assemblages&mdash;all
+      were associated in his retrospective thoughts with solitary rambles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a very direct and vivid consciousness now that it was good to be on
+      his legs, and alone. He had never in his life been more sensible of the
+      charm of his own companionship. The encounter with Gorringe seemed to have
+      cleared all the clouds out of his brain, and restored lightness to his
+      heart. After such an object lesson, the impossibility of his continuing to
+      sacrifice himself to a notion of duty to these low-minded and
+      coarse-natured villagers was beyond all argument. There could no longer be
+      any doubt about his moral right to turn his back upon them, to wash his
+      hands of the miserable combination of hypocrisy and hysterics which they
+      called their spiritual life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the question of Gorringe and Alice, that too stood precisely where he
+      wanted it. Even in his own thoughts, he preferred to pursue it no further.
+      Between them somewhere an offence of concealment, it might be of
+      conspiracy, had been committed against him. It was no business of his to
+      say more, or to think more. He rested his case simply on the fact, which
+      could not be denied, and which he was not in the least interested to have
+      explained, one way or the other. The recollection of Gorringe's obvious
+      disturbance of mind was especially pleasant to him. He himself had been
+      magnanimous almost to the point of weakness. He had gone out of his way to
+      call the man &ldquo;brother,&rdquo; and to give him an opportunity of behaving like a
+      gentleman; but his kindly forbearance had been wasted. Gorringe was not
+      the man to understand generous feelings, much less rise to their level. He
+      had merely shown that he would be vicious if he knew how. It was more
+      important and satisfactory to recall that he had also shown a complete
+      comprehension of the injured husband's grievance. The fact that he had
+      recognized it was enough&mdash;was, in fact, everything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the background of his thoughts Theron had carried along a notion of
+      going and dining with Father Forbes when the time for the evening meal
+      should arrive. The idea in itself attracted him, as a fitting capstone to
+      his resolve not to go home to supper. It gave just the right kind of
+      character to his domestic revolt. But when at last he stood on the
+      doorstep of the pastorate, waiting for an answer to the tinkle of the
+      electric bell he had heard ring inside, his mind contained only the single
+      thought that now he should hear something about Celia. Perhaps he might
+      even find her there; but he put that suggestion aside as slightly
+      unpleasant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hag-faced housekeeper led him, as before, into the dining-room. It was
+      still daylight, and he saw on the glance that the priest was alone at the
+      table, with a book beside him to read from as he ate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes rose and came forward, greeting his visitor with profuse
+      urbanity and smiles. If there was a perfunctory note in the invitation to
+      sit down and share the meal, Theron did not catch it. He frankly displayed
+      his pleasure as he laid aside his hat, and took the chair opposite his
+      host.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is really only a few months since I was here, in this room, before,&rdquo;
+       he remarked, as the priest closed his book and tossed it to one side, and
+      the housekeeper came in to lay another place. &ldquo;Yet it might have been
+      years, many long years, so tremendous is the difference that the lapse of
+      time has wrought in me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid we have nothing to tempt you very much, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; remarked
+      Father Forbes, with a gesture of his plump white hand which embraced the
+      dishes in the centre of the table. &ldquo;May I send you a bit of this boiled
+      mutton? I have very homely tastes when I am by myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was saying,&rdquo; Theron observed, after some moments had passed in silence,
+      &ldquo;that I date such a tremendous revolution in my thoughts, my beliefs, my
+      whole mind and character, from my first meeting with you, my first coming
+      here. I don't know how to describe to you the enormous change that has
+      come over me; and I owe it all to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can only hope, then, that it is entirely of a satisfactory nature,&rdquo;
+       said the priest, politely smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it is so splendidly satisfactory!&rdquo; said Theron, with fervor. &ldquo;I look
+      back at myself now with wonder and pity. It seems incredible that, such a
+      little while ago, I should have been such an ignorant and unimaginative
+      clod of earth, content with such petty ambitions and actually proud of my
+      limitations.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you have larger ambitions now?&rdquo; asked the other. &ldquo;Pray let me help
+      you to some potatoes. I am afraid that ambitions only get in our way and
+      trip us up. We clergymen are like street-car horses. The more steadily we
+      jog along between the rails, the better it is for us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I don't intend to remain in the ministry,&rdquo; declared Theron. The
+      statement seemed to him a little bald, now that he had made it; and as his
+      companion lifted his brows in surprise, he added stumblingly: &ldquo;That is, as
+      I feel now, it seems to me impossible that I should remain much longer.
+      With you, of course, it is different. You have a thousand things to
+      interest and pleasantly occupy you in your work and its ceremonies, so
+      that mere belief or non-belief in the dogma hardly matters. But in our
+      church dogma is everything. If you take that away, or cease to have its
+      support, the rest is intolerable, hideous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes cut another slice of mutton for himself. &ldquo;It is a pretty
+      serious business to make such a change at your time of life. I take it for
+      granted you will think it all over very carefully before you commit
+      yourself.&rdquo; He said this with an almost indifferent air, which rather
+      chilled his listener's enthusiasm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo;, Theron made answer; &ldquo;I shall do nothing rash. But I have a
+      good many plans for the future.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes did not ask what these were, and a brief further period of
+      silence fell upon the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope everything went off smoothly at the picnic,&rdquo; Theron ventured, at
+      last. &ldquo;I have not seen any of you since then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest shook his head and sighed. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It is a bad
+      business. I have had a great deal of unhappiness out of it this past
+      fortnight. That young man who was rude to you&mdash;of course it was mere
+      drunken, irresponsible nonsense on his part&mdash;has got himself into a
+      serious scrape, I'm afraid. It is being kept quite within the family, and
+      we hope to manage so that it will remain there, but it has terribly upset
+      his father and his sister. But that, after all, is not so hard to bear as
+      the other affliction that has come upon the Maddens. You remember Michael,
+      the other brother? He seems to have taken cold that evening, or perhaps
+      over-exerted himself. He has been seized with quick consumption. He will
+      hardly last till snow flies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I am GRIEVED to hear that!&rdquo; Theron spoke with tremulous earnestness.
+      It seemed to him as if Michael were in some way related to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very hard upon them all,&rdquo; the priest went on. &ldquo;Michael is as sweet
+      and holy a character as it is possible for any one to think of. He is the
+      apple of his father's eye. They were inseparable, those two. Do you know
+      the father, Mr. Madden?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron shook his head. &ldquo;I think I have seen him,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;A small man,
+      with gray whiskers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A peasant,&rdquo; said Father Forbes, &ldquo;but with a heart of gold. Poor man! he
+      has had little enough out of his riches. Ah, the West Coast people, what
+      tragedies I have seen among them over here! They have rudimentary lung
+      organizations, like a frog's, to fit the mild, wet soft air they live in.
+      The sharp air here kills them off like flies in a frost. Whole families
+      go. I should think there are a dozen of old Jeremiah's children in the
+      cemetery. If Michael could have passed his twenty-eighth year, there would
+      have been hope for him, at least till his thirty-fifth. These pulmonary
+      things seem to go by sevens, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know,&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;It is very strange&mdash;and very sad.&rdquo; His
+      startled mind was busy, all at once, with conjectures as to Celia's age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sister&mdash;Miss Madden&mdash;seems extremely strong,&rdquo; he remarked
+      tentatively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Celia may escape the general doom,&rdquo; said the priest. His guest noted that
+      he clenched his shapely white hand on the table as he spoke, and that his
+      gentle, carefully modulated voice had a gritty hardness in its tone. &ldquo;THAT
+      would be too dreadful to think of,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron shuddered in silence, and strove to shut his mind against the
+      thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has taken Michael's illness so deeply to heart,&rdquo; the priest
+      proceeded, &ldquo;and devoted herself to him so untiringly that I get a little
+      nervous about her. I have been urging her to go away and get a change of
+      air and scene, if only for a few days. She does not sleep well, and that
+      is always a bad thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I remember her telling me once that sometimes she had sleepless
+      spells,&rdquo; said Theron. &ldquo;She said that then she banged on her piano at all
+      hours, or dragged the cushions about from room to room, like a wild woman.
+      A very interesting young lady, don't you find her so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes let a wan smile play on his lips. &ldquo;What, our Celia?&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;Interesting! Why, Mr. Ware, there is no one like her in the world.
+      She is as unique as&mdash;what shall I say?&mdash;as the Irish are among
+      races. Her father and mother were both born in mud-cabins, and she&mdash;she
+      might be the daughter of a hundred kings, except that they seem mostly
+      rather under-witted than otherwise. She always impresses me as a sort of
+      atavistic idealization of the old Kelt at his finest and best. There in
+      Ireland you got a strange mixture of elementary early peoples, walled off
+      from the outer world by the four seas, and free to work out their own
+      racial amalgam on their own lines. They brought with them at the outset a
+      great inheritance of Eastern mysticism. Others lost it, but the Irish, all
+      alone on their island, kept it alive and brooded on it, and rooted their
+      whole spiritual side in it. Their religion is full of it; their blood is
+      full of it; our Celia is fuller of it than anybody else. The Ireland of
+      two thousand years ago is incarnated in her. They are the merriest people
+      and the saddest, the most turbulent and the most docile, the most talented
+      and the most unproductive, the most practical and the most visionary, the
+      most devout and the most pagan. These impossible contradictions war
+      ceaselessly in their blood. When I look at Celia, I seem to see in my
+      mind's eye the fair young-ancestral mother of them all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron gazed at the speaker with open admiration. &ldquo;I love to hear you
+      talk,&rdquo; he said simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An unbidden memory flitted upward in his mind. Those were the very words
+      that Alice had so often on her lips in their old courtship days. How
+      curious it was! He looked at the priest, and had a quaint sensation of
+      feeling as a romantic woman must feel in the presence of a specially
+      impressive masculine personality. It was indeed strange that this
+      soft-voiced, portly creature in a gown, with his white, fat hands and his
+      feline suavity of manner, should produce such a commanding and unique
+      effect of virility. No doubt this was a part of the great sex mystery
+      which historically surrounded the figure of the celibate priest as with an
+      atmosphere. Women had always been prostrating themselves before it.
+      Theron, watching his companion's full, pallid face in the lamp-light,
+      tried to fancy himself in the priest's place, looking down upon these
+      worshipping female forms. He wondered what the celibate's attitude really
+      was. The enigma fascinated him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes, after his rhetorical outburst, and been eating. He pushed
+      aside his cheese-plate. &ldquo;I grow enthusiastic on the subject of my race
+      sometimes,&rdquo; he remarked, with the suggestion of an apology. &ldquo;But I make up
+      for it other times&mdash;most of the time&mdash;by scolding them. If it
+      were not such a noble thing to be an Irishman, it would be ridiculous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said Theron, deprecatingly, &ldquo;who would not be enthusiastic in
+      talking of Miss Madden? What you said about her was perfect. As you spoke,
+      I was thinking how proud and thankful we ought to be for the privilege of
+      knowing her&mdash;we who do know her well&mdash;although of course your
+      friendship with her is vastly more intimate than mine&mdash;than mine
+      could ever hope to be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest offered no comment, and Theron went on: &ldquo;I hardly know how to
+      describe the remarkable impression she makes upon me. I can't imagine to
+      myself any other young woman so brilliant or broad in her views, or so
+      courageous. Of course, her being so rich makes it easier for her to do
+      just what she wants to do, but her bravery is astonishing all the same. We
+      had a long and very sympathetic talk in the woods, that day of the picnic,
+      after we left you. I don't know whether she spoke to you about it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes made a movement of the head and eyes which seemed to
+      negative the suggestion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her talk,&rdquo; continued Theron, &ldquo;gave me quite new ideas of the range and
+      capacity of the female mind. I wonder that everybody in Octavius isn't
+      full of praise and admiration for her talents and exceptional character.
+      In such a small town as this, you would think she would be the centre of
+      attention&mdash;the pride of the place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think she has as much praise as is good for her,&rdquo; remarked the priest,
+      quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And here's a thing that puzzles me,&rdquo; pursued Mr. Ware. &ldquo;I was immensely
+      surprised to find that Dr. Ledsmar doesn't even think she is smart&mdash;or
+      at least he professes the utmost intellectual contempt for her, and says
+      he dislikes her into the bargain. But of course she dislikes him, too, so
+      that's only natural. But I can't understand his denying her great
+      ability.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest smiled in a dubious way. &ldquo;Don't borrow unnecessary alarm about
+      that, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; he said, with studied smoothness of modulated tones.
+      &ldquo;These two good friends of mine have much enjoyment out of the idea that
+      they are fighting for the mastery over my poor unstable character. It has
+      grown to be a habit with them, and a hobby as well, and they pursue it
+      with tireless zest. There are not many intellectual diversions open to us
+      here, and they make the most of this one. It amuses them, and it is not
+      without its charms for me, in my capacity as an interested observer. It is
+      a part of the game that they should pretend to themselves that they detest
+      each other. In reality I fancy that they like each other very much. At any
+      rate, there is nothing to be disturbed about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His mellifluous tones had somehow the effect of suggesting to Theron that
+      he was an outsider and would better mind his own business. Ah, if this
+      purring pussy-cat of a priest only knew how little of an outsider he
+      really was! The thought gave him an easy self-control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;our warm mutual friendship makes the observation of
+      these little individual vagaries merely a part of a delightful whole. I
+      should not dream of discussing Miss Madden's confidences to me, or the
+      doctor's either, outside our own little group.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Forbes reached behind him and took from a chair his black
+      three-cornered cap with the tassel. &ldquo;Unfortunately I have a sick call
+      waiting me,&rdquo; he said, gathering up his gown and slowly rising.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I saw the man sitting in the hall,&rdquo; remarked Theron, getting to his
+      feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would ask you to go upstairs and wait,&rdquo; the priest went on, &ldquo;but my
+      return, unhappily, is quite uncertain. Another evening I may be more
+      fortunate. I am leaving town tomorrow for some days, but when I get back&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The polite sentence did not complete itself. Father Forbes had come out
+      into the hall, giving a cool nod to the working-man, who rose from the
+      bench as they passed, and shook hands with his guest on the doorstep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the door had closed upon Mr. Ware, the priest turned to the man. &ldquo;You
+      have come about those frames,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If you will come upstairs, I will
+      show you the prints, and you can give me a notion of what can be done with
+      them. I rather fancy the idea of a triptych in carved old English, if you
+      can manage it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After the workman had gone away, Father Forbes put on slippers and an old
+      loose soutane, lighted a cigar, and, pushing an easy-chair over to the
+      reading lamp, sat down with a book. Then something occurred to him, and he
+      touched the house-bell at his elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Maggie,&rdquo; he said gently, when the housekeeper appeared at the door, &ldquo;I
+      will have the coffee and FINE CHAMPAGNE up here, if it is no trouble. And&mdash;oh,
+      Maggie&mdash;I was compelled this evening to turn the blameless visit of
+      the framemaker into a venial sin, and that involves a needless wear and
+      tear of conscience. I think that&mdash;hereafter&mdash;you understand?&mdash;I
+      am not invariably at home when the Rev. Mr. Ware does me the honor to
+      call.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0027" id="link2HCH0027">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That night brought the first frost of the season worth counting. In the
+      morning, when Theron came downstairs, his casual glance through the window
+      caught a desolate picture of blackened dahlia stalks and shrivelled
+      blooms. The gayety and color of the garden were gone, and in their place
+      was shabby and dishevelled ruin. He flung the sash up and leaned out. The
+      nipping autumn air was good to breathe. He looked about him, surveying the
+      havoc the frost had wrought among the flowers, and smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At breakfast he smiled again&mdash;a mirthless and calculated smile. &ldquo;I
+      see that Brother Gorringe's flowers have come to grief over night,&rdquo; he
+      remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice looked at him before she spoke, and saw on his face a confirmation
+      of the hostile hint in his voice. She nodded in a constrained way, and
+      said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or rather, I should say,&rdquo; Theron went on, with deliberate words, &ldquo;the
+      late Brother Gorringe's flowers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you mean&mdash;LATE&rdquo; asked his wife, swiftly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, calm yourself!&rdquo; replied the husband. &ldquo;He is not dead. He has only
+      intimated to me his desire to sever his connection. I may add that he did
+      so in a highly offensive manner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very sorry,&rdquo; said Alice, in a low tone, and with her eyes on her
+      plate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I took it for granted you would be grieved at his backsliding,&rdquo; remarked
+      Theron, making his phrases as pointed as he could. &ldquo;He was such a
+      promising probationer, and you took such a keen interest in his spiritual
+      awakening. But the frost has nipped his zeal&mdash;along with the hundred
+      or more dollars' worth of flowers by which he testified his faith. I find
+      something interesting in their having been blasted simultaneously.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice dropped all pretence of interest in her breakfast. With a flushed
+      face and lips tightly compressed, she made a movement as if to rise from
+      her chair. Then, changing her mind, she sat bolt upright and faced her
+      husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think we had better have this out right now,&rdquo; she said, in a voice
+      which Theron hardly recognized. &ldquo;You have been hinting round the subject
+      long enough&mdash;too long. There are some things nobody is obliged to put
+      up with, and this is one of them. You will oblige me by saying out in so
+      many words what it is you are driving at.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The outburst astounded Theron. He laid down his knife and fork, and gazed
+      at his wife in frank surprise. She had so accustomed him, of late, to a
+      demeanor almost abject in its depressed docility that he had quite
+      forgotten the Alice of the old days, when she had spirit and courage
+      enough for two, and a notable tongue of her own. The flash in her eyes and
+      the lines of resolution about her mouth and chin for a moment daunted him.
+      Then he observed by a flutter of the frill at her wrist that she was
+      trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure I have nothing to 'say out in so many words,' as you put it,&rdquo;
+       he replied, forcing his voice into cool, impassive tones. &ldquo;I merely
+      commented upon a coincidence, that was all. If, for any reason under the
+      sun, the subject chances to be unpleasant to you, I have no earthly desire
+      to pursue it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I insist upon having it pursued!&rdquo; returned Alice. &ldquo;I've had just all
+      I can stand of your insinuations and innuendoes, and it's high time we had
+      some plain talk. Ever since the revival, you have been dropping sly,
+      underhand hints about Mr. Gorringe and&mdash;and me. Now I ask you what
+      you mean by it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, there was a shake in her voice, and he could see how her bosom heaved
+      in a tremor of nervousness. It was easy for him to be very calm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is you who introduce these astonishing suggestions, not I,&rdquo; he replied
+      coldly. &ldquo;It is you who couple your name with his&mdash;somewhat to my
+      surprise, I admit&mdash;but let me suggest that we drop the subject. You
+      are excited just now, and you might say things that you would prefer to
+      leave unsaid. It would surely be better for all concerned to say no more
+      about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice, staring across the table at him with knitted brows, emitted a sharp
+      little snort of indignation. &ldquo;Well, I never! Theron, I wouldn't have
+      thought it of you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are so many things you wouldn't have thought, on such a variety of
+      subjects,&rdquo; he observed, with a show of resuming his breakfast. &ldquo;But why
+      continue? We are only angering each other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind that,&rdquo; she replied, with more control over her speech. &ldquo;I
+      guess things have come to a pass where a little anger won't do any harm. I
+      have a right to insist on knowing what you mean by your insinuations.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron sighed. &ldquo;Why will you keep harping on the thing?&rdquo; he asked wearily.
+      &ldquo;I have displayed no curiosity. I don't ask for any explanations. I think
+      I mentioned that the man had behaved insultingly to me&mdash;but that
+      doesn't matter. I don't bring it up as a grievance. I am very well able to
+      take care of myself I have no wish to recur to the incident in any way. So
+      far as I am concerned, the topic is dismissed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen to me!&rdquo; broke in Alice, with eager gravity. She hesitated, as he
+      looked up with a nod of attention, and reflected as well as she was able
+      among her thoughts for a minute or two. &ldquo;This is what I want to say to
+      you. Ever since we came to this hateful Octavius, you and I have been
+      drifting apart&mdash;or no, that doesn't express it&mdash;simply rushing
+      away from each other. It only began last spring, and now the space between
+      us is so wide that we are worse than complete strangers. For strangers at
+      least don't hate each other, and I've had a good many occasions lately to
+      see that you positively do hate me&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What grotesque absurdity&rdquo; interposed Theron, impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it isn't absurdity; it's gospel truth,&rdquo; retorted Alice. &ldquo;And&mdash;don't
+      interrupt me&mdash;there have been times, too, when I have had to ask
+      myself if I wasn't getting almost to hate you in return. I tell you this
+      frankly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you are undoubtedly frank,&rdquo; commented the husband, toying with his
+      teaspoon. &ldquo;A hypercritical person might consider, almost too frank.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice scanned his face closely while he spoke, and held her breath as if
+      in expectant suspense. Her countenance clouded once more. &ldquo;You don't
+      realize, Theron,&rdquo; she said gravely; &ldquo;your voice when you speak to me, your
+      look, your manner, they have all changed. You are like another man&mdash;some
+      man who never loved me, and doesn't even know me, much less like me. I
+      want to know what the end of it is to be. Up to the time of your sickness
+      last summer, until after the Soulsbys went away, I didn't let myself get
+      downright discouraged. It seemed too monstrous for belief that you should
+      go away out of my life like that. It didn't seem possible that God could
+      allow such a thing. It came to me that I had been lax in my Christian
+      life, especially in my position as a minister's wife, and that this was my
+      punishment. I went to the altar, to intercede with Him, and to try to
+      loose my burden at His feet. But nothing has come of it. I got no help
+      from you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really, Alice,&rdquo; broke in Theron, &ldquo;I explained over and over again to you
+      how preoccupied I was&mdash;with the book&mdash;and affairs generally.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I got no assistance from Heaven either,&rdquo; she went on, declining the
+      diversion he offered. &ldquo;I don't want to talk impiously, but if there is a
+      God, he has forgotten me, his poor heart-broken hand-maiden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are talking impiously, Alice,&rdquo; observed her husband. &ldquo;And you are
+      doing me cruel injustice, into the bargain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I only wish I were!&rdquo; she replied; &ldquo;I only wish to God I were!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, accept my complete assurance that you ARE&mdash;that your
+      whole conception of me, and of what you are pleased to describe as my
+      change toward you, is an entire and utter mistake. Of course, the married
+      state is no more exempt from the universal law of growth, development,
+      alteration, than any other human institution. On its spiritual side, of
+      course, viewed either as a sacrament, or as&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't let us go into that,&rdquo; interposed Alice, abruptly. &ldquo;In fact, there
+      is no good in talking any more at all. It is as if we didn't speak the
+      same language. You don't understand what I say; it makes no impression
+      upon your mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite to the contrary,&rdquo; he assured her; &ldquo;I have been deeply interested
+      and concerned in all you have said. I think you are laboring under a great
+      delusion, and I have tried my best to convince you of it; but I have never
+      heard you speak more intelligibly or, I might say, effectively.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A little gleam of softness stole over Alice's face. &ldquo;If you only gave me a
+      little more credit for intelligence,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;you would find that I am
+      not such a blockhead as you think I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come!&rdquo; he said, with a smiling show of impatience. &ldquo;You really
+      mustn't impute things to me wholesale, like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was glad to answer the smile in kind. &ldquo;No; but truly,&rdquo; she pleaded,
+      &ldquo;you don't realize it, but you have grown into a way of treating me as if
+      I had absolutely no mind at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have a very admirable mind,&rdquo; he responded, and took up his teaspoon
+      again. She reached for his cup, and poured out hot coffee for him. An
+      almost cheerful spirit had suddenly descended upon the breakfast table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now let me say the thing I have been aching to say for months,&rdquo; she
+      began in less burdened voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted his brows. &ldquo;Haven't things been discussed pretty fully already?&rdquo;
+       he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doubtful, harassed expression clouded upon her face at his words, and
+      she paused. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said resolutely, after an instant's reflection; &ldquo;it
+      is my duty to discuss this, too. It is a misunderstanding all round. You
+      remember that I told you Mr. Gorringe had given me some plants, which he
+      got from some garden or other?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you really wish to go on with the subject&mdash;yes I have a
+      recollection of that particular falsehood of his.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He did it with the kindest and friendliest motives in the world!&rdquo;
+       protested Alice. &ldquo;He saw how down-in-the-mouth and moping I was here,
+      among these strangers&mdash;and I really was getting quite peaked and
+      run-down&mdash;and he said I stayed indoors too much and it would do me
+      all sorts of good to work in the garden, and he would send me some plants.
+      The next I knew, here they were, with a book about mixing soils and
+      planting, and so on. When I saw him next, and thanked him, I suppose I
+      showed some apprehension about his having laid out money on them, and he,
+      just to ease my mind, invented the story about his getting them for
+      nothing. When I found out the truth&mdash;I got it out of that boy, Harvey
+      Semple&mdash;he admitted it quite frankly&mdash;said he was wrong to
+      deceive me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This was in the fine first fervor of his term of probation, I suppose,&rdquo;
+       put in Theron. He made no effort to dissemble the sneer in his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; answered Alice, with a touch of acerbity, &ldquo;I have told you now,
+      and it is off my mind. There never would have been the slightest
+      concealment about it, if you hadn't begun by keeping me at arm's length,
+      and making it next door to impossible to speak to you at all, and if&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if he hadn't lied.&rdquo; Theron, as he finished her sentence for her, rose
+      from the table. Dallying for a brief moment by his chair, there seemed the
+      magnetic premonition in the air of some further and kindlier word. Then he
+      turned and walked sedately into the next room, and closed the door behind
+      him. The talk was finished; and Alice, left alone, passed the knuckle of
+      her thumb over one swimming eye and then the other, and bit her lips and
+      swallowed down the sob that rose in her throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0028" id="link2HCH0028">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was early afternoon when Theron walked out of his yard, bestowing no
+      glance upon the withered and tarnished show of the garden, and started
+      with a definite step down the street. The tendency to ruminative
+      loitering, which those who saw him abroad always associated with his tall,
+      spare figure, was not suggested today. He moved forward like a man with a
+      purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the forenoon in the seclusion of the sitting-room, with a book opened
+      before him, he had been thinking hard. It was not the talk with Alice that
+      occupied his thoughts. That rose in his mind from time to time, only as a
+      disagreeable blur, and he refused to dwell upon it. It was nothing to him,
+      he said to himself, what Gorringe's motives in lying had been. As for
+      Alice, he hardened his heart against her. Just now it was her mood to try
+      and make up to him. But it had been something different yesterday, and who
+      could say what it would be tomorrow? He really had passed the limit of
+      patience with her shifting emotional vagaries, now lurching in this
+      direction, now in that. She had had her chance to maintain a hold upon his
+      interest and imagination, and had let it slip. These were the accidents of
+      life, the inevitable harsh happenings in the great tragedy of Nature. They
+      could not be helped, and there was nothing more to be said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had bestowed much more attention upon what the priest had said the
+      previous evening. He passed in review all the glowing tributes Father
+      Forbes had paid to Celia. They warmed his senses as he recalled them, but
+      they also, in a curious, indefinite way, caused him uneasiness. There had
+      been a personal fervor about them which was something more than priestly.
+      He remembered how the priest had turned pale and faltered when the
+      question whether Celia would escape the general doom of her family came
+      up. It was not a merely pastoral agitation that, he felt sure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A hundred obscure hints, doubts, stray little suspicions, crowded upward
+      together in his thoughts. It became apparent to him now that from the
+      outset he had been conscious of something queer&mdash;yes, from that very
+      first day when he saw the priest and Celia together, and noted their
+      glance of recognition inside the house of death. He realized now, upon
+      reflection, that the tone of other people, his own parishioners and his
+      casual acquaintances in Octavius alike, had always had a certain note of
+      reservation in it when it touched upon Miss Madden. Her running in and out
+      of the pastorate at all hours, the way the priest patted her on the
+      shoulder before others, the obvious dislike the priest's ugly old
+      housekeeper bore her, the astonishing freedom of their talk with each
+      other&mdash;these dark memories loomed forth out of a mass of sinister
+      conjecture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He could bear the uncertainty no longer. Was it indeed not entirely his
+      own fault that it had existed thus long? No man with the spirit of a mouse
+      would have shilly-shallied in this preposterous fashion, week after week,
+      with the fever of a beautiful woman's kiss in his blood, and the woman
+      herself living only round the corner. The whole world had been as good as
+      offered to him&mdash;a bewildering world of wealth and beauty and
+      spiritual exaltation and love&mdash;and he, like a weak fool, had waited
+      for it to be brought to him on a salver, as it were, and actually forced
+      upon his acceptance! &ldquo;That is my failing,&rdquo; he reflected; &ldquo;these miserable
+      ecclesiastical bandages of mine have dwarfed my manly side. The meanest of
+      Thurston's clerks would have shown a more adventurous spirit and a bolder
+      nerve. If I do not act at once, with courage and resolution, everything
+      will be lost. Already she must think me unworthy of the honor it was in
+      her sweet will to bestow.&rdquo; Then he remembered that she was now always at
+      home. &ldquo;Not another hour of foolish indecision!&rdquo; he whispered to himself.
+      &ldquo;I will put my destiny to the test. I will see her today!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A middle-aged, plain-faced servant answered his ring at the door-bell of
+      the Madden mansion. She was palpably Irish, and looked at him with a
+      saddened preoccupation in her gray eyes, holding the door only a little
+      ajar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron had got out one of his cards. &ldquo;I wish to make inquiry about young
+      Mr. Madden&mdash;Mr. Michael Madden,&rdquo; he said, holding the card forth
+      tentatively. &ldquo;I have only just heard of his illness, and it has been a
+      great grief to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is no better,&rdquo; answered the woman, briefly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am the Rev. Mr. Ware,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;and you may say that, if he is well
+      enough, I should be glad to see him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The servant peered out at him with a suddenly altered expression, then
+      shook her head. &ldquo;I don't think he would be wishing to see YOU,&rdquo; she
+      replied. It was evident from her tone that she suspected the visitor's
+      intentions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron smiled in spite of himself. &ldquo;I have not come as a clergyman,&rdquo; he
+      explained, &ldquo;but as a friend of the family. If you will tell Miss Madden
+      that I am here, it will do just as well. Yes, we won't bother him. If you
+      will kindly hand my card to his sister.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the domestic turned at this and went in, Theron felt like throwing
+      his hat in the air, there where he stood. The woman's churlish sectarian
+      prejudices had played ideally into his hands. In no other imaginable way
+      could he have asked for Celia so naturally. He wondered a little that a
+      servant at such a grand house as this should leave callers standing on the
+      doorstep. Still more he wondered what he should say to the lady of his
+      dream when he came into her presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you please to walk this way?&rdquo; The woman had returned. She closed the
+      door noiselessly behind him, and led the way, not up the sumptuous
+      staircase, as Theron had expected, but along through the broad hall, past
+      several large doors, to a small curtained archway at the end. She pushed
+      aside this curtain, and Theron found himself in a sort of conservatory,
+      full of the hot, vague light of sunshine falling through ground-glass. The
+      air was moist and close, and heavy with the smell of verdure and wet
+      earth. A tall bank of palms, with ferns sprawling at their base, reared
+      itself directly in front of him. The floor was of mosaic, and he saw now
+      that there were rugs upon it, and that there were chairs and sofas, and
+      other signs of habitation. It was, indeed, only half a greenhouse, for the
+      lower part of it was in rosewood panels, with floral paintings on them,
+      like a room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moving to one side of the barrier of palms, he discovered, to his great
+      surprise, the figure of Michael, sitting propped up with pillows in a huge
+      easy-chair. The sick man was looking at him with big, gravely intent eyes.
+      His face did not show as much change as Theron had in fancy pictured. It
+      had seemed almost as bony and cadaverous on the day of the picnic. The
+      hands spread out on the chair-arms were very white and thin, though, and
+      the gaze in the blue eyes had a spectral quality which disturbed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Michael raised his right hand, and Theron, stepping forward, took it
+      limply in his for an instant. Then he laid it down again. The touch of
+      people about to die had always been repugnant to him. He could feel on his
+      own warm palm the very damp of the grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I only heard from Father Forbes last evening of your&mdash;your
+      ill-health,&rdquo; he said, somewhat hesitatingly. He seated himself on a bench
+      beneath the palms, facing the invalid, but still holding his hat. &ldquo;I hope
+      very sincerely that you will soon be all right again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My sister is lying down in her room,&rdquo; answered Michael. He had not once
+      taken his sombre and embarrassing gaze from the other's face. The voice in
+      which he uttered this uncalled-for remark was thin in fibre, cold and
+      impassive. It fell upon Theron's ears with a suggestion of hidden meaning.
+      He looked uneasily into Michael's eyes, and then away again. They seemed
+      to be looking straight through him, and there was no shirking the
+      sensation that they saw and comprehended things with an unnatural
+      prescience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope she is feeling better,&rdquo; Theron found himself saying. &ldquo;Father
+      Forbes mentioned that she was a little under the weather. I dined with him
+      last night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad that you came,&rdquo; said Michael, after a little pause. His
+      earnest, unblinking eyes seemed to supplement his tongue with speech of
+      their own. &ldquo;I do be thinking a great deal about you. I have matters to
+      speak of to you, now that you are here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron bowed his head gently, in token of grateful attention. He tried the
+      experiment of looking away from Michael, but his glance went back again
+      irresistibly, and fastened itself upon the sick man's gaze, and clung
+      there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am next door to a dead man,&rdquo; he went on, paying no heed to the other's
+      deprecatory gesture. &ldquo;It is not years or months with me, but weeks. Then I
+      go away to stand up for judgment on my sins, and if it is His merciful
+      will, I shall see God. So I say my good-byes now, and so you will let me
+      speak plainly, and not think ill of what I say. You are much changed, Mr.
+      Ware, since you came to Octavius, and it is not a change for the good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron lifted his brows in unaffected surprise, and put inquiry into his
+      glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know if Protestants will be saved, in God's good time, or not,&rdquo;
+       continued Michael. &ldquo;I find there are different opinions among the clergy
+      about that, and of course it is not for me, only a plain mechanic, to be
+      sure where learned and pious scholars are in doubt. But I am sure about
+      one thing. Those Protestants, and others too, mind you, who profess and
+      preach good deeds, and themselves do bad deeds&mdash;they will never be
+      saved. They will have no chance at all to escape hell-fire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think we are all agreed upon that, Mr. Madden,&rdquo; said Theron, with
+      surface suavity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I say to you, Mr. Ware, you are yourself in a bad path. Take the
+      warning of a dying man, sir, and turn from it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The impulse to smile tugged at Theron's facial muscles. This was really
+      too droll. He looked up at the ceiling, the while he forced his
+      countenance into a polite composure, then turned again to Michael, with
+      some conciliatory commonplace ready for utterance. But he said nothing,
+      and all suggestion of levity left his mind, under the searching inspection
+      bent upon him by the young man's hollow eyes. What did Michael suspect?
+      What did he know? What was he hinting at, in this strange talk of his?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw you often on the street when first you came here,&rdquo; continued
+      Michael. &ldquo;I knew the man who was here before you&mdash;that is, by sight&mdash;and
+      he was not a good man. But your face, when you came, pleased me. I liked
+      to look at you. I was tormented just then, do you see, that so many
+      decent, kindly people, old school-mates and friends and neighbors of mine&mdash;and,
+      for that matter, others all over the country must lose their souls because
+      they were Protestants. At my boyhood and young manhood, that thought took
+      the joy out of me. Sometimes I usen't to sleep a whole night long, for
+      thinking that some lad I had been playing with, perhaps in his own house,
+      that very day, would be taken when he died, and his mother too, when she
+      died, and thrown into the flames of hell for all eternity. It made me so
+      unhappy that finally I wouldn't go to any Protestant boy's house, and have
+      his mother be nice to me, and give me cake and apples&mdash;and me
+      thinking all the while that they were bound to be damned, no matter how
+      good they were to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The primitive humanity of this touched Theron, and he nodded approbation
+      with a tender smile in his eyes, forgetting for the moment that a personal
+      application of the monologue had been hinted at.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But then later, as I grew up,&rdquo; the sick man went on, &ldquo;I learned that it
+      was not altogether certain. Some of the authorities, I found, maintained
+      that it was doubtful, and some said openly that there must be salvation
+      possible for good people who lived in ignorance of the truth through no
+      fault of their own. Then I had hope one day, and no hope the next, and as
+      I did my work I thought it over, and in the evenings my father and I
+      talked it over, and we settled nothing of it at all. Of course, how could
+      we?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you ever discuss the question with your sister?&rdquo; it occurred suddenly
+      to Theron to interpose. He was conscious of some daring in doing so, and
+      he fancied that Michael's drawn face clouded a little at his words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My sister is no theologian,&rdquo; he answered briefly. &ldquo;Women have no call to
+      meddle with such matters. But I was saying&mdash;it was in the middle of
+      these doubtings of mine that you came here to Octavius, and I noticed you
+      on the streets, and once in the evening&mdash;I made no secret of it to my
+      people&mdash;I sat in the back of your church and heard you preach. As I
+      say, I liked you. It was your face, and what I thought it showed of the
+      man underneath it, that helped settle my mind more than anything else. I
+      said to myself: 'Here is a young man, only about my own age, and he has
+      education and talents, and he does not seek to make money for himself, or
+      a great name, but he is content to live humbly on the salary of a
+      book-keeper, and devote all his time to prayer and the meditation of his
+      religion, and preaching, and visiting the sick and the poor, and
+      comforting them. His very face is a pleasure and a help for those in
+      suffering and trouble to look at. The very sight of it makes one believe
+      in pure thoughts and merciful deeds. I will not credit it that God intends
+      damning such a man as that, or any like him!'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron bowed, with a slow, hesitating gravity of manner, and deep, not
+      wholly complacent, attention on his face. Evidently all this was by way of
+      preparation for something unpleasant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was only last spring,&rdquo; said Michael. His tired voice sank for a
+      sentence or two into a meditative half-whisper. &ldquo;And it was MY last spring
+      of all. I shall not be growing weak any more, or drawing hard breaths,
+      when the first warm weather comes. It will be one season to me hereafter,
+      always the same.&rdquo; He lifted his voice with perceptible effort. &ldquo;I am
+      talking too much. The rest I can say in a word. Only half a year has gone
+      by, and you have another face on you entirely. I had noticed the small
+      changes before, one by one. I saw the great change, all of a sudden, the
+      day of the picnic. I see it a hundred times more now, as you sit there. If
+      it seemed to me like the face of a saint before, it is more like the face
+      of a bar-keeper now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was quite too much. Theron rose, flushed to the temples, and scowled
+      down at the helpless man in the chair. He swallowed the sharp words which
+      came uppermost, and bit and moistened his lips as he forced himself to
+      remember that this was a dying man, and Celia's brother, to whom she was
+      devoted, and whom he himself felt he wanted to be very fond of. He got the
+      shadow of a smile on to his countenance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I fear you HAVE tired yourself unduly,&rdquo; he said, in as non-contentious a
+      tone as he could manage. He even contrived a little deprecatory laugh. &ldquo;I
+      am afraid your real quarrel is with the air of Octavius. It agrees with me
+      so wonderfully&mdash;I am getting as fat as a seal. But I do hope I am not
+      paying for it by such a wholesale deterioration inside. If my own opinion
+      could be of any value, I should assure you that I feel myself an
+      infinitely better and broader and stronger man than I was when I came
+      here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Michael shook his head dogmatically. &ldquo;That is the greatest pity of all,&rdquo;
+       he said, with renewed earnestness. &ldquo;You are entirely deceived about
+      yourself. You do not at all realize how you have altered your direction,
+      or where you are going. It was a great misfortune for you, sir, that you
+      did not keep among your own people. That poor half-brother of mine, though
+      the drink was in him when he said that same to you, never spoke a truer
+      word. Keep among your own people, Mr. Ware! When you go among others&mdash;you
+      know what I mean&mdash;you have no proper understanding of what their
+      sayings and doings really mean. You do not realize that they are held up
+      by the power of the true Church, as a little child learning to walk is
+      held up with a belt by its nurse. They can say and do things, and no harm
+      at all come to them, which would mean destruction to you, because they
+      have help, and you are walking alone. And so be said by me, Mr. Ware! Go
+      back to the way you were brought up in, and leave alone the people whose
+      ways are different from yours. You are a married man, and you are the
+      preacher of a religion, such as it is. There can be nothing better for you
+      than to go and strive to be a good husband, and to set a good example to
+      the people of your Church, who look up to you&mdash;and mix yourself up no
+      more with outside people and outside notions that only do you mischief.
+      And that is what I wanted to say to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron took up his hat. &ldquo;I take in all kindness what you have felt it your
+      duty to say to me, Mr. Madden,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I am not sure that I have
+      altogether followed you, but I am very sure you mean it well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean well by you,&rdquo; replied Michael, wearily moving his head on the
+      pillow, and speaking in an undertone of languor and pain, &ldquo;and I mean well
+      by others, that are nearer to me, and that I have a right to care more
+      about. When a man lies by the site of his open grave, he does not be
+      meaning ill to any human soul.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;thanks&mdash;quite so!&rdquo; faltered Theron. He dallied for an
+      instant with the temptation to seek some further explanation, but the
+      sight of Michael's half-closed eyes and worn-out expression decided him
+      against it. It did not seem to be expected, either, that he should shake
+      hands, and with a few perfunctory words of hope for the invalid's
+      recovery, which fell with a jarring note of falsehood upon his own ears,
+      he turned and left the room. As he did so, Michael touched a bell on the
+      table beside him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron drew a long breath in the hall, as the curtain fell behind him. It
+      was an immense relief to escape from the oppressive humidity and heat of
+      the flower-room, and from that ridiculous bore of a Michael as well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The middle-aged, grave-faced servant, warned by the bell, stood waiting to
+      conduct him to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry to have missed Miss Madden,&rdquo; he said to her. &ldquo;She must be
+      quite worn out. Perhaps later in the day&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will not be seeing anybody today,&rdquo; returned the woman. &ldquo;She is going
+      to New York this evening, and she is taking some rest against the
+      journey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will she be away long?&rdquo; he asked mechanically. The servant's answer, &ldquo;I
+      have no idea,&rdquo; hardly penetrated his consciousness at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved down the steps, and along the gravel to the street, in a maze of
+      mental confusion. When he reached the sidewalk, under the familiar elms,
+      he paused, and made a definite effort to pull his thoughts together, and
+      take stock of what had happened, of what was going to happen; but the
+      thing baffled him. It was as if some drug had stupefied his faculties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to walk, and gradually saw that what he was thinking about was
+      the fact of Celia's departure for New York that evening. He stared at this
+      fact, at first in its nakedness, then clothed with reassuring suggestions
+      that this was no doubt a trip she very often made. There was a blind sense
+      of comfort in this idea, and he rested himself upon it. Yes, of course,
+      she travelled a great deal. New York must be as familiar to her as
+      Octavius was to him. Her going there now was quite a matter of course&mdash;the
+      most natural thing in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then there burst suddenly uppermost in his mind the other fact&mdash;that
+      Father Forbes was also going to New York that evening. The two things
+      spindled upward, side by side, yet separately, in his mental vision; then
+      they twisted and twined themselves together. He followed their
+      convolutions miserably, walking as if his eyes were shut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In slow fashion matters defined and arranged themselves before him. The
+      process of tracing their sequence was all torture, but there was no
+      possibility, no notion, of shirking any detail of the pain. The priest had
+      spoken of his efforts to persuade Celia to go away for a few days, for
+      rest and change of air and scene. He must have known only too well that
+      she was going, but of that he had been careful to drop no hint. The
+      possibility of accident was too slight to be worth considering. People on
+      such intimate terms as Celia and the priest&mdash;people with such
+      facilities for seeing each other whenever they desired&mdash;did not find
+      themselves on the same train of cars, with the same long journey in view,
+      by mere chance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron walked until dusk began to close in upon the autumn day. It grew
+      colder, as he turned his face homeward. He wondered if it would freeze
+      again over-night, and then remembered the shrivelled flowers in his wife's
+      garden. For a moment they shaped themselves in a picture before his mind's
+      eye; he saw their blackened foliage, their sicklied, drooping stalks, and
+      wilted blooms, and as he looked, they restored themselves to the vigor and
+      grace and richness of color of summer-time, as vividly as if they had been
+      painted on a canvas. Or no, the picture he stared at was not on canvas,
+      but on the glossy, varnished panel of a luxurious sleeping-car. He shook
+      his head angrily and blinked his eyes again and again, to prevent their
+      seeing, seated together in the open window above this panel, the two
+      people he knew were there, gloved and habited for the night's journey,
+      waiting for the train to start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very much to my surprise,&rdquo; he found himself saying to Alice, watching her
+      nervously as she laid the supper-table, &ldquo;I find I must go to Albany
+      tonight. That is, it isn't absolutely necessary, for that matter, but I
+      think it may easily turn out to be greatly to my advantage to go.
+      Something has arisen&mdash;I can't speak about it as yet&mdash;but the
+      sooner I see the Bishop about it the better. Things like that occur in a
+      man's life, where boldly striking out a line of action, and following it
+      up without an instant's delay, may make all the difference in the world to
+      him. Tomorrow it might be too late; and, besides, I can be home the sooner
+      again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice's face showed surprise, but no trace of suspicion. She spoke with
+      studied amiability during the meal, and deferred with such unexpected tact
+      to his implied desire not to be questioned as to the mysterious motives of
+      the journey, that his mood instinctively softened and warmed toward her,
+      as they finished supper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled a little. &ldquo;I do hope I shan't have to go on tomorrow to New
+      York; but these Bishops of ours are such gad-abouts one never knows where
+      to catch them. As like as not Sanderson may be down in New York, on
+      Book-Concern business or something; and if he is, I shall have to chase
+      him up. But, after all, perhaps the trip will do me good&mdash;the change
+      of air and scene, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sure I hope so,&rdquo; said Alice, honestly enough. &ldquo;If you do go on to New
+      York, I suppose you'll go by the river-boat. Everybody talks so much of
+      that beautiful sail down the Hudson.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's an idea!&rdquo; exclaimed Theron, welcoming it with enthusiasm. &ldquo;It
+      hadn't occurred to me. If I do have to go, and it is as lovely as they
+      make out, the next time I promise I won't go without you, my girl. I HAVE
+      been rather out of sorts lately,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;When I come back, I
+      daresay I shall be feeling better, more like my old self. Then I'm going
+      to try, Alice, to be nicer to you than I have been of late. I'm afraid
+      there was only too much truth in what you said this morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind what I said this morning&mdash;or any other time,&rdquo; broke in
+      Alice, softly. &ldquo;Don't ever remember it again, Theron, if only&mdash;only&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose as she spoke, moved round the table to where she sat, and, bending
+      over her, stopped the faltering sentence with a kiss. When was it, he
+      wondered, that he had last kissed her? It seemed years, ages, ago.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An hour later, with hat and overcoat on, and his valise in his hand, he
+      stood on the doorstep of the parsonage, and kissed her once more before he
+      turned and descended into the darkness. He felt like whistling as his feet
+      sounded firmly on the plank sidewalk beyond the gate. It seemed as if he
+      had never been in such capital good spirits before in his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0029" id="link2HCH0029">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The train was at a standstill somewhere, and the dull, ashen beginnings of
+      daylight had made a first feeble start toward effacing the lamps in the
+      car-roof, when the new day opened for Theron. A man who had just come in
+      stopped at the seat upon which he had been stretched through the night,
+      and, tapping him brusquely on the knee, said, &ldquo;I'm afraid I must trouble
+      you, sir.&rdquo; After a moment of sleep-burdened confusion, he sat up, and the
+      man took the other half of the seat and opened a newspaper, still damp
+      from the press. It was morning, then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron rubbed a clear space upon the clouded window with his thumb, and
+      looked out. There was nothing to be seen but a broad stretch of tracks,
+      and beyond this the shadowed outlines of wagons and machinery in a yard,
+      with a background of factory buildings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The atmosphere in the car was vile beyond belief. He thought of opening
+      the window, but feared that the peremptory-looking man with the paper, who
+      had wakened him and made him sit up, might object. They were the only
+      people in the car who were sitting up. Backwards and forwards, on either
+      side of the narrow aisle, the dim light disclosed recumbent forms, curled
+      uncomfortably into corners, or sprawling at difficult angles which
+      involved the least interference with one another. Here and there an
+      upturned face gave a livid patch of surface for the mingled play of the
+      gray dawn and the yellow lamp-light. A ceaseless noise of snoring was in
+      the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up and walked to the tank of ice-water at the end of the aisle, and
+      took a drink from the most inaccessible portion of the common tin-cup's
+      rim. The happy idea of going out on the platform struck him, and he acted
+      upon it. The morning air was deliciously cool and fresh by contrast, and
+      he filled his lungs with it again and again. Standing here, he could
+      discern beyond the buildings to the right the faint purplish outlines of
+      great rounded hills. Some workmen, one of them bearing a torch, were
+      crouching along under the side of the train, pounding upon the resonant
+      wheels with small hammers. He recalled having heard the same sound in the
+      watches of the night, during a prolonged halt. Some one had said it was
+      Albany. He smiled in spite of himself at the thought that Bishop Sanderson
+      would never know about the visit he had missed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swinging himself to the ground, he bent sidewise and looked forward down
+      the long train. There were five, six, perhaps more, sleeping-cars on in
+      front. Which one of them, he wondered&mdash;and then there came the sharp
+      &ldquo;All aboard!&rdquo; from the other side, and he bundled up the steps again, and
+      entered the car as the train slowly resumed its progress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was wide-awake now, and quite at his ease. He took his seat, and
+      diverted himself by winking gravely at a little child facing him on the
+      next seat but one. There were four other children in the family party,
+      encamped about the tired and still sleeping mother whose back was turned
+      to Theron. He recalled now having noticed this poor woman last night, in
+      the first stage of his journey&mdash;how she fed her brood from one of the
+      numerous baskets piled under their feet, and brought water in a tin dish
+      of her own from the tank to use in washing their faces with a rag, and
+      loosened their clothes to dispose them for the night's sleep. The face of
+      the woman, her manner and slatternly aspect, and the general effect of her
+      belongings, bespoke squalid ignorance and poverty. Watching her, Theron
+      had felt curiously interested in the performance. In one sense, it was
+      scarcely more human than the spectacle of a cat licking her kittens, or a
+      cow giving suck to her calf. Yet, in another, was there anything more
+      human?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The child who had wakened before the rest regarded him with placidity,
+      declining to be amused by his winkings, but exhibiting no other emotion.
+      She had been playing by herself with a couple of buttons tied on a string,
+      and after giving a civil amount of attention to Theron's grimaces, she
+      turned again to the superior attractions of this toy. Her self-possession,
+      her capacity for self-entertainment, the care she took not to arouse the
+      others, all impressed him very much. He felt in his pocket for a small
+      coin, and, reaching forward, offered it to her. She took it calmly,
+      bestowed a tranquil gaze upon him for a moment, and went back to the
+      buttons. Her indifference produced an unpleasant sensation upon him
+      somehow, and he rubbed the steaming window clear again, and stared out of
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wide river lay before him, flanked by a precipitous wall of cliffs
+      which he knew instantly must be the Palisades. There was an advertisement
+      painted on them which he tried in vain to read. He was surprised to find
+      they interested him so slightly. He had heard all his life of the Hudson,
+      and especially of it just at this point. The reality seemed to him almost
+      commonplace. His failure to be thrilled depressed him for the moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose those ARE the Palisades?&rdquo; he asked his neighbor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man glanced up from his paper, nodded, and made as if to resume his
+      reading. But his eye had caught something in the prospect through the
+      window which arrested his attention. &ldquo;By George!&rdquo; he exclaimed, and lifted
+      himself to get a clearer view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; asked Theron, peering forth as well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing; only Barclay Wendover's yacht is still there. There's been a
+      hitch of some sort. They were to have left yesterday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that it&mdash;that long black thing?&rdquo; queried Theron. &ldquo;That can't be a
+      yacht, can it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you think it is?&rdquo; answered the other. They were looking at a
+      slim, narrow hull, lying at anchor, silent and motionless on the drab
+      expanse of water. &ldquo;If that ain't a yacht, they haven't begun building any
+      yet. They're taking her over to the Mediterranean for a cruise, you know&mdash;around
+      India and Japan for the winter, and home by the South Sea islands. Friend
+      o' mine's in the party. Wouldn't mind the trip myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But do you mean to say,&rdquo; asked Theron, &ldquo;that that little shell of a thing
+      can sail across the ocean? Why, how many people would she hold?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man laughed. &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;there's room for two sets of quadrilles
+      in the chief saloon, if the rest keep their legs well up on the sofas. But
+      there's only ten or a dozen in the party this time. More than that rather
+      get in one another's way, especially with so many ladies on board.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron asked no more questions, but bent his head to see the last of this
+      wonderful craft. The sight of it, and what he had heard about it, suddenly
+      gave point and focus to his thoughts. He knew at last what it was that had
+      lurked, formless and undesignated, these many days in the background of
+      his dreams. The picture rose in his mind now of Celia as the mistress of a
+      yacht. He could see her reclining in a low easy-chair upon the polished
+      deck, with the big white sails billowing behind her, and the sun shining
+      upon the deep blue waves, and glistening through the splash of spray in
+      the air, and weaving a halo of glowing gold about her fair head. Ah, how
+      the tender visions crowded now upon him! Eternal summer basked round this
+      enchanted yacht of his fancy&mdash;summer sought now in Scottish firths or
+      Norwegian fiords, now in quaint old Southern harbors, ablaze with the hues
+      of strange costumes and half-tropical flowers and fruits, now in far-away
+      Oriental bays and lagoons, or among the coral reefs and palm-trees of the
+      luxurious Pacific. He dwelt upon these new imaginings with the fervent
+      longing of an inland-born boy. Every vague yearning he had ever felt
+      toward salt-water stirred again in his blood at the thought of the sea&mdash;with
+      Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why not? She had never visited any foreign land. &ldquo;Sometime,&rdquo; she had said,
+      &ldquo;sometime, no doubt I will.&rdquo; He could hear again the wistful, musing tone
+      of her voice. The thought had fascinations for her, it was clear. How
+      irresistibly would it not appeal to her, presented with the added charm of
+      a roving, vagrant independence on the high seas, free to speed in her
+      snow-winged chariot wherever she willed over the deep, loitering in this
+      place, or up-helm-and-away to another, with no more care or weight of
+      responsibility than the gulls tossing through the air in her wake!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron felt, rather than phrased to himself, that there would not be &ldquo;ten
+      or a dozen in the party&rdquo; on that yacht. Without defining anything in his
+      mind, he breathed in fancy the same bold ocean breeze which filled the
+      sails, and toyed with Celia's hair; he looked with her as she sat by the
+      rail, and saw the same waves racing past, the same vast dome of cloud and
+      ether that were mirrored in her brown eyes, and there was no one else
+      anywhere near them. Even the men in sailors' clothes, who would be pulling
+      at ropes, or climbing up tarred ladders, kept themselves considerately
+      outside the picture. Only Celia sat there, and at her feet, gazing up
+      again into her face as in the forest, the man whose whole being had been
+      consecrated to her service, her worship, by the kiss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've passed it now. I was trying to point out the Jumel house to you&mdash;where
+      Aaron Burr lived, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron roused himself from his day-dream, and nodded with a confused smile
+      at his neighbor. &ldquo;Thanks,&rdquo; he faltered; &ldquo;I didn't hear you. The train
+      makes such a noise, and I must have been dozing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked about him. The night aspect, as of a tramps' lodging-house, had
+      quite disappeared from the car. Everybody was sitting up; and the more
+      impatient were beginning to collect their bundles and hand-bags from the
+      racks and floor. An expressman came through, jangling a huge bunch of
+      brass checks on leathern thongs over his arm, and held parley with
+      passengers along the aisle. Outside, citified streets, with stores and
+      factories, were alternating in the moving panorama with open fields; and,
+      even as he looked, these vacant spaces ceased altogether, and successive
+      regular lines of pavement, between two tall rows of houses all alike,
+      began to stretch out, wheel to the right, and swing off out of view, for
+      all the world like the avenues of hop-poles he remembered as a boy. Then
+      was a long tunnel, its darkness broken at stated intervals by brief bursts
+      of daylight from overhead, and out of this all at once the train drew up
+      its full length in some vast, vaguely lighted enclosure, and stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, this is New York,&rdquo; said the man, folding up his paper, and springing
+      to his feet. The narrow aisle was filled with many others who had been
+      prompter still; and Theron stood, bag in hand, waiting till this energetic
+      throng should have pushed itself bodily past him forth from the car. Then
+      he himself made his way out, drifting with a sense of helplessness in
+      their resolute wake. There rose in his mind the sudden conviction that he
+      would be too late. All the passengers in the forward sleepers would be
+      gone before he could get there. Yet even this terror gave him no new power
+      to get ahead of anybody else in the tightly packed throng.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once on the broad platform, the others started off briskly; they all
+      seemed to know just where they wanted to go, and to feel that no instant
+      of time was to be lost in getting there. Theron himself caught some of
+      this urgent spirit, and hurled himself along in the throng with reckless
+      haste, knocking his bag against peoples' legs, but never pausing for
+      apology or comment until he found himself abreast of the locomotive at the
+      head of the train. He drew aside from the main current here, and began
+      searching the platform, far and near, for those he had travelled so far to
+      find.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The platform emptied itself. Theron lingered on in puzzled hesitation, and
+      looked about him. In the whole immense station, with its acres of tracks
+      and footways, and its incessantly shifting processions of people, there
+      was visible nobody else who seemed also in doubt, or who appeared capable
+      of sympathizing with indecision in any form. Another train came in, some
+      way over to the right, and before it had fairly stopped, swarms of eager
+      men began boiling out of each end of each car, literally precipitating
+      themselves over one another, it seemed to Theron, in their excited dash
+      down the steps. As they caught their footing below, they started racing
+      pell-mell down the platform to its end; there he saw them, looking more
+      than ever like clustered bees in the distance, struggling vehemently in a
+      dense mass up a staircase in the remote corner of the building.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are those folks running for? Is there a fire?&rdquo; he asked an
+      amiable-faced young mulatto, in the uniform of the sleeping-car service,
+      who passed him with some light hand-bags.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; they's Harlem people, I guess&mdash;jes' catchin' the Elevated&mdash;that's
+      all, sir,&rdquo; he answered obligingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the moment some passengers emerged slowly from one of the
+      sleeping-cars, and came loitering toward him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, are there people still in these cars?&rdquo; he asked eagerly. &ldquo;Haven't
+      they all gone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some has; some ain't,&rdquo; the porter replied. &ldquo;They most generally take
+      their time about it. They ain't no hurry, so long's they get out 'fore
+      we're drawn round to the drill-yard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was still hope, then. Theron took up his bag and walked forward,
+      intent upon finding some place from which he could watch unobserved the
+      belated stragglers issuing from the sleeping-cars. He started back all at
+      once, confronted by a semi-circle of violent men with whips and badges,
+      who stunned his hearing by a sudden vociferous outburst of shouts and
+      yells. They made furious gestures at him with their whips and fists, to
+      enforce the incoherent babel of their voices; and in these gestures, as in
+      their faces and cries, there seemed a great deal of menace and very little
+      invitation. There was a big policeman sauntering near by, and Theron got
+      the idea that it was his presence alone which protected him from open
+      violence at the hands of these savage hackmen. He tightened his clutch on
+      his valise, and, turning his back on them and their uproar, tried to brave
+      it out and stand where he was. But the policeman came lounging slowly
+      toward him, with such authority in his swaying gait, and such urban
+      omniscience written all over his broad, sandy face, that he lost heart,
+      and beat an abrupt retreat off to the right, where there were a number of
+      doorways, near which other people had ventured to put down baggage on the
+      floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, somewhat screened from observation, he stood for a long time,
+      watching at odd moments the ceaselessly varying phases of the strange
+      scene about him, but always keeping an eye on the train he had himself
+      arrived in. It was slow and dispiriting work. A dozen times his heart
+      failed him, and he said to himself mournfully that he had had his journey
+      for nothing. Then some new figure would appear, alighting from the steps
+      of a sleeper, and hope revived in his breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, when over half an hour of expectancy had been marked off by the
+      big clock overhead, his suspense came to an end. He saw Father Forbes'
+      erect and substantial form, standing on the car platform nearest of all,
+      balancing himself with his white hands on the rails, waiting for
+      something. Then after a little he came down, followed by a black porter,
+      whose arms were burdened by numerous bags and parcels. The two stood a
+      minute or so more in hesitation at the side of the steps. Then Celia
+      descended, and the three advanced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The importance of not being discovered was uppermost in Theron's mind, now
+      that he saw them actually coming toward him. He had avoided this the
+      previous evening, in the Octavius depot, with some skill, he flattered
+      himself. It gave him a pleasurable sense of being a man of affairs, almost
+      a detective, to be confronted by the necessity now of baffling observation
+      once again. He was still rather without plans for keeping them in view,
+      once they left the station. He had supposed that he would be able to hear
+      what hotel they directed their driver to take them to, and, failing that,
+      he had fostered a notion, based upon a story he had read when a boy, of
+      throwing himself into another carriage, and bidding his driver to pursue
+      them in hot haste, and on his life not fail to track them down. These
+      devices seemed somewhat empty, now that the urgent moment was at hand; and
+      as he drew back behind some other loiterers, out of view, he sharply
+      racked his wits for some way of coping with this most pressing problem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It turned out, however, that there was no difficulty at all. Father Forbes
+      and Celia seemed to have no use for the hackmen, but moved straight
+      forward toward the street, through the doorway next to that in which
+      Theron cowered. He stole round, and followed them at a safe distance,
+      making Celia's hat, and the portmanteau perched on the shoulder of the
+      porter behind her, his guides. To his surprise, they still kept on their
+      course when they had reached the sidewalk, and went over the pavement
+      across an open square which spread itself directly in front of the
+      station. Hanging as far behind as he dared, he saw them pass to the other
+      sidewalk diagonally opposite, proceed for a block or so along this, and
+      then separate at a corner. Celia and the negro lad went down a side
+      street, and entered the door of a vast, tall red-brick building which
+      occupied the whole block. The priest, turning on his heel, came back again
+      and went boldly up the broad steps of the front entrance to this same
+      structure, which Theron now discovered to be the Murray Hill Hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fortune had indeed favored him. He not only knew where they were, but he
+      had been himself a witness to the furtive way in which they entered the
+      house by different doors. Nothing in his own limited experience of hotels
+      helped him to comprehend the notion of a separate entrance for ladies and
+      their luggage. He did not feel quite sure about the significance of what
+      he had observed, in his own mind. But it was apparent to him that there
+      was something underhanded about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After lingering awhile on the steps of the hotel, and satisfying himself
+      by peeps through the glass doors that the coast was clear, he ventured
+      inside. The great corridor contained many people, coming, going, or
+      standing about, but none of them paid any attention to him. At last he
+      made up his mind, and beckoned a colored boy to him from a group gathered
+      in the shadows of the big central staircase. Explaining that he did not at
+      that moment wish a room, but desired to leave his bag, the boy took him to
+      a cloak-room, and got him a check for the thing. With this in his pocket
+      he felt himself more at his ease, and turned to walk away. Then suddenly
+      he wheeled, and, bending his body over the counter of the cloak-room,
+      astonished the attendant inside by the eagerness with which he scrutinized
+      the piled rows of portmanteaus, trunks, overcoats, and bundles in the
+      little enclosure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it you want? Here's your bag, if you're looking for that,&rdquo; this
+      man said to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thanks; it's nothing,&rdquo; replied Theron, straightening himself again.
+      He had had a narrow escape. Father Forbes and Celia, walking side by side,
+      had come down the small passage in which he stood, and had passed him so
+      closely that he had felt her dress brush against him. Fortunately he had
+      seen them in time, and by throwing himself half into the cloak-room, had
+      rendered recognition impossible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked now in the direction they had taken, till he came to the polite
+      colored man at an open door on the left, who was bowing people into the
+      breakfast room. Standing in the doorway, he looked about him till his eye
+      lighted upon his two friends, seated at a small table by a distant window,
+      with a black waiter, card in hand, bending over in consultation with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Returning to the corridor, he made bold now to march up to the desk and
+      examine the register. The priest's name was not there. He found only the
+      brief entry, &ldquo;Miss Madden, Octavius,&rdquo; written, not by her, but by Father
+      Forbes. On the line were two numbers in pencil, with an &ldquo;and&rdquo; between
+      them. An indirect question to one of the clerks helped him to an
+      explanation of this. When there were two numbers, it meant that the guest
+      in question had a parlor as well as a bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here he drew a long, satisfied breath, and turned away. The first half of
+      his quest stood completed&mdash;and that much more fully and easily than
+      he had dared to hope. He could not but feel a certain new respect for
+      himself as a man of resource and energy. He had demonstrated that people
+      could not fool with him with impunity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It remained to decide what he would do with his discovery, now that it had
+      been so satisfactorily made. As yet, he had given this hardly a thought.
+      Even now, it did not thrust itself forward as a thing demanding instant
+      attention. It was much more important, first of all, to get a good
+      breakfast. He had learned that there was another and less formal
+      eating-place, downstairs in the basement by the bar, with an entrance from
+      the street. He walked down by the inner stairway instead, feeling himself
+      already at home in the big hotel. He ordered an ample breakfast, and came
+      out while it was being served to wash and have his boots blacked, and he
+      gave the man a quarter of a dollar. His pockets were filled with silver
+      quarters, half-dollars, and dollars almost to a burdensome point, and in
+      his valise was a bag full of smaller change, including many rolls of
+      copper cents which Alice always counted and packed up on Mondays. In the
+      hurry of leaving he had brought with him the church collections for the
+      past two weeks. It occurred to him that he must keep a strict account of
+      his expenditure. Meanwhile he gave ten cents to another man in a
+      silk-sleeved cardigan jacket, who had merely stood by and looked at him
+      while his boots were being polished. There was a sense of metropolitan
+      affluence in the very atmosphere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little table in the adjoining room, on which Theron found his meal in
+      waiting for him, seemed a vision of delicate napery and refined
+      appointments in his eyes. He was wolfishly hungry, and the dishes he
+      looked upon gave him back assurances by sight and smell that he was very
+      happy as well. The servant in attendance had an extremely white apron and
+      a kindly black face. He bowed when Theron looked at him, with the air of a
+      lifelong admirer and humble friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you'll have claret with your breakfast, sir?&rdquo; he remarked, as
+      if it were a matter of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, certainly,&rdquo; answered Theron, stretching his legs contentedly under
+      the table, and tucking the corner of his napkin in his neckband.&mdash;&ldquo;Certainly,
+      my good man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0030" id="link2HCH0030">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At ten o'clock Theron, loitering near the bookstall in the corridor, saw
+      Father Forbes come downstairs, pass out through the big front doors, get
+      into a carriage, and drive away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This relieved him of a certain sense of responsibility, and he retired to
+      a corner sofa and sat down. The detective side of him being off duty, so
+      to speak, there was leisure at last for reflection upon the other aspects
+      of his mission. Yes; it was high time for him to consider what he should
+      do next.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was easier to recognize this fact, however, than to act upon it. His
+      mind was full of tricksy devices for eluding this task of serious thought
+      which he sought to impose upon it. It seemed so much pleasanter not to
+      think at all&mdash;but just to drift. He found himself watching with envy
+      the men who, as they came out from their breakfast, walked over to the
+      bookstall, and bought cigars from the row of boxes nestling there among
+      the newspaper piles. They had such evident delight in the work of
+      selection; they took off the ends of the cigars so carefully, and lighted
+      them with such meditative attention,&mdash;he could see that he was
+      wofully handicapped by not knowing how to smoke. He had had the most
+      wonderful breakfast of his life, but even in the consciousness of
+      comfortable repletion which pervaded his being, there was an obstinate
+      sense of something lacking. No doubt a good cigar was the thing needed to
+      round out the perfection of such a breakfast. He half rose once, fired by
+      a sudden resolution to go over and get one. But of course that was
+      nonsense; it would only make him sick. He sat down, and determinedly set
+      himself to thinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effort finally brought fruit&mdash;and of a kind which gave him a very
+      unhappy quarter of an hour. The lover part of him was uppermost now,
+      insistently exposing all its raw surfaces to the stings and scalds of
+      jealousy. Up to this moment, his brain had always evaded the direct
+      question of how he and the priest relatively stood in Celia's estimation.
+      It forced itself remorselessly upon him now; and his thoughts, so far from
+      shirking the subject, seemed to rise up to meet it. It was extremely
+      unpleasant, all this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then a calmer view asserted itself. Why go out of his way to invent
+      anguish for himself? The relations between Celia and the priest, whatever
+      they might be, were certainly of old standing. They had begun before his
+      time. His own romance was a more recent affair, and must take its place,
+      of course, subject to existing conditions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was all right for him to come to New York, and satisfy his legitimate
+      curiosity as to the exact character and scope of these conditions. But it
+      was foolish to pretend to be amazed or dismayed at the discovery of their
+      existence. They were a part of the situation which he, with his eyes wide
+      open, had accepted. It was his function to triumph over them, to supplant
+      them, to rear the edifice of his own victorious passion upon their ruins.
+      It was to this that Celia's kiss had invited him. It was for this that he
+      had come to New York. To let his purpose be hampered or thwarted now by
+      childish doubts and jealousies would be ridiculous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose, and holding himself very erect, walked with measured deliberation
+      across the corridor and up the broad staircase. There was an elevator near
+      at hand, he had noticed, but he preferred the stairs. One or two of the
+      colored boys clustered about the foot of the stairs looked at him, and he
+      had a moment of dreadful apprehension lest they should stop his progress.
+      Nothing was said, and he went on. The numbers on the first floor were not
+      what he wanted, and after some wandering about he ascended to the next,
+      and then to the third. Every now and then he encountered attendants, but
+      intuitively he bore himself with an air of knowing what he was about which
+      protected him from inquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally he came upon the hall-way he sought. Passing along, he found the
+      doors bearing the numbers he had memorized so well. They were quite close
+      together, and there was nothing to help him guess which belonged to the
+      parlor. He hesitated, gazing wistfully from one to the other. In the
+      instant of indecision, even while his alert ear caught the sound of feet
+      coming along toward the passage in which he stood, a thought came to
+      quicken his resolve. It became apparent to him that his discovery gave him
+      a certain new measure of freedom with Celia, a sort of right to take
+      things more for granted than heretofore. He chose a door at random, and
+      rapped distinctly on the panel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The voice he knew for Celia's. The single word, however, recalled the
+      usage of Father Forbes, which he had noted more than once at the
+      pastorate, when Maggie had knocked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He straightened his shoulders, took his hat off, and pushed open the door.
+      It WAS the parlor&mdash;a room of sofas, pianos, big easy-chairs, and
+      luxurious bric-a-brac. A tall woman was walking up and down in it, with
+      bowed head. Her back was at the moment toward him; and he looked at her,
+      saying to himself that this was the lady of his dreams, the enchantress of
+      the kiss, the woman who loved him&mdash;but somehow it did not seem to his
+      senses to be Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned, and moved a step or two in his direction before she
+      mechanically lifted her eyes and saw who was standing in her doorway. She
+      stopped short, and regarded him. Her face was in the shadow, and he could
+      make out nothing of its expression, save that there was a general effect
+      of gravity about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot receive you,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You must go away. You have no business
+      to come like this without sending up your card.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron smiled at her. The notion of taking in earnest her inhospitable
+      words did not at all occur to him. He could see now that her face had
+      vexed and saddened lines upon it, and the sharpness of her tone remained
+      in his ears. But he smiled again gently, to reassure her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought to have sent up my name, I know,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I couldn't bear
+      to wait. I just saw your name on the register and&mdash;you WILL forgive
+      me, won't you?&mdash;I ran to you at once. I know you won't have the heart
+      to send me away!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood where she had halted, her arms behind her, looking him fixedly
+      in the face. He had made a movement to advance, and offer his hand in
+      greeting, but her posture checked the impulse. His courage began to falter
+      under her inspection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Must I really go down again?&rdquo; he pleaded. &ldquo;It's a crushing penalty to
+      suffer for such little indiscretion. I was so excited to find you were
+      here&mdash;I never stopped to think. Don't send me away; please don't!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia raised her head. &ldquo;Well, shut the door, then,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;since you
+      are so anxious to stay. You would have done much better, though, very much
+      better indeed, to have taken the hint and gone away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you shake hands with me, Celia?&rdquo; he asked softly, as he came near
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit there, please!&rdquo; she made answer, indicating a chair in the middle of
+      the room. He obeyed her, but to his surprise, instead of seating herself
+      as well, she began walking up and down the length of the floor again.
+      After a turn or two she stopped in front of him, and looked him full in
+      the eye. The light from the windows was on her countenance now, and its
+      revelations vaguely troubled him. It was a Celia he had never seen before
+      who confronted him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am much occupied by other matters,&rdquo; she said, speaking with cold
+      impassivity, &ldquo;but still I find myself curious to know just what limits you
+      set to your dishonesty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron stared up at her. His lips quivered, but no speech came to them. If
+      this was all merely fond playfulness, it was being carried to a
+      heart-aching point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw you hiding about in the depot at home last evening,&rdquo; she went on.
+      &ldquo;You come up here, pretending to have discovered me by accident, but I saw
+      you following me from the Grand Central this morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I did both these things,&rdquo; said Theron, boldly. A fine bravery
+      tingled in his veins all at once. He looked into her face and found the
+      spirit to disregard its frowning aspect. &ldquo;Yes, I did them,&rdquo; he repeated
+      defiantly. &ldquo;That is not the hundredth part, or the thousandth part, of
+      what I would do for your sake. I have got way beyond caring for any
+      consequences. Position, reputation, the good opinion of fools&mdash;what
+      are they? Life itself&mdash;what does it amount to? Nothing at all&mdash;with
+      you in the balance!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;but I am not in the balance,&rdquo; observed Celia, quietly. &ldquo;That is
+      where you have made your mistake.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron laid aside his hat. Women were curious creatures, he reflected.
+      Some were susceptible to one line of treatment, some to another. His own
+      reading of Celia had always been that she liked opposition, of a smart,
+      rattling, almost cheeky, sort. One got on best with her by saying bright
+      things. He searched his brain now for some clever quip that would strike
+      sparks from the adamantine mood which for the moment it was her whim to
+      assume. To cover the process, he smiled a little. Then her beauty, as she
+      stood before him, her queenly form clad in a more stiffly fashionable
+      dress than he had seen her wearing before, appealed afresh and
+      overwhelmingly to him. He rose to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you forgotten our talk in the woods?&rdquo; he murmured with a wooing
+      note. &ldquo;Have you forgotten the kiss?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head calmly. &ldquo;I have forgotten nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why play with me so cruelly now?&rdquo; he went on, in a voice of tender
+      deprecation. &ldquo;I know you don't mean it, but all the same it bruises my
+      heart a little. I build myself so wholly upon you, I have made existence
+      itself depend so completely upon your smile, upon a soft glance in your
+      eyes, that when they are not there, why, I suffer, I don't know how to
+      live at all. So be kinder to me, Celia!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was kinder, as you call it, when you came in,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;I told you
+      to go away. That was pure kindness&mdash;more kindness than you deserved.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron looked at his hat, where it stood on the carpet by his feet. He
+      felt tears coming into his eyes. &ldquo;You tell me that you remember,&rdquo; he said,
+      in depressed tones, &ldquo;and yet you treat me like this! Perhaps I am wrong.
+      No doubt it is my own fault. I suppose I ought not to have come down here
+      at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia nodded her head in assent to this view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I swear that I was helpless in the matter,&rdquo; he burst forth. &ldquo;I HAD to
+      come! It would have been literally impossible for me to have stayed at
+      home, knowing that you were here, and knowing also that&mdash;that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on!&rdquo; said Celia, thrusting forth her under-lip a trifle, and hardening
+      still further the gleam in her eye, as he stumbled over his sentence and
+      left it unfinished. &ldquo;What was the other thing that you were 'knowing'?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Knowing&mdash;&rdquo; he took up the word hesitatingly&mdash;&ldquo;knowing that life
+      would be insupportable to me if I could not be near you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She curled her lip at him. &ldquo;You skated over the thin spot very well,&rdquo; she
+      commented. &ldquo;It was on the tip of your tongue to mention the fact that
+      Father Forbes came with me. Oh, I can read you through and through, Mr.
+      Ware.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a misty way Theron felt things slipping from his grasp. The rising
+      moisture blurred his eyes as their gaze clung to Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then if you do read me,&rdquo; he protested, &ldquo;you must know how utterly my
+      heart and brain are filled with you. No other man in all the world can
+      yield himself so absolutely to the woman he worships as I can. You have
+      taken possession of me so wholly, I am not in the least master of myself
+      any more. I don't know what I say or what I do. I am not worthy of you, I
+      know. No man alive could be that. But no one else will idolize and
+      reverence you as I do. Believe me when I say that, Celia! And how can you
+      blame me, in your heart, for following you? 'Whither thou goest, I will
+      go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people,
+      and thy God my God; where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be
+      buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee
+      and me!'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia shrugged her shoulders, and moved a few steps away from him.
+      Something like despair seized upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely,&rdquo; he urged with passion, &ldquo;surely I have a right to remind you of
+      the kiss!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned. &ldquo;The kiss,&rdquo; she said meditatively. &ldquo;Yes, you have a right to
+      remind me of it. Oh, yes, an undoubted right. You have another right too&mdash;the
+      right to have the kiss explained to you. It was of the good-bye order. It
+      signified that we weren't to meet again, and that just for one little
+      moment I permitted myself to be sorry for you. That was all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held himself erect under the incredible words, and gazed blankly at
+      her. The magnitude of what he confronted bewildered him; his mind was
+      incapable of taking it in. &ldquo;You mean&mdash;&rdquo; he started to say, and then
+      stopped, helplessly staring into her face, with a dropped jaw. It was too
+      much to try to think what she meant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little side-thought sprouted in the confusion of his brain. It grew
+      until it spread a bitter smile over his pale face. &ldquo;I know so little about
+      kisses,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I am such a greenhorn at that sort of thing. You should
+      have had pity on my inexperience, and told me just what brand of kiss it
+      was I was getting. Probably I ought to have been able to distinguish, but
+      you see I was brought up in the country&mdash;on a farm. They don't have
+      kisses in assorted varieties there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She bowed her head slightly. &ldquo;Yes, you are entitled to say that,&rdquo; she
+      assented. &ldquo;I was to blame, and it is quite fair that you should tell me
+      so. You spoke of your inexperience, your innocence. That was why I kissed
+      you in saying good-bye. It was in memory of that innocence of yours, to
+      which you yourself had been busy saying good-bye ever since I first saw
+      you. The idea seemed to me to mean something at the moment. I see now that
+      it was too subtle. I do not usually err on that side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron kept his hold upon her gaze, as if it afforded him bodily support.
+      He felt that he ought to stoop and take up his hat, but he dared not look
+      away from her. &ldquo;Do you not err now, on the side of cruelty?&rdquo; he asked her
+      piteously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed for the instant as if she were wavering, and he swiftly thrust
+      forth other pleas. &ldquo;I admit that I did wrong to follow you to New York. I
+      see that now. But it was an offence committed in entire good faith. Think
+      of it, Celia! I have never seen you since that day&mdash;that day in the
+      woods. I have waited&mdash;and waited&mdash;with no sign from you, no
+      chance of seeing you at all. Think what that meant to me! Everything in
+      the world had been altered for me, torn up by the roots. I was a new
+      being, plunged into a new existence. The kiss had done that. But until saw
+      you again, I could not tell whether this vast change in me and my life was
+      for good or for bad&mdash;whether the kiss had come to me as a blessing or
+      a curse. The suspense was killing me, Celia! That is why, when I learned
+      that you were coming here, I threw everything to the winds and followed
+      you. You blame me for it, and I bow my head and accept the blame. But are
+      you justified in punishing me so terribly&mdash;in going on after I have
+      confessed my error, and cutting my heart into little strips, putting me to
+      death by torture?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down,&rdquo; said Celia, with a softened weariness in her voice. She seated
+      herself in front of him as he sank into his chair again. &ldquo;I don't want to
+      give you unnecessary pain, but you have insisted on forcing yourself into
+      a position where there isn't anything else but pain. I warned you to go
+      away, but you wouldn't. No matter how gently I may try to explain things
+      to you, you are bound to get nothing but suffering out of the explanation.
+      Now shall I still go on?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He inclined his head in token of assent, and did not lift it again, but
+      raised toward her a disconsolate gaze from a pallid, drooping face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is all in a single word, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; she proceeded, in low tones. &ldquo;I
+      speak for others as well as myself, mind you&mdash;we find that you are a
+      bore.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron's stiffened countenance remained immovable. He continued to stare
+      unblinkingly up into her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were disposed to like you very much when we first knew you,&rdquo; Celia
+      went on. &ldquo;You impressed us as an innocent, simple, genuine young
+      character, full of mother's milk. It was like the smell of early spring in
+      the country to come in contact with you. Your honesty of nature, your
+      sincerity in that absurd religion of yours, your general NAIVETE of mental
+      and spiritual get-up, all pleased us a great deal. We thought you were
+      going to be a real acquisition.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just a moment&mdash;whom do you mean by 'we'?&rdquo; He asked the question
+      calmly enough, but in a voice with an effect of distance in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It may not be necessary to enter into that,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;Let me go on.
+      But then it became apparent, little by little, that we had misjudged you.
+      We liked you, as I have said, because you were unsophisticated and
+      delightfully fresh and natural. Somehow we took it for granted you would
+      stay so. Rut that is just what you didn't do&mdash;just what you hadn't
+      the sense to try to do. Instead, we found you inflating yourself with all
+      sorts of egotisms and vanities. We found you presuming upon the
+      friendships which had been mistakenly extended to you. Do you want
+      instances? You went to Dr. Ledsmar's house that very day after I had been
+      with you to get a piano at Thurston's, and tried to inveigle him into
+      talking scandal about me. You came to me with tales about him. You went to
+      Father Forbes, and sought to get him to gossip about us both. Neither of
+      those men will ever ask you inside his house again. But that is only one
+      part of it. Your whole mind became an unpleasant thing to contemplate. You
+      thought it would amuse and impress us to hear you ridiculing and reviling
+      the people of your church, whose money supports you, and making a mock of
+      the things they believe in, and which you for your life wouldn't dare let
+      them know you didn't believe in. You talked to us slightingly about your
+      wife. What were you thinking of, not to comprehend that that would disgust
+      us? You showed me once&mdash;do you remember?&mdash;a life of George Sand
+      that you had just bought,&mdash;bought because you had just discovered
+      that she had an unclean side to her life. You chuckled as you spoke to me
+      about it, and you were for all the world like a little nasty boy, giggling
+      over something dirty that older people had learned not to notice. These
+      are merely random incidents. They are just samples, picked hap-hazard, of
+      the things in you which have been opening our eyes, little by little, to
+      our mistake. I can understand that all the while you really fancied that
+      you were expanding, growing, in all directions. What you took to be
+      improvement was degeneration. When you thought that you were impressing us
+      most by your smart sayings and doings, you were reminding us most of the
+      fable about the donkey trying to play lap-dog. And it wasn't even an
+      honest, straightforward donkey at that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She uttered these last words sorrowfully, her hands clasped in her lap,
+      and her eyes sinking to the floor. A silence ensued. Then Theron reached a
+      groping hand out for his hat, and, rising, walked with a lifeless,
+      automatic step to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had it half open, when the impossibility of leaving in this way towered
+      suddenly in his path and overwhelmed him. He slammed the door to, and
+      turned as if he had been whirled round by some mighty wind. He came toward
+      her, with something almost menacing in the vigor of his movements, and in
+      the wild look upon his white, set face. Halting before her, he covered the
+      tailor-clad figure, the coiled red hair, the upturned face with its
+      simulated calm, the big brown eyes, the rings upon the clasped fingers,
+      with a sweeping, comprehensive glare of passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is what you have done to me, then!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice was unrecognizable in his own ears&mdash;hoarse and broken, but
+      with a fright-compelling something in it which stimulated his rage. The
+      horrible notion of killing her, there where she sat, spread over the chaos
+      of his mind with an effect of unearthly light&mdash;red and abnormally
+      evil. It was like that first devilish radiance ushering in Creation, of
+      which the first-fruit was Cain. Why should he not kill her? In all ages,
+      women had been slain for less. Yes&mdash;and men had been hanged.
+      Something rose and stuck in his dry throat; and as he swallowed it down,
+      the sinister flare of murderous fascination died suddenly away into
+      darkness. The world was all black again&mdash;plunged in the Egyptian
+      night which lay upon the face of the deep while the earth was yet without
+      form and void. He was alone on it&mdash;alone among awful, planetary
+      solitudes which crushed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sight of Celia, sitting motionless only a pace in front of him, was
+      plain enough to his eyes. It was an illusion. She was really a star, many
+      millions of miles away. These things were hard to understand; but they
+      were true, none the less. People seemed to be about him, but in fact he
+      was alone. He recalled that even the little child in the car, playing with
+      those two buttons on a string, would have nothing to do with him. Take his
+      money, yes; take all he would give her&mdash;but not smile at him, not
+      come within reach of him! Men closed the doors of their houses against
+      him. The universe held him at arm's length as a nuisance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was standing with one knee upon a sofa. Unconsciously he had moved
+      round to the side of Celia; and as he caught the effect of her face now in
+      profile, memory-pictures began at once building themselves in his brain&mdash;pictures
+      of her standing in the darkened room of the cottage of death, declaiming
+      the CONFITEOR; of her seated at the piano, under the pure, mellowed
+      candle-light; of her leaning her chin on her hands, and gazing
+      meditatively at the leafy background of the woods they were in; of her
+      lying back, indolently content, in the deck-chair on the yacht of his
+      fancy&mdash;that yacht which a few hours before had seemed so brilliantly
+      and bewitchingly real to him, and now&mdash;now&mdash;!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sank in a heap upon the couch, and, burying his face among its
+      cushions, wept and groaned aloud. His collapse was absolute. He sobbed
+      with the abandonment of one who, in the veritable presence of death, lets
+      go all sense of relation to life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently some one was touching him on the shoulder&mdash;an incisive,
+      pointed touch&mdash;and he checked himself, and lifted his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will have to get up, and present some sort of an appearance, and go
+      away at once,&rdquo; Celia said to him in low, rapid tones. &ldquo;Some gentlemen are
+      at the door, whom I have been waiting for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he stupidly sat up and tried to collect his faculties, Celia had opened
+      the door and admitted two visitors. The foremost was Father Forbes; and
+      he, with some whispered, smiling words, presented to her his companion, a
+      tall, robust, florid man of middle-age, with a frock-coat and a gray
+      mustache, sharply waxed. The three spoke for a moment together. Then the
+      priest's wandering eye suddenly lighted upon the figure on the sofa. He
+      stared, knitted his brows, and then lifted them in inquiry as he turned to
+      Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor man!&rdquo; she said readily, in tones loud enough to reach Theron. &ldquo;It is
+      our neighbor, Father, the Rev. Mr. Ware. He hit upon my name in the
+      register quite unexpectedly, and I had him come up. He is in sore distress&mdash;a
+      great and sudden bereavement. He is going now. Won't you speak to him in
+      the hall&mdash;a few words, Father? It would please him. He is terribly
+      depressed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The words had drawn Theron to his feet, as by some mechanical process. He
+      took up his hat and moved dumbly to the door. It seemed to him that Celia
+      intended offering to shake hands; but he went past her with only some
+      confused exchange of glances and a murmured word or two. The tall
+      stranger, who drew aside to let him pass, had acted as if he expected to
+      be introduced. Theron, emerging into the hall, leaned against the wall and
+      looked dreamily at the priest, who had stepped out with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very sorry to learn that you are in trouble, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; Father
+      Forbes said, gently enough, but in hurried tones. &ldquo;Miss Madden is also in
+      trouble. I mentioned to you that her brother had got into a serious
+      scrape. I have brought my old friend, General Brady, to consult with her
+      about the matter. He knows all the parties concerned, and he can set
+      things right if anybody can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a mistake about me&mdash;I 'm not in any trouble at all,&rdquo; said
+      Theron. &ldquo;I just dropped in to make a friendly call.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest glanced sharply at him, noting with a swift, informed scrutiny
+      how he sprawled against the wall, and what vacuity his eyes and loosened
+      lips expressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you have a talent for the inopportune amounting to positive genius,&rdquo;
+       said Father Forbes, with a stormy smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me this, Father Forbes,&rdquo; the other demanded, with impulsive
+      suddenness, &ldquo;is it true that you don't want me in your house again? Is
+      that the truth or not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The truth is always relative, Mr. Ware,&rdquo; replied the priest, turning
+      away, and closing the door of the parlor behind him with a decisive sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Left alone, Theron started to make his way downstairs. He found his legs
+      wavering under him and making zigzag movements of their own in a
+      bewildering fashion. He referred this at first, in an outburst of fresh
+      despair, to the effects of his great grief. Then, as he held tight to the
+      banister and governed his descent step by step, it occurred to him that it
+      must be the wine he had had for breakfast. Upon examination, he was not so
+      unhappy, after all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0031" id="link2HCH0031">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXXI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At the second peal of the door-bell, Brother Soulsby sat up in bed. It was
+      still pitch-dark, and the memory of the first ringing fluttered musically
+      in his awakening consciousness as a part of some dream he had been having.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who the deuce can that be?&rdquo; he mused aloud, in querulous resentment at
+      the interruption.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put your head out of the window, and ask,&rdquo; suggested his wife, drowsily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bell-pull scraped violently in its socket, and a third outburst of
+      shrill reverberations clamored through the silent house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whatever you do, I'd do it before he yanked the whole thing to pieces,&rdquo;
+       added the wife, with more decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Soulsby was wide awake now. He sprang to the floor, and, groping
+      about in the obscurity, began drawing on some of his clothes. He rapped on
+      the window during the process, to show that the house was astir, and a
+      minute afterward made his way out of the room and down the stairs, the
+      boards creaking under his stockinged feet as he went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nearly a quarter of an hour passed before he returned. Sister Soulsby,
+      lying in sleepy quiescence, heard vague sounds of voices at the front
+      door, and did not feel interested enough to lift her head and listen. A
+      noise of footsteps on the sidewalk followed, first receding from the door,
+      then turning toward it, this second time marking the presence of more than
+      one person. There seemed in this the implication of a guest, and she shook
+      off the dozing impulses which enveloped her faculties, and waited to hear
+      more. There came up, after further muttering of male voices, the
+      undeniable chink of coins striking against one another. Then more
+      footsteps, the resonant slam of a carriage door out in the street, the
+      grinding of wheels turning on the frosty road, and the racket of a vehicle
+      and horses going off at a smart pace into the night. Somebody had come,
+      then. She yawned at the thought, but remained well awake, tracing idly in
+      her mind, as various slight sounds rose from the lower floor, the
+      different things Soulsby was probably doing. Their spare room was down
+      there, directly underneath, but curiously enough no one seemed to enter
+      it. The faint murmur of conversation which from time to time reached her
+      came from the parlor instead. At last she heard her husband's soft tread
+      coming up the staircase, and still there had been no hint of employing the
+      guest-chamber. What could he be about? she wondered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Soulsby came in, bearing a small lamp in his hand, the reddish
+      light of which, flaring upward, revealed an unlooked-for display of
+      amusement on his thin, beardless face. He advanced to the bedside, shading
+      the glare from her blinking eyes with his palm, and grinned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A thousand guesses, old lady,&rdquo; he said, with a dry chuckle, &ldquo;and you
+      wouldn't have a ghost of a chance. You might guess till Hades froze over
+      seven feet thick, and still you wouldn't hit it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat up in turn. &ldquo;Good gracious, man,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;you don't mean&mdash;&rdquo;
+       Here the cheerful gleam in his small eyes reassured her, and she sighed
+      relief, then smiled confusedly. &ldquo;I half thought, just for the minute,&rdquo; she
+      explained, &ldquo;it might be some bounder who'd come East to try and blackmail
+      me. But no, who is it&mdash;and what on earth have you done with him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Soulsby cackled in merriment. &ldquo;It's Brother Ware of Octavius, out
+      on a little bat, all by himself. He says he's been on the loose only two
+      days; but it looks more like a fortnight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;OUR Brother Ware?&rdquo; she regarded him with open-eyed surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, yes, I suppose he's OUR Brother Ware&mdash;some,&rdquo; returned Soulsby,
+      genially. &ldquo;He seems to think so, anyway.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But tell me about it!&rdquo; she urged eagerly. &ldquo;What's the matter with him?
+      How does he explain it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, he explains it pretty badly, if you ask me,&rdquo; said Soulsby, with a
+      droll, joking eye and a mock-serious voice. He seated himself on the side
+      of the bed, facing her, and still considerately shielding her from the
+      light of the lamp he held. &ldquo;But don't think I suggested any explanations.
+      I've been a mother myself. He's merely filled himself up to the neck with
+      rum, in the simple, ordinary, good old-fashioned way. That's all. What is
+      there to explain about that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked meditatively at him for a time, shaking her head. &ldquo;No,
+      Soulsby,&rdquo; she said gravely, at last. &ldquo;This isn't any laughing matter. You
+      may be sure something bad has happened, to set him off like that. I'm
+      going to get up and dress right now. What time is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now don't you do anything of the sort,&rdquo; he urged persuasively. &ldquo;It isn't
+      five o'clock; it'll be dark for nearly an hour yet. Just you turn over,
+      and have another nap. He's all right. I put him on the sofa, with the
+      buffalo robe round him. You'll find him there, safe and sound, when it's
+      time for white folks to get up. You know how it breaks you up all day, not
+      to get your full sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't care if it makes me look as old as the everlasting hills,&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;Can't you understand, Soulsby? The thing worries me&mdash;gets on
+      my nerves. I couldn't close an eye, if I tried. I took a great fancy to
+      that young man. I told you so at the time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Soulsby nodded, and turned down the wick of his lamp a trifle. &ldquo;Yes, I
+      know you did,&rdquo; he remarked in placidly non-contentious tones. &ldquo;I can't say
+      I saw much in him myself, but I daresay you're right.&rdquo; There followed a
+      moment's silence, during which he experimented in turning the wick up
+      again. &ldquo;But, anyway,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;there isn't anything you can do. He'll
+      sleep it off, and the longer he's left alone the better. It isn't as if we
+      had a hired girl, who'd come down and find him there, and give the whole
+      thing away. He's fixed up there perfectly comfortable; and when he's had
+      his sleep out, and wakes up on his own account, he'll be feeling a heap
+      better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The argument might have carried conviction, but on the instant the sound
+      of footsteps came to them from the room below. The subdued noise rose
+      regularly, as of one pacing to and fro.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Soulsby, YOU come back to bed, and get YOUR sleep out. I'm going
+      downstairs. It's no good talking; I'm going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brother Soulsby offered no further opposition, either by talk or demeanor,
+      but returned contentedly to bed, pulling the comforter over his ears, and
+      falling into the slow, measured respiration of tranquil slumber before his
+      wife was ready to leave the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dim, cold gray of twilight was sifting furtively through the lace
+      curtains of the front windows when Mrs. Soulsby, lamp in hand, entered the
+      parlor. She confronted a figure she would have hardly recognized. The man
+      seemed to have been submerged in a bath of disgrace. From the crown of his
+      head to the soles of his feet, everything about him was altered,
+      distorted, smeared with an intangible effect of shame. In the vague gloom
+      of the middle distance, between lamp and window, she noticed that his
+      shoulders were crouched, like those of some shambling tramp. The frowsy
+      shadows of a stubble beard lay on his jaw and throat. His clothes were
+      crumpled and hung awry; his boots were stained with mud. The silk hat on
+      the piano told its battered story with dumb eloquence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lifting the lamp, she moved forward a step, and threw its light upon his
+      face. A little groan sounded involuntarily upon her lips. Out of a mask of
+      unpleasant features, swollen with drink and weighted by the physical
+      craving for rest and sleep, there stared at her two bloodshot eyes,
+      shining with the wild light of hysteria. The effect of dishevelled hair,
+      relaxed muscles, and rough, half-bearded lower face lent to these eyes, as
+      she caught their first glance, an unnatural glare. The lamp shook in her
+      hand for an instant. Then, ashamed of herself, she held out her other hand
+      fearlessly to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me all about it, Theron,&rdquo; she said calmly, and with a soothing,
+      motherly intonation in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not take the hand she offered, but suddenly, with a wailing moan,
+      cast himself on his knees at her feet. He was so tall a man that the
+      movement could have no grace. He abased his head awkwardly, to bury it
+      among the folds of the skirts at her ankles. She stood still for a moment,
+      looking down upon him. Then, blowing out the light, she reached over and
+      set the smoking lamp on the piano near by. The daylight made things
+      distinguishable in a wan, uncertain way, throughout the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have come out of hell, for the sake of hearing some human being speak
+      to me like that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The thick utterance proceeded in a muffled fashion from where his face
+      grovelled against her dress. Its despairing accents appealed to her, but
+      even more was she touched by the ungainly figure he made, sprawling on the
+      carpet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, since you are out, stay out,&rdquo; she answered, as reassuringly as she
+      could. &ldquo;But get up and take a seat here beside me, like a sensible man,
+      and tell me all about it. Come! I insist!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In obedience to her tone, and the sharp tug at his shoulder with which she
+      emphasized it, he got slowly to his feet, and listlessly seated himself on
+      the sofa to which she pointed. He hung his head, and began catching his
+      breath with a periodical gasp, half hiccough, half sob.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First of all,&rdquo; she said, in her brisk, matter-of-fact manner, &ldquo;don't you
+      want to lie down there again, and have me tuck you up snug with the
+      buffalo robe, and go to sleep? That would be the best thing you could do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head disconsolately, from side to side. &ldquo;I can't!&rdquo; he
+      groaned, with a swifter recurrence of the sob-like convulsions. &ldquo;I'm dying
+      for sleep, but I'm too&mdash;too frightened!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, I'll sit beside you till you drop off,&rdquo; she said, with masterful
+      decision. He suffered himself to be pushed into recumbency on the couch,
+      and put his head with docility on the pillow she brought from the spare
+      room. When she had spread the fur over him, and pushed her chair close to
+      the sofa, she stood by it for a little, looking down in meditation at his
+      demoralized face. Under the painful surface-blur of wretchedness and
+      fatigued debauchery, she traced reflectively the lineaments of the younger
+      and cleanlier countenance she had seen a few months before. Nothing
+      essential had been taken away. There was only this pestiferous overlaying
+      of shame and cowardice to be removed. The face underneath was still all
+      right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a soft, maternal touch, she smoothed the hair from his forehead into
+      order. Then she seated herself, and, when he got his hand out from under
+      the robe and thrust it forth timidly, she took it in hers and held it in a
+      warm, sympathetic grasp. He closed his eyes at this, and gradually the
+      paroxysmal catch in his breathing lapsed. The daylight strengthened, until
+      at last tiny flecks of sunshine twinkled in the meshes of the further
+      curtains at the window. She fancied him asleep, and gently sought to
+      disengage her hand, but his fingers clutched at it with vehemence, and his
+      eyes were wide open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't sleep at all,&rdquo; he murmured. &ldquo;I want to talk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There 's nothing in the world to hinder you,&rdquo; she commented smilingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you the solemn truth,&rdquo; he said, lifting his voice in dogged
+      assertion: &ldquo;the best sermon I ever preached in my life, I preached only
+      three weeks ago, at the camp-meeting. It was admitted by everybody to be
+      far and away my finest effort! They will tell you the same!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's quite likely,&rdquo; assented Sister Soulsby. &ldquo;I quite believe it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then how can anybody say that I've degenerated, that I've become a fool?&rdquo;
+       he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't heard anybody hint at such a thing,&rdquo; she answered quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, of course, YOU haven't heard them!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;I heard them, though!&rdquo;
+       Then, forcing himself to a sitting posture, against the restraint of her
+      hand, he flung back the covering. &ldquo;I'm burning hot already! Yes, those
+      were the identical words: I haven't improved; I've degenerated. People
+      hate me; they won't have me in their houses. They say I'm a nuisance and a
+      bore. I'm like a little nasty boy. That's what they say. Even a young man
+      who was dying&mdash;lying right on the edge of his open grave&mdash;told
+      me solemnly that I reminded him of a saint once, but I was only fit for a
+      barkeeper now. They say I really don't know anything at all. And I'm not
+      only a fool, they say, I'm a dishonest fool into the bargain!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But who says such twaddle as that?&rdquo; she returned consolingly. The
+      violence of his emotion disturbed her. &ldquo;You mustn't imagine such things.
+      You are among friends here. Other people are your friends, too. They have
+      the very highest opinion of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't a friend on earth but you!&rdquo; he declared solemnly. His eyes
+      glowed fiercely, and his voice sank into a grave intensity of tone. &ldquo;I was
+      going to kill myself. I went on to the big bridge to throw myself off, and
+      a policeman saw me trying to climb over the railing, and he grabbed me and
+      marched me away. Then he threw me out at the entrance, and said he would
+      club my head off if I came there again. And then I went and stood and let
+      the cable-cars pass close by me, and twenty times I thought I had the
+      nerve to throw myself under the next one, and then I waited for the next&mdash;and
+      I was afraid! And then I was in a crowd somewhere, and the warning came to
+      me that I was going to die. The fool needn't go kill himself: God would
+      take care of that. It was my heart, you know. I've had that terrible
+      fluttering once before. It seized me this time, and I fell down in the
+      crowd, and some people walked over me, but some one else helped me up, and
+      let me sit down in a big lighted hallway, the entrance to some theatre,
+      and some one brought me some brandy, but somebody else said I was drunk,
+      and they took it away again, and put me out. They could see I was a fool,
+      that I hadn't a friend on earth. And when I went out, there was a big
+      picture of a woman in tights, and the word 'Amazons' overhead&mdash;and
+      then I remembered you. I knew you were my friend&mdash;the only one I have
+      on earth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very flattering&mdash;to be remembered like that,&rdquo; said Sister
+      Soulsby, gently. The disposition to laugh was smothered by a pained
+      perception of the suffering he was undergoing. His face had grown drawn
+      and haggard under the burden of his memories as he rambled on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I came straight to you,&rdquo; he began again. &ldquo;I had just money enough left
+      to pay my fare. The rest is in my valise at the hotel&mdash;the Murray
+      Hill Hotel. It belongs to the church. I stole it from the church. When I
+      am dead they can get it back again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby forced a smile to her lips. &ldquo;What nonsense you talk&mdash;about
+      dying!&rdquo; she exclaimed. &ldquo;Why, man alive, you'll sleep this all off like a
+      top, if you'll only lie down and give yourself a chance. Come, now, you
+      must do as you're told.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a resolute hand, she made him lie down again, and once more covered
+      him with the fur. He submitted, and did not even offer to put out his arm
+      this time, but looked in piteous dumbness at her for a long time. While
+      she sat thus in silence, the sound of Brother Soulsby moving about
+      upstairs became audible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron heard it, and the importance of hurrying on some further disclosure
+      seemed to suggest itself. &ldquo;I can see you think I'm just drunk,&rdquo; he said,
+      in low, sombre tones. &ldquo;Of course that's what HE thought. The hackman
+      thought so, and so did the conductor, and everybody. But I hoped you would
+      know better. I was sure you would see that it was something worse than
+      that. See here, I'll tell you. Then you'll understand. I've been drinking
+      for two days and one whole night, on my feet all the while, wandering
+      alone in that big strange New York, going through places where they
+      murdered men for ten cents, mixing myself up with the worst people in low
+      bar-rooms and dance-houses, and they saw I had money in my pocket, too,
+      and yet nobody touched me, or offered to lay a finger on me. Do you know
+      why? They understood that I wanted to get drunk, and couldn't. The Indians
+      won't harm an idiot, or lunatic, you know. Well, it was the same with
+      these vilest of the vile. They saw that I was a fool whom God had taken
+      hold of, to break his heart first, and then to craze his brain, and then
+      to fling him on a dunghill to die like a dog. They believe in God, those
+      people. They're the only ones who do, it seems to me. And they wouldn't
+      interfere when they saw what He was doing to me. But I tell you I wasn't
+      drunk. I haven't been drunk. I'm only heart-broken, and crushed out of
+      shape and life&mdash;that's all. And I've crawled here just to have a
+      friend by me when&mdash;when I come to the end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're not talking very sensibly, or very bravely either, Theron Ware,&rdquo;
+       remarked his companion. &ldquo;It's cowardly to give way to notions like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I 'm not afraid to die; don't think that,&rdquo; he remonstrated wearily.
+      &ldquo;If there is a Judgment, it has hit me as hard as it can already. There
+      can't be any hell worse than that I've gone through. Here I am talking
+      about hell,&rdquo; he continued, with a pained contraction of the muscles about
+      his mouth&mdash;a stillborn, malformed smile&mdash;&ldquo;as if I believed in
+      one! I've got way through all my beliefs, you know. I tell you that
+      frankly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's none of my business,&rdquo; she reassured him. &ldquo;I'm not your Bishop, or
+      your confessor. I'm just your friend, your pal, that's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here!&rdquo; he broke in, with some animation and a new intensity of
+      glance and voice. &ldquo;If I was going to live, I'd have some funny things to
+      tell. Six months ago I was a good man. I not only seemed to be good, to
+      others and to myself, but I was good. I had a soul; I had a conscience. I
+      was going along doing my duty, and I was happy in it. We were poor, Alice
+      and I, and people behaved rather hard toward us, and sometimes we were a
+      little down in the mouth about it; but that was all. We really were happy;
+      and I&mdash;I really was a good man. Here's the kind of joke God plays!
+      You see me here six months after. Look at me! I haven't got an honest hair
+      in my head. I'm a bad man through and through, that's what I am. I look
+      all around at myself, and there isn't an atom left anywhere of the good
+      man I used to be. And, mind you, I never lifted a finger to prevent the
+      change. I didn't resist once; I didn't make any fight. I just walked
+      deliberately down-hill, with my eyes wide open. I told myself all the
+      while that I was climbing uphill instead, but I knew in my heart that it
+      was a lie. Everything about me was a lie. I wouldn't be telling the truth,
+      even now, if&mdash;if I hadn't come to the end of my rope. Now, how do you
+      explain that? How can it be explained? Was I really rotten to the core all
+      the time, years ago, when I seemed to everybody, myself and the rest, to
+      be good and straight and sincere? Was it all a sham, or does God take a
+      good man and turn him into an out-and-out bad one, in just a few months&mdash;in
+      the time that it takes an ear of corn to form and ripen and go off with
+      the mildew? Or isn't there any God at all&mdash;but only men who live and
+      die like animals? And that would explain my case, wouldn't it? I got
+      bitten and went vicious and crazy, and they've had to chase me out and
+      hunt me to my death like a mad dog! Yes, that makes it all very simple. It
+      isn't worth while to discuss me at all as if I had a soul, is it? I'm just
+      one more mongrel cur that's gone mad, and must be put out of the way.
+      That's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See here,&rdquo; said Sister Soulsby, alertly, &ldquo;I half believe that a good
+      cuffing is what you really stand in need of. Now you stop all this
+      nonsense, and lie quiet and keep still! Do you hear me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The jocose sternness which she assumed, in words and manner, seemed to
+      soothe him. He almost smiled up at her in a melancholy way, and sighed
+      profoundly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've told you MY religion before,&rdquo; she went on with gentleness. &ldquo;The
+      sheep and the goats are to be separated on Judgment Day, but not a minute
+      sooner. In other words, as long as human life lasts, good, bad, and
+      indifferent are all braided up together in every man's nature, and every
+      woman's too. You weren't altogether good a year ago, any more than you're
+      altogether bad now. You were some of both then; you're some of both now.
+      If you've been making an extra sort of fool of yourself lately, why, now
+      that you recognize it, the only thing to do is to slow steam, pull up, and
+      back engine in the other direction. In that way you'll find things will
+      even themselves up. It's a see-saw with all of us, Theron Ware&mdash;sometimes
+      up; sometimes down. But nobody is rotten clear to the core.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He closed his eyes, and lay in silence for a time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is what day of the week?&rdquo; he asked, at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Friday, the nineteenth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wednesday&mdash;that would be the seventeenth. That was the day ordained
+      for my slaughter. On that morning, I was the happiest man in the world. No
+      king could have been so proud and confident as I was. A wonderful romance
+      had come to me. The most beautiful young woman in the world, the most
+      talented too, was waiting for me. An express train was carrying me to her,
+      and it couldn't go fast enough to keep up with my eagerness. She was very
+      rich, and she loved me, and we were to live in eternal summer, wherever we
+      liked, on a big, beautiful yacht. No one else had such a life before him
+      as that. It seemed almost too good for me, but I thought I had grown and
+      developed so much that perhaps I would be worthy of it. Oh, how happy I
+      was! I tell you this because&mdash;because YOU are not like the others.
+      You will understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I understand,&rdquo; she said patiently. &ldquo;Well&mdash;you were being so
+      happy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was in the morning&mdash;Wednesday the seventeenth&mdash;early in
+      the morning. There was a little girl in the car, playing with some
+      buttons, and when I tried to make friends with her, she looked at me, and
+      she saw, right at a glance, that I was a fool. 'Out of the mouths of babes
+      and sucklings,' you know. She was the first to find it out. It began like
+      that, early in the morning. But then after that everybody knew it. They
+      had only to look at me and they said: 'Why, this is a fool&mdash;like a
+      little nasty boy; we won't let him into our houses; we find him a bore.'
+      That is what they said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did SHE say it?&rdquo; Sister Soulsby permitted herself to ask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For answer Theron bit his lips, and drew his chin under the fur, and
+      pushed his scowling face into the pillow. The spasmodic, sob-like gasps
+      began to shake him again. She laid a compassionate hand upon his hot brow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is why I made my way here to you,&rdquo; he groaned piteously. &ldquo;I knew you
+      would sympathize; I could tell it all to you. And it was so awful, to die
+      there alone in the strange city&mdash;I couldn't do it&mdash;with nobody
+      near me who liked me, or thought well of me. Alice would hate me. There
+      was no one but you. I wanted to be with you&mdash;at the last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His quavering voice broke off in a gust of weeping, and his face frankly
+      surrendered itself to the distortions of a crying child's countenance,
+      wide-mouthed and tragically grotesque in its abandonment of control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby, as her husband's boots were heard descending the stairs,
+      rose, and drew the robe up to half cover his agonized visage. She patted
+      the sufferer softly on the head, and then went to the stair-door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think he'll go to sleep now,&rdquo; she said, lifting her voice to the
+      new-comer, and with a backward nod toward the couch. &ldquo;Come out into the
+      kitchen while I get breakfast, or into the sitting-room, or somewhere, so
+      as not to disturb him. He's promised me to lie perfectly quiet, and try to
+      sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When they had passed together out of the room, she turned. &ldquo;Soulsby,&rdquo; she
+      said with half-playful asperity, &ldquo;I'm disappointed in you. For a man who's
+      knocked about as much as you have, I must say you've picked up an
+      astonishingly small outfit of gumption. That poor creature in there is no
+      more drunk than I am. He's been drinking&mdash;yes, drinking like a fish;
+      but it wasn't able to make him drunk. He's past being drunk; he's
+      grief-crazy. It's a case of 'woman.' Some girl has made a fool of him, and
+      decoyed him up in a balloon, and let him drop. He's been hurt bad, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have all been hurt in our day and generation,&rdquo; responded Brother
+      Soulsby, genially. &ldquo;Don't you worry; he'll sleep that off too. It takes
+      longer than drink, and it doesn't begin to be so pleasant, but it can be
+      slept off. Take my word for it, he'll be a different man by noon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When noon came, however, Brother Soulsby was on his way to summon one of
+      the village doctors. Toward nightfall, he went out again to telegraph for
+      Alice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0032" id="link2HCH0032">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXXII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Spring fell early upon the pleasant southern slopes of the Susquehanna
+      country. The snow went off as by magic. The trees budded and leaved before
+      their time. The birds came and set up their chorus in the elms, while
+      winter seemed still a thing of yesterday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice, clad gravely in black, stood again upon a kitchen-stoop, and looked
+      across an intervening space of back-yards and fences to where the tall
+      boughs, fresh in their new verdure, were silhouetted against the pure blue
+      sky. The prospect recalled to her irresistibly another sunlit morning, a
+      year ago, when she had stood in the doorway of her own kitchen, and
+      surveyed a scene not unlike this; it might have been with the same
+      carolling robins, the same trees, the same azure segment of the tranquil,
+      speckless dome. Then she was looking out upon surroundings novel and
+      strange to her, among which she must make herself at home as best she
+      could. But at least the ground was secure under her feet; at least she had
+      a home, and a word from her lips could summon her husband out, to stand
+      beside her with his arm about her, and share her buoyant, hopeful joy in
+      the promises of spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To think that that was only one little year ago&mdash;the mere revolution
+      of four brief seasons! And now&mdash;!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby, wiping her hands on her apron, came briskly out upon the
+      stoop. Some cheerful commonplace was on her tongue, but a glance at
+      Alice's wistful face kept it back. She passed an arm around her waist
+      instead, and stood in silence, looking at the elms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It brings back memories to me&mdash;all this,&rdquo; said Alice, nodding her
+      head, and not seeking to dissemble the tears which sprang to her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The men will be down in a minute, dear,&rdquo; the other reminded her. &ldquo;They'd
+      nearly finished packing before I put the biscuits in the oven. We mustn't
+      wear long faces before folks, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I know,&rdquo; murmured Alice. Then, with a sudden impulse, she turned to
+      her companion. &ldquo;Candace,&rdquo; she said fervently, &ldquo;we're alone here for the
+      moment; I must tell you that if I don't talk gratitude to you, it's simply
+      and solely because I don't know where to begin, or what to say. I'm just
+      dumfounded at your goodness. It takes my speech away. I only know this,
+      Candace: God will be very good to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tut! tut!&rdquo; replied Sister Soulsby, &ldquo;that's all right, you dear thing. I
+      know just how you feel. Don't dream of being under obligation to explain
+      it to me, or to thank us at all. We've had all sorts of comfort out of the
+      thing&mdash;Soulsby and I. We used to get downright lonesome, here all by
+      ourselves, and we've simply had a winter of pleasant company instead, that
+      s all. Besides, there's solid satisfaction in knowing that at last, for
+      once in our lives we've had a chance to be of some real use to somebody
+      who truly needed it. You can't imagine how stuck up that makes us in our
+      own conceit. We feel as if we were George Peabody and Lady Burdett-Coutts,
+      and several other philanthropists thrown in. No, seriously, don't think of
+      it again. We're glad to have been able to do it all; and if you only go
+      ahead now, and prosper and be happy, why, that will be the only reward we
+      want.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope we shall do well,&rdquo; said Alice. &ldquo;Only tell me this, Candace. You do
+      think I was right, don't you, in insisting on Theron's leaving the
+      ministry altogether? He seems convinced enough now that it was the right
+      thing to do; but I grow nervous sometimes lest he should find it harder
+      than he thought to get along in business, and regret the change&mdash;and
+      blame me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you may rest easy in your mind about that,&rdquo; the other responded.
+      &ldquo;Whatever else he does, he will never want to come within gunshot of a
+      pulpit again. It came too near murdering him for that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alice looked at her doubtfully. &ldquo;Something came near murdering him, I
+      know. But it doesn't seem to me that I would say it was the ministry. And
+      I guess you know pretty well yourself what it was. Of course, I've never
+      asked any questions, and I've hushed up everybody at Octavius who tried to
+      quiz me about it&mdash;his disappearance and my packing up and leaving,
+      and all that&mdash;and I've never discussed the question with you&mdash;but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, and there's no good going into it now,&rdquo; put in Sister Soulsby, with
+      amiable decisiveness. &ldquo;It's all past and gone. In fact, I hardly remember
+      much about it now myself. He simply got into deep water, poor soul, and
+      we've floated him out again, safe and sound. That's all. But all the same,
+      I was right in what I said. He was a mistake in the ministry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if you'd known him in previous years,&rdquo; urged Alice, plaintively,
+      &ldquo;before we were sent to that awful Octavius. He was the very ideal of all
+      a young minister should be. People used to simply worship him, he was such
+      a perfect preacher, and so pure-minded and friendly with everybody, and
+      threw himself into his work so. It was all that miserable, contemptible
+      Octavius that did the mischief.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby slowly shook her head. &ldquo;If there hadn't been a screw loose
+      somewhere,&rdquo; she said gently, &ldquo;Octavius wouldn't have hurt him. No, take my
+      word for it, he never was the right man for the place. He seemed to be, no
+      doubt, but he wasn't. When pressure was put on him, it found out his weak
+      spot like a shot, and pushed on it, and&mdash;well, it came near smashing
+      him, that's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And do you think he'll always be a&mdash;a back-slider,&rdquo; mourned Alice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For mercy's sake, don't ever try to have him pretend to be anything
+      else!&rdquo; exclaimed the other. &ldquo;The last state of that man would be worse
+      than the first. You must make up your mind to that. And you mustn't show
+      that you're nervous about it. You mustn't get nervous! You mustn't be
+      afraid of things. Just you keep a stiff upper lip, and say you WILL get
+      along, you WILL be happy. That's your only chance, Alice. He isn't going
+      to be an angel of light, or a saint, or anything of that sort, and it's no
+      good expecting it. But he'll be just an average kind of man&mdash;a little
+      sore about some things, a little wiser than he was about some others. You
+      can get along perfectly with him, if you only keep your courage up, and
+      don't show the white feather.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I know; but I've had it pretty well taken out of me,&rdquo; commented
+      Alice. &ldquo;It used to come easy to me to be cheerful and resolute and all
+      that; but it's different now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Soulsby stole a swift glance at the unsuspecting face of her
+      companion which was not all admiration, but her voice remained patiently
+      affectionate. &ldquo;Oh, that'll all come back to you, right enough. You'll have
+      your hands full, you know, finding a house, and unpacking all your old
+      furniture, and buying new things, and getting your home settled. It'll
+      keep you so busy you won't have time to feel strange or lonesome, one bit.
+      You'll see how it'll tone you up. In a year's time you won't know yourself
+      in the looking-glass.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, my health is good enough,&rdquo; said Alice; &ldquo;but I can't help thinking,
+      suppose Theron should be taken sick again, away out there among strangers.
+      You know he's never appeared to me to have quite got his strength back.
+      These long illnesses, you know, they always leave a mark on a man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense! He's strong as an ox,&rdquo; insisted Sister Soulsby. &ldquo;You mark my
+      word, he'll thrive in Seattle like a green bay-tree.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seattle!&rdquo; echoed Alice, meditatively. &ldquo;It sounds like the other end of
+      the world, doesn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The noise of feet in the house broke upon the colloquy, and the women went
+      indoors, to join the breakfast party. During the meal, it was Brother
+      Soulsby who bore the burden of the conversation. He was full of the future
+      of Seattle and the magnificent impending development of that Pacific
+      section. He had been out there, years ago, when it was next door to
+      uninhabited. He had visited the district twice since, and the changes
+      discoverable each new time were more wonderful than anything Aladdin's
+      lamp ever wrought. He had secured for Theron, through some of his friends
+      in Portland, the superintendency of a land and real estate company, which
+      had its headquarters in Seattle, but ambitiously linked its affairs with
+      the future of all Washington Territory. In an hour's time the hack would
+      come to take the Wares and their baggage to the depot, the first stage in
+      their long journey across the continent to their new home. Brother Soulsby
+      amiably filled the interval with reminiscences of the Oregon of twenty
+      years back, with instructive dissertations upon the soil, climate, and
+      seasons of Puget Sound and the Columbia valley, and, above all, with
+      helpful characterizations of the social life which had begun to take form
+      in this remotest West. He had nothing but confidence, to all appearances,
+      in the success of his young friend, now embarking on this new career. He
+      seemed so sanguine about it that the whole atmosphere of the breakfast
+      room lightened up, and the parting meal, surrounded by so many temptations
+      to distraught broodings and silences as it was, became almost jovial in
+      its spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, it was time to look for the carriage. The trunks and hand-bags
+      were ready in the hall, and Sister Soulsby was tying up a package of
+      sandwiches for Alice to keep by her in the train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theron, with hat in hand, and overcoat on arm, loitered restlessly into
+      the kitchen, and watched this proceeding for a moment. Then he sauntered
+      out upon the stoop, and, lifting his head and drawing as long a breath as
+      he could, looked over at the elms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps the face was older and graver; it was hard to tell. The long
+      winter's illness, with its recurring crises and sustained confinement, had
+      bleached his skin and reduced his figure to gauntness, but there was none
+      the less an air of restored and secure good health about him. Only in the
+      eyes themselves, as they rested briefly upon the prospect, did a
+      substantial change suggest itself. They did not dwell fondly upon the
+      picture of the lofty, spreading boughs, with their waves of sap-green
+      leafage stirring against the blue. They did not soften and glow this time,
+      at the thought of how wholly one felt sure of God's goodness in these
+      wonderful new mornings of spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They looked instead straight through the fairest and most moving spectacle
+      in nature's processional, and saw afar off, in conjectural vision, a
+      formless sort of place which was Seattle. They surveyed its impalpable
+      outlines, its undefined dimensions, with a certain cool glitter of
+      hard-and-fast resolve. There rose before his fancy, out of the chaos of
+      these shapeless imaginings, some faces of men, then more behind them, then
+      a great concourse of uplifted countenances, crowded close together as far
+      as the eye could reach. They were attentive faces all, rapt, eager,
+      credulous to a degree. Their eyes were admiringly bent upon a common
+      object of excited interest. They were looking at HIM; they strained their
+      ears to miss no cadence of his voice. Involuntarily he straightened
+      himself, stretched forth his hand with the pale, thin fingers gracefully
+      disposed, and passed it slowly before him from side to side, in a
+      comprehensive, stately gesture. The audience rose at him, as he dropped
+      his hand, and filled his day-dream with a mighty roar of applause, in
+      volume like an ocean tempest, yet pitched for his hearing alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled, shook himself with a little delighted tremor, and turned on the
+      stoop to the open door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What Soulsby said about politics out there interested me enormously,&rdquo; he
+      remarked to the two women. &ldquo;I shouldn't be surprised if I found myself
+      doing something in that line. I can speak, you know, if I can't do
+      anything else. Talk is what tells, these days. Who knows? I may turn up in
+      Washington a full-blown senator before I'm forty. Stranger things have
+      happened than that, out West!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll come down and visit you then, Soulsby and I,&rdquo; said Sister Soulsby,
+      cheerfully. &ldquo;You shall take us to the White House, Alice, and introduce
+      us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it isn't likely I would come East,&rdquo; said Alice, pensively. &ldquo;Most
+      probably I'd be left to amuse myself in Seattle. But there&mdash;I think
+      that's the carriage driving up to the door.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg's The Damnation of Theron Ware, by Harold Frederic
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Damnation of Theron Ware
+
+Author: Harold Frederic
+
+Release Date: March 8, 2006 [EBook #133]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAMNATION OF THERON WARE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Meredith Ricker, John Hamm and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DAMNATION OF THERON WARE
+
+
+by Harold Frederic
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+No such throng had ever before been seen in the building during all its
+eight years of existence. People were wedged together most uncomfortably
+upon the seats; they stood packed in the aisles and overflowed the
+galleries; at the back, in the shadows underneath these galleries, they
+formed broad, dense masses about the doors, through which it would be
+hopeless to attempt a passage.
+
+The light, given out from numerous tin-lined circles of flaring gas-jets
+arranged on the ceiling, fell full upon a thousand uplifted faces--some
+framed in bonnets or juvenile curls, others bearded or crowned with
+shining baldness--but all alike under the spell of a dominant emotion
+which held features in abstracted suspense and focussed every eye upon a
+common objective point.
+
+The excitement of expectancy reigned upon each row of countenances, was
+visible in every attitude--nay, seemed a part of the close, overheated
+atmosphere itself.
+
+An observer, looking over these compact lines of faces and noting the
+uniform concentration of eagerness they exhibited, might have guessed
+that they were watching for either the jury's verdict in some peculiarly
+absorbing criminal trial, or the announcement of the lucky numbers in
+a great lottery. These two expressions seemed to alternate, and even to
+mingle vaguely, upon the upturned lineaments of the waiting throng--the
+hope of some unnamed stroke of fortune and the dread of some adverse
+decree.
+
+But a glance forward at the object of this universal gaze would have
+sufficed to shatter both hypotheses. Here was neither a court of justice
+nor a tombola. It was instead the closing session of the annual Nedahma
+Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Bishop was about
+to read out the list of ministerial appointments for the coming year.
+This list was evidently written in a hand strange to him, and the slow,
+near-sighted old gentleman, having at last sufficiently rubbed the
+glasses of his spectacles, and then adjusted them over his nose
+with annoying deliberation, was now silently rehearsing his task to
+himself--the while the clergymen round about ground their teeth and
+restlessly shuffled their feet in impatience.
+
+Upon a closer inspection of the assemblage, there were a great many
+of these clergymen. A dozen or more dignified, and for the most part
+elderly, brethren sat grouped about the Bishop in the pulpit. As many
+others, not quite so staid in mien, and indeed with here and there
+almost a suggestion of frivolity in their postures, were seated on the
+steps leading down from this platform. A score of their fellows sat
+facing the audience, on chairs tightly wedged into the space railed off
+round the pulpit; and then came five or six rows of pews, stretching
+across the whole breadth of the church, and almost solidly filled with
+preachers of the Word.
+
+There were very old men among these--bent and decrepit veterans who
+had known Lorenzo Dow, and had been ordained by elders who remembered
+Francis Asbury and even Whitefield. They sat now in front places,
+leaning forward with trembling and misshapen hands behind their hairy
+ears, waiting to hear their names read out on the superannuated list, it
+might be for the last time.
+
+The sight of these venerable Fathers in Israel was good to the eyes,
+conjuring up, as it did, pictures of a time when a plain and homely
+people had been served by a fervent and devoted clergy--by preachers
+who lacked in learning and polish, no doubt, but who gave their lives
+without dream of earthly reward to poverty and to the danger and wearing
+toil of itinerant missions through the rude frontier settlements. These
+pictures had for their primitive accessories log-huts, rough household
+implements, coarse clothes, and patched old saddles which told of weary
+years of journeying; but to even the least sympathetic vision there
+shone upon them the glorified light of the Cross and Crown. Reverend
+survivors of the heroic times, their very presence there--sitting
+meekly at the altar-rail to hear again the published record of their
+uselessness and of their dependence upon church charity--was in the
+nature of a benediction.
+
+The large majority of those surrounding these patriarchs were
+middle-aged men, generally of a robust type, with burly shoulders, and
+bushing beards framing shaven upper lips, and who looked for the most
+part like honest and prosperous farmers attired in their Sunday clothes.
+As exceptions to this rule, there were scattered stray specimens of
+a more urban class, worthies with neatly trimmed whiskers, white
+neckcloths, and even indications of hair-oil--all eloquent of citified
+charges; and now and again the eye singled out a striking and scholarly
+face, at once strong and simple, and instinctively referred it to the
+faculty of one of the several theological seminaries belonging to the
+Conference.
+
+The effect of these faces as a whole was toward goodness, candor,
+and imperturbable self-complacency rather than learning or mental
+astuteness; and curiously enough it wore its pleasantest aspect on
+the countenances of the older men. The impress of zeal and moral worth
+seemed to diminish by regular gradations as one passed to younger faces;
+and among the very beginners, who had been ordained only within the past
+day or two, this decline was peculiarly marked. It was almost a relief
+to note the relative smallness of their number, so plainly was it to be
+seen that they were not the men their forbears had been.
+
+And if those aged, worn-out preachers facing the pulpit had gazed
+instead backward over the congregation, it may be that here too their
+old eyes would have detected a difference--what at least they would have
+deemed a decline.
+
+But nothing was further from the minds of the members of the First M. E.
+Church of Tecumseh than the suggestion that they were not an improvement
+on those who had gone before them. They were undoubtedly the smartest
+and most important congregation within the limits of the Nedahma
+Conference, and this new church edifice of theirs represented alike
+a scale of outlay and a standard of progressive taste in devotional
+architecture unique in the Methodism of that whole section of the State.
+They had a right to be proud of themselves, too. They belonged to the
+substantial order of the community, with perhaps not so many very rich
+men as the Presbyterians had, but on the other hand with far fewer
+extremely poor folk than the Baptists were encumbered with. The pews
+in the first four rows of their church rented for one hundred dollars
+apiece--quite up to the Presbyterian highwater mark--and they now had
+almost abolished free pews altogether. The oyster suppers given by their
+Ladies' Aid Society in the basement of the church during the winter
+had established rank among the fashionable events in Tecumseh's social
+calendar.
+
+A comprehensive and satisfied perception of these advantages was
+uppermost in the minds of this local audience, as they waited for the
+Bishop to begin his reading. They had entertained this Bishop and his
+Presiding Elders, and the rank and file of common preachers, in a style
+which could not have been remotely approached by any other congregation
+in the Conference. Where else, one would like to know, could the
+Bishop have been domiciled in a Methodist house where he might have a
+sitting-room all to himself, with his bedroom leading out of it? Every
+clergyman present had been provided for in a private residence--even
+down to the Licensed Exhorters, who were not really ministers at all
+when you came to think of it, and who might well thank their stars
+that the Conference had assembled among such open-handed people. There
+existed a dim feeling that these Licensed Exhorters--an uncouth crew,
+with country store-keepers and lumbermen and even a horse-doctor among
+their number--had taken rather too much for granted, and were not
+exhibiting quite the proper degree of gratitude over their reception.
+
+But a more important issue hung now imminent in the balance--was
+Tecumseh to be fairly and honorably rewarded for her hospitality by
+being given the pastor of her choice?
+
+All were agreed--at least among those who paid pew-rents--upon the great
+importance of a change in the pulpit of the First M. E. Church. A change
+in persons must of course take place, for their present pastor had
+exhausted the three-year maximum of the itinerant system, but there was
+needed much more than that. For a handsome and expensive church building
+like this, and with such a modern and go-ahead congregation, it was
+simply a vital necessity to secure an attractive and fashionable
+preacher. They had held their own against the Presbyterians these past
+few years only by the most strenuous efforts, and under the depressing
+disadvantage of a minister who preached dreary out-of-date sermons, and
+who lacked even the most rudimentary sense of social distinctions. The
+Presbyterians had captured the new cashier of the Adams County Bank, who
+had always gone to the Methodist Church in the town he came from, but
+now was lost solely because of this tiresome old fossil of theirs; and
+there were numerous other instances of the same sort, scarcely less
+grievous. That this state of things must be altered was clear.
+
+The unusually large local attendance upon the sessions of the Conference
+had given some of the more guileless of visiting brethren a high notion
+of Tecumseh's piety; and perhaps even the most sophisticated stranger
+never quite realized how strictly it was to be explained by the anxiety
+to pick out a suitable champion for the fierce Presbyterian competition.
+Big gatherings assembled evening after evening to hear the sermons of
+those selected to preach, and the church had been almost impossibly
+crowded at each of the three Sunday services. Opinions had naturally
+differed a good deal during the earlier stages of this scrutiny, but
+after last night's sermon there could be but one feeling. The man for
+Tecumseh was the Reverend Theron Ware.
+
+The choice was an admirable one, from points of view much more exalted
+than those of the local congregation.
+
+You could see Mr. Ware sitting there at the end of the row inside the
+altar-rail--the tall, slender young man with the broad white brow,
+thoughtful eyes, and features moulded into that regularity of strength
+which used to characterize the American Senatorial type in those
+far-away days of clean-shaven faces and moderate incomes before the War.
+The bright-faced, comely, and vivacious young woman in the second side
+pew was his wife--and Tecumseh noted with approbation that she knew
+how to dress. There were really no two better or worthier people in the
+building than this young couple, who sat waiting along with the rest to
+hear their fate. But unhappily they had come to know of the effort being
+made to bring them to Tecumseh; and their simple pride in the triumph of
+the husband's fine sermon had become swallowed up in a terribly anxious
+conflict of hope and fear. Neither of them could maintain a satisfactory
+show of composure as the decisive moment approached. The vision of
+translation from poverty and obscurity to such a splendid post as
+this--truly it was too dazzling for tranquil nerves.
+
+The tedious Bishop had at last begun to call his roll of names, and the
+good people of Tecumseh mentally ticked them off, one by one, as the
+list expanded. They felt that it was like this Bishop--an unimportant
+and commonplace figure in Methodism, not to be mentioned in the same
+breath with Simpson and Janes and Kingsley--that he should begin with
+the backwoods counties, and thrust all these remote and pitifully rustic
+stations ahead of their own metropolitan charge. To these they listened
+but listlessly--indifferent alike to the joy and to the dismay which he
+was scattering among the divines before him.
+
+The announcements were being doled out with stumbling hesitation. After
+each one a little half-rustling movement through the crowded rows of
+clergymen passed mute judgment upon the cruel blow this brother had
+received, the reward justly given to this other, the favoritism by which
+a third had profited. The Presiding Elders, whose work all this was,
+stared with gloomy and impersonal abstraction down upon the rows of
+blackcoated humanity spread before them. The ministers returned this
+fixed and perfunctory gaze with pale, set faces, only feebly masking the
+emotions which each new name stirred somewhere among them. The Bishop
+droned on laboriously, mispronouncing words and repeating himself as if
+he were reading a catalogue of unfamiliar seeds.
+
+"First church of Tecumseh--Brother Abram G. Tisdale!"
+
+There was no doubt about it! These were actually the words that had been
+uttered. After all this outlay, all this lavish hospitality, all this
+sacrifice of time and patience in sitting through those sermons, to draw
+from the grab-bag nothing better than--a Tisdale!
+
+A hum of outraged astonishment--half groan, half wrathful snort bounded
+along from pew to pew throughout the body of the church. An echo of it
+reached the Bishop, and so confused him that he haltingly repeated the
+obnoxious line. Every local eye turned as by intuition to where the
+calamitous Tisdale sat, and fastened malignantly upon him.
+
+Could anything be worse? This Brother Tisdale was past fifty--a
+spindling, rickety, gaunt old man, with a long horse-like head and
+vacantly solemn face, who kept one or the other of his hands continually
+fumbling his bony jaw. He had been withdrawn from routine service for a
+number of years, doing a little insurance canvassing on his own account,
+and also travelling for the Book Concern. Now that he wished to return
+to parochial work, the richest prize in the whole list, Tecumseh, was
+given to him--to him who had never been asked to preach at a Conference,
+and whose archaic nasal singing of "Greenland's Icy Mountains" had made
+even the Licensed Exhorters grin! It was too intolerably dreadful to
+think of!
+
+An embittered whisper to the effect that Tisdale was the Bishop's cousin
+ran round from pew to pew. This did not happen to be true, but indignant
+Tecumseh gave it entire credit. The throngs about the doors dwindled as
+by magic, and the aisles cleared. Local interest was dead; and even some
+of the pewholders rose and made their way out. One of these murmured
+audibly to his neighbors as he departed that HIS pew could be had now
+for sixty dollars.
+
+So it happened that when, a little later on, the appointment of Theron
+Ware to Octavius was read out, none of the people of Tecumseh either
+noted or cared. They had been deeply interested in him so long as
+it seemed likely that he was to come to them--before their clearly
+expressed desire for him had been so monstrously ignored. But now what
+became of him was no earthly concern of theirs.
+
+After the Doxology had been sung and the Conference formally declared
+ended, the Wares would fain have escaped from the flood of handshakings
+and boisterous farewells which spread over the front part of the church.
+But the clergymen were unusually insistent upon demonstrations of
+cordiality among themselves--the more, perhaps, because it was evident
+that the friendliness of their local hosts had suddenly evaporated--and,
+of all men in the world, the present incumbent of the Octavius pulpit
+now bore down upon them with noisy effusiveness, and defied evasion.
+
+"Brother Ware--we have never been interduced--but let me clasp your
+hand! And--Sister Ware, I presume--yours too!"
+
+He was a portly man, who held his head back so that his face seemed all
+jowl and mouth and sandy chin-whisker. He smiled broadly upon them with
+half-closed eyes, and shook hands again.
+
+"I said to 'em," he went on with loud pretence of heartiness, "the
+minute I heerd your name called out for our dear Octavius, 'I must go
+over an' interduce myself.' It will be a heavy cross to part with those
+dear people, Brother Ware, but if anything could wean me to the notion,
+so to speak, it would be the knowledge that you are to take up my labors
+in their midst. Perhaps--ah--perhaps they ARE jest a trifle close in
+money matters, but they come out strong on revivals. They'll need a good
+deal o' stirrin' up about parsonage expenses, but, oh! such seasons
+of grace as we've experienced there together!" He shook his head, and
+closed his eyes altogether, as if transported by his memories.
+
+Brother Ware smiled faintly in decorous response, and bowed in silence;
+but his wife resented the unctuous beaming of content on the other's
+wide countenance, and could not restrain her tongue.
+
+"You seem to bear up tolerably well under this heavy cross, as you call
+it," she said sharply.
+
+"The will o' the Lord, Sister Ware--the will o' the Lord!" he responded,
+disposed for the instant to put on his pompous manner with her, and then
+deciding to smile again as he moved off. The circumstance that he was to
+get an additional three hundred dollars yearly in his new place was not
+mentioned between them.
+
+By a mutual impulse the young couple, when they had at last gained the
+cool open air, crossed the street to the side where over-hanging trees
+shaded the infrequent lamps, and they might be comparatively alone. The
+wife had taken her husband's arm, and pressed closely upon it as they
+walked. For a time no word passed, but finally he said, in a grave
+voice,--
+
+"It is hard upon you, poor girl."
+
+Then she stopped short, buried her face against his shoulder, and fell
+to sobbing.
+
+He strove with gentle, whispered remonstrance to win her from this mood,
+and after a few moments she lifted her head and they resumed their walk,
+she wiping her eyes as they went.
+
+"I couldn't keep it in a minute longer!" she said, catching her breath
+between phrases. "Oh, WHY do they behave so badly to us, Theron?"
+
+He smiled down momentarily upon her as they moved along, and patted her
+hand.
+
+"Somebody must have the poor places, Alice," he said consolingly. "I am
+a young man yet, remember. We must take our turn, and be patient. For
+'we know that all things work together for good.'"
+
+"And your sermon was so head-and-shoulders above all the others!" she
+went on breathlessly. "Everybody said so! And Mrs. Parshall heard it so
+DIRECT that you were to be sent here, and I know she told everybody how
+much I was lotting on it--I wish we could go right off tonight without
+going to her house--I shall be ashamed to look her in the face--and
+of course she knows we're poked off to that miserable Octavius.--Why,
+Theron, they tell me it's a worse place even than we've got now!"
+
+"Oh, not at all," he put in reassuringly. "It has grown to be a large
+town--oh, quite twice the size of Tyre. It's a great Irish place, I've
+heard. Our own church seems to be a good deal run down there. We must
+build it up again; and the salary is better--a little."
+
+But he too was depressed, and they walked on toward their temporary
+lodging in a silence full of mutual grief. It was not until they had
+come within sight of this goal that he prefaced by a little sigh of
+resignation these further words,--
+
+"Come--let us make the best of it, my girl! After all, we are in the
+hands of the Lord."
+
+"Oh, don't, Theron!" she said hastily. "Don't talk to me about the Lord
+tonight; I can't bear it!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+"Theron! Come out here! This is the funniest thing we have heard yet!"
+
+Mrs. Ware stood on the platform of her new kitchen stoop. The bright
+flood of May-morning sunshine completely enveloped her girlish form,
+clad in a simple, fresh-starched calico gown, and shone in golden
+patches upon her light-brown hair. She had a smile on her face, as she
+looked down at the milk boy standing on the bottom step--a smile of a
+doubtful sort, stormily mirthful.
+
+"Come out a minute, Theron!" she called again; and in obedience to the
+summons the tall lank figure of her husband appeared in the open doorway
+behind her. A long loose, open dressing-gown dangled to his knees,
+and his sallow, clean-shaven, thoughtful face wore a morning undress
+expression of youthful good-nature. He leaned against the door-sill,
+crossed his large carpet slippers, and looked up into the sky, drawing a
+long satisfied breath.
+
+"What a beautiful morning!" he exclaimed. "The elms over there are full
+of robins. We must get up earlier these mornings, and take some walks."
+
+His wife indicated the boy with the milk-pail on his arm, by a wave of
+her hand.
+
+"Guess what he tells me!" she said. "It wasn't a mistake at all, our
+getting no milk yesterday or the Sunday before. It seems that that's the
+custom here, at least so far as the parsonage is concerned."
+
+"What's the matter, boy?" asked the young minister, drawling his words
+a little, and putting a sense of placid irony into them. "Don't the cows
+give milk on Sunday, then?"
+
+The boy was not going to be chaffed. "Oh, I'll bring you milk fast
+enough on Sundays, if you give me the word," he said with nonchalance.
+"Only it won't last long."
+
+"How do you mean--'won't last long'?", asked Mrs. Ware, briskly.
+
+The boy liked her--both for herself, and for the doughnuts fried with
+her own hands, which she gave him on his morning round. He dropped his
+half-defiant tone.
+
+"The thing of it's this," he explained. "Every new minister starts in
+saying we can deliver to this house on Sundays, an' then gives us notice
+to stop before the month's out. It's the trustees that does it."
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware uncrossed his feet and moved out on to the stoop
+beside his wife. "What's that you say?" he interjected. "Don't THEY take
+milk on Sundays?"
+
+"Nope!" answered the boy.
+
+The young couple looked each other in the face for a puzzled moment,
+then broke into a laugh.
+
+"Well, we'll try it, anyway," said the preacher. "You can go on bringing
+it Sundays till--till--"
+
+"Till you cave in an' tell me to stop," put in the boy. "All right!" and
+he was off on the instant, the dipper jangling loud incredulity in his
+pail as he went.
+
+The Wares exchanged another glance as he disappeared round the corner
+of the house, and another mutual laugh seemed imminent. Then the wife's
+face clouded over, and she thrust her under-lip a trifle forward out of
+its place in the straight and gently firm profile.
+
+"It's just what Wendell Phillips said," she declared. "'The Puritan's
+idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.'"
+
+The young minister stroked his chin thoughtfully, and let his gaze
+wander over the backyard in silence. The garden parts had not been
+spaded up, but lay, a useless stretch of muddy earth, broken only by
+last year's cabbage-stumps and the general litter of dead roots and
+vegetation. The door of the tenantless chicken-coop hung wide open.
+Before it was a great heap of ashes and cinders, soaked into grimy
+hardness by the recent spring rains, and nearer still an ancient
+chopping-block, round which were scattered old weather-beaten
+hardwood knots which had defied the axe, parts of broken barrels and
+packing-boxes, and a nameless debris of tin cans, clam-shells, and
+general rubbish. It was pleasanter to lift the eyes, and look across the
+neighbors' fences to the green, waving tops of the elms on the street
+beyond. How lofty and beautiful they were in the morning sunlight, and
+with what matchless charm came the song of the robins, freshly installed
+in their haunts among the new pale-green leaves! Above them, in the
+fresh, scented air, glowed the great blue dome, radiant with light and
+the purification of spring.
+
+Theron lifted his thin, long-fingered hand, and passed it in a slow arch
+of movement to comprehend this glorious upper picture.
+
+"What matter anyone's ideas of hell," he said, in soft, grave tones,
+"when we have that to look at, and listen to, and fill our lungs with?
+It seems to me that we never FEEL quite so sure of God's goodness at
+other times as we do in these wonderful new mornings of spring."
+
+The wife followed his gesture, and her eyes rested for a brief moment,
+with pleased interest, upon the trees and the sky. Then they reverted,
+with a harsher scrutiny, to the immediate foreground.
+
+"Those Van Sizers ought to be downright ashamed of themselves," she
+said, "to leave everything in such a muss as this. You MUST see about
+getting a man to clean up the yard, Theron. It's no use your thinking of
+doing it yourself. In the first place, it wouldn't look quite the thing,
+and, second, you'd never get at it in all your born days. Or if a man
+would cost too much, we might get a boy. I daresay Harvey would come
+around, after he'd finished with his milk-route in the forenoon. We
+could give him his dinner, you know, and I'd bake him some cookies. He's
+got the greatest sweet-tooth you ever heard of. And then perhaps if we
+gave him a quarter, or say half a dollar, he'd be quite satisfied. I'll
+speak to him in the morning. We can save a dollar or so that way."
+
+"I suppose every little does help," commented Mr. Ware, with a doleful
+lack of conviction. Then his face brightened. "I tell you what let's
+do!" he exclaimed. "Get on your street dress, and we'll take a long
+walk, way out into the country. You've never seen the basin, where they
+float the log-rafts in, or the big sawmills. The hills beyond give
+you almost mountain effects, they are so steep; and they say there's a
+sulphur spring among the slate on the hill-side, somewhere, with trees
+all about it; and we could take some sandwiches with us--"
+
+"You forget," put in Mrs. Ware,--"those trustees are coming at eleven."
+
+"So they are!" assented the young minister, with something like a sigh.
+He cast another reluctant, lingering glance at the sunlit elm boughs,
+and, turning, went indoors.
+
+He loitered for an aimless minute in the kitchen, where his wife, her
+sleeves rolled to the elbow, now resumed the interrupted washing of the
+breakfast dishes--perhaps with vague visions of that ever-receding
+time to come when they might have a hired girl to do such work. Then
+he wandered off into the room beyond, which served them alike as
+living-room and study, and let his eye run along the two rows of books
+that constituted his library. He saw nothing which he wanted to read.
+Finally he did take down "Paley's Evidences," and seated himself in
+the big armchair--that costly and oversized anomaly among his humble
+house-hold gods; but the book lay unopened on his knee, and his eyelids
+half closed themselves in sign of revery.
+
+This was his third charge--this Octavius which they both knew they were
+going to dislike so much.
+
+The first had been in the pleasant dairy and hop country many miles to
+the south, on another watershed and among a different kind of people.
+Perhaps, in truth, the grinding labor, the poverty of ideas, the
+systematic selfishness of later rural experience, had not been lacking
+there; but they played no part in the memories which now he passed in
+tender review. He recalled instead the warm sunshine on the fertile
+expanse of fields; the sleek, well-fed herds of "milkers" coming
+lowing down the road under the maples; the prosperous and hospitable
+farmhouses, with their orchards in blossom and their spacious red barns;
+the bountiful boiled dinners which cheery housewives served up with
+their own skilled hands. Of course, he admitted to himself, it would
+not be the same if he were to go back there again. He was conscious of
+having moved along--was it, after all, an advance?--to a point where it
+was unpleasant to sit at table with the unfragrant hired man, and still
+worse to encounter the bucolic confusion between the functions of
+knives and forks. But in those happy days--young, zealous, himself
+farm-bred--these trifles had been invisible to him, and life there
+among those kindly husbandmen had seemed, by contrast with the gaunt
+surroundings and gloomy rule of the theological seminary, luxuriously
+abundant and free.
+
+It was there too that the crowning blessedness of his youth--nay, should
+he not say of all his days?--had come to him. There he had first seen
+Alice Hastings,--the bright-eyed, frank-faced, serenely self-reliant
+girl, who now, less than four years thereafter, could be heard washing
+the dishes out in the parsonage kitchen.
+
+How wonderful she had seemed to him then! How beautiful and
+all-beneficent the miracle still appeared! Though herself the daughter
+of a farmer, her presence on a visit within the borders of his remote
+country charge had seemed to make everything, there a hundred times
+more countrified than it had ever been before. She was fresh from the
+refinements of a town seminary: she read books; it was known that
+she could play upon the piano. Her clothes, her manners, her way of
+speaking, the readiness of her thoughts and sprightly tongue--not
+least, perhaps, the imposing current understanding as to her father's
+wealth--placed her on a glorified pinnacle far away from the girls of
+the neighborhood. These honest and good-hearted creatures indeed
+called ceaseless attention to her superiority by their deference and
+open-mouthed admiration, and treated it as the most natural thing in the
+world that their young minister should be visibly "taken" with her.
+
+Theron Ware, in truth, left this first pastorate of his the following
+spring, in a transfiguring halo of romance. His new appointment was
+to Tyre--a somewhat distant village of traditional local pride and
+substance--and he was to be married only a day or so before entering
+upon his pastoral duties there. The good people among whom he had begun
+his ministry took kindly credit to themselves that he had met his bride
+while she was "visiting round" their countryside. In part by jocose
+inquiries addressed to the expectant groom, in part by the confidences
+of the postmaster at the corners concerning the bulk and frequency of
+the correspondence passing between Theron and the now remote Alice--they
+had followed the progress of the courtship through the autumn and
+winter with friendly zest. When he returned from the Conference, to say
+good-bye and confess the happiness that awaited him, they gave him a
+"donation"--quite as if he were a married pastor with a home of his
+own, instead of a shy young bachelor, who received his guests and their
+contributions in the house where he boarded.
+
+He went away with tears of mingled regret and proud joy in his eyes,
+thinking a good deal upon their predictions of a distinguished career
+before him, feeling infinitely strengthened and upborne by the hearty
+fervor of their God-speed, and taking with him nearly two wagon-loads of
+vegetables, apples, canned preserves, assorted furniture, glass dishes,
+cheeses, pieced bedquilts, honey, feathers, and kitchen utensils.
+
+Of the three years' term in Tyre, it was pleasantest to dwell upon the
+beginning.
+
+The young couple--after being married out at Alice's home in an
+adjoining county, under the depressing conditions of a hopelessly
+bedridden mother, and a father and brothers whose perceptions were
+obviously closed to the advantages of a matrimonial connection with
+Methodism--came straight to the house which their new congregation
+rented as a parsonage. The impulse of reaction from the rather grim
+cheerlessness of their wedding lent fresh gayety to their lighthearted,
+whimsical start at housekeeping. They had never laughed so much in all
+their lives as they did now in these first months--over their weird
+ignorance of domestic details; with its mishaps, mistakes, and
+entertaining discoveries; over the comical super-abundances and
+shortcomings of their "donation" outfit; over the thousand and one
+quaint experiences of their novel relation to each other, to the
+congregation, and to the world of Tyre at large.
+
+Theron, indeed, might be said never to have laughed before. Up to that
+time no friendly student of his character, cataloguing his admirable
+qualities, would have thought of including among them a sense of humor,
+much less a bent toward levity. Neither his early strenuous battle to
+get away from the farm and achieve such education as should serve
+to open to him the gates of professional life, nor the later wave of
+religious enthusiasm which caught him up as he stood on the border-land
+of manhood, and swept him off into a veritable new world of views and
+aspirations, had been a likely school of merriment. People had prized
+him for his innocent candor and guileless mind, for his good heart, his
+pious zeal, his modesty about gifts notably above the average, but it
+had occurred to none to suspect in him a latent funny side.
+
+But who could be solemn where Alice was?--Alice in a quandary over the
+complications of her cooking stove; Alice boiling her potatoes all day,
+and her eggs for half an hour; Alice ordering twenty pounds of steak and
+half a pound of sugar, and striving to extract a breakfast beverage from
+the unground coffee-bean? Clearly not so tenderly fond and sympathetic a
+husband as Theron. He began by laughing because she laughed, and grew by
+swift stages to comprehend, then frankly to share, her amusement. From
+this it seemed only a step to the development of a humor of his own,
+doubling, as it were, their sportive resources. He found himself
+discovering a new droll aspect in men and things; his phraseology took
+on a dryly playful form, fittingly to present conceits which danced up,
+unabashed, quite into the presence of lofty and majestic truths. He
+got from this nothing but satisfaction; it obviously involved increased
+claims to popularity among his parishioners, and consequently magnified
+powers of usefulness, and it made life so much more a joy and a thing to
+be thankful for. Often, in the midst of the exchange of merry quip
+and whimsical suggestion, bright blossoms on that tree of strength and
+knowledge which he felt expanding now with a mighty outward pushing
+in all directions, he would lapse into deep gravity, and ponder with a
+swelling heart the vast unspeakable marvel of his blessedness, in being
+thus enriched and humanized by daily communion with the most worshipful
+of womankind.
+
+This happy and good young couple took the affections of Tyre by storm.
+The Methodist Church there had at no time held its head very high among
+the denominations, and for some years back had been in a deplorably
+sinking state, owing first to the secession of the Free Methodists and
+then to the incumbency of a pastor who scandalized the community by
+marrying a black man to a white woman. But the Wares changed all this.
+Within a month the report of Theron's charm and force in the pulpit was
+crowding the church building to its utmost capacity--and that, too,
+with some of Tyre's best people. Equally winning was the atmosphere of
+jollity and juvenile high spirits which pervaded the parsonage under
+these new conditions, and which Theron and Alice seemed to diffuse
+wherever they went.
+
+Thus swimmingly their first year sped, amid universal acclaim. Mrs. Ware
+had a recognized social place, quite outside the restricted limits of
+Methodism, and shone in it with an unflagging brilliancy altogether
+beyond the traditions of Tyre. Delightful as she was in other people's
+houses, she was still more naively fascinating in her own quaint and
+somewhat harum-scarum domicile; and the drab, two-storied, tin-roofed
+little parsonage might well have rattled its clapboards to see if it
+was not in dreamland--so gay was the company, so light were the hearts,
+which it sheltered in these new days. As for Theron, the period was one
+of incredible fructification and output. He scarcely recognized for his
+own the mind which now was reaching out on all sides with the arms of
+an octopus, exploring unsuspected mines of thought, bringing in rich
+treasures of deduction, assimilating, building, propounding as if by
+some force quite independent of him. He could not look without blinking
+timidity at the radiance of the path stretched out before him, leading
+upward to dazzling heights of greatness.
+
+At the end of this first year the Wares suddenly discovered that they
+were eight hundred dollars in debt.
+
+The second year was spent in arriving, by slow stages and with a cruel
+wealth of pathetic detail, at a realization of what being eight hundred
+dollars in debt meant.
+
+It was not in their elastic and buoyant natures to grasp the full
+significance of the thing at once, or easily. Their position in the
+social structure, too, was all against clear-sightedness in material
+matters. A general, for example, uniformed and in the saddle, advancing
+through the streets with his staff in the proud wake of his division's
+massed walls of bayonets, cannot be imagined as quailing at the glance
+thrown at him by his tailor on the sidewalk. Similarly, a man invested
+with sacerdotal authority, who baptizes, marries, and buries, who
+delivers judgments from the pulpit which may not be questioned in his
+hearing, and who receives from all his fellow-men a special deference of
+manner and speech, is in the nature of things prone to see the grocer's
+book and the butcher's bill through the little end of the telescope.
+
+The Wares at the outset had thought it right to trade as exclusively as
+possible with members of their own church society. This loyalty became
+a principal element of martyrdom. Theron had his creditors seated in
+serried rows before him, Sunday after Sunday. Alice had her critics
+consolidated among those whom it was her chief duty to visit and profess
+friendship for. These situations now began, by regular gradations, to
+unfold their terrors. At the first intimation of discontent, the Wares
+made what seemed to them a sweeping reduction in expenditure. When
+they heard that Brother Potter had spoken of them as "poor pay," they
+dismissed their hired girl. A little later, Theron brought himself
+to drop a laboriously casual suggestion as to a possible increase of
+salary, and saw with sinking spirits the faces of the stewards freeze
+with dumb disapprobation. Then Alice paid a visit to her parents, only
+to find her brothers doggedly hostile to the notion of her being helped,
+and her father so much under their influence that the paltry sum he
+dared offer barely covered the expenses of her journey. With another
+turn of the screw, they sold the piano she had brought with her from
+home, and cut themselves down to the bare necessities of life, neither
+receiving company nor going out. They never laughed now, and even smiles
+grew rare.
+
+By this time Theron's sermons, preached under that stony glare of
+people to whom he owed money, had degenerated to a pitiful level of
+commonplace. As a consequence, the attendance became once more
+confined to the insufficient membership of the church, and the trustees
+complained of grievously diminished receipts. When the Wares, grown
+desperate, ventured upon the experiment of trading outside the bounds of
+the congregation, the trustees complained again, this time peremptorily.
+
+Thus the second year dragged itself miserably to an end. Nor was
+relief possible, because the Presiding Elder knew something of the
+circumstances, and felt it his duty to send Theron back for a third
+year, to pay his debts, and drain the cup of disciplinary medicine to
+its dregs.
+
+The worst has been told. Beginning in utter blackness, this third year,
+in the second month, brought a change as welcome as it was unlooked for.
+An elderly and important citizen of Tyre, by name Abram Beekman, whom
+Theron knew slightly, and had on occasions seen sitting in one of
+the back pews near the door, called one morning at the parsonage, and
+electrified its inhabitants by expressing a desire to wipe off all their
+old scores for them, and give them a fresh start in life. As he put the
+suggestion, they could find no excuse for rejecting it. He had watched
+them, and heard a good deal about them, and took a fatherly sort of
+interest in them. He did not deprecate their regarding the aid he
+proffered them in the nature of a loan, but they were to make themselves
+perfectly easy about it, and never return it at all unless they could
+spare it sometime with entire convenience, and felt that they wanted to
+do so. As this amazing windfall finally took shape, it enabled the Wares
+to live respectably through the year, and to leave Tyre with something
+over one hundred dollars in hand.
+
+It enabled them, too, to revive in a chastened form their old dream of
+ultimate success and distinction for Theron. He had demonstrated clearly
+enough to himself, during that brief season of unrestrained effulgence,
+that he had within him the making of a great pulpit orator. He set
+to work now, with resolute purpose, to puzzle out and master all the
+principles which underlie this art, and all the tricks that adorn its
+superstructure. He studied it, fastened his thoughts upon it, talked
+daily with Alice about it. In the pulpit, addressing those people who
+had so darkened his life and crushed the first happiness out of his
+home, he withheld himself from any oratorical display which could afford
+them gratification. He put aside, as well; the thought of attracting
+once more the non-Methodists of Tyre, whose early enthusiasm had
+spread such pitfalls for his unwary feet. He practised effects now
+by piecemeal, with an alert ear, and calculation in every tone. An
+ambition, at once embittered and tearfully solicitous, possessed him.
+
+He reflected now, this morning, with a certain incredulous interest,
+upon that unworthy epoch in his life history, which seemed so far behind
+him, and yet had come to a close only a few weeks ago. The opportunity
+had been given him, there at the Tecumseh Conference, to reveal his
+quality. He had risen to its full limit of possibilities, and preached
+a great sermon in a manner which he at least knew was unapproachable. He
+had made his most powerful bid for the prize place, had trebly deserved
+success--and had been banished instead to Octavius!
+
+The curious thing was that he did not resent his failure. Alice had
+taken it hard, but he himself was conscious of a sense of spiritual
+gain. The influence of the Conference, with its songs and seasons of
+prayer and high pressure of emotional excitement, was still strong upon
+him. It seemed years and years since the religious side of him had been
+so stirred into motion. He felt, as he lay back in the chair, and folded
+his hands over the book on his knee, that he had indeed come forth
+from the fire purified and strengthened. The ministry to souls diseased
+beckoned him with a new and urgent significance. He smiled to remember
+that Mr. Beekman, speaking in his shrewd and pointed way, had asked him
+whether, looking it all over, he didn't think it would be better for
+him to study law, with a view to sliding out of the ministry when a good
+chance offered. It amazed him now to recall that he had taken this
+hint seriously, and even gone to the length of finding out what books
+law-students began upon.
+
+Thank God! all that was past and gone now. The Call sounded, resonant
+and imperative, in his ears, and there was no impulse of his heart, no
+fibre of his being, which did not stir in devout response. He closed his
+eyes, to be the more wholly alone with the Spirit, that moved him.
+
+The jangling of a bell in the hallway broke sharply upon his
+meditations, and on the instant his wife thrust in her head from the
+kitchen.
+
+"You'll have to go to the door, Theron!" she warned him, in a loud,
+swift whisper. "I'm not fit to be seen. It is the trustees."
+
+"All right," he said, and rose slowly from sprawling recumbency to his
+feet. "I'll go."
+
+"And don't forget," she added strenuously; "I believe in Levi Gorringe!
+I've seen him go past here with his rod and fish-basket twice in eight
+days, and that's a good sign. He's got a soft side somewhere. And just
+keep a stiff upper lip about the gas, and don't you let them jew you
+down a solitary cent on that sidewalk."
+
+"All right," said Theron, again, and moved reluctantly toward the hall
+door.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+When the three trustees had been shown in by the Rev. Mr. Ware, and had
+taken seats, an awkward little pause ensued. The young minister looked
+doubtingly from one face to another, the while they glanced with
+inquiring interest about the room, noting the pictures and appraising
+the furniture in their minds.
+
+The obvious leader of the party, Loren Pierce, a rich quarryman, was an
+old man of medium size and mean attire, with a square, beardless face as
+hard and impassive in expression as one of his blocks of limestone. The
+irregular, thin-lipped mouth, slightly sunken, and shut with vice-like
+firmness, the short snub nose, and the little eyes squinting from
+half-closed lids beneath slightly marked brows, seemed scarcely to
+attain to the dignity of features, but evaded attention instead, as if
+feeling that they were only there at all from plain necessity, and ought
+not to be taken into account. Mr. Pierce's face did not know how to
+smile--what was the use of smiles?--but its whole surface radiated
+secretiveness. Portrayed on canvas by a master brush, with a ruff or a
+red robe for masquerade, generations of imaginative amateurs would
+have seen in it vast reaching plots, the skeletons of a dozen dynastic
+cupboards, the guarded mysteries of half a century's international
+diplomacy. The amateurs would have been wrong again. There was nothing
+behind Mr. Pierce's juiceless countenance more weighty than a general
+determination to exact seven per cent for his money, and some specific
+notions about capturing certain brickyards which were interfering with
+his quarry-sales. But Octavius watched him shamble along its sidewalks
+quite as the Vienna of dead and forgotten yesterday might have watched
+Metternich.
+
+Erastus Winch was of a breezier sort--a florid, stout, and sandy man,
+who spent most of his life driving over evil country roads in a buggy,
+securing orders for dairy furniture and certain allied lines of farm
+utensils. This practice had given him a loud voice and a deceptively
+hearty manner, to which the other avocation of cheese-buyer, which he
+pursued at the Board of Trade meetings every Monday afternoon, had added
+a considerable command of persuasive yet non-committal language. To
+look at him, still more to hear him, one would have sworn he was a good
+fellow, a trifle rough and noisy, perhaps, but all right at bottom.
+But the County Clerk of Dearborn County could have told you of
+agriculturists who knew Erastus from long and unhappy experience, and
+who held him to be even a tighter man than Loren Pierce in the matter of
+a mortgage.
+
+The third trustee, Levi Gorringe, set one wondering at the very first
+glance what on earth he was doing in that company. Those who had known
+him longest had the least notion; but it may be added that no one knew
+him well. He was a lawyer, and had lived in Octavius for upwards of ten
+years; that is to say, since early manhood. He had an office on the main
+street, just under the principal photograph gallery. Doubtless he was
+sometimes in this office; but his fellow-townsmen saw him more often
+in the street doorway, with the stairs behind him, and the flaring
+show-cases of the photographer on either side, standing with his hands
+in his pockets and an unlighted cigar in his mouth, looking at nothing
+in particular. About every other day he went off after breakfast into
+the country roundabout, sometimes with a rod, sometimes with a gun, but
+always alone. He was a bachelor, and slept in a room at the back of
+his office, cooking some of his meals himself, getting others at a
+restaurant close by. Though he had little visible practice, he was
+understood to be well-to-do and even more, and people tacitly inferred
+that he "shaved notes." The Methodists of Octavius looked upon him as
+a queer fish, and through nearly a dozen years had never quite outgrown
+their hebdomadal tendency to surprise at seeing him enter their church.
+He had never, it is true, professed religion, but they had elected him
+as a trustee now for a number of terms, all the same--partly because he
+was their only lawyer, partly because he, like both his colleagues, held
+a mortgage on the church edifice and lot. In person, Mr. Gorringe was a
+slender man, with a skin of a clear, uniform citron tint, black waving
+hair, and dark gray eyes, and a thin, high-featured face. He wore
+a mustache and pointed chin-tuft; and, though he was of New England
+parentage and had never been further south than Ocean Grove, he
+presented a general effect of old Mississippian traditions and tastes
+startlingly at variance with the standards of Dearborn County Methodism.
+Nothing could convince some of the elder sisters that he was not a
+drinking man.
+
+The three visitors had completed their survey of the room now; and Loren
+Pierce emitted a dry, harsh little cough, as a signal that business
+was about to begin. At this sound, Winch drew up his feet, and Gorringe
+untied a parcel of account-books and papers that he held on his knee.
+Theron felt that his countenance must be exhibiting to the assembled
+brethren an unfortunate sense of helplessness in their hands. He tried
+to look more resolute, and forced his lips into a smile.
+
+"Brother Gorringe allus acts as Seckertary," said Erastus Winch, beaming
+broadly upon the minister, as if the mere mention of the fact promoted
+jollity. "That's it, Brother Gorringe,--take your seat at Brother Ware's
+desk. Mind the Dominie's pen don't play tricks on you, an' start off
+writin' out sermons instid of figgers." The humorist turned to Theron
+as the lawyer walked over to the desk at the window. "I allus have to
+caution him about that," he remarked with great joviality. "An' do YOU
+look out afterwards, Brother Ware, or else you'll catch that pen o'
+yours scribblin' lawyer's lingo in place o' the Word."
+
+Theron felt bound to exhibit a grin in acknowledgment of this
+pleasantry. The lawyer's change of position had involved some shifting
+of the others' chairs, and the young minister found himself directly
+confronted by Brother Pierce's hard and colorless old visage. Its little
+eyes were watching him, as through a mask, and under their influence
+the smile of politeness fled from his lips. The lawyer on his right, the
+cheese-buyer to the left, seemed to recede into distance as he for the
+moment returned the gaze of the quarryman. He waited now for him to
+speak, as if the others were of no importance.
+
+"We are a plain sort o' folks up in these parts," said Brother Pierce,
+after a slight further pause. His voice was as dry and rasping as his
+cough, and its intonations were those of authority. "We walk here," he
+went on, eying the minister with a sour regard, "in a meek an' humble
+spirit, in the straight an' narrow way which leadeth unto life. We ain't
+gone traipsin' after strange gods, like some people that call themselves
+Methodists in other places. We stick by the Discipline an' the ways of
+our fathers in Israel. No new-fangled notions can go down here. Your
+wife'd better take them flowers out of her bunnit afore next Sunday."
+
+Silence possessed the room for a few moments, the while Theron,
+pale-faced and with brows knit, studied the pattern of the ingrain
+carpet. Then he lifted his head, and nodded it in assent. "Yes,"
+he said; "we will do nothing by which our 'brother stumbleth, or is
+offended, or is made weak.'"
+
+Brother Pierce's parchment face showed no sign of surprise or pleasure
+at this easy submission. "Another thing: We don't want no book-learnin'
+or dictionary words in our pulpit," he went on coldly. "Some folks may
+stomach 'em; we won't. Them two sermons o' yours, p'r'aps they'd do down
+in some city place; but they're like your wife's bunnit here, they're
+too flowery to suit us. What we want to hear is the plain, old-fashioned
+Word of God, without any palaver or 'hems and ha's. They tell me
+there's some parts where hell's treated as played-out--where our
+ministers don't like to talk much about it because people don't want to
+hear about it. Such preachers ought to be put out. They ain't Methodists
+at all. What we want here, sir, is straight-out, flat-footed hell--the
+burnin' lake o' fire an' brim-stone. Pour it into 'em, hot an' strong.
+We can't have too much of it. Work in them awful deathbeds of Voltaire
+an' Tom Paine, with the Devil right there in the room, reachin' for
+'em, an' they yellin' for fright; that's what fills the anxious seat an'
+brings in souls hand over fist."
+
+Theron's tongue dallied for an instant with the temptation to comment
+upon these old-wife fables, which were so dear to the rural religious
+heart when he and I were boys. But it seemed wiser to only nod again,
+and let his mentor go on.
+
+"We ain't had no trouble with the Free Methodists here," continued
+Brother Pierce, "jest because we kept to the old paths, an' seek for
+salvation in the good old way. Everybody can shout 'Amen!' as loud
+and as long as the Spirit moves him, with us. Some one was sayin' you
+thought we ought to have a choir and an organ. No, sirree! No such
+tom-foolery for us! You'll only stir up feelin' agin yourself by hintin'
+at such things. And then, too, our folks don't take no stock in all that
+pack o' nonsense about science, such as tellin' the age of the earth by
+crackin' up stones. I've b'en in the quarry line all my life, an' I know
+it's all humbug! Why, they say some folks are goin' round now preachin'
+that our grandfathers were all monkeys. That comes from departin'
+from the ways of our forefathers, an puttin' in organs an' choirs, an'
+deckin' our women-folks out with gewgaws, an' apin' the fashions of the
+worldly. I shouldn't wonder if them kind did have some monkey blood in
+'em. You'll find we're a different sort here."
+
+The young minister preserved silence for a little, until it became
+apparent that the old trustee had had his say out. Even then he raised
+his head slowly, and at last made answer in a hesitating and irresolute
+way.
+
+"You have been very frank," he said. "I am obliged to you. A clergyman
+coming to a new charge cannot be better served than by having
+laid before him a clear statement of the views and--and spiritual
+tendencies--of his new flock, quite at the outset. I feel it to be
+of especial value in this case, because I am young in years and in my
+ministry, and am conscious of a great weakness of the flesh. I can
+see how daily contact with a people so attached to the old, simple,
+primitive Methodism of Wesley and Asbury may be a source of much
+strength to me. I may take it," he added upon second thought, with an
+inquiring glance at Mr. Winch, "that Brother Pierce's description of our
+charge, and its tastes and needs, meets with your approval?"
+
+Erastus Winch nodded his head and smiled expansively. "Whatever Brother
+Pierce says, goes!" he declared. The lawyer, sitting behind at the desk
+by the window, said nothing.
+
+"The place is jest overrun with Irish," Brother Pierce began again.
+"They've got two Catholic churches here now to our one, and they do jest
+as they blamed please at the Charter elections. It'd be a good idee to
+pitch into Catholics in general whenever you can. You could make a hit
+that way. I say the State ought to make 'em pay taxes on their church
+property. They've no right to be exempted, because they ain't Christians
+at all. They're idolaters, that's what they are! I know 'em! I've had
+'em in my quarries for years, an' they ain't got no idee of decency or
+fair dealin'. Every time the price of stone went up, every man of 'em
+would jine to screw more wages out o' me. Why, they used to keep account
+o' the amount o' business I done, an' figger up my profits, an' have
+the face to come an' talk to me about 'em, as if that had anything to do
+with wages. It's my belief their priests put 'em up to it. People
+don't begin to reelize--that church of idolatry 'll be the ruin o' this
+country, if it ain't checked in time. Jest you go at 'em hammer 'n'
+tongs! I've got Eyetalians in the quarries now. They're sensible
+fellows: they know when they're well off--a dollar a day, an' they're
+satisfied, an' everything goes smooth."
+
+"But they're Catholics, the same as the Irish," suddenly interjected the
+lawyer, from his place by the window. Theron pricked up his ears at the
+sound of his voice. There was an anti-Pierce note in it, so to speak,
+which it did him good to hear. The consciousness of sympathy began on
+the instant to inspire him with courage.
+
+"I know some people SAY they are," Brother Pierce guardedly retorted
+"but I've summered an' wintered both kinds, an' I hold to it they're
+different. I grant ye, the Eyetalians ARE some given to jabbin' knives
+into each other, but they never git up strikes, an' they don't grumble
+about wages. Why, look at the way they live--jest some weeds an' yarbs
+dug up on the roadside, an' stewed in a kettle with a piece o' fat the
+size o' your finger, an' a loaf o' bread, an' they're happy as a king.
+There's some sense in THAT; but the Irish, they've got to have meat an'
+potatoes an' butter jest as if--as if--"
+
+"As if they'd b'en used to 'em at home," put in Mr. Winch, to help his
+colleague out.
+
+The lawyer ostentatiously drew up his chair to the desk, and began
+turning over the leaves of his biggest book. "It's getting on toward
+noon, gentlemen," he said, in an impatient voice.
+
+The business meeting which followed was for a considerable time confined
+to hearing extracts from the books and papers read in a swift and formal
+fashion by Mr. Gorringe. If this was intended to inform the new pastor
+of the exact financial situation in Octavius, it lamentably failed of
+its purpose. Theron had little knowledge of figures; and though he
+tried hard to listen, and to assume an air of comprehension, he did not
+understand much of what he heard. In a general way he gathered that the
+church property was put down at $12,000, on which there was a debt of
+$4,800. The annual expenses were $2,250, of which the principal items
+were $800 for his salary, $170 for the rent of the parsonage, and $319
+for interest on the debt. It seemed that last year the receipts had
+fallen just under $2,000, and they now confronted the necessity of
+making good this deficit during the coming year, as well as increasing
+the regular revenues. Without much discussion, it was agreed that they
+should endeavor to secure the services of a celebrated "debt-raiser,"
+early in the autumn, and utilize him in the closing days of a revival.
+
+Theron knew this "debt-raiser," and had seen him at work--a burly,
+bustling, vulgar man who took possession of the pulpit as if it were an
+auctioneer's block, and pursued the task of exciting liberality in the
+bosoms of the congregation by alternating prayer, anecdote, song,
+and cheap buffoonery in a manner truly sickening. Would it not be
+preferable, he feebly suggested, to raise the money by a festival, or
+fair, or some other form of entertainment which the ladies could manage?
+
+Brother Pierce shook his head with contemptuous emphasis. "Our
+women-folks ain't that kind," he said. "They did try to hold a sociable
+once, but nobody came, and we didn't raise more 'n three or four
+dollars. It ain't their line. They lack the worldly arts. As the
+Discipline commands, they avoid the evil of putting on gold and costly
+apparel, and taking such diversions as cannot be used in the name of the
+Lord Jesus."
+
+"Well--of course--if you prefer the 'debt-raiser'--" Theron began, and
+took the itemized account from Gorringe's knee as an excuse for not
+finishing the hateful sentence.
+
+He looked down the foolscap sheet, line by line, with no special sense
+of what it signified, until his eye caught upon this little section of
+the report, bracketed by itself in the Secretary's neat hand:
+
+     INTEREST CHARGE.
+
+     First mortgage (1873) .. $1,000 ... (E. Winch)    @7.. $ 70
+     Second mortgage (1776)..  1,700 ... (L. Gorringe) @6..  102
+     Third mortgage (1878)...  2,100 ... (L. Pierce)   @7..  147
+     -------                       -----
+     $4,800                        $319
+
+It was no news to him that the three mortgages on the church property
+were held by the three trustees. But as he looked once more, another
+feature of the thing struck him as curious.
+
+"I notice that the rates of interest vary," he remarked without
+thinking, and then wished the words unsaid, for the two trustees in view
+moved uneasily on their seats.
+
+"Oh, that's nothing," exclaimed Erastus Winch, with a boisterous display
+of jollity. "It's only Brother Gorringe's pleasant little way of making
+a contribution to our funds. You will notice that, at the date of all
+these mortgages, the State rate of interest was seven per cent. Since
+then it's b'en lowered to six. Well, when that happened, you see,
+Brother Gorringe, not being a professin' member, and so not bound by our
+rules, he could just as well as not let his interest down a cent. But
+Brother Pierce an' me, we talked it over, an' we made up our minds
+we were tied hand an' foot by our contract. You know how strong the
+Discipline lays it down that we must be bound to the letter of our
+agreements. That bein' so, we seen it in the light of duty not to change
+what we'd set our hands to. That's how it is, Brother Ware."
+
+"I understand," said Theron, with an effort at polite calmness of tone.
+"And--is there anything else?"
+
+"There's this," broke in Brother Pierce: "we're commanded to be
+law-abiding people, an' seven per cent WAS the law an' would be now if
+them ragamuffins in the Legislation--"
+
+"Surely we needn't go further into that," interrupted the minister,
+conscious of a growing stiffness in his moral spine. "Have we any other
+business before us?"
+
+Brother Pierce's little eyes snapped, and the wrinkles in his forehead
+deepened angrily. "Business?" he demanded. "Yes, plenty of it. We've
+got to reduce expenses. We're nigh onto $300 behind-hand this minute.
+Besides your house-rent, you get $800 free an' clear--that is $15.38
+every week, an' only you an' your wife to keep out of it. Why, when
+I was your age, young man, and after that too, I was glad to get $4 a
+week."
+
+"I don't think my salary is under discussion, Mr. Pierce--"
+
+"BROTHER Pierce!" suggested Winch, in a half-shuckling undertone.
+
+"Brother Pierce, then!" echoed Theron, impatiently. "The Quarterly
+Conference and the Estimating Committee deal with that. The trustees
+have no more to do with it than the man in the moon."
+
+"Come, come, Brother Ware," put in Erastus Winch, "we mustn't have no
+hard feelin's. Brotherly love is what we're all lookin' after. Brother
+Pierce's meanin' wasn't agin your drawin' your full salary, every cent
+of it, only--only there are certain little things connected with the
+parsonage here that we feel you ought to bear. F'r instance, there's the
+new sidewalk we had to lay in front of the house here only a month ago.
+Of course, if the treasury was flush we wouldn't say a word about it.
+An' then there's the gas bill here. Seein' as you get your rent for
+nothin', it don't seem much to ask that you should see to lightin' the
+place yourself."
+
+"No, I don't think that either is a proper charge upon me," interposed
+Theron. "I decline to pay them."
+
+"We can have the gas shut off," remarked Brother Pierce, coldly.
+
+"As soon as you like," responded the minister, sitting erect and tapping
+the carpet nervously with his foot. "Only you must understand that I will
+take the whole matter to the Quarterly Conference in July. I already see
+a good many other interesting questions about the financial management
+of this church which might be appropriately discussed there."
+
+"Oh, come, Brother Ware!" broke in Trustee Winch, with a somewhat
+agitated assumption of good-feeling. "Surely these are matters we ought
+to settle amongst ourselves. We never yet asked outsiders to meddle with
+our business here. It's our motto, Brother Ware. I say, if you've got a
+motto, stand by it."
+
+"Well, my motto," said Theron, "is to be behaved decently to by those
+with whom I have to deal; and I also propose to stand by it."
+
+Brother Pierce rose gingerly to his feet, with the hesitation of an old
+man not sure about his knees. When he had straightened himself, he put
+on his hat, and eyed the minister sternly from beneath its brim.
+
+"The Lord gives us crosses grievous to our natur'," he said, "an' we're
+told to bear 'em cheerfully as long as they're on our backs; but there
+ain't nothin' said agin our unloadin' 'em in the ditch the minute we git
+the chance. I guess you won't last here more 'n a twelvemonth."
+
+He pulled his soft and discolored old hat down over his brows with a
+significantly hostile nod, and, turning, stumped toward the hall-door
+without offering to shake hands.
+
+The other trustees had risen likewise, in tacit recognition that the
+meeting was over. Winch clasped the minister's hand in his own broad,
+hard palm, and squeezed it in an exuberant grip. "Don't mind his little
+ways, Brother Ware," he urged in a loud, unctuous whisper, with a
+grinning backward nod: "he's a trifle skittish sometimes when you don't
+give him free rein; but he's all wool an' a yard wide when it comes to
+right-down hard-pan religion. My love to Sister Ware;" and he followed
+the senior trustee into the hall.
+
+Mr. Gorringe had been tying up his books and papers. He came now with
+the bulky parcel under his arm, and his hat and stick in the other hand.
+He could give little but his thumb to Theron to shake. His face wore
+a grave expression, and not a line relaxed as, catching the minister's
+look, he slowly covered his left eye in a deliberate wink.
+
+
+
+"Well?--and how did it go off?" asked Alice, from where she knelt by the
+oven door, a few minutes later.
+
+For answer, Theron threw himself wearily into the big old farm
+rocking-chair on the other side of the stove, and shook his head with a
+lengthened sigh.
+
+"If it wasn't for that man Gorringe of yours," he said dejectedly, "I
+think I should feel like going off--and learning a trade."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+On the following Sunday, young Mrs. Ware sat alone in the preacher's pew
+through the morning service, and everybody noted that the roses had
+been taken from her bonnet. In the evening she was absent, and after
+the doxology and benediction several people, under the pretence of
+solicitude for her health, tried to pump her husband as to the reason.
+He answered their inquiries civilly enough, but with brevity: she
+had stayed at home because she did not feel like coming out--this and
+nothing more.
+
+The congregation dispersed under a gossip-laden cloud of consciousness
+that there must be something queer about Sister Ware. There was a
+tolerably general agreement, however, that the two sermons of the day
+had been excellent. Not even Loren Pierce's railing commentary on the
+pastor's introduction of an outlandish word like "epitome"--clearly
+forbidden by the Discipline's injunction to plain language understood of
+the people--availed to sap the satisfaction of the majority.
+
+Theron himself comprehended that he had pleased the bulk of his
+auditors; the knowledge left him curiously hot and cold. On the one
+hand, there was joy in the apparent prospect that the congregation would
+back him up in a stand against the trustees, if worst came to worst.
+But, on the other hand, the bonnet episode entered his soul. It had
+been a source of bitter humiliation to him to see his wife sitting there
+beneath the pulpit, shorn by despotic order of the adornments natural
+to her pretty head. But he had even greater pain in contemplating the
+effect it had produced on Alice herself. She had said not a word on the
+subject, but her every glance and gesture seemed to him eloquent of deep
+feeling about it. He made sure that she blamed him for having defended
+his own gas and sidewalk rights with successful vigor, but permitted
+the sacrifice of her poor little inoffensive roses without a protest. In
+this view of the matter, indeed, he blamed himself. Was it too late to
+make the error good? He ventured a hint on this Sunday evening, when he
+returned to the parsonage and found her reading an old weekly newspaper
+by the light of the kitchen lamp, to the effect that he fancied there
+would be no great danger in putting those roses back into her bonnet.
+Without lifting her eyes from the paper, she answered that she had
+no earthly desire to wear roses in her bonnet, and went on with her
+reading.
+
+At breakfast the next morning Theron found himself in command of an
+unusual fund of humorous good spirits, and was at pains to make the
+most of it, passing whimsical comments on subjects which the opening
+day suggested, recalling quaint and comical memories of the past, and
+striving his best to force Alice into a laugh. Formerly her merry temper
+had always ignited at the merest spark of gayety. Now she gave his jokes
+only a dutiful half-smile, and uttered scarcely a word in response to
+his running fire of talk. When the meal was finished, she went silently
+to work to clear away the dishes.
+
+Theron turned over in his mind the project of offering to help her, as
+he had done so often in those dear old days when they laughingly began
+life together. Something decided this project in the negative for him,
+and after lingering moments he put on his hat and went out for a walk.
+
+Not even the most doleful and trying hour of his bitter experience in
+Tyre had depressed him like this. Looking back upon these past troubles,
+he persuaded himself that he had borne them all with a light and
+cheerful heart, simply because Alice had been one with him in every
+thought and emotion. How perfect, how ideally complete, their sympathy
+had always been! With what absolute unity of mind and soul they had
+trod that difficult path together! And now--henceforth--was it to be
+different? The mere suggestion of such a thing chilled his veins. He
+said aloud to himself as he walked that life would be an intolerable
+curse if Alice were to cease sharing it with him in every conceivable
+phase.
+
+He had made his way out of town, and tramped along the country hill-road
+for a considerable distance, before a merciful light began to lessen the
+shadows in the picture of gloom with which his mind tortured itself.
+All at once he stopped short, lifted his head, and looked about him. The
+broad valley lay warm and tranquil in the May sunshine at his feet. In
+the thicket up the side-hill above him a gray squirrel was chattering
+shrilly, and the birds sang in a tireless choral confusion. Theron
+smiled, and drew a long breath. The gay clamor of the woodland
+songsters, the placid radiance of the landscape, were suddenly taken in
+and made a part of his new mood. He listened, smiled once more, and then
+started in a leisurely way back toward Octavius.
+
+How could he have been so ridiculous as to fancy that Alice--his
+Alice--had been changed into someone else? He marvelled now at his own
+perverse folly. She was overworked--tired out--that was all. The task of
+moving in, of setting the new household to rights, had been too much for
+her. She must have a rest. They must get in a hired girl.
+
+Once this decision about a servant fixed itself in the young minister's
+mind, it drove out the last vestage of discomfort. He strode along now
+in great content, revolving idly a dozen different plans for gilding and
+beautifying this new life of leisure into which his sanguine thoughts
+projected Alice. One of these particularly pleased him, and waxed in
+definiteness as he turned it over and over. He would get another piano
+for her, in place of that which had been sacrificed in Tyre. That
+beneficient modern invention, the instalment plan, made this quite
+feasible--so easy, in fact, that it almost seemed as if he should find
+his wife playing on the new instrument when he got home. He would stop
+in at the music store and see about it that very day.
+
+Of course, now that these important resolutions had been taken, it would
+be a good thing if he could do something to bring in some extra money.
+This was by no means a new notion. He had mused over the possibility in
+a formless way ever since that memorable discovery of indebtedness in
+Tyre, and had long ago recognized the hopelessness of endeavor in every
+channel save that of literature. Latterly his fancy had been stimulated
+by reading an account of the profits which Canon Farrar had derived from
+his "Life of Christ." If such a book could command such a bewildering
+multitude of readers, Theron felt there ought to be a chance for him.
+So clear did constant rumination render this assumption that the young
+pastor in time had come to regard this prospective book of his as a
+substantial asset, which could be realized without trouble whenever he
+got around to it.
+
+He had not, it is true, gone to the length of seriously considering what
+should be the subject of his book. That had not seemed to him to matter
+much, so long as it was scriptural. Familiarity with the process of
+extracting a fixed amount of spiritual and intellectual meat from any
+casual text, week after week, had given him an idea that any one of
+many subjects would do, when the time came for him to make a choice.
+He realized now that the time for a selection had arrived, and almost
+simultaneously found himself with a ready-made decision in his mind. The
+book should be about Abraham!
+
+Theron Ware was extremely interested in the mechanism of his own brain,
+and followed its workings with a lively curiosity. Nothing could be more
+remarkable, he thought, than to thus discover that, on the instant of
+his formulating a desire to know what he should write upon, lo, and
+behold! there his mind, quite on its own initiative, had the answer
+waiting for him! When he had gone a little further, and the powerful
+range of possibilities in the son's revolt against the idolatry of his
+father, the image-maker, in the exodus from the unholy city of Ur, and
+in the influence of the new nomadic life upon the little deistic family
+group, had begun to unfold itself before him, he felt that the hand of
+Providence was plainly discernible in the matter. The book was to be
+blessed from its very inception.
+
+Walking homeward briskly now, with his eyes on the sidewalk and his mind
+all aglow with crowding suggestions for the new work, and impatience to
+be at it, he came abruptly upon a group of men and boys who occupied the
+whole path, and were moving forward so noiselessly that he had not heard
+them coming. He almost ran into the leader of this little procession,
+and began a stammering apology, the final words of which were left
+unspoken, so solemnly heedless of him and his talk were all the faces he
+saw.
+
+In the centre of the group were four working-men, bearing between them
+an extemporized litter of two poles and a blanket hastily secured across
+them with spikes. Most of what this litter held was covered by another
+blanket, rounded in coarse folds over a shapeless bulk. From beneath
+its farther end protruded a big broom-like black beard, thrown upward at
+such an angle as to hide everything beyond to those in front. The tall
+young minister, stepping aside and standing tip-toe, could see sloping
+downward behind this hedge of beard a pinched and chalk-like face, with
+wide-open, staring eyes. Its lips, of a dull lilac hue, were moving
+ceaselessly, and made a dry, clicking sound.
+
+Theron instinctively joined himself to those who followed the litter--a
+motley dozen of street idlers, chiefly boys. One of these in whispers
+explained to him that the man was one of Jerry Madden's workmen in the
+wagon-shops, who had been deployed to trim an elm-tree in front of his
+employer's house, and, being unused to such work, had fallen from the
+top and broken all his bones. They would have cared for him at Madden's
+house, but he had insisted upon being taken home. His name was MacEvoy,
+and he was Joey MacEvoy's father, and likewise Jim's and Hughey's and
+Martin's. After a pause the lad, a bright-eyed, freckled, barefooted wee
+Irishman, volunteered the further information that his big brother had
+run to bring "Father Forbess," on the chance that he might be in time to
+administer "extry munction."
+
+The way of the silent little procession led through back streets--where
+women hanging up clothes in the yards hurried to the gates, their aprons
+full of clothes-pins, to stare open-mouthed at the passers-by--and came
+to a halt at last in an irregular and muddy lane, before one of a half
+dozen shanties reared among the ash-heaps and debris of the town's most
+bedraggled outskirts.
+
+A stout, middle-aged, red-armed woman, already warned by some messenger
+of calamity, stood waiting on the roadside bank. There were whimpering
+children clinging to her skirts, and a surrounding cluster of women of
+the neighborhood, some of the more elderly of whom, shrivelled little
+crones in tidy caps, and with their aprons to their eyes, were beginning
+in a low-murmured minor the wail which presently should rise into the
+keen of death. Mrs. MacEvoy herself made no moan, and her broad ruddy
+face was stern in expression rather than sorrowful. When the litter
+stopped beside her, she laid a hand for an instant on her husband's wet
+brow, and looked--one could have sworn impassively--into his staring
+eyes. Then, still without a word, she waved the bearers toward the door,
+and led the way herself.
+
+Theron, somewhat wonderingly, found himself, a minute later, inside a
+dark and ill-smelling room, the air of which was humid with the steam
+from a boiler of clothes on the stove, and not in other ways improved by
+the presence of a jostling score of women, all straining their gaze upon
+the open door of the only other apartment--the bed-chamber. Through
+this they could see the workmen laying MacEvoy on the bed, and standing
+awkwardly about thereafter, getting in the way of the wife and old
+Maggie Quirk as they strove to remove the garments from his crushed
+limbs. As the neighbors watched what could be seen of these proceedings,
+they whispered among themselves eulogies of the injured man's industry
+and good temper, his habit of bringing his money home to his wife, and
+the way he kept his Father Mathew pledge and attended to his religious
+duties. They admitted freely that, by the light of his example, their
+own husbands and sons left much to be desired, and from this wandered
+easily off into domestic digressions of their own. But all the while
+their eyes were bent upon the bedroom door; and Theron made out, after
+he had grown accustomed to the gloom and the smell, that many of them
+were telling their beads even while they kept the muttered conversation
+alive. None of them paid any attention to him, or seemed to regard his
+presence there as unusual.
+
+Presently he saw enter through the sunlit street doorway a person of
+a different class. The bright light shone for a passing instant upon a
+fashionable, flowered hat, and upon some remarkably brilliant shade of
+red hair beneath it. In another moment there had edged along through the
+throng, to almost within touch of him, a tall young woman, the owner of
+this hat and wonderful hair. She was clad in light and pleasing spring
+attire, and carried a parasol with a long oxidized silver handle of a
+quaint pattern. She looked at him, and he saw that her face was of a
+lengthened oval, with a luminous rose-tinted skin, full red lips, and
+big brown, frank eyes with heavy auburn lashes. She made a grave little
+inclination of her head toward him, and he bowed in response. Since her
+arrival, he noted, the chattering of the others had entirely ceased.
+
+"I followed the others in, in the hope that I might be of some
+assistance," he ventured to explain to her in a low murmur, feeling that
+at last here was some one to whom an explanation of his presence in this
+Romish house was due. "I hope they won't feel that I have intruded."
+
+She nodded her head as if she quite understood. "They'll take the will
+for the deed," she whispered back. "Father Forbes will be here in a
+minute. Do you know is it too late?"
+
+Even as she spoke, the outer doorway was darkened by the commanding bulk
+of a newcomer's figure. The flash of a silk hat, and the deferential way
+in which the assembled neighbors fell back to clear a passage, made his
+identity clear. Theron felt his blood tingle in an unaccustomed way
+as this priest of a strange church advanced across the room--a
+broad-shouldered, portly man of more than middle height, with a shapely,
+strong-lined face of almost waxen pallor, and a firm, commanding tread.
+He carried in his hands, besides his hat, a small leather-bound case. To
+this and to him the women courtesied and bowed their heads as he passed.
+
+"Come with me," whispered the tall girl with the parasol to Theron; and
+he found himself pushing along in her wake until they intercepted the
+priest just outside the bedroom door. She touched Father Forbes on the
+arm.
+
+"Just to tell you that I am here," she said. The priest nodded with
+a grave face, and passed into the other room. In a minute or two the
+workmen, Mrs. MacEvoy, and her helper came out, and the door was shut
+behind them.
+
+"He is making his confession," explained the young lady. "Stay here for
+a minute."
+
+She moved over to where the woman of the house stood, glum-faced and
+tearless, and whispered something to her. A confused movement among the
+crowd followed, and out of it presently resulted a small table, covered
+with a white cloth, and bearing on it two unlighted candles, a basin of
+water, and a spoon, which was brought forward and placed in readiness
+before the closed door. Some of those nearest this cleared space were
+kneeling now, and murmuring a low buzz of prayer to the click of beads
+on their rosaries.
+
+The door opened, and Theron saw the priest standing in the doorway with
+an uplifted hand. He wore now a surplice, with a purple band over his
+shoulders, and on his pale face there shone a tranquil and tender light.
+
+One of the workmen fetched from the stove a brand, lighted the two
+candles, and bore the table with its contents into the bedroom. The
+young woman plucked Theron's sleeve, and he dumbly followed her into
+the chamber of death, making one of the group of a dozen, headed by Mrs.
+MacEvoy and her children, which filled the little room, and overflowed
+now outward to the street door. He found himself bowing with the others
+to receive the sprinkled holy water from the priest's white fingers;
+kneeling with the others for the prayers; following in impressed silence
+with the others the strange ceremonial by which the priest traced
+crosses of holy oil with his thumb upon the eyes, ears, nostrils, lips,
+hands, and feet of the dying man, wiping off the oil with a piece
+of cotton-batting each time after he had repeated the invocation to
+forgiveness for that particular sense. But most of all he was moved by
+the rich, novel sound of the Latin as the priest rolled it forth in the
+ASPERGES ME, DOMINE, and MISEREATUR VESTRI OMNIPOTENS DEUS, with its
+soft Continental vowels and liquid R's. It seemed to him that he had
+never really heard Latin before. Then the astonishing young woman with
+the red hair declaimed the CONFITEOR, vigorously and with a resonant
+distinctness of enunciation. It was a different Latin, harsher and more
+sonorous; and while it still dominated the murmured undertone of the
+other's prayers, the last moment came.
+
+Theron had stood face to face with death at many other bedsides; no
+other final scene had stirred him like this. It must have been
+the girl's Latin chant, with its clanging reiteration of the great
+names--BEATUM MICHAELEM ARCHANGELUM, BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, SANCTOS
+APOSTOLOS PETRUM ET PAULUM--invoked with such proud confidence in this
+squalid little shanty, which so strangely affected him.
+
+He came out with the others at last--the candles and the folded hands
+over the crucifix left behind--and walked as one in a dream. Even by
+the time that he had gained the outer doorway, and stood blinking at
+the bright light and filling his lungs with honest air once more, it had
+begun to seem incredible to him that he had seen and done all this.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+While Mr. Ware stood thus on the doorstep, through a minute of
+formless musing, the priest and the girl came out, and, somewhat to his
+confusion, made him one of their party. He felt himself flushing under
+the idea that they would think he had waited for them--was thrusting
+himself upon them. The notion prompted him to bow frigidly in response
+to Father Forbes' pleasant "I am glad to meet you, sir," and his
+outstretched hand.
+
+"I dropped in by the--the merest accident," Theron said. "I met them
+bringing the poor man home, and--and quite without thinking, I obeyed
+the impulse to follow them in, and didn't realize--"
+
+He stopped short, annoyed by the reflection that this was his second
+apology. The girl smiled placidly at him, the while she put up her
+parasol.
+
+"It did me good to see you there," she said, quite as if she had known
+him all her life. "And so it did the rest of us."
+
+Father Forbes permitted himself a soft little chuckle, approving rather
+than mirthful, and patted her on the shoulder with the air of being
+fifty years her senior instead of fifteen. To the minister's relief, he
+changed the subject as the three started together toward the road.
+
+"Then, again, no doctor was sent for!" he exclaimed, as if resuming a
+familiar subject with the girl. Then he turned to Theron. "I dare-say
+you have no such trouble; but with our poorer people it is very
+vexing. They will not call in a physician, but hurry off first for the
+clergyman. I don't know that it is altogether to avoid doctor's bills,
+but it amounts to that in effect. Of course in this case it made no
+difference; but I have had to make it a rule not to go out at night
+unless they bring me a physician's card with his assurance that it is a
+genuine affair. Why, only last winter, I was routed up after midnight,
+and brought off in the mud and pelting rain up one of the new streets
+on the hillside there, simply because a factory girl who was laced too
+tight had fainted at a dance. I slipped and fell into a puddle in the
+darkness, ruined a new overcoat, and got drenched to the skin; and when
+I arrived the girl had recovered and was dancing away again, thirteen
+to the dozen. It was then that I made the rule. I hope, Mr. Ware, that
+Octavius is producing a pleasant impression upon you so far?"
+
+"I scarcely know yet," answered Theron. The genial talk of the priest,
+with its whimsical anecdote, had in truth passed over his head. His
+mind still had room for nothing but that novel death-bed scene, with
+the winged captain of the angelic host, the Baptist, the glorified
+Fisherman and the Preacher, all being summoned down in the pomp of
+liturgical Latin to help MacEvoy to die. "If you don't mind my saying
+so," he added hesitatingly, "what I have just seen in there DID make a
+very powerful impression upon me."
+
+"It is a very ancient ceremony," said the priest; "probably Persian,
+like the baptismal form, although, for that matter, we can never dig
+deep enough for the roots of these things. They all turn up Turanian if
+we probe far enough. Our ways separate here, I'm afraid. I am delighted
+to have made your acquaintance, Mr. Ware. Pray look in upon me, if you
+can as well as not. We are near neighbors, you know."
+
+Father Forbes had shaken hands, and moved off up another street some
+distance, before the voice of the girl recalled Theron to himself.
+
+"Of course you knew HIM by name," she was saying, "and he knew you
+by sight, and had talked of you; but MY poor inferior sex has to be
+introduced. I am Celia Madden. My father has the wagon-shops, and I--I
+play the organ at the church."
+
+"I--I am delighted to make your acquaintance," said Theron, conscious
+as he spoke that he had slavishly echoed the formula of the priest. He
+could think of nothing better to add than, "Unfortunately, we have no
+organ in our church."
+
+The girl laughed, as they resumed their walk down the street. "I'm
+afraid I couldn't undertake two," she said, and laughed again. Then she
+spoke more seriously. "That ceremony must have interested you a good
+deal, never having seen it before. I saw that it was all new to you, and
+so I made bold to take you under my wing, so to speak."
+
+"You were very kind," said the young minister. "It was really a great
+experience for me. May--may I ask, is it a part of your functions, in
+the church, I mean, to attend these last rites?"
+
+"Mercy, no!" replied the girl, spinning the parasol on her shoulder and
+smiling at the thought. "No; it was only because MacEvoy was one of our
+workmen, and really came by his death through father sending him up to
+trim a tree. Ann MacEvoy will never forgive us that, the longest day she
+lives. Did you notice her? She wouldn't speak to me. After you came out,
+I tried to tell her that we would look out for her and the children; but
+all she would say to me was: 'An' fwat would a wheelwright, an' him the
+father of a family, be doin' up a tree?'"
+
+They had come now upon the main street of the village, with its
+flagstone sidewalk overhung by a lofty canopy of elm-boughs. Here, for
+the space of a block, was concentrated such fashionable elegance of
+mansions and ornamental lawns as Octavius had to offer; and it was
+presented with the irregularity so characteristic of our restless
+civilization. Two or three of the houses survived untouched from the
+earlier days--prim, decorous structures, each with its gabled centre
+and lower wings, each with its row of fluted columns supporting the
+classical roof of a piazza across its whole front, each vying with the
+others in the whiteness of those wooden walls enveloping its bright
+green blinds. One had to look over picket fences to see these houses,
+and in doing so caught the notion that they thus railed themselves
+off in pride at being able to remember before the railroad came to the
+village, or the wagon-works were thought of.
+
+Before the neighboring properties the fences had been swept away, so
+that one might stroll from the sidewalk straight across the well-trimmed
+sward to any one of a dozen elaborately modern doorways. Some of the
+residences, thus frankly proffering friendship to the passer-by, were of
+wood painted in drabs and dusky reds, with bulging windows which marked
+the native yearning for the mediaeval, and shingles that strove to be
+accounted tiles. Others--a prouder, less pretentious sort--were of brick
+or stone, with terra-cotta mouldings set into the walls, and with real
+slates covering the riot of turrets and peaks and dormer peepholes
+overhead.
+
+Celia Madden stopped in front of the largest and most important-looking
+of these new edifices, and said, holding out her hand: "Here I am, once
+more. Good-morning, Mr. Ware."
+
+Theron hoped that his manner did not betray the flash of surprise he
+felt in discovering that his new acquaintance lived in the biggest house
+in Octavius. He remembered now that some one had pointed it out as the
+abode of the owner of the wagon factories; but it had not occurred to
+him before to associate this girl with that village magnate. It was
+stupid of him, of course, because she had herself mentioned her father.
+He looked at her again with an awkward smile, as he formally shook
+the gloved hand she gave him, and lifted his soft hat. The strong noon
+sunlight, forcing its way down between the elms, and beating upon her
+parasol of lace-edged, creamy silk, made a halo about her hair and face
+at once brilliant and tender. He had not seen before how beautiful she
+was. She nodded in recognition of his salute, and moved up the lawn
+walk, spinning the sunshade on her shoulder.
+
+Though the parsonage was only three blocks away, the young minister had
+time to think about a good many things before he reached home.
+
+First of all, he had to revise in part the arrangement of his notions
+about the Irish. Save for an occasional isolated and taciturn figure
+among the nomadic portion of the hired help in the farm country, Theron
+had scarcely ever spoken to a person of this curiously alien race
+before. He remembered now that there had been some dozen or more Irish
+families in Tyre, quartered in the outskirts among the brickyards,
+but he had never come in contact with any of them, or given to their
+existence even a passing thought. So far as personal acquaintance went,
+the Irish had been to him only a name.
+
+But what a sinister and repellent name! His views on this general
+subject were merely those common to his communion and his environment.
+He took it for granted, for example, that in the large cities most of
+the poverty and all the drunkenness, crime, and political corruption
+were due to the perverse qualities of this foreign people--qualities
+accentuated and emphasized in every evil direction by the baleful
+influence of a false and idolatrous religion. It is hardly too much to
+say that he had never encountered a dissenting opinion on this point.
+His boyhood had been spent in those bitter days when social, political,
+and blood prejudices were fused at white heat in the public crucible
+together. When he went to the Church Seminary, it was a matter of course
+that every member of the faculty was a Republican, and that every one of
+his classmates had come from a Republican household. When, later on, he
+entered the ministry, the rule was still incredulous of exceptions. One
+might as well have looked in the Nedahma Conference for a divergence
+of opinion on the Trinity as for a difference in political conviction.
+Indeed, even among the laity, Theron could not feel sure that he had
+ever known a Democrat; that is, at all closely. He understood very
+little about politics, it is true. If he had been driven into a corner,
+and forced to attempt an explanation of this tremendous partisan unity
+in which he had a share, he would probably have first mentioned
+the War--the last shots of which were fired while he was still in
+petticoats. Certainly his second reason, however, would have been that
+the Irish were on the other side.
+
+He had never before had occasion to formulate, even in his own thoughts,
+this tacit race and religious aversion in which he had been bred. It
+rose now suddenly in front of him, as he sauntered from patch to patch
+of sunlight under the elms, like some huge, shadowy, and symbolic
+monument. He looked at it with wondering curiosity, as at something
+he had heard of all his life, but never seen before--an abhorrent
+spectacle, truly! The foundations upon which its dark bulk reared itself
+were ignorance, squalor, brutality and vice. Pigs wallowed in the mire
+before its base, and burrowing into this base were a myriad of narrow
+doors, each bearing the hateful sign of a saloon, and giving forth
+from its recesses of night the sounds of screams and curses. Above were
+sculptured rows of lowering, ape-like faces from Nast's and Keppler's
+cartoons, and out of these sprang into the vague upper gloom--on the one
+side, lamp-posts from which negroes hung by the neck, and on the other
+gibbets for dynamiters and Molly Maguires, and between the two glowed a
+spectral picture of some black-robed tonsured men, with leering satanic
+masks, making a bonfire of the Bible in the public schools.
+
+Theron stared this phantasm hard in the face, and recognized it for a
+very tolerable embodiment of what he had heretofore supposed he thought
+about the Irish. For an instant, the sight of it made him shiver, as if
+the sunny May had of a sudden lapsed back into bleak December. Then he
+smiled, and the bad vision went off into space. He saw instead Father
+Forbes, in the white and purple vestments, standing by poor MacEvoy's
+bedside, with his pale, chiselled, luminous, uplifted face, and he
+heard only the proud, confident clanging of the girl's recital,--BEATUM
+MICHAELEM ARCHANGELUM, BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, PETRUM ET
+PAULUM--EM!--AM!--UM!--like strokes on a great resonant alarm-bell,
+attuned for the hearing of heaven. He caught himself on the very verge
+of feeling that heaven must have heard.
+
+Then he smiled again, and laid the matter aside, with a parting
+admission that it had been undoubtedly picturesque and impressive, and
+that it had been a valuable experience to him to see it. At least the
+Irish, with all their faults, must have a poetic strain, or they would
+not have clung so tenaciously to those curious and ancient forms. He
+recalled having heard somewhere, or read, it might be, that they were
+a people much given to songs and music. And the young lady, that very
+handsome and friendly Miss Madden, had told him that she was a musician!
+He had a new pleasure in turning this over in his mind. Of all the
+closed doors which his choice of a career had left along his pathway, no
+other had for him such a magical fascination as that on which was graven
+the lute of Orpheus. He knew not even the alphabet of music, and his
+conceptions of its possibilities ran but little beyond the best of the
+hymn-singing he had heard at Conferences, yet none the less the longing
+for it raised on occasion such mutiny in his soul that more than once he
+had specifically prayed against it as a temptation.
+
+Dangerous though some of its tendencies might be, there was no
+gainsaying the fact that a love for music was in the main an uplifting
+influence--an attribute of cultivation. The world was the sweeter and
+more gentle for it. And this brought him to musing upon the odd chance
+that the two people of Octavius who had given him the first notion of
+polish and intellectual culture in the town should be Irish. The Romish
+priest must have been vastly surprised at his intrusion, yet had been
+at the greatest pains to act as if it were quite the usual thing to have
+Methodist ministers assist at Extreme Unction. And the young woman--how
+gracefully, with what delicacy, had she comprehended his position and
+robbed it of all its possible embarrassments! It occurred to him that
+they must have passed, there in front of her home, the very tree from
+which the luckless wheelwright had fallen some hours before; and the
+fact that she had forborne to point it out to him took form in his mind
+as an added proof of her refinement of nature.
+
+The midday dinner was a little more than ready when Theron reached home,
+and let himself in by the front door. On Mondays, owing to the moisture
+and "clutter" of the weekly washing in the kitchen, the table was laid
+in the sitting-room, and as he entered from the hall the partner of
+his joys bustled in by the other door, bearing the steaming platter of
+corned beef, dumplings, cabbages, and carrots, with arms bared to the
+elbows, and a red face. It gave him great comfort, however, to note that
+there were no signs of the morning's displeasure remaining on this face;
+and he immediately remembered again those interrupted projects of his
+about the piano and the hired girl.
+
+"Well! I'd just about begun to reckon that I was a widow," said Alice,
+putting down her fragrant burden. There was such an obvious suggestion
+of propitiation in her tone that Theron went around and kissed her. He
+thought of saying something about keeping out of the way because it was
+"Blue Monday," but held it back lest it should sound like a reproach.
+
+"Well, what kind of a washerwoman does THIS one turn out to be?" he
+asked, after they were seated, and he had invoked a blessing and was
+cutting vigorously into the meat.
+
+"Oh, so-so," replied Alice; "she seems to be particular, but she's
+mortal slow. If I hadn't stood right over her, we shouldn't have had the
+clothes out till goodness knows when. And of course she's Irish!"
+
+"Well, what of THAT?" asked the minister, with a fine unconcern.
+
+Alice looked up from her plate, with knife and fork suspended in air.
+"Why, you know we were talking only the other day of what a pity it was
+that none of our own people went out washing," she said. "That Welsh
+woman we heard of couldn't come, after all; and they say, too, that she
+presumes dreadfully upon the acquaintance, being a church member, you
+know. So we simply had to fall back on the Irish. And even if they do
+go and tell their priest everything they see and hear, why, there's one
+comfort, they can tell about US and welcome. Of course I see to it she
+doesn't snoop around in here."
+
+Theron smiled. "That's all nonsense about their telling such things to
+their priests," he said with easy confidence.
+
+"Why, you told me so yourself," replied Alice, briskly. "And I've always
+understood so, too; they're bound to tell EVERYTHING in confession.
+That's what gives the Catholic Church such a tremendous hold. You've
+spoken of it often."
+
+"It must have been by way of a figure of speech," remarked Theron,
+not with entire directness. "Women are great hands to separate one's
+observations from their context, and so give them meanings quite
+unintended. They are also great hands," he added genially, "or at least
+one of them is, at making the most delicious dumplings in the world. I
+believe these are the best even you ever made."
+
+Alice was not unmindful of the compliment, but her thoughts were on
+other things. "I shouldn't like that woman's priest, for example," she
+said, "to know that we had no piano."
+
+"But if he comes and stands outside our house every night and
+listens--as of course he will," said Theron, with mock gravity, "it is
+only a question of time when he must reach that conclusion for himself.
+Our only chance, however, is that there are some sixteen hundred other
+houses for him to watch, so that he may not get around to us for quite a
+spell. Why, seriously, Alice, what on earth do you suppose Father Forbes
+knows or cares about our poor little affairs, or those of any other
+Protestant household in this whole village? He has his work to do, just
+as I have mine--only his is ten times as exacting in everything except
+sermons--and you may be sure he is only too glad when it is over each
+day, without bothering about things that are none of his business."
+
+"All the same I'm afraid of them," said Alice, as if argument were
+exhausted.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+On the following morning young Mr. Ware anticipated events by inscribing
+in his diary for the day, immediately after breakfast, these remarks:
+"Arranged about piano. Began work upon book."
+
+The date indeed deserved to be distinguished from its fellows. Theron
+was so conscious of its importance that he not only prophesied in the
+little morocco-bound diary which Alice had given him for Christmas, but
+returned after he had got out upon the front steps of the parsonage to
+have his hat brushed afresh by her.
+
+"Wonders will never cease," she said jocosely. "With you getting
+particular about your clothes, there isn't anything in this wide world
+that can't happen now!"
+
+"One doesn't go out to bring home a piano every day," he made answer.
+"Besides, I want to make such an impression upon the man that he will
+deal gently with that first cash payment down. Do you know," he added,
+watching her turn the felt brim under the wisp-broom's strokes, "I'm
+thinking some of getting me a regular silk stove-pipe hat."
+
+"Why don't you, then?" she rejoined, but without any ring of glad
+acquiescence in her tone. He fancied that her face lengthened a little,
+and he instantly ascribed it to recollections of the way in which the
+roses had been bullied out of her own headgear.
+
+"You are quite sure, now, pet," he made haste to change the subject,
+"that the hired girl can wait just as well as not until fall?"
+
+"Oh, MY, yes!" Alice replied, putting the hat on his head, and smoothing
+back his hair behind his ears. "She'd only be in the way now. You see,
+with hot weather coming on, there won't be much cooking. We'll take all
+our meals out here, and that saves so much work that really what remains
+is hardly more than taking care of a bird-cage. And, besides, not having
+her will almost half pay for the piano."
+
+"But when cold weather comes, you're sure you'll consent?" he urged.
+
+"Like a shot!" she assured him, and, after a happy little caress, he
+started out again on his momentous mission.
+
+"Thurston's" was a place concerning which opinions differed in Octavius.
+That it typified progress, and helped more than any other feature of the
+village to bring it up to date, no one indeed disputed. One might move
+about a great deal, in truth, and hear no other view expressed. But then
+again one might stumble into conversation with one small storekeeper
+after another, and learn that they united in resenting the existence of
+"Thurston's," as rival farmers might join to curse a protracted drought.
+Each had his special flaming grievance. The little dry-goods dealers
+asked mournfully how they could be expected to compete with an
+establishment which could buy bankrupt stocks at a hundred different
+points, and make a profit if only one-third of the articles were sold
+for more than they would cost from the jobber? The little boot and
+shoe dealers, clothiers, hatters, and furriers, the small merchants in
+carpets, crockery, and furniture, the venders of hardware and household
+utensils, of leathern goods and picture-frames, of wall-paper, musical
+instruments, and even toys--all had the same pathetically unanswerable
+question to propound. But mostly they put it to themselves, because the
+others were at "Thurston's."
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware had entertained rather strong views on this
+subject, and that only a week or two ago. One of his first acquaintances
+in Octavius had been the owner of the principal book-store in the
+place--a gentle and bald old man who produced the complete impression of
+a bibliophile upon what the slightest investigation showed to be only a
+meagre acquaintance with publishers' circulars. But at least he had the
+air of loving his business, and the young minister had enjoyed a long
+talk with, or rather, at him. Out of this talk had come the information
+that the store was losing money. Not even the stationery department now
+showed a profit worth mentioning. When Octavius had contained only five
+thousand inhabitants, it boasted four book-stores, two of them good
+ones. Now, with a population more than doubled, only these latter two
+survived, and they must soon go to the wall. The reason? It was in a
+nutshell. A book which sold at retail for one dollar and a half cost the
+bookseller ninety cents. If it was at all a popular book, "Thurston's"
+advertised it at eighty-nine cents--and in any case at a profit of only
+two or three cents. Of course it was done to widen the establishment's
+patronage--to bring people into the store. Equally of course, it was
+destroying the book business and debauching the reading tastes of the
+community. Without the profits from the light and ephemeral popular
+literature of the season, the book-store proper could not keep up its
+stock of more solid works, and indeed could not long keep open at all.
+On the other hand, "Thurston's" dealt with nothing save the demand of
+the moment, and offered only the books which were the talk of the week.
+Thus, in plain words, the book trade was going to the dogs, and it was
+the same with pretty nearly every other trade.
+
+Theron was indignant at this, and on his return home told Alice that
+he desired her to make no purchases whatever at "Thurston's." He
+even resolved to preach a sermon on the subject of the modern idea of
+admiring the great for crushing the small, and sketched out some notes
+for it which he thought solved the problem of flaying the local abuse
+without mentioning it by name. They had lain on his desk now for ten
+days or more, and on only the previous Friday he had speculated upon
+using them that coming Sunday.
+
+On this bright and cheerful Tuesday morning he walked with a blithe step
+unhesitatingly down the main street to "Thurston's," and entered without
+any show of repugnance the door next to the window wherein, flanked
+by dangling banjos and key-bugles built in pyramids, was displayed the
+sign, "Pianos on the Instalment Plan."
+
+He was recognized by some responsible persons, and treated with
+distinguished deference. They were charmed with the intelligence that he
+desired a piano, and fascinated by his wish to pay for it only a little
+at a time. They had special terms for clergymen, and made him feel as
+if these were being extended to him on a silver charger by kneeling
+admirers.
+
+It was so easy to buy things here that he was a trifle disturbed to find
+his flowing course interrupted by his own entire ignorance as to what
+kind of piano he wanted. He looked at all they had in stock, and heard
+them played upon. They differed greatly in price, and, so he fancied,
+almost as much in tone. It discouraged him to note, however, that
+several of those he thought the finest in tone were among the very
+cheapest in the lot. Pondering this, and staring in hopeless puzzlement
+from one to another of the big black shiny monsters, he suddenly thought
+of something.
+
+"I would rather not decide for myself," he said, "I know so little about
+it. If you don't mind, I will have a friend of mine, a skilled musician,
+step in and make a selection. I have so much confidence in--in her
+judgment." He added hurriedly, "It will involve only a day or two's
+delay."
+
+The next moment he was sorry he had spoken. What would they think when
+they saw the organist of the Catholic church come to pick out a piano
+for the Methodist parsonage? And how could he decorously prefer the
+request to her to undertake this task? He might not meet her again for
+ages, and to his provincial notions writing would have seemed out of the
+question. And would it not be disagreeable to have her know that he was
+buying a piano by part payments? Poor Alice's dread of the washerwoman's
+gossip occurred to him, at this, and he smiled in spite of himself. Then
+all at once the difficulty vanished. Of course it would come all right
+somehow. Everything did.
+
+He was on firmer ground, buying the materials for the new book, over
+on the stationery side. His original intention had been to bestow this
+patronage upon the old bookseller, but these suavely smart people in
+"Thurston's" had had the effect of putting him on his honor when
+they asked, "Would there be anything else?" and he had followed them
+unresistingly.
+
+He indulged to the full his whim that everything entering into the
+construction of "Abraham" should be spick-and-span. He watched with his
+own eyes a whole ream of broad glazed white paper being sliced down by
+the cutter into single sheets, and thrilled with a novel ecstasy as he
+laid his hand upon the spotless bulk, so wooingly did it invite him to
+begin. He tried a score of pens before the right one came to hand.
+When a box of these had been laid aside, with ink and pen-holders and a
+little bronze inkstand, he made a sign that the outfit was complete.
+Or no--there must be some blotting-paper. He had always used those
+blotting-pads given away by insurance companies--his congregations never
+failed to contain one or more agents, who had these to bestow by the
+armful--but the book deserved a virgin blotter.
+
+Theron stood by while all these things were being tied up together in a
+parcel. The suggestion that they should be sent almost hurt him. Oh,
+no, he would carry them home himself. So strongly did they appeal to his
+sanguine imagination that he could not forbear hinting to the man who
+had shown him the pianos and was now accompanying him to the door that
+this package under his arm represented potentially the price of the
+piano he was going to have. He did it in a roundabout way, with one of
+his droll, hesitating smiles. The man did not understand at all, and
+Theron had not the temerity to repeat the remark. He strode home with
+the precious bundle as fast as he could.
+
+"I thought it best, after all, not to commit myself to a selection," he
+explained about the piano at dinner-time. "In such a matter as this,
+the opinion of an expert is everything. I am going to have one of the
+principal musicians of the town go and try them all, and tell me which
+we ought to have."
+
+"And while he's about it," said Alice, "you might ask him to make a
+little list of some of the new music. I've got way behind the times,
+being without a piano so long. Tell him not any VERY difficult pieces,
+you know."
+
+"Yes, I know," put in Theron, almost hastily, and began talking of other
+things. His conversation was of the most rambling and desultory sort,
+because all the while the two lobes of his brain, as it were, kept up a
+dispute as to whether Alice ought to have been told that this "principal
+musician" was of her own sex. It would certainly have been better, at
+the outset, he decided; but to mention it now would be to invest the
+fact with undue importance. Yes, that was quite clear; only the clearer
+it became, from one point of view, the shadier it waxed from the other.
+The problem really disturbed the young minister's mind throughout
+the meal, and his abstraction became so marked at last that his wife
+commented upon it.
+
+"A penny for your thoughts!" she said, with cheerful briskness. This
+ancient formula of the farm-land had always rather jarred on Theron. It
+presented itself now to his mind as a peculiarly aggravating banality.
+
+"I am going to begin my book this afternoon," he remarked impressively.
+"There is a great deal to think about."
+
+It turned out that there was even more to think about than he had
+imagined. After hours of solitary musing at his desk, or of pacing up
+and down before his open book-shelves, Theron found the first shadows of
+a May-day twilight beginning to fall upon that beautiful pile of white
+paper, still unstained by ink. He saw the book he wanted to write before
+him, in his mental vision, much more distinctly than ever, but the idea
+of beginning it impetuously, and hurling it off hot and glowing week by
+week, had faded away like a dream.
+
+This long afternoon, spent face to face with a project born of his own
+brain but yesterday, yet already so much bigger than himself, was really
+a most fruitful time for the young clergyman. The lessons which cut
+most deeply into our consciousness are those we learn from our children.
+Theron, in this first day's contact with the offspring of his fancy,
+found revealed to him an unsuspected and staggering truth. It was that
+he was an extremely ignorant and rudely untrained young man, whose
+pretensions to intellectual authority among any educated people would be
+laughed at with deserved contempt.
+
+Strangely enough, after he had weathered the first shock, this discovery
+did not dismay Theron Ware. The very completeness of the conviction it
+carried with it, saturated his mind with a feeling as if the fact had
+really been known to him all along. And there came, too, after a little,
+an almost pleasurable sense of the importance of the revelation. He had
+been merely drifting in fatuous and conceited blindness. Now all at once
+his eyes were open; he knew what he had to do. Ignorance was a thing to
+be remedied, and he would forthwith bend all his energies to cultivating
+his mind till it should blossom like a garden. In this mood, Theron
+mentally measured himself against the more conspicuous of his colleagues
+in the Conference. They also were ignorant, clownishly ignorant: the
+difference was that they were doomed by native incapacity to go on all
+their lives without ever finding it out. It was obvious to him that his
+case was better. There was bright promise in the very fact that he had
+discovered his shortcomings.
+
+He had begun the afternoon by taking down from their places the various
+works in his meagre library which bore more or less relation to the task
+in hand. The threescore books which constituted his printed possessions
+were almost wholly from the press of the Book Concern; the few
+exceptions were volumes which, though published elsewhere, had come to
+him through that giant circulating agency of the General Conference,
+and wore the stamp of its approval. Perhaps it was the sight of these
+half-filled shelves which started this day's great revolution in
+Theron's opinions of himself. He had never thought much before about
+owning books. He had been too poor to buy many, and the conditions of
+canvassing about among one's parishioners which the thrifty Book Concern
+imposes upon those who would have without buying, had always repelled
+him. Now, suddenly, as he moved along the two shelves, he felt ashamed
+at their beggarly showing.
+
+"The Land and the Book," in three portly volumes, was the most
+pretentious of the aids which he finally culled from his collection.
+Beside it he laid out "Bible Lands," "Rivers and Lakes of Scripture,"
+"Bible Manners and Customs," the "Genesis and Exodus" volume of Whedon's
+Commentary, some old numbers of the "Methodist Quarterly Review," and a
+copy of "Josephus" which had belonged to his grandmother, and had
+seen him through many a weary Sunday afternoon in boyhood. He glanced
+casually through these, one by one, as he took them down, and began to
+fear that they were not going to be of so much use as he had thought.
+Then, seating himself, he read carefully through the thirteen chapters
+of Genesis which chronicle the story of the founder of Israel.
+
+Of course he had known this story from his earliest years. In almost
+every chapter he came now upon a phrase or an incident which had served
+him as the basis for a sermon. He had preached about Hagar in the
+wilderness, about Lot's wife, about the visit of the angels, about the
+intended sacrifice of Isaac, about a dozen other things suggested by the
+ancient narrative. Somehow this time it all seemed different to him.
+The people he read about were altered to his vision. Heretofore a poetic
+light had shone about them, where indeed they had not glowed in a halo
+of sanctification. Now, by some chance, this light was gone, and he saw
+them instead as untutored and unwashed barbarians, filled with animal
+lusts and ferocities, struggling by violence and foul chicanery to
+secure a foothold in a country which did not belong to them--all rude
+tramps and robbers of the uncivilized plain.
+
+The apparent fact that Abram was a Chaldean struck him with peculiar
+force. How was it, he wondered, that this had never occurred to him
+before? Examining himself, he found that he had supposed vaguely that
+there had been Jews from the beginning, or at least, say, from the
+flood. But, no, Abram was introduced simply as a citizen of the Chaldean
+town of Ur, and there was no hint of any difference in race between him
+and his neighbors. It was specially mentioned that his brother, Lot's
+father, died in Ur, the city of his nativity. Evidently the family
+belonged there, and were Chaldeans like the rest.
+
+I do not cite this as at all a striking discovery, but it did have a
+curious effect upon Theron Ware. Up to that very afternoon, his notion
+of the kind of book he wanted to write had been founded upon a popular
+book called "Ruth the Moabitess," written by a clergyman he knew very
+well, the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin. This model performance troubled itself
+not at all with difficult points, but went swimmingly along through
+scented summer seas of pretty rhetoric, teaching nothing, it is true,
+but pleasing a good deal and selling like hot cakes. Now, all at once
+Theron felt that he hated that sort of book. HIS work should be of a
+vastly different order. He might fairly assume, he thought, that if the
+fact that Abram was a Chaldean was new to him, it would fall upon the
+world in general as a novelty. Very well, then, there was his chance.
+He would write a learned book, showing who the Chaldeans were, and how
+their manners and beliefs differed from, and influenced--
+
+It was at this psychological instant that the wave of self-condemnation
+suddenly burst upon and submerged the young clergyman. It passed again,
+leaving him staring fixedly at the pile of books he had taken down from
+the shelves, and gasping a little, as if for breath. Then the humorous
+side of the thing, perversely enough, appealed to him, and he grinned
+feebly to himself at the joke of his having imagined that he could write
+learnedly about the Chaldeans, or anything else. But, no, it shouldn't
+remain a joke! His long mobile face grew serious under the new resolve.
+He would learn what there was to be learned about the Chaldeans. He rose
+and walked up and down the room, gathering fresh strength of purpose
+as this inviting field of research spread out its vistas before him.
+Perhaps--yes, he would incidentally explore the mysteries of the
+Moabitic past as well, and thus put the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin to confusion
+on his own subject. That would in itself be a useful thing, because
+Mifflin wore kid gloves at the Conference, and affected an intolerable
+superiority of dress and demeanor, and there would be general
+satisfaction among the plainer and worthier brethren at seeing him taken
+down a peg.
+
+Now for the first time there rose distinctly in Theron's mind that
+casual allusion which Father Forbes had made to the Turanians. He
+recalled, too, his momentary feeling of mortification at not knowing who
+the Turanians were, at the time. Possibly, if he had probed this matter
+more deeply, now as he walked and pondered in the little living-room,
+he might have traced the whole of the afternoon's mental experiences to
+that chance remark of the Romish priest. But this speculation did not
+detain him. He mused instead upon the splendid library Father Forbes
+must have.
+
+"Well, how does the book come on? Have you got to 'my Lady Keturah'
+yet?'"
+
+It was Alice who spoke, opening the door from the kitchen, and putting
+in her head with a pretence of great and solemn caution, but with a
+correcting twinkle in her eyes.
+
+"I haven't got to anybody yet," answered Theron, absently. "These big
+things must be approached slowly."
+
+"Come out to supper, then, while the beans are hot," said Alice.
+
+The young minister sat through this other meal, again in deep
+abstraction. His wife pursued her little pleasantry about Keturah,
+the second wife, urging him with mock gravity to scold her roundly for
+daring to usurp Sarah's place, but Theron scarcely heard her, and said
+next to nothing. He ate sparingly, and fidgeted in his seat, waiting
+with obvious impatience for the finish of the meal. At last he rose
+abruptly.
+
+"I've got a call to make--something with reference to the book," he
+said. "I'll run out now, I think, before it gets dark."
+
+He put on his hat, and strode out of the house as if his errand was of
+the utmost urgency. Once upon the street, however, his pace slackened.
+There was still a good deal of daylight outside, and he loitered
+aimlessly about, walking with bowed head and hands clasped behind him,
+until dusk fell. Then he squared his shoulders, and started straight as
+the crow flies toward the residence of Father Forbes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The new Catholic church was the largest and most imposing public
+building in Octavius. Even in its unfinished condition, with a bald
+roofing of weather-beaten boards marking on the stunted tower the place
+where a spire was to begin later on, it dwarfed every other edifice of
+the sort in the town, just as it put them all to shame in the matter of
+the throngs it drew, rain or shine, to its services.
+
+These facts had not heretofore been a source of satisfaction to the Rev.
+Theron Ware. He had even alluded to the subject in terms which gave his
+wife the impression that he actively deplored the strength and size of
+the Catholic denomination in this new home of theirs, and was troubled
+in his mind about Rome generally. But this evening he walked along
+the extended side of the big structure, which occupied nearly half the
+block, and then, turning the corner, passed in review its wide-doored,
+looming front, without any hostile emotions whatever. In the gathering
+dusk it seemed more massive than ever before, but he found himself only
+passively considering the odd statement he had heard that all Catholic
+Church property was deeded absolutely in the name of the Bishop of the
+diocese.
+
+Only a narrow passage-way separated the church from the pastorate--a
+fine new brick residence standing flush upon the street. Theron mounted
+the steps, and looked about for a bell-pull. Search revealed instead a
+little ivory button set in a ring of metal work. He picked at this for
+a time with his finger-nail, before he made out the injunction, printed
+across it, to push. Of course! how stupid of him! This was one of those
+electric bells he had heard so much of, but which had not as yet made
+their way to the class of homes he knew. For custodians of a mediaeval
+superstition and fanaticism, the Catholic clergy seemed very much up to
+date. This bell made him feel rather more a countryman than ever.
+
+The door was opened by a tall gaunt woman, who stood in black relief
+against the radiance of the hall-way while Theron, choosing his words
+with some diffidence, asked if the Rev. Mr. Forbes was in.
+
+"He is" came the hush-voiced answer. "He's at dinner, though."
+
+It took the young minister a second or two to bring into association in
+his mind this evening hour and this midday meal. Then he began to say
+that he would call again--it was nothing special--but the woman suddenly
+cut him short by throwing the door wide open.
+
+"It's Mr. Ware, is it not?" she asked, in a greatly altered tone. "Sure,
+he'd not have you go away. Come inside--do, sir!--I'll tell him."
+
+Theron, with a dumb show of reluctance, crossed the threshold. He noted
+now that the woman, who had bustled down the hall on her errand, was
+gray-haired and incredibly ugly, with a dark sour face, glowering black
+eyes, and a twisted mouth. Then he saw that he was not alone in the
+hall-way. Three men and two women, all poorly clad and obviously working
+people, were seated in meek silence on a bench beyond the hat-rack. They
+glanced up at him for an instant, then resumed their patient study of
+the linoleum pattern on the floor at their feet.
+
+"And will you kindly step in, sir?" the elderly Gorgon had returned to
+ask. She led Mr. Ware along the hall-way to a door near the end, and
+opened it for him to pass before her.
+
+He entered a room in which for the moment he could see nothing but a
+central glare of dazzling light beating down from a great shaded
+lamp upon a circular patch of white table linen. Inside this ring of
+illumination points of fire sparkled from silver and porcelain, and two
+bars of burning crimson tracked across the cloth in reflection from tall
+glasses filled with wine. The rest of the room was vague darkness; but
+the gloom seemed saturated with novel aromatic odors, the appetizing
+scent of which bore clear relation to what Theron's blinking eyes rested
+upon.
+
+He was able now to discern two figures at the table, outside the glowing
+circle of the lamp. They had both risen, and one came toward him with
+cordial celerity, holding out a white plump hand in greeting. He took
+this proffered hand rather limply, not wholly sure in the half-light
+that this really was Father Forbes, and began once more that everlasting
+apology to which he seemed doomed in the presence of the priest. It was
+broken abruptly off by the other's protesting laughter.
+
+"My dear Mr. Ware, I beg of you," the priest urged, chuckling with
+hospitable mirth, "don't, don't apologize! I give you my word, nothing
+in the world could have pleased us better than your joining us here
+tonight. It was quite dramatic, your coming in as you did. We were
+speaking of you at that very moment. Oh, I forgot--let me make you
+acquainted with my friend--my very particular friend, Dr. Ledsmar. Let
+me take your hat; pray draw up a chair. Maggie will have a place laid
+for you in a minute."
+
+"Oh, I assure you--I couldn't think of it--I've just eaten
+my--my--dinner," expostulated Theron. He murmured more inarticulate
+remonstrances a moment later, when the grim old domestic appeared with
+plates, serviette, and tableware for his use, but she went on spreading
+them before him as if she heard nothing. Thus committed against a decent
+show of resistance, the young minister did eat a little here and there
+of what was set before him, and was human enough to regret frankly
+that he could not eat more. It seemed to him very remarkable cookery,
+transfiguring so simple a thing as a steak, for example, quite out of
+recognition, and investing the humble potato with a charm he had never
+dreamed of. He wondered from time to time if it would be polite to ask
+how the potatoes were cooked, so that he might tell Alice.
+
+The conversation at the table was not continuous, or even enlivened.
+After the lapses into silence became marked, Theron began to suspect
+that his refusal to drink wine had annoyed them--the more so as he had
+drenched a large section of table-cloth in his efforts to manipulate a
+siphon instead. He was greatly relieved, therefore, when Father Forbes
+explained in an incidental way that Dr. Ledsmar and he customarily ate
+their meals almost without a word.
+
+"It's a philosophic fad of his," the priest went on smilingly, "and I
+have fallen in with it for the sake of a quiet life; so that when we do
+have company--that is to say, once in a blue moon--we display no manners
+to speak of."
+
+"I had always supposed--that is, I've always heard--that it was more
+healthful to talk at meals," said Theron. "Of course--what I mean--I
+took it for granted all physicians thought so."
+
+Dr. Ledsmar laughed. "That depends so much upon the quality of the
+meals!" he remarked, holding his glass up to the light.
+
+He seemed a man of middle age and an equable disposition. Theron,
+stealing stray glances at him around the lampshade, saw most distinctly
+of all a broad, impressive dome of skull, which, though obviously the
+result of baldness, gave the effect of quite belonging to the face.
+There were gold-rimmed spectacles, through which shone now and again the
+vivid sparkle of sharp, alert eyes, and there was a nose of some sort
+not easy to classify, at once long and thick. The rest was thin hair and
+short round beard, mouse-colored where the light caught them, but losing
+their outlines in the shadows of the background. Theron had not heard of
+him among the physicians of Octavius. He wondered if he might not be a
+doctor of something else than medicine, and decided upon venturing the
+question.
+
+"Oh, yes, it is medicine," replied Ledsmar. "I am a doctor three or four
+times over, so far as parchments can make one. In some other respects,
+though, I should think I am probably less of a doctor than anybody else
+now living. I haven't practised--that is, regularly--for many years, and
+I take no interest whatever in keeping abreast of what the profession
+regards as its progress. I know nothing beyond what was being taught in
+the sixties, and that I am glad to say I have mostly forgotten."
+
+"Dear me!" said Theron. "I had always supposed that Science was the most
+engrossing of pursuits--that once a man took it up he never left it."
+
+"But that would imply a connection between Science and Medicine!"
+commented the doctor. "My dear sir, they are not even on speaking
+terms."
+
+"Shall we go upstairs?" put in the priest, rising from his chair. "It
+will be more comfortable to have our coffee there--unless indeed, Mr.
+Ware, tobacco is unpleasant to you?"
+
+"Oh, my, no!" the young minister exclaimed, eager to free himself from
+the suggestion of being a kill-joy. "I don't smoke myself; but I am very
+fond of the odor, I assure you."
+
+Father Forbes led the way out. It could be seen now that he wore a long
+house-gown of black silk, skilfully moulded to his erect, shapely, and
+rounded form. Though he carried this with the natural grace of a proud
+and beautiful belle, there was no hint of the feminine in his bearing,
+or in the contour of his pale, firm-set, handsome face. As he moved
+through the hall-way, the five people whom Theron had seen waiting rose
+from their bench, and two of the women began in humble murmurs, "If you
+please, Father," and "Good-evening to your Riverence;" but the priest
+merely nodded and passed on up the staircase, followed by his guests.
+The people sat down on their bench again.
+
+A few minutes later, reclining at his ease in a huge low chair, and
+feeling himself unaccountably at home in the most luxuriously appointed
+and delightful little room he had ever seen, the Rev. Theron Ware sipped
+his unaccustomed coffee and embarked upon an explanation of his errand.
+Somehow the very profusion of scholarly symbols about him--the great
+dark rows of encased and crowded book-shelves rising to the ceiling,
+the classical engravings upon the wall, the revolving book-case, the
+reading-stand, the mass of littered magazines, reviews, and papers at
+either end of the costly and elaborate writing-desk--seemed to make
+it the easier for him to explain without reproach that he needed
+information about Abram. He told them quite in detail the story of his
+book.
+
+The two others sat watching him through a faint haze of scented smoke,
+with polite encouragement on their faces. Father Forbes took the added
+trouble to nod understandingly at the various points of the narrative,
+and when it was finished gave one of his little approving chuckles.
+
+"This skirts very closely upon sorcery," he said smilingly. "Do
+you know, there is perhaps not another man in the country who knows
+Assyriology so thoroughly as our friend here, Dr. Ledsmar."
+
+"That's putting it too strong," remarked the Doctor. "I only follow at
+a distance--a year or two behind. But I daresay I can help you. You are
+quite welcome to anything I have: my books cover the ground pretty well
+up to last year. Delitzsch is very interesting; but Baudissin's 'Studien
+zur Semitischen Religionsgeschichte' would come closer to what you need.
+There are several other important Germans--Schrader, Bunsen, Duncker,
+Hommel, and so on."
+
+"Unluckily I--I don't read German readily," Theron explained with
+diffidence.
+
+"That's a pity," said the doctor, "because they do the best work--not
+only in this field, but in most others. And they do so much that the
+mass defies translation. Well, the best thing outside of German of
+course is Sayce. I daresay you know him, though."
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head mournfully. "I don't seem to know any
+one," he murmured.
+
+The others exchanged glances.
+
+"But if I may ask, Mr. Ware," pursued the doctor, regarding their guest
+with interest through his spectacles, "why do you specially hit upon
+Abraham? He is full of difficulties--enough, just now, at any rate, to
+warn off the bravest scholar. Why not take something easier?"
+
+Theron had recovered something of his confidence. "Oh, no," he said,
+"that is just what attracts me to Abraham. I like the complexities and
+contradictions in his character. Take for instance all that strange
+and picturesque episode of Hagar: see the splendid contrast between the
+craft and commercial guile of his dealings in Egypt and with Abimelech,
+and the simple, straightforward godliness of his later years. No, all
+those difficulties only attract me. Do you happen to know--of course
+you would know--do those German books, or the others, give anywhere any
+additional details of the man himself and his sayings and doings--little
+things which help, you know, to round out one's conception of the
+individual?"
+
+Again the priest and the doctor stole a furtive glance across the young
+minister's head. It was Father Forbes who replied.
+
+"I fear that you are taking our friend Abraham too literally, Mr. Ware,"
+he said, in that gentle semblance of paternal tones which seemed to go
+so well with his gown. "Modern research, you know, quite wipes him out
+of existence as an individual. The word 'Abram' is merely an eponym--it
+means 'exalted father.' Practically all the names in the Genesis
+chronologies are what we call eponymous. Abram is not a person at all:
+he is a tribe, a sept, a clan. In the same way, Shem is not intended for
+a man; it is the name of a great division of the human race. Heber is
+simply the throwing back into allegorical substance, so to speak, of the
+Hebrews; Heth of the Hittites; Asshur of Assyria."
+
+"But this is something very new, this theory, isn't it?" queried Theron.
+
+The priest smiled and shook his head. "Bless you, no! My dear sir, there
+is nothing new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian
+theory more than two thousand years ago. As for this eponym thing, why
+Saint Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago. In
+his 'De Civitate Dei,' he expressly says of these genealogical names,
+'GENTES NON HOMINES;' that is, 'peoples, not persons.' It was as obvious
+to him--as much a commonplace of knowledge--as it was to Ezekiel eight
+hundred years before him."
+
+"It seems passing strange that we should not know it now, then,"
+commented Theron; "I mean, that everybody shouldn't know it."
+
+Father Forbes gave a little purring chuckle. "Ah, there we get upon
+contentious ground," he remarked. "Why should 'everybody' be supposed
+to know anything at all? What business is it of 'everybody's' to know
+things? The earth was just as round in the days when people supposed it
+to be flat, as it is now. So the truth remains always the truth, even
+though you give a charter to ten hundred thousand separate numskulls to
+examine it by the light of their private judgment, and report that it is
+as many different varieties of something else. But of course that whole
+question of private judgment versus authority is No-Man's-Land for us.
+We were speaking of eponyms."
+
+"Yes," said Theron; "it is very interesting."
+
+"There is a curious phase of the subject which hasn't been worked out
+much," continued the priest. "Probably the Germans will get at that too,
+sometime. They are doing the best Irish work in other fields, as it is.
+I spoke of Heber and Heth, in Genesis, as meaning the Hebrews and the
+Hittites. Now my own people, the Irish, have far more ancient legends
+and traditions than any other nation west of Athens; and you find in
+their myth of the Milesian invasion and conquest two principal leaders
+called Heber and Ith, or Heth. That is supposed to be comparatively
+modern--about the time of Solomon's Temple. But these independent Irish
+myths go back to the fall of the Tower of Babel, and they have there an
+ancestor, grandson of Japhet, named Fenius Farsa, and they ascribe
+to him the invention of the alphabet. They took their ancient name of
+Feine, the modern Fenian, from him. Oddly enough, that is the name which
+the Romans knew the Phoenicians by, and to them also is ascribed the
+invention of the alphabet. The Irish have a holy salmon of knowledge,
+just like the Chaldean man-fish. The Druids' tree-worship is identical
+with that of the Chaldeans--those pagan groves, you know, which the Jews
+were always being punished for building. You see, there is nothing new.
+Everything is built on the ruins of something else. Just as the material
+earth is made up of countless billions of dead men's bones, so the
+mental world is all alive with the ghosts of dead men's thoughts and
+beliefs, the wraiths of dead races' faiths and imaginings."
+
+Father Forbes paused, then added with a twinkle in his eye: "That
+peroration is from an old sermon of mine, in the days when I used to
+preach. I remember rather liking it, at the time."
+
+"But you still preach?" asked the Rev. Mr. Ware, with lifted brows.
+
+"No! no more! I only talk now and again," answered the priest, with what
+seemed a suggestion of curtness. He made haste to take the conversation
+back again. "The names of these dead-and-gone things are singularly
+pertinacious, though. They survive indefinitely. Take the modern name
+Marmaduke, for example. It strikes one as peculiarly modern, up-to-date,
+doesn't it? Well, it is the oldest name on earth--thousands of years
+older than Adam. It is the ancient Chaldean Meridug, or Merodach. He was
+the young god who interceded continually between the angry, omnipotent
+Ea, his father, and the humble and unhappy Damkina, or Earth, who was
+his mother. This is interesting from another point of view, because
+this Merodach or Marmaduke is, so far as we can see now, the original
+prototype of our 'divine intermediary' idea. I daresay, though, that if
+we could go back still other scores of centuries, we should find whole
+receding series of types of this Christ-myth of ours."
+
+Theron Ware sat upright at the fall of these words, and flung a
+swift, startled look about the room--the instinctive glance of a man
+unexpectedly confronted with peril, and casting desperately about for
+means of defence and escape. For the instant his mind was aflame with
+this vivid impression--that he was among sinister enemies, at the mercy
+of criminals. He half rose under the impelling stress of this feeling,
+with the sweat standing on his brow, and his jaw dropped in a scared and
+bewildered stare.
+
+Then, quite as suddenly, the sense of shock was gone; and it was as if
+nothing at all had happened. He drew a long breath, took another sip of
+his coffee, and found himself all at once reflecting almost pleasurably
+upon the charm of contact with really educated people. He leaned back in
+the big chair again, and smiled to show these men of the world how much
+at his ease he was. It required an effort, he discovered, but he made it
+bravely, and hoped he was succeeding.
+
+"It hasn't been in my power to at all lay hold of what the world keeps
+on learning nowadays about its babyhood," he said. "All I have done is
+to try to preserve an open mind, and to maintain my faith that the more
+we know, the nearer we shall approach the Throne."
+
+Dr. Ledsmar abruptly scuffled his feet on the floor, and took out his
+watch. "I'm afraid--" he began.
+
+"No, no! There's plenty of time," remarked the priest, with his soft
+half-smile and purring tones. "You finish your cigar here with Mr. Ware,
+and excuse me while I run down and get rid of the people in the hall."
+
+Father Forbes tossed his cigar-end into the fender. Then he took from
+the mantel a strange three-cornered black-velvet cap, with a dangling
+silk tassel at the side, put it on his head, and went out.
+
+Theron, being left alone with the doctor, hardly knew what to do or say.
+He took up a paper from the floor beside him, but realized that it would
+be impolite to go farther, and laid it on his knee. Some trace of that
+earlier momentary feeling that he was in hostile hands came back, and
+worried him. He lifted himself upright in the chair, and then became
+conscious that what really disturbed him was the fact that Dr. Ledsmar
+had turned in his seat, crossed his legs, and was contemplating him with
+a gravely concentrated scrutiny through his spectacles.
+
+This uncomfortable gaze kept itself up a long way beyond the point of
+good manners; but the doctor seemed not to mind that at all.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+When Dr. Ledsmar finally spoke, it was in a kindlier tone than the
+young minister had looked for. "I had half a notion of going to hear
+you preach the other evening," he said; "but at the last minute I backed
+out. I daresay I shall pluck up the courage, sooner or later, and really
+go. It must be fully twenty years since I last heard a sermon, and I had
+supposed that that would suffice for the rest of my life. But they
+tell me that you are worth while; and, for some reason or other, I find
+myself curious on the subject."
+
+Involved and dubious though the compliment might be, Theron felt himself
+flushing with satisfaction. He nodded his acknowledgment, and changed
+the topic.
+
+"I was surprised to hear Father Forbes say that he did not preach," he
+remarked.
+
+"Why should he?" asked the doctor, indifferently. "I suppose he hasn't
+more than fifteen parishioners in a thousand who would understand him
+if he did, and of these probably twelve would join in a complaint to his
+Bishop about the heterodox tone of his sermon. There is no point in his
+going to all that pains, merely to incur that risk. Nobody wants him to
+preach, and he has reached an age where personal vanity no longer tempts
+him to do so. What IS wanted of him is that he should be the paternal,
+ceremonial, authoritative head and centre of his flock, adviser,
+monitor, overseer, elder brother, friend, patron, seigneur--whatever you
+like--everything except a bore. They draw the line at that. You see how
+diametrically opposed this Catholic point of view is to the Protestant."
+
+"The difference does seem extremely curious to me," said Theron. "Now,
+those people in the hall--"
+
+"Go on," put in the doctor, as the other faltered hesitatingly. "I know
+what you were going to say. It struck you as odd that he should let them
+wait on the bench there, while he came up here to smoke."
+
+Theron smiled faintly. "I WAS thinking that my--my parishioners wouldn't
+have taken it so quietly. But of course--it is all so different!"
+
+"As chalk from cheese!" said Dr. Ledsmar, lighting a fresh cigar. "I
+daresay every one you saw there had come either to take the pledge, or
+see to it that one of the others took it. That is the chief industry
+in the hall, so far as I have observed. Now discipline is an important
+element in the machinery here. Coming to take the pledge implies that
+you have been drunk and are now ashamed. Both states have their values,
+but they are opposed. Sitting on that bench tends to develop penitence
+to the prejudice of alcoholism. But at no stage would it ever occur to
+the occupant of the bench that he was the best judge of how long he was
+to sit there, or that his priest should interrupt his dinner or general
+personal routine, in order to administer that pledge. Now, I daresay you
+have no people at all coming to 'swear off.'"
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head. "No; if a man with us got as bad as
+all that, he wouldn't come near the church at all. He'd simply drop out,
+and there would be an end to it."
+
+"Quite so," interjected the doctor. "That is the voluntary system. But
+these fellows can't drop out. There's no bottom to the Catholic Church.
+Everything that's in, stays in. If you don't mind my saying so--of
+course I view you all impartially from the outside--but it seems logical
+to me that a church should exist for those who need its help, and not
+for those who by their own profession are so good already that it is
+they who help the church. Now, you turn a man out of your church who
+behaves badly: that must be on the theory that his remaining in would
+injure the church, and that in turn involves the idea that it is the
+excellent character of the parishioners which imparts virtue to the
+church. The Catholics' conception, you see, is quite the converse. Such
+virtue as they keep in stock is on tap, so to speak, here in the church
+itself, and the parishioners come and get some for themselves according
+to their need for it. Some come every day, some only once a year, some
+perhaps never between their baptism and their funeral. But they all
+have a right here, the professional burglar every whit as much as the
+speckless saint. The only stipulation is that they oughtn't to come
+under false pretences: the burglar is in honor bound not to pass himself
+off to his priest as the saint. But that is merely a moral obligation,
+established in the burglar's own interest. It does him no good to come
+unless he feels that he is playing the rules of the game, and one of
+these is confession. If he cheats there, he knows that he is cheating
+nobody but himself, and might much better have stopped away altogether."
+
+Theron nodded his head comprehendingly. He had a great many views about
+the Romanish rite of confession which did not at all square with this
+statement of the case, but this did not seem a specially fit time for
+bringing them forth. There was indeed a sense of languid repletion in
+his mind, as if it had been overfed and wanted to lie down for awhile.
+He contented himself with nodding again, and murmuring reflectively,
+"Yes, it is all strangely different."
+
+His tone was an invitation to silence; and the doctor turned his
+attention to the cigar, studying its ash for a minute with an air
+of deep meditation, and then solemnly blowing out a slow series of
+smoke-rings. Theron watched him with an indolent, placid eye, wondering
+lazily if it was, after all, so very pleasant to smoke.
+
+There fell upon this silence--with a softness so delicate that it came
+almost like a progression in the hush--the sound of sweet music. For a
+little, strain and source were alike indefinite--an impalpable setting
+to harmony of the mellowed light, the perfumed opalescence of the air,
+the luxury and charm of the room. Then it rose as by a sweeping curve of
+beauty, into a firm, calm, severe melody, delicious to the ear, but as
+cold in the mind's vision as moonlit sculpture. It went on upward with
+stately collectedness of power, till the atmosphere seemed all alive
+with the trembling consciousness of the presence of lofty souls, sternly
+pure and pitilessly great.
+
+Theron found himself moved as he had never been before. He almost
+resented the discovery, when it was presented to him by the prosaic,
+mechanical side of his brain, that he was listening to organ-music, and
+that it came through the open window from the church close by. He would
+fain have reclined in his chair and closed his eyes, and saturated
+himself with the uttermost fulness of the sensation. Yet, in absurd
+despite of himself, he rose and moved over to the window.
+
+Only a narrow alley separated the pastorate from the church; Mr. Ware
+could have touched with a walking-stick the opposite wall. Indirectly
+facing him was the arched and mullioned top of a great window. A dim
+light from within shone through the more translucent portions of the
+glass below, throwing out faint little bars of party-colored radiance
+upon the blackness of the deep passage-way. He could vaguely trace by
+these the outlines of some sort of picture on the window. There were
+human figures in it, and--yes--up here in the centre, nearest him, was a
+woman's head. There was a halo about it, engirdling rich, flowing waves
+of reddish hair, the lights in which glowed like flame. The face itself
+was barely distinguishable, but its half-suggested form raised a curious
+sense of resemblance to some other face. He looked at it closely,
+blankly, the noble music throbbing through his brain meanwhile.
+
+"It's that Madden girl!" he suddenly heard a voice say by his side. Dr.
+Ledsmar had followed him to the window, and was close at his shoulder.
+
+Theron's thoughts were upon the puzzling shadowed lineaments on the
+stained glass. He saw now in a flash the resemblance which had baffled
+him. "It IS like her, of course," he said.
+
+"Yes, unfortunately, it IS just like her," replied the doctor, with a
+hostile note in his voice. "Whenever I am dining here, she always goes
+in and kicks up that racket. She knows I hate it."
+
+"Oh, you mean that it is she who is playing," remarked Theron. "I
+thought you referred to--at least--I was thinking of--"
+
+His sentence died off in inconsequence. He had a feeling that he did not
+want to talk with the doctor about the stained-glass likeness. The music
+had sunk away now into fragmentary and unconnected passages, broken here
+and there by abrupt stops. Dr. Ledsmar stretched an arm out past him and
+shut the window. "Let's hear as little of the row as we can," he said,
+and the two went back to their chairs.
+
+"Pardon me for the question," the Rev. Mr. Ware said, after a pause
+which began to affect him as constrained, "but something you said about
+dining--you don't live here, then? In the house, I mean?"
+
+The doctor laughed--a characteristically abrupt, dry little laugh, which
+struck Theron at once as bearing a sort of black-sheep relationship
+to the priest's habitual chuckle. "That must have been puzzling you no
+end," he said--"that notion that the pastorate kept a devil's advocate
+on the premises. No, Mr. Ware, I don't live here. I inhabit a house
+of my own--you may have seen it--an old-fashioned place up beyond the
+race-course, with a sort of tower at the back, and a big garden. But I
+dine here three or four times a week. It is an old arrangement of ours.
+Vincent and I have been friends for many years now. We are quite alone
+in the world, we two--much to our mutual satisfaction. You must come
+up and see me some time; come up and have a look over the books we were
+speaking of."
+
+"I am much obliged," said Theron, without enthusiasm. The thought of the
+doctor by himself did not attract him greatly.
+
+The reservation in his tone seemed to interest the doctor. "I suppose
+you are the first man I have asked in a dozen years," he remarked,
+frankly willing that the young minister should appreciate the favor
+extended him. "It must be fully that since anybody but Vincent Forbes
+has been under my roof; that is, of my own species, I mean."
+
+"You live there quite alone," commented Theron.
+
+"Quite--with my dogs and cats and lizards--and my Chinaman. I mustn't
+forget him." The doctor noted the inquiry in the other's lifted brows,
+and smilingly explained. "He is my solitary servant. Possibly he
+might not appeal to you much; but I can assure you he used to interest
+Octavius a great deal when I first brought him here, ten years ago or
+so. He afforded occupation for all the idle boys in the village for a
+twelve-month at least. They used to lie in wait for him all day long,
+with stones or horse-chestnuts or snowballs, according to the season.
+The Irishmen from the wagon-works nearly killed him once or twice, but
+he patiently lived it all down. The Chinaman has the patience to live
+everything down--the Caucasian races included. He will see us all to
+bed, will that gentleman with the pigtail!"
+
+The music over in the church had lifted itself again into form and
+sequence, and defied the closed window. If anything, it was louder than
+before, and the sonorous roar of the bass-pedals seemed to be shaking
+the very walls. It was something with a big-lunged, exultant, triumphing
+swing in it--something which ought to have been sung on the battlefield
+at the close of day by the whole jubilant army of victors. It was
+impossible to pretend not to be listening to it; but the doctor
+submitted with an obvious scowl, and bit off the tip of his third cigar
+with an annoyed air.
+
+"You don't seem to care much for music," suggested Mr. Ware, when a lull
+came.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar looked up, lighted match in hand. "Say musicians!" he
+growled. "Has it ever occurred to you," he went on, between puffs at the
+flame, "that the only animals who make the noises we call music are of
+the bird family--a debased offshoot of the reptilian creation--the
+very lowest types of the vertebrata now in existence? I insist upon
+the parallel among humans. I have in my time, sir, had considerable
+opportunities for studying close at hand the various orders of mammalia
+who devote themselves to what they describe as the arts. It may sound
+a harsh judgement, but I am convinced that musicians stand on the very
+bottom rung of the ladder in the sub-cellar of human intelligence, even
+lower than painters and actors."
+
+This seemed such unqualified nonsense to the Rev. Mr. Ware that he
+offered no comment whatever upon it. He tried instead to divert his
+thoughts to the stormy strains which rolled in through the vibrating
+brickwork, and to picture to himself the large, capable figure of Miss
+Madden seated in the half-light at the organ-board, swaying to and fro
+in a splendid ecstasy of power as she evoked at will this superb and
+ordered uproar. But the doctor broke insistently in upon his musings.
+
+"All art, so-called, is decay," he said, raising his voice. "When a race
+begins to brood on the beautiful--so-called--it is a sign of rot, of
+getting ready to fall from the tree. Take the Jews--those marvellous old
+fellows--who were never more than a handful, yet have imposed the rule
+of their ideas and their gods upon us for fifteen hundred years. Why?
+They were forbidden by their most fundamental law to make sculptures or
+pictures. That was at a time when the Egyptians, when the Assyrians, and
+other Semites, were running to artistic riot. Every great museum in
+the world now has whole floors devoted to statues from the Nile, and
+marvellous carvings from the palaces of Sargon and Assurbanipal. You
+can get the artistic remains of the Jews during that whole period into
+a child's wheelbarrow. They had the sense and strength to penalize art;
+they alone survived. They saw the Egyptians go, the Assyrians go, the
+Greeks go, the late Romans go, the Moors in Spain go--all the artistic
+peoples perish. They remained triumphing over all. Now at last their
+long-belated apogee is here; their decline is at hand. I am told that in
+this present generation in Europe the Jews are producing a great lot of
+young painters and sculptors and actors, just as for a century they have
+been producing famous composers and musicians. That means the end of the
+Jews!"
+
+"What! have you only got as far as that?" came the welcome interruption
+of a cheery voice. Father Forbes had entered the room, and stood looking
+down with a whimsical twinkle in his eye from one to the other of his
+guests.
+
+"You must have been taken over the ground at a very slow pace, Mr.
+Ware," he continued, chuckling softly, "to have arrived merely at the
+collapse of the New Jerusalem. I fancied I had given him time enough to
+bring you straight up to the end of all of us, with that Chinaman of
+his gently slapping our graves with his pigtail. That's where the doctor
+always winds up, if he's allowed to run his course."
+
+"It has all been very interesting, extremely so, I assure you," faltered
+Theron. It had become suddenly apparent to him that he desired nothing
+so much as to make his escape--that he had indeed only been waiting for
+the host's return to do so.
+
+He rose at this, and explained that he must be going. No special effort
+being put forth to restrain him, he presently made his way out, Father
+Forbes hospitably following him down to the door, and putting a very
+gracious cordiality into his adieux.
+
+The night was warm and black. Theron stood still in it the moment the
+pastorate door had closed; the sudden darkness was so thick that it
+was as if he had closed his eyes. His dominant sensation was of a deep
+relief and rest after some undue fatigue. It crossed his mind that
+drunken men probably felt like that as they leaned against things on
+their way home. He was affected himself, he saw, by the weariness and
+half-nausea following a mental intoxication. The conceit pleased him,
+and he smiled to himself as he turned and took the first homeward steps.
+It must be growing late, he thought. Alice would be wondering as she
+waited.
+
+There was a street lamp at the corner, and as he walked toward it he
+noted all at once that his feet were keeping step to the movement of
+the music proceeding from the organ within the church--a vaguely
+processional air, marked enough in measure, but still with a dreamy
+effect. It became a pleasure to identify his progress with the quaint
+rhythm of sound as he sauntered along. He discovered, as he neared
+the light, that he was instinctively stepping over the seams in the
+flagstone sidewalk as he had done as a boy. He smiled again at this.
+There was something exceptionally juvenile and buoyant about his mood,
+now that he examined it. He set it down as a reaction from that doctor's
+extravagant and incendiary talk. One thing was certain--he would never
+be caught up at that house beyond the race-course, with its reptiles and
+its Chinaman. Should he ever even go to the pastorate again? He decided
+not to quite definitely answer THAT in the negative, but as he felt now,
+the chances were all against it.
+
+Turning the corner, and walking off into the shadows along the side
+of the huge church building, Theron noted, almost at the end of the
+edifice, a small door--the entrance to a porch coming out to the
+sidewalk--which stood wide open. A thin, pale, vertical line of light
+showed that the inner door, too, was ajar.
+
+Through this wee aperture the organ-music, reduced and mellowed by
+distance, came to him again with that same curious, intimate, personal
+relation which had so moved him at the start, before the doctor closed
+the window. It was as if it was being played for him alone.
+
+He paused for a doubting minute or two, with bowed head, listening to
+the exquisite harmony which floated out to caress and soothe and enfold
+him. There was no spiritual, or at least pious, effect in it now.
+He fancied that it must be secular music, or, if not, then something
+adapted to marriage ceremonies--rich, vivid, passionate, a celebration
+of beauty and the glory of possession, with its ruling note of joy only
+heightened by soft, wooing interludes, and here and there the tremor of
+a fond, timid little sob.
+
+Theron turned away irresolutely, half frightened at the undreamt-of
+impression this music was making upon him. Then, all at once, he wheeled
+and stepped boldly into the porch, pushing the inner door open and
+hearing it rustle against its leathern frame as it swung to behind him.
+
+He had never been inside a Catholic church before.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Jeremiah Madden was supposed to be probably the richest man in Octavius.
+There was no doubt at all about his being its least pretentious citizen.
+
+The huge and ornate modern mansion which he had built, putting to shame
+every other house in the place, gave an effect of ostentation to the
+Maddens as a family; it seemed only to accentuate the air of humility
+which enveloped Jeremiah as with a garment. Everybody knew some version
+of the many tales afloat which, in a kindly spirit, illustrated the
+incongruity between him and his splendid habitation. Some had it that he
+slept in the shed. Others told whimsical stories of his sitting alone in
+the kitchen evenings, smoking his old clay pipe, and sorrowing because
+the second Mrs. Madden would not suffer the pigs and chickens to come
+in and bear him company. But no matter how comic the exaggeration,
+these legends were invariably amiable. It lay in no man's mouth to speak
+harshly of Jeremiah Madden.
+
+He had been born a Connemara peasant, and he would die one. When he
+was ten years old he had seen some of his own family, and most of his
+neighbors, starve to death. He could remember looking at the stiffened
+figure of a woman stretched on the stones by the roadside, with the
+green stain of nettles on her white lips. A girl five years or so
+older than himself, also a Madden and distantly related, had started
+in despair off across the mountains to the town where it was said the
+poor-law officers were dealing out food. He could recall her coming back
+next day, wild-eyed with hunger and the fever; the officers had refused
+her relief because her bare legs were not wholly shrunken to the bone.
+"While there's a calf on the shank, there's no starvation," they had
+explained to her. The girl died without profiting by this official
+apothegm. The boy found it burned ineffaceably upon his brain. Now,
+after a lapse of more than forty years, it seemed the thing that he
+remembered best about Ireland.
+
+He had drifted westward as an unconsidered, unresisting item in that
+vast flight of the famine years. Others whom he rubbed against in that
+melancholy exodus, and deemed of much greater promise than himself, had
+done badly. Somehow he did well. He learned the wheelwright's trade,
+and really that seemed all there was to tell. The rest had been calm
+and sequent progression--steady employment as a journeyman first; then
+marriage and a house and lot; the modest start as a master; the move to
+Octavius and cheap lumber; the growth of his business, always marked of
+late years stupendous--all following naturally, easily, one thing out of
+another. Jeremiah encountered the idea among his fellows, now and again,
+that he was entitled to feel proud of all this. He smiled to himself at
+the thought, and then sent a sigh after the smile. What was it all but
+empty and transient vanity? The score of other Connemara boys he had
+known--none very fortunate, several broken tragically in prison or the
+gutter, nearly all now gone the way of flesh--were as good as he. He
+could not have it in his heart to take credit for his success; it would
+have been like sneering over their poor graves.
+
+Jeremiah Madden was now fifty-three--a little man of a reddened,
+weather-worn skin and a meditative, almost saddened, aspect. He had blue
+eyes, but his scanty iron-gray hair showed raven black in its shadows.
+The width and prominence of his cheek-bones dominated all one's
+recollections of his face. The long vertical upper-lip and irregular
+teeth made, in repose, an unshapely mouth; its smile, though, sweetened
+the whole countenance. He wore a fringe of stiff, steel-colored beard,
+passing from ear to ear under his chin. His week-day clothes were as
+simple as his workaday manners, fitting his short black pipe and his
+steadfast devotion to his business. On Sundays he dressed with a certain
+rigor of respectability, all in black, and laid aside tobacco, at least
+to the public view. He never missed going to the early Low Mass, quite
+alone. His family always came later, at the ten o'clock High Mass.
+
+There had been, at one time or another, a good many members of this
+family. Two wives had borne Jeremiah Madden a total of over a dozen
+children. Of these there survived now only two of the first Mrs.
+Madden's offspring--Michael and Celia--and a son of the present wife,
+who had been baptized Terence, but called himself Theodore. This
+minority of the family inhabited the great new house on Main Street.
+Jeremiah went every Sunday afternoon by himself to kneel in the presence
+of the majority, there where they lay in Saint Agnes' consecrated
+ground. If the weather was good, he generally extended his walk through
+the fields to an old deserted Catholic burial-field, which had been used
+only in the first years after the famine invasion, and now was clean
+forgotten. The old wagon-maker liked to look over the primitive,
+neglected stones which marked the graves of these earlier exiles. Fully
+half of the inscriptions mentioned his County Galway--there were two
+naming the very parish adjoining his. The latest date on any stone was
+of the remoter 'fifties. They had all been stricken down, here in this
+strange land with its bitter winters, while the memory of their own
+soft, humid, gentle west-coast air was fresh within them. Musing upon
+the clumsy sculpture, with its "R.I.P.," or "Pray for the Soul of," half
+to be guessed under the stain and moss of a generation, there would seem
+to him but a step from this present to that heart-rending, awful past.
+What had happened between was a meaningless vision--as impersonal as the
+passing of the planets overhead. He rarely had an impulse to tears
+in the new cemetery, where his ten children were. He never left this
+weed-grown, forsaken old God's-acre dry-eyed.
+
+One must not construct from all this the image of a melancholy man, as
+his fellows met and knew him. Mr. Madden kept his griefs, racial and
+individual, for his own use. To the men about him in the offices and
+the shops he presented day after day, year after year, an imperturbable
+cheeriness of demeanor. He had been always fortunate in the selection of
+lieutenants and chief helpers. Two of these had grown now into partners,
+and were almost as much a part of the big enterprise as Jeremiah
+himself. They spoke often of their inability to remember any unjust or
+petulant word of his--much less any unworthy deed. Once they had seen
+him in a great rage, all the more impressive because he said next to
+nothing. A thoughtless fellow told a dirty story in the presence of
+some apprentices; and Madden, listening to this, drove the offender
+implacably from his employ. It was years now since any one who knew him
+had ventured upon lewd pleasantries in his hearing. Jokes of the sort
+which women might hear he was very fond of though he had not much humor
+of his own. Of books he knew nothing whatever, and he made only the most
+perfunctory pretence now and again of reading the newspapers.
+
+The elder son Michael was very like his father--diligent, unassuming,
+kindly, and simple--a plain, tall, thin red man of nearly thirty, who
+toiled in paper cap and rolled-up shirt-sleeves as the superintendent in
+the saw-mill, and put on no airs whatever as the son of the master.
+If there was surprise felt at his not being taken into the firm as a
+partner, he gave no hint of sharing it. He attended to his religious
+duties with great zeal, and was President of the Sodality as a matter
+of course. This was regarded as his blind side; and young employees
+who cultivated it, and made broad their phylacteries under his notice,
+certainly had an added chance of getting on well in the works. To some
+few whom he knew specially well, Michael would confess that if he
+had had the brains for it, he should have wished to be a priest. He
+displayed no inclination to marry.
+
+The other son, Terence, was some eight years younger, and seemed the
+product of a wholly different race. The contrast between Michael's sandy
+skin and long gaunt visage and this dark boy's handsome, rounded face,
+with its prettily curling black hair, large, heavily fringed brown
+eyes, and delicately modelled features, was not more obvious than their
+temperamental separation. This second lad had been away for years at
+school,--indeed, at a good many schools, for no one seemed to manage
+to keep him long. He had been with the Jesuits at Georgetown, with the
+Christian Brothers at Manhattan; the sectarian Mt. St. Mary's and the
+severely secular Annapolis had both been tried, and proved misfits.
+The young man was home again now, and save that his name had become
+Theodore, he appeared in no wise changed from the beautiful, wilful,
+bold, and showy boy who had gone away in his teens. He was still rather
+small for his years, but so gracefully moulded in form, and so perfectly
+tailored, that the fact seemed rather an advantage than otherwise.
+He never dreamed of going near the wagon-works, but he did go a good
+deal--in fact, most of the time--to the Nedahma Club. His mother spoke
+often to her friends about her fears for his health. He never spoke to
+his friends about his mother at all.
+
+The second Mrs. Madden did not, indeed, appeal strongly to the family
+pride. She had been a Miss Foley, a dress-maker, and an old maid.
+Jeremiah had married her after a brief widowerhood, principally
+because she was the sister of his parish priest, and had a considerable
+reputation for piety. It was at a time when the expansion of his
+business was promising certain wealth, and suggesting the removal to
+Octavius. He was conscious of a notion that his obligations to social
+respectability were increasing; it was certain that the embarrassments
+of a motherless family were. Miss Foley had shown a good deal of
+attention to his little children. She was not ill-looking; she bore
+herself with modesty; she was the priest's sister--the niece once
+removed of a vicar-general. And so it came about.
+
+Although those most concerned did not say so, everybody could see from
+the outset the pity of its ever having come about at all. The pious
+and stiffly respectable priest's sister had been harmless enough as
+a spinster. It made the heart ache to contemplate her as a wife.
+Incredibly narrow-minded, ignorant, suspicious, vain, and sour-tempered,
+she must have driven a less equable and well-rooted man than Jeremiah
+Madden to drink or flight. He may have had his temptations, but they
+made no mark on the even record of his life. He only worked the harder,
+concentrating upon his business those extra hours which another sort of
+home-life would have claimed instead. The end of twenty years found him
+a rich man, but still toiling pertinaciously day by day, as if he had
+his wage to earn. In the great house which had been built to please, or
+rather placate, his wife, he kept to himself as much as possible. The
+popular story of his smoking alone in the kitchen was more or less
+true; only Michael as a rule sat with him, too weak-lunged for tobacco
+himself, but reading stray scraps from the papers to the lonely old man,
+and talking with him about the works, the while Jeremiah meditatively
+sucked his clay pipe. One or two evenings in the week the twain spent up
+in Celia's part of the house, listening with the awe of simple, honest
+mechanics to the music she played for them.
+
+Celia was to them something indefinably less, indescribably more, than
+a daughter and sister. They could not think there had ever been anything
+like her before in the world; the notion of criticising any deed or word
+of hers would have appeared to them monstrous and unnatural.
+
+She seemed to have come up to this radiant and wise and marvellously
+talented womanhood of hers, to their minds, quite spontaneously. There
+had been a little Celia--a red-headed, sulky, mutinous slip of a girl,
+always at war with her step-mother, and affording no special comfort or
+hope to the rest of the family. Then there was a long gap, during which
+the father, four times a year, handed Michael a letter he had received
+from the superioress of a distant convent, referring with cold formality
+to the studies and discipline by which Miss Madden might profit more if
+she had been better brought up, and enclosing a large bill. Then all at
+once they beheld a big Celia, whom they spoke of as being home again,
+but who really seemed never to have been there before--a tall, handsome,
+confident young woman, swift of tongue and apprehension, appearing to
+know everything there was to be known by the most learned, able to paint
+pictures, carve wood, speak in divers languages, and make music for the
+gods, yet with it all a very proud lady, one might say a queen.
+
+The miracle of such a Celia as this impressed itself even upon the
+step-mother. Mrs. Madden had looked forward with a certain grim
+tightening of her combative jaws to the home-coming of the "red-head."
+She felt herself much more the fine lady now than she had been when the
+girl went away. She had her carriage now, and the magnificent new house
+was nearly finished, and she had a greater number of ailments, and
+spent far more money on doctor's bills, than any other lady in the
+whole section. The flush of pride in her greatest achievement up to
+date--having the most celebrated of New York physicians brought up to
+Octavius by special train--still prickled in her blood. It was in
+all the papers, and the admiration of the flatterers and
+"soft-sawdherers"--wives of Irish merchants and smaller professional men
+who formed her social circle--was raising visions in her poor head of
+going next year with Theodore to Saratoga, and fastening the attention
+of the whole fashionable republic upon the variety and resources of her
+invalidism. Mrs. Madden's fancy did not run to the length of seeing her
+step-daughter also at Saratoga; it pictured her still as the sullen
+and hated "red-head," moping defiantly in corners, or courting by
+her insolence the punishments which leaped against their leash in the
+step-mother's mind to get at her.
+
+The real Celia, when she came, fairly took Mrs. Madden's breath away.
+The peevish little plans for annoyance and tyranny, the resolutions born
+of ignorant and jealous egotism, found themselves swept out of sight by
+the very first swirl of Celia's dress-train, when she came down from her
+room robed in peacock blue. The step-mother could only stare.
+
+Now, after two years of it, Mrs. Madden still viewed her step-daughter
+with round-eyed uncertainty, not unmixed with wrathful fear. She still
+drove about behind two magnificent horses; the new house had become
+almost tiresome by familiarity; her pre-eminence in the interested minds
+of the Dearborn County Medical Society was as towering as ever, but
+somehow it was all different. There was a note of unreality nowadays
+in Mrs. Donnelly's professions of wonder at her bearing up under
+her multiplied maladies; there was almost a leer of mockery in the
+sympathetic smirk with which the Misses Mangan listened to her symptoms.
+Even the doctors, though they kept their faces turned toward her,
+obviously did not pay much attention; the people in the street seemed no
+longer to look at her and her equipage at all. Worst of all, something
+of the meaning of this managed to penetrate her own mind. She caught now
+and again a dim glimpse of herself as others must have been seeing her
+for years--as a stupid, ugly, boastful, and bad-tempered old nuisance.
+And it was always as if she saw this in a mirror held up by Celia.
+
+Of open discord there had been next to none. Celia would not permit it,
+and showed this so clearly from the start that there was scarcely need
+for her saying it. It seemed hardly necessary for her to put into words
+any of her desires, for that matter. All existing arrangements in the
+Madden household seemed to shrink automatically and make room for her,
+whichever way she walked. A whole quarter of the unfinished house set
+itself apart for her. Partitions altered themselves; door-ways moved
+across to opposite sides; a recess opened itself, tall and deep, for it
+knew not what statue--simply because, it seemed, the Lady Celia willed
+it so.
+
+When the family moved into this mansion, it was with a consciousness
+that the only one who really belonged there was Celia. She alone could
+behave like one perfectly at home. It seemed entirely natural to the
+others that she should do just what she liked, shut them off from her
+portion of the house, take her meals there if she felt disposed, and
+keep such hours as pleased her instant whim. If she awakened them at
+midnight by her piano, or deferred her breakfast to the late afternoon,
+they felt that it must be all right, since Celia did it. She had one
+room furnished with only divans and huge, soft cushions, its walls
+covered with large copies of statuary not too strictly clothed, which
+she would suffer no one, not even the servants, to enter. Michael
+fancied sometimes, when he passed the draped entrance to this sacred
+chamber, that the portiere smelt of tobacco, but he would not have
+spoken of it, even had he been sure. Old Jeremiah, whose established
+habit it was to audit minutely the expenses of his household, covered
+over round sums to Celia's separate banking account, upon the mere
+playful hint of her holding her check-book up, without a dream of
+questioning her.
+
+That the step-mother had joy, or indeed anything but gall and wormwood,
+out of all this is not to be pretended. There lingered along in the
+recollection of the family some vague memories of her having tried to
+assert an authority over Celia's comings and goings at the outset, but
+they grouped themselves as only parts of the general disorder of moving
+and settling, which a fort-night or so quite righted. Mrs. Madden
+still permitted herself a certain license of hostile comment when her
+step-daughter was not present, and listened with gratification to what
+the women of her acquaintance ventured upon saying in the same spirit;
+but actual interference or remonstrance she never offered nowadays.
+The two rarely met, for that matter, and exchanged only the baldest and
+curtest forms of speech.
+
+Celia Madden interested all Octavius deeply. This she must have done
+in any case, if only because she was the only daughter of its richest
+citizen. But the bold, luxuriant quality of her beauty, the original
+and piquant freedom of her manners, the stories told in gossip about
+her lawlessness at home, her intellectual attainments, and artistic
+vagaries--these were even more exciting. The unlikelihood of her
+marrying any one--at least any Octavian--was felt to add a certain
+romantic zest to the image she made on the local perceptions. There was
+no visible young Irishman at all approaching the social and financial
+standard of the Maddens; it was taken for granted that a mixed marriage
+was quite out of the question in this case. She seemed to have more
+business about the church than even the priest. She was always playing
+the organ, or drilling the choir, or decorating the altars with flowers,
+or looking over the robes of the acolytes for rents and stains, or going
+in or out of the pastorate. Clearly this was not the sort of girl to
+take a Protestant husband.
+
+The gossip of the town concerning her was, however, exclusively
+Protestant. The Irish spoke of her, even among themselves, but seldom.
+There was no occasion for them to pretend to like her: they did not know
+her, except in the most distant and formal fashion. Even the members of
+the choir, of both sexes, had the sense of being held away from her
+at haughty arm's length. No single parishioner dreamed of calling her
+friend. But when they referred to her, it was always with a cautious and
+respectful reticence. For one thing, she was the daughter of their chief
+man, the man they most esteemed and loved. For another, reservations
+they may have had in their souls about her touched close upon a
+delicately sore spot. It could not escape their notice that their
+Protestant neighbors were watching her with vigilant curiosity, and with
+a certain tendency to wink when her name came into conversation along
+with that of Father Forbes. It had never yet got beyond a tendency--the
+barest fluttering suggestion of a tempted eyelid--but the whole Irish
+population of the place felt themselves to be waiting, with clenched
+fists but sinking hearts, for the wink itself.
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware had not caught even the faintest hint of these
+overtures to suspicion.
+
+When he had entered the huge, dark, cool vault of the church, he could
+see nothing at first but a faint light up over the gallery, far at the
+other end. Then, little by little, his surroundings shaped themselves
+out of the gloom. To his right was a rail and some broad steps rising
+toward a softly confused mass of little gray vertical bars and the pale
+twinkle of tiny spots of gilded reflection, which he made out in the
+dusk to be the candles and trappings of the altar. Overhead the great
+arches faded away from foundations of dimly discernible capitals
+into utter blackness. There was a strange medicinal odor--as of cubeb
+cigarettes--in the air.
+
+After a little pause, he tiptoed noiselessly up the side aisle toward
+the end of the church--toward the light above the gallery. This radiance
+from a single gas-jet expanded as he advanced, and spread itself upward
+over a burnished row of monster metal pipes, which went towering into
+the darkness like giants. They were roaring at him now--a sonorous,
+deafening, angry bellow, which made everything about him vibrate. The
+gallery balustrade hid the keyboard and the organist from view. There
+were only these jostling brazen tubes, as big round as trees and as
+tall, trembling with their own furious thunder. It was for all the world
+as if he had wandered into some vast tragical, enchanted cave, and was
+being drawn against his will--like fascinated bird and python--toward
+fate at the savage hands of these swollen and enraged genii.
+
+He stumbled in the obscure light over a kneeling-bench, making a
+considerable racket. On the instant the noise from the organ ceased, and
+he saw the black figure of a woman rise above the gallery-rail and look
+down.
+
+"Who is it?" the indubitable voice of Miss Madden demanded sharply.
+
+Theron had a sudden sheepish notion of turning and running. With the
+best grace he could summon, he called out an explanation instead.
+
+"Wait a minute. I'm through now. I'm coming down," she returned. He
+thought there was a note of amusement in her tone.
+
+She came to him a moment later, accompanied by a thin, tall man, whom
+Theron could barely see in the dark, now that the organ-light too was
+gone. This man lighted a match or two to enable them to make their way
+out.
+
+When they were on the sidewalk, Celia spoke: "Walk on ahead, Michael!"
+she said. "I have some matters to speak of with Mr. Ware."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+"Well, what did you think of Dr. Ledsmar?"
+
+The girl's abrupt question came as a relief to Theron. They were walking
+along in a darkness so nearly complete that he could see next to nothing
+of his companion. For some reason, this seemed to suggest a sort of
+impropriety. He had listened to the footsteps of the man ahead--whom
+he guessed to be a servant--and pictured him as intent upon getting up
+early next morning to tell everybody that the Methodist minister had
+stolen into the Catholic church at night to walk home with Miss Madden.
+That was going to be very awkward--yes, worse than awkward! It might
+mean ruin itself. She had mentioned aloud that she had matters to talk
+over with him: that of course implied confidences, and the man might
+put heaven only knew what construction on that. It was notorious that
+servants did ascribe the very worst motives to those they worked for.
+The bare thought of the delight an Irish servant would have in also
+dragging a Protestant clergyman into the thing was sickening. And what
+could she want to talk to him about, anyway? The minute of silence
+stretched itself out upon his nerves into an interminable period of
+anxious unhappiness. Her mention of the doctor at last somehow, seemed
+to lighten the situation.
+
+"Oh, I thought he was very smart." he made haste to answer. "Wouldn't
+it be better--to--keep close to your man? He--may--think we've gone some
+other way."
+
+"It wouldn't matter if he did," remarked Celia. She appeared to
+comprehend his nervousness and take pity on it, for she added, "It is
+my brother Michael, as good a soul as ever lived. He is quite used to my
+ways."
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware drew a long comforting breath. "Oh, I see! He went
+with you to--bring you home."
+
+"To blow the organ," said the girl in the dark, correctingly. "But about
+that doctor; did you like him?"
+
+"Well," Theron began, "'like' is rather a strong word for so short
+an acquaintance. He talked very well; that is, fluently. But he is so
+different from any other man I have come into contact with that--"
+
+"What I wanted you to say was that you hated him," put in Celia, firmly.
+
+"I don't make a practice of saying that of anybody," returned Theron, so
+much at his ease again that he put an effect of gentle, smiling reproof
+into the words. "And why specially should I make an exception for him?"
+
+"Because he's a beast!"
+
+Theron fancied that he understood. "I noticed that he seemed not to have
+much of an ear for music," he commented, with a little laugh. "He shut
+down the window when you began to play. His doing so annoyed me, because
+I--I wanted very much to hear it all. I never heard such music before.
+I--I came into the church to hear more of it; but then you stopped!"
+
+"I will play for you some other time," Celia said, answering the
+reproach in his tone. "But tonight I wanted to talk with you instead."
+
+She kept silent, in spite of this, so long now that Theron was on the
+point of jestingly asking when the talk was to begin. Then she put a
+question abruptly--
+
+"It is a conventional way of putting it, but are you fond of poetry, Mr.
+Ware?"
+
+"Well, yes, I suppose I am," replied Theron, much mystified. "I can't
+say that I am any great judge; but I like the things that I like--and--"
+
+"Meredith," interposed Celia, "makes one of his women, Emilia in
+England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in
+cages, always going to one end and back again. Does it impress you that
+way?"
+
+"I don't know that it does," said he, dubiously. It seemed, however,
+to be her whim to talk literature, and he went on: "I've hardly read
+Meredith at all. I once borrowed his 'Lucile,' but somehow I never got
+interested in it. I heard a recitation of his once, though--a piece
+about a dead wife, and the husband and another man quarrelling as to
+whose portrait was in the locket on her neck, and of their going up to
+settle the dispute, and finding that it was the likeness of a third man,
+a young priest--and though it was very striking, it didn't give me a
+thirst to know his other poems. I fancied I shouldn't like them. But
+I daresay I was wrong. As I get older, I find that I take less narrow
+views of literature--that is, of course, of light literature--and
+that--that--"
+
+Celia mercifully stopped him. "The reason I asked you was--" she began,
+and then herself paused. "Or no,--never mind that--tell me something
+else. Are you fond of pictures, statuary, the beautiful things of the
+world? Do great works of art, the big achievements of the big artists,
+appeal to you, stir you up?"
+
+"Alas! that is something I can only guess at myself," answered Theron,
+humbly. "I have always lived in little places. I suppose, from your
+point of view, I have never seen a good painting in my life. I can only
+say this, though--that it has always weighed on my mind as a great and
+sore deprivation, this being shut out from knowing what others mean when
+they talk and write about art. Perhaps that may help you to get at what
+you are after. If I ever went to New York, I feel that one of the first
+things I should do would be to see all the picture galleries; is that
+what you meant? And--would you mind telling me--why you--?"
+
+"Why I asked you?" Celia supplied his halting question. "No, I DON'T
+mind. I have a reason for wanting to know--to satisfy myself whether I
+had guessed rightly or not--about the kind of man you are. I mean in the
+matter of temperament and bent of mind and tastes."
+
+The girl seemed to be speaking seriously, and without intent to offend.
+Theron did not find any comment ready, but walked along by her side,
+wondering much what it was all about.
+
+"I daresay you think me 'too familiar on short acquaintance,'" she
+continued, after a little.
+
+"My dear Miss Madden!" he protested perfunctorily.
+
+"No; it is a matter of a good deal of importance," she went on. "I can
+see that you are going to be thrown into friendship, close contact, with
+Father Forbes. He likes you, and you can't help liking him. There is
+nobody else in this raw, overgrown, empty-headed place for you and him
+TO like, nobody except that man, that Dr. Ledsmar. And if you like HIM,
+I shall hate you! He has done mischief enough already. I am counting on
+you to help undo it, and to choke him off from doing more. It would be
+different if you were an ordinary Orthodox minister, all encased like
+a terrapin in prejudices and nonsense. Of course, if you had been THAT
+kind, we should never have got to know you at all. But when I saw you in
+MacEvoy's cottage there, it was plain that you were one of US--I mean a
+MAN, and not a marionette or a mummy. I am talking very frankly to you,
+you see. I want you on my side, against that doctor and his heartless,
+bloodless science."
+
+"I feel myself very heartily on your side," replied Theron. She had set
+their progress at a slower pace, now that the lights of the main
+street were drawing near, as if to prolong their talk. All his earlier
+reservations had fled. It was almost as if she were a parishioner of
+his own. "I need hardly tell you that the doctor's whole attitude
+toward--toward revelation--was deeply repugnant to me. It doesn't make
+it any the less hateful to call it science. I am afraid, though," he
+went on hesitatingly, "that there are difficulties in the way of my
+helping, as you call it. You see, the very fact of my being a Methodist
+minister, and his being a Catholic priest, rather puts my interference
+out of the question."
+
+"No; that doesn't matter a button," said Celia, lightly. "None of us
+think of that at all."
+
+"There is the other embarrassment, then," pursued Theron, diffidently,
+"that Father Forbes is a vastly broader and deeper scholar--in all these
+matters--than I am. How could I possibly hope to influence him by my
+poor arguments? I don't know even the alphabet of the language he thinks
+in--on these subjects, I mean."
+
+"Of course you don't!" interposed the girl, with a confidence which the
+other, for all his meekness, rather winced under. "That wasn't what
+I meant at all. We don't want arguments from our friends: we want
+sympathies, sensibilities, emotional bonds. The right person's silence
+is worth more for companionship than the wisest talk in the world from
+anybody else. It isn't your mind that is needed here, or what you know;
+it is your heart, and what you feel. You are full of poetry, of ideals,
+of generous, unselfish impulses. You see the human, the warm-blooded
+side of things. THAT is what is really valuable. THAT is how you can
+help!"
+
+"You overestimate me sadly," protested Theron, though with considerable
+tolerance for her error in his tone. "But you ought to tell me something
+about this Dr. Ledsmar. He spoke of being an old friend of the pr--of
+Father Forbes."
+
+"Oh, yes, they've always known each other; that is, for many years. They
+were professors together in a college once, heaven only knows how long
+ago. Then they separated, I fancy they quarrelled, too, before they
+parted. The doctor came here, where some relative had left him the
+place he lives in. Then in time the Bishop chanced to send Father Forbes
+here--that was about three years ago,--and the two men after a while
+renewed their old relations. They dine together; that is the doctor's
+stronghold. He knows more about eating than any other man alive, I
+believe. He studies it as you would study a language. He has taught
+old Maggie, at the pastorate there, to cook like the mother of all
+the Delmonicos. And while they sit and stuff themselves, or loll about
+afterward like gorged snakes, they think it is smart to laugh at all the
+sweet and beautiful things in life, and to sneer at people who believe
+in ideals, and to talk about mankind being merely a fortuitous product
+of fermentation, and twaddle of that sort. It makes me sick!"
+
+"I can readily see," said Theron, with sympathy, "how such a cold,
+material, and infidel influence as that must shock and revolt an
+essentially religious temperament like yours."
+
+Miss Madden looked up at him. They had turned into the main street, and
+there was light enough for him to detect something startlingly like a
+grin on her beautiful face.
+
+"But I'm not religious at all, you know," he heard her say. "I'm as
+Pagan as--anything! Of course there are forms to be observed, and so on;
+I rather like them than otherwise. I can make them serve very well for
+my own system; for I am myself, you know, an out-an-out Greek."
+
+"Why, I had supposed that you were full blooded Irish," the Rev. Mr.
+Ware found himself remarking, and then on the instant was overwhelmed by
+the consciousness that he had said a foolish thing. Precisely where the
+folly lay he did not know, but it was impossible to mistake the gesture
+of annoyance which his companion had instinctively made at his words.
+She had widened the distance between them now, and quickened her step.
+They went on in silence till they were within a block of her house.
+Several people had passed them who Theron felt sure must have recognized
+them both.
+
+"What I meant was," the girl all at once began, drawing nearer again,
+and speaking with patient slowness, "that I find myself much more in
+sympathy with the Greek thought, the Greek theology of the beautiful
+and the strong, the Greek philosophy of life, and all that, than what is
+taught nowadays. Personally, I take much more stock in Plato than I
+do in Peter. But of course it is a wholly personal affair; I had no
+business to bother you with it. And for that matter, I oughtn't to have
+troubled you with any of our--"
+
+"I assure you, Miss Madden!" the young minister began, with fervor.
+
+"No," she broke in, in a resigned and even downcast tone; "let it all be
+as if I hadn't spoken. Don't mind anything I have said. If it is to be,
+it will be. You can't say more than that, can you?"
+
+She looked into his face again, and her large eyes produced an
+impression of deep melancholy, which Theron found himself somehow
+impelled to share. Things seemed all at once to have become very sad
+indeed.
+
+"It is one of my unhappy nights," she explained, in gloomy confidence.
+"I get them every once in a while--as if some vicious planet or other
+was crossing in front of my good star--and then I'm a caution to snakes.
+I shut myself up--that's the only thing to do--and have it out with
+myself I didn't know but the organ-music would calm me down, but it
+hasn't. I shan't sleep a wink tonight, but just rage around from one
+room to another, piling all the cushions from the divans on to the
+floor, and then kicking them away again. Do YOU ever have fits like
+that?"
+
+Theron was able to reply with a good conscience in the negative. It
+occurred to him to add, with jocose intent: "I am curious to know,
+do these fits, as you call them, occupy a prominent part in Grecian
+philosophy as a general rule?"
+
+Celia gave a little snort, which might have signified amusement, but did
+not speak until they were upon her own sidewalk. "There is my brother,
+waiting at the gate," she said then, briefly.
+
+"Well, then, I will bid you good-night here, I think," Theron remarked,
+coming to a halt, and offering his hand. "It must be getting very
+late, and my--that is--I have to be up particularly early tomorrow. So
+good-night; I hope you will be feeling ever so much better in spirits in
+the morning."
+
+"Oh, that doesn't matter," replied the girl, listlessly. "It's a very
+paltry little affair, this life of ours, at the best of it. Luckily it's
+soon done with--like a bad dream."
+
+"Tut! Tut! I won't have you talk like that!" interrupted Theron, with a
+swift and smart assumption of authority. "Such talk isn't sensible, and
+it isn't good. I have no patience with it!"
+
+"Well, try and have a little patience with ME, anyway, just for
+tonight," said Celia, taking the reproof with gentlest humility, rather
+to her censor's surprise. "I really am unhappy tonight, Mr. Ware, very
+unhappy. It seems as if all at once the world had swelled out in size
+a thousandfold, and that poor me had dwindled down to the merest wee
+little red-headed atom--the most helpless and forlorn and lonesome of
+atoms at that." She seemed to force a sorrowful smile on her face as she
+added: "But all the same it has done me good to be with you--I am sure
+it has--and I daresay that by tomorrow I shall be quite out of the
+blues. Good-night, Mr. Ware. Forgive my making such an exhibition of
+myself I WAS going to be such a fine early Greek, you know, and I have
+turned out only a late Milesian--quite of the decadence. I shall do
+better next time. And good-night again, and ever so many thanks."
+
+She was walking briskly away toward the gate now, where the shadowy
+Michael still patiently stood. Theron strode off in the opposite
+direction, taking long, deliberate steps, and bowing his head in
+thought. He had his hands behind his back, as was his wont, and the
+sense of their recent contact with her firm, ungloved hands was,
+curiously enough, the thing which pushed itself uppermost in his mind.
+There had been a frank, almost manly vigor in her grasp; he said
+to himself that of course that came from her playing so much on the
+keyboard; the exercise naturally would give her large, robust hands.
+
+Suddenly he remembered about the piano; he had quite forgotten to
+solicit her aid in selecting it. He turned, upon the impulse, to go
+back. She had not entered the gate as yet, but stood, shiningly visible
+under the street lamp, on the sidewalk, and she was looking in his
+direction. He turned again like a shot, and started homeward.
+
+The front door of the parsonage was unlocked, and he made his way on
+tiptoe through the unlighted hall to the living-room. The stuffy air
+here was almost suffocating with the evil smell of a kerosene
+lamp turned down too low. Alice sat asleep in her old farmhouse
+rocking-chair, with an inelegant darning-basket on the table by her
+side. The whole effect of the room was as bare and squalid to Theron's
+newly informed eye as the atmosphere was offensive to his nostrils. He
+coughed sharply, and his wife sat up and looked at the clock. It was
+after eleven.
+
+"Where on earth have you been?" she asked, with a yawn, turning up the
+wick of her sewing-lamp again.
+
+"You ought never to turn down a light like that," said Theron, with a
+complaining note in his voice. "It smells up the whole place. I never
+dreamed of your sitting up for me like this. You ought to have gone to
+bed."
+
+"But how could I guess that you were going to be so late?," she
+retorted. "And you haven't told me where you were. Is this book of yours
+going to keep you up like this right along?"
+
+The episode of the book was buried in the young minister's mind beneath
+such a mass of subsequent experiences that it required an effort for him
+to grasp what she was talking about. It seemed as if months had elapsed
+since he was in earnest about that book; and yet he had left the house
+full of it only a few hours before. He shook his wits together, and made
+answer--
+
+"Oh, bless you, no! Only there arose a very curious question. You have
+no idea, literally no conception, of the interesting and important
+problems which are raised by the mere fact of Abraham leaving the city
+of Ur. It's amazing, I assure you. I hadn't realized it myself."
+
+"Well," remarked Alice, rising--and with good-humor and petulance
+struggling sleepily ill her tone--"all I've got to say is, that if
+Abraham hasn't anything better to do than to keep young ministers of the
+gospel out, goodness knows where, till all hours of the night, I wish to
+gracious he'd stayed in the city of Ur right straight along."
+
+"You have no idea what a scholarly man Dr. Ledsmar is," Theron suddenly
+found himself inspired to volunteer. "He has the most marvellous
+collection of books--a whole library devoted to this very subject--and
+he has put them all quite freely at my disposal. Extremely kind of him,
+isn't it?"
+
+"Ledsmar? Ledsmar?" queried Alice. "I don't seem to remember the name.
+He isn't the little man with the birthmark, who sits in the pew behind
+the Lovejoys, is he? I think some one said he was a doctor."
+
+"Yes, a horse doctor!" said Theron, with a sniff. "No; you haven't seen
+this Dr. Ledsmar at all. I--I don't know that he attends any church
+regularly. I scraped his acquaintance quite by accident. He is really a
+character. He lives in the big house, just beyond the race-course, you
+know--the one with the tower at the back--"
+
+"No, I don't know. How should I? I've hardly poked my nose outside of
+the yard since I have been here."
+
+"Well, you shall go," said the husband, consolingly. "You HAVE been
+cooped up here too much, poor girl. I must take you out more, really.
+I don't know that I could take you to the doctor's place--without an
+invitation, I mean. He is very queer about some things. He lives there
+all alone, for instance, with only a Chinaman for a servant. He told
+me I was almost the only man he had asked under his roof for years. He
+isn't a practising physician at all, you know. He is a scientist; he
+makes experiments with lizards--and things."
+
+"Theron," the wife said, pausing lamp in hand on her way to the bedroom,
+"do you be careful, now! For all you know this doctor may be a loose
+man, or pretty near an infidel. You've got to be mighty particular in
+such matters, you know, or you'll have the trustees down on you like a
+'thousand of bricks.'"
+
+"I will thank the trustees to mind their own business," said Theron,
+stiffly, and the subject dropped.
+
+The bedroom window upstairs was open, and upon the fresh night air
+was borne in the shrill, jangling sound of a piano, being played off
+somewhere in the distance, but so vehemently that the noise imposed
+itself upon the silence far and wide. Theron listened to this as he
+undressed. It proceeded from the direction of the main street, and he
+knew, as by instinct, that it was the Madden girl who was playing. The
+incongruity of the hour escaped his notice. He mused instead upon the
+wild and tropical tangle of moods, emotions, passions, which had grown
+up in that strange temperament. He found something very pathetic in
+that picture she had drawn of herself in forecast, roaming disconsolate
+through her rooms the livelong night, unable to sleep. The woful moan of
+insomnia seemed to make itself heard in every strain from her piano.
+
+Alice heard it also, but being unillumined, she missed the romantic
+pathos. "I call it disgraceful," she muttered from her pillow, "for
+folks to be banging away on a piano at this time of night. There ought
+to be a law to prevent it."
+
+"It may be some distressed soul," said Theron, gently, "seeking relief
+from the curse of sleeplessness."
+
+The wife laughed, almost contemptuously. "Distressed fiddlesticks!" was
+her only other comment.
+
+The music went on for a long time--rising now to strident heights, now
+sinking off to the merest tinkling murmur, and broken ever and again by
+intervals of utter hush. It did not prevent Alice from at once falling
+sound asleep; but Theron lay awake, it seemed to him, for hours,
+listening tranquilly, and letting his mind wander at will through the
+pleasant antechambers of Sleep, where are more unreal fantasies than
+Dreamland itself affords.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+For some weeks the Rev. Theron Ware saw nothing of either the priest or
+the doctor, or the interesting Miss Madden.
+
+There were, indeed, more urgent matters to think about. June had come;
+and every succeeding day brought closer to hand the ordeal of his first
+Quarterly Conference in Octavius. The waters grew distinctly rougher as
+his pastoral bark neared this difficult passage.
+
+He would have approached the great event with an easier mind if he could
+have made out just how he stood with his congregation. Unfortunately
+nothing in his previous experiences helped him in the least to measure
+or guess at the feelings of these curious Octavians. Their Methodism
+seemed to be sound enough, and to stick quite to the letter of the
+Discipline, so long as it was expressed in formulae. It was its spirit
+which he felt to be complicated by all sorts of conditions wholly novel
+to him.
+
+The existence of a line of street-cars in the town, for example, would
+not impress the casual thinker as likely to prove a rock in the path of
+peaceful religion. Theron, in his simplicity, had even thought, when he
+first saw these bobtailed cars bumping along the rails in the middle of
+the main street, that they must be a great convenience to people living
+in the outskirts, who wished to get in to church of a Sunday morning. He
+was imprudent enough to mention this in conversation with one of his new
+parishioners. Then he learned, to his considerable chagrin, that when
+this line was built, some years before, a bitter war of words had been
+fought upon the question of its being worked on the Sabbath day. The
+then occupant of the Methodist pulpit had so distinguished himself
+above the rest by the solemnity and fervor of his protests against this
+insolent desecration of God's day that the Methodists of Octavius
+still felt themselves peculiarly bound to hold this horse-car line, its
+management, and everything connected with it, in unbending aversion. At
+least once a year they were accustomed to expect a sermon denouncing it
+and all its impious Sunday patrons. Theron made a mental resolve that
+this year they should be disappointed.
+
+Another burning problem, which he had not been called upon before to
+confront, he found now entangled with the mysterious line which divided
+a circus from a menagerie. Those itinerant tent-shows had never come his
+way heretofore, and he knew nothing of that fine balancing proportion
+between ladies in tights on horseback and cages full of deeply
+educational animals, which, even as the impartial rain, was designed
+to embrace alike the just and the unjust. There had arisen inside the
+Methodist society of Octavius some painful episodes, connected with
+members who took their children "just to see the animals," and were
+convicted of having also watched the Rose-Queen of the Arena, in her
+unequalled flying leap through eight hoops, with an ardent and unashamed
+eye. One of these cases still remained on the censorial docket of the
+church; and Theron understood that he was expected to name a committee
+of five to examine and try it. This he neglected to do.
+
+He was no longer at all certain that the congregation as a whole liked
+his sermons. The truth was, no doubt, that he had learned enough to
+cease regarding the congregation as a whole. He could still rely upon
+carrying along with him in his discourses from the pulpit a large
+majority of interested and approving faces. But here, unhappily, was a
+case where the majority did not rule. The minority, relatively small in
+numbers, was prodigious in virile force.
+
+More than twenty years had now elapsed since that minor schism in the
+Methodist Episcopal Church, the result of which was the independent body
+known as Free Methodists, had relieved the parent flock of its principal
+disturbing element. The rupture came fittingly at that time when all the
+"isms" of the argumentative fifties were hurled violently together into
+the melting-pot of civil war. The great Methodist Church, South, had
+broken bodily off on the question of State Rights. The smaller and
+domestic fraction of Free Methodism separated itself upon an issue
+which may be most readily described as one of civilization. The seceders
+resented growth in material prosperity; they repudiated the introduction
+of written sermons and organ-music; they deplored the increasing laxity
+in meddlesome piety, the introduction of polite manners in the pulpit
+and classroom, and the development of even a rudimentary desire among
+the younger people of the church to be like others outside in dress and
+speech and deportment. They did battle as long as they could, inside
+the fold, to restore it to the severely straight and narrow path of
+primitive Methodism. When the adverse odds became too strong for them,
+they quitted the church and set up a Bethel for themselves.
+
+Octavius chanced to be one of the places where they were able to hold
+their own within the church organization. The Methodism of the town had
+gone along without any local secession. It still held in full fellowship
+the radicals who elsewhere had followed their unbridled bent into the
+strongest emotional vagaries--where excited brethren worked themselves
+up into epileptic fits, and women whirled themselves about in weird
+religious ecstasies, like dervishes of the Orient, till they
+fell headlong in a state of trance. Octavian Methodism was spared
+extravagances of this sort, it is true, but it paid a price for the
+immunity. The people whom an open split would have taken away remained
+to leaven and dominate the whole lump. This small advanced section, with
+its men of a type all the more aggressive from its narrowness, and women
+who went about solemnly in plain gray garments, with tight-fitting,
+unadorned, mouse-colored sunbonnets, had not been able wholly to
+enforce its views upon the social life of the church members, but of its
+controlling influence upon their official and public actions there could
+be no doubt.
+
+The situation had begun to unfold itself to Theron from the outset.
+He had recognized the episodes of the forbidden Sunday milk and of the
+flowers in poor Alice's bonnet as typical of much more that was to
+come. No week followed without bringing some new fulfilment of this
+foreboding. Now, at the end of two months, he knew well enough that
+the hitherto dominant minority was hostile to him and his ministry, and
+would do whatever it could against him.
+
+Though Theron at once decided to show fight, and did not at all waver
+in that resolve, his courage was in the main of a despondent sort.
+Sometimes it would flutter up to the point of confidence, or at
+least hopefulness, when he met with substantial men of the church who
+obviously liked him, and whom he found himself mentally ranging on his
+side, in the struggle which was to come. But more often it was blankly
+apparent to him that, the moment flags were flying and drums on the
+roll, these amiable fair-weather friends would probably take to their
+heels.
+
+Still, such as they were, his sole hope lay in their support. He must
+make the best of them. He set himself doggedly to the task of gathering
+together all those who were not his enemies into what, when the proper
+time came, should be known as the pastor's party. There was plenty of
+apostolic warrant for this. If there had not been, Theron felt that the
+mere elementary demands of self-defence would have justified his use of
+strategy.
+
+The institution of pastoral calling, particularly that inquisitorial
+form of it laid down in the Discipline, had never attracted Theron.
+He and Alice had gone about among their previous flocks in quite a
+haphazard fashion, without thought of system, much less of deliberate
+purpose. Theron made lists now, and devoted thought and examination to
+the personal tastes and characteristics of the people to be cultivated.
+There were some, for example, who would expect him to talk pretty much
+as the Discipline ordained--that is, to ask if they had family prayer,
+to inquire after their souls, and generally to minister grace to his
+hearers--and these in turn subdivided themselves into classes, ranging
+from those who would wish nothing else to those who needed only a mild
+spiritual flavor. There were others whom he would please much better by
+not talking shop at all. Although he could ill afford it, he subscribed
+now for a daily paper that he might have a perpetually renewed source of
+good conversational topics for these more worldly calls. He also bought
+several pounds of candy, pleasing in color, but warranted to be entirely
+harmless, and he made a large mysterious mark on the inside of his new
+silk hat to remind him not to go out calling without some of this in his
+pocket for the children.
+
+Alice, he felt, was not helping him in this matter as effectively as he
+could have wished. Her attitude toward the church in Octavius might best
+be described by the word "sulky." Great allowance was to be made, he
+realized, for her humiliation over the flowers in her bonnet. That might
+justify her, fairly enough, in being kept away from meeting now and
+again by headaches, or undefined megrims. But it ought not to prevent
+her from going about and making friends among the kindlier parishioners
+who would welcome such a thing, and whom he from time to time indicated
+to her. She did go to some extent, it is true, but she produced,
+in doing so, an effect of performing a duty. He did not find traces
+anywhere of her having created a brilliant social impression. When they
+went out together, he was peculiarly conscious of having to do the work
+unaided.
+
+This was not at all like the Alice of former years, of other charges.
+Why, she had been, beyond comparison, the most popular young woman in
+Tyre. What possessed her to mope like this in Octavius?
+
+Theron looked at her attentively nowadays, when she was unaware of his
+gaze, to try if her face offered any answer to the riddle. It could not
+be suggested that she was ill. Never in her life had she been looking so
+well. She had thrown herself, all at once, and with what was to him
+an unaccountable energy, into the creation and management of a
+flower-garden. She was out the better part of every day, rain or shine,
+digging, transplanting, pruning, pottering generally about among her
+plants and shrubs. This work in the open air had given her an aspect of
+physical well-being which it was impossible to be mistaken about.
+
+Her husband was glad, of course, that she had found some occupation
+which at once pleased her and so obviously conduced to health. This was
+so much a matter of course, in fact, that he said to himself over and
+over again that he was glad. Only--only, sometimes the thought WOULD
+force itself upon his attention that if she did not spend so much of her
+time in her own garden, she would have more time to devote to winning
+friends for them in the Garden of the Lord--friends whom they were going
+to need badly.
+
+The young minister, in taking anxious stock of the chances for and
+against him, turned over often in his mind the fact that he had already
+won rank as a pulpit orator. His sermons had attracted almost universal
+attention at Tyre, and his achievement before the Conference at
+Tecumseh, if it did fail to receive practical reward, had admittedly
+distanced all the other preaching there. It was a part of the evil luck
+pursuing him that here in this perversely enigmatic Octavius his special
+gift seemed to be of no use whatever. There were times, indeed, when he
+was tempted to think that bad preaching was what Octavius wanted.
+
+Somewhere he had heard of a Presbyterian minister, in charge of a big
+city church, who managed to keep well in with a watchfully Orthodox
+congregation, and at the same time establish himself in the affections
+of the community at large, by simply preaching two kinds of sermons. In
+the morning, when almost all who attended were his own communicants,
+he gave them very cautious and edifying doctrinal discourses, treading
+loyally in the path of the Westminster Confession. To the evening
+assemblages, made up for the larger part of outsiders, he addressed
+broadly liberal sermons, literary in form, and full of respectful
+allusions to modern science and the philosophy of the day. Thus he
+filled the church at both services, and put money in its treasury and
+his own fame before the world. There was of course the obvious danger
+that the pious elders who in the forenoon heard infant damnation
+vigorously proclaimed, would revolt when they heard after supper that
+there was some doubt about even adults being damned at all. But either
+because the same people did not attend both services, or because the
+minister's perfect regularity in the morning was each week regarded as a
+retraction of his latest vagaries of an evening, no trouble ever came.
+
+Theron had somewhat tentatively tried this on in Octavius. It was no
+good. His parishioners were of the sort who would have come to church
+eight times a day on Sunday, instead of two, if occasion offered. The
+hope that even a portion of them would stop away, and that their places
+would be taken in the evening by less prejudiced strangers who wished
+for intellectual rather than theological food, fell by the wayside. The
+yearned-for strangers did not come; the familiar faces of the morning
+service all turned up in their accustomed places every evening. They
+were faces which confused and disheartened Theron in the daytime.
+Under the gaslight they seemed even harder and more unsympathetic. He
+timorously experimented with them for an evening or two, then abandoned
+the effort.
+
+Once there had seemed the beginning of a chance. The richest banker in
+Octavius--a fat, sensual, hog-faced old bachelor--surprised everybody
+one evening by entering the church and taking a seat. Theron happened
+to know who he was; even if he had not known, the suppressed excitement
+visible in the congregation, the way the sisters turned round to
+look, the way the more important brethren put their heads together and
+exchanged furtive whispers--would have warned him that big game was in
+view. He recalled afterward with something like self-disgust the eager,
+almost tremulous pains he himself took to please this banker. There was
+a part of the sermon, as it had been written out, which might easily
+give offence to a single man of wealth and free notions of life. With
+the alertness of a mental gymnast, Theron ran ahead, excised this
+portion, and had ready when the gap was reached some very pretty general
+remarks, all the more effective and eloquent, he felt, for having
+been extemporized. People said it was a good sermon; and after
+the benediction and dispersion some of the officials and principal
+pew-holders remained to talk over the likelihood of a capture having
+been effected. Theron did not get away without having this mentioned
+to him, and he was conscious of sharing deeply the hope of the
+brethren--with the added reflection that it would be a personal triumph
+for himself into the bargain. He was ashamed of this feeling a little
+later, and of his trick with the sermon. But this chastening product
+of introspection was all the fruit which the incident bore. The banker
+never came again.
+
+Theron returned one afternoon, a little earlier than usual, from a group
+of pastoral calls. Alice, who was plucking weeds in a border at the
+shady side of the house, heard his step, and rose from her labors. He
+was walking slowly, and seemed weary. He took off his high hat, as
+he saw her, and wiped his brow. The broiling June sun was still high
+overhead. Doubtless it was its insufferable heat which was accountable
+for the worn lines in his face and the spiritless air which the wife's
+eye detected. She went to the gate, and kissed him as he entered.
+
+"I believe if I were you," she said, "I'd carry an umbrella such
+scorching days as this. Nobody'd think anything of it. I don't see why a
+minister shouldn't carry one as much as a woman carries a parasol."
+
+Theron gave her a rueful, meditative sort of smile. "I suppose people
+really do think of us as a kind of hybrid female," he remarked. Then,
+holding his hat in his hand, he drew a long breath of relief at finding
+himself in the shade, and looked about him.
+
+"Why, you've got more posies here, on this one side of the house alone,
+than mother had in her whole yard," he said, after a little. "Let's
+see--I know that one: that's columbine, isn't it? And that's London
+pride, and that's ragged robin. I don't know any of the others."
+
+Alice recited various unfamiliar names, as she pointed out the several
+plants which bore them, and he listened with a kindly semblance of
+interest.
+
+They strolled thus to the rear of the house, where thick clumps of
+fragrant pinks lined both sides of the path. She picked some of these
+for him, and gave him more names with which to label the considerable
+number of other plants he saw about him.
+
+"I had no idea we were so well provided as all this," he commented at
+last. "Those Van Sizers must have been tremendous hands for flowers. You
+were lucky in following such people."
+
+"Van Sizers!" echoed Alice, with contempt. "All they left was old tomato
+cans and clamshells. Why, I've put in every blessed one of these myself,
+all except those peonies, there, and one brier on the side wall."
+
+"Good for you!" exclaimed Theron, approvingly. Then it occurred to him
+to ask, "But where did you get them all? Around among our friends?"
+
+"Some few," responded Alice, with a note of hesitation in her voice.
+"Sister Bult gave me the verbenas, there, and the white pinks were
+a present from Miss Stevens. But most of them Levi Gorringe was good
+enough to send me--from his garden."
+
+"I didn't know that Gorringe had a garden," said Theron. "I thought he
+lived over his law-office, in the brick block, there."
+
+"Well, I don't know that it's exactly HIS," explained Alice; "but it's a
+big garden somewhere outside, where he can have anything he likes." She
+went on with a little laugh: "I didn't like to question him too closely,
+for fear he'd think I was looking a gift horse in the mouth--or else
+hinting for more. It was quite his own offer, you know. He picked them
+all out for me, and brought them here, and lent me a book telling me
+just what to do with each one. And in a few days, now, I am to have
+another big batch of plants--dahlias and zinnias and asters and so on;
+I'm almost ashamed to take them. But it's such a change to find some one
+in this Octavius who isn't all self!"
+
+"Yes, Gorringe is a good fellow," said Theron. "I wish he was a
+professing member." Then some new thought struck him. "Alice," he
+exclaimed, "I believe I'll go and see him this very afternoon. I don't
+know why it hasn't occurred to me before: he's just the man whose advice
+I need most. He knows these people here; he can tell me what to do."
+
+"Aren't you too tired now?" suggested Alice, as Theron put on his hat.
+
+"No, the sooner the better," he replied, moving now toward the gate.
+
+"Well," she began, "if I were you, I wouldn't say too much about--that
+is, I--but never mind."
+
+"What is it?" asked her husband.
+
+"Nothing whatever," replied Alice, positively. "It was only some
+nonsense of mine;" and Theron, placidly accepting the feminine whim,
+went off down the street again.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware found Levi Gorringe's law-office readily enough, but
+its owner was not in. He probably would be back again, though, in a
+quarter of an hour or so, the boy said, and the minister at once decided
+to wait.
+
+Theron was interested in finding that this office-boy was no other than
+Harvey--the lad who brought milk to the parsonage every morning. He
+remembered now that he had heard good things of this urchin, as to the
+hard work he did to help his mother, the Widow Semple, in her struggle
+to keep a roof over her head; and also bad things, in that he did
+not come regularly either to church or Sunday-school. The clergyman
+recalled, too, that Harvey had impressed him as a character.
+
+"Well, sonny, are you going to be a lawyer?" he asked, as he seated
+himself by the window, and looked about him, first at the dusty litter
+of old papers, pamphlets, and tape-bound documents in bundles which
+crowded the stuffy chamber, and then at the boy himself.
+
+Harvey was busy at a big box--a rough pine dry-goods box which bore the
+flaring label of an express company, and also of a well-known seed firm
+in a Western city, and which the boy had apparently just opened. He was
+lifting from it, and placing on the table after he had shaken off the
+sawdust and moss in which they were packed, small parcels of what looked
+in the fading light to be half-dried plants.
+
+"Well, I don't know--I rather guess not," he made answer, as he pursued
+his task. "So far as I can make out, this wouldn't be the place to start
+in at, if I WAS going to be a lawyer. A boy can learn here first-rate
+how to load cartridges and clean a gun, and braid trout-flies on to
+leaders, but I don't see much law laying around loose. Anyway," he went
+on, "I couldn't afford to read law, and not be getting any wages. I have
+to earn money, you know."
+
+Theron felt that he liked the boy. "Yes," he said, with a kindly tone;
+"I've heard that you are a good, industrious youngster. I daresay Mr.
+Gorringe will see to it that you get a chance to read law, and get wages
+too."
+
+"Oh, I can read all there is here and welcome," the boy explained,
+stepping toward the window to decipher the label on a bundle of roots
+in his hand, "but that's no good unless there's regular practice coming
+into the office all the while. THAT'S how you learn to be a lawyer. But
+Gorringe don't have what I call a practice at all. He just sees men in
+the other room there, with the door shut, and whatever there is to do he
+does it all himself."
+
+The minister remembered a stray hint somewhere that Mr. Gorringe was
+a money-lender--what was colloquially called a "note-shaver." To his
+rustic sense, there was something not quite nice about that occupation.
+It would be indecorous, he felt, to encourage further talk about it from
+the boy.
+
+"What are you doing there?" he inquired, to change the subject.
+
+"Sorting out some plants," replied Harvey. "I don't know what's got
+into Gorringe lately. This is the third big box he's had since I've been
+here--that is, in six weeks--besides two baskets full of rose-bushes.
+I don't know what he does with them. He carries them off himself
+somewhere. I've had kind of half a notion that he's figurin' on getting
+married. I can't think of anything else that would make a man spend
+money like water--just for flowers and bushes. They do get foolish, you
+know, when they've got marriage on the brain."
+
+Theron found himself only imperfectly following the theories of the
+young philosopher. It was his fact that monopolized the minister's
+attention.
+
+"But as I understand it," he remarked hesitatingly, "Brother
+Gorringe--or rather Mr. Gorringe--gets all the plants he wants,
+everything he likes, from a big garden somewhere outside. I don't
+know that it is exactly his; but I remember hearing something to that
+effect."
+
+The boy slapped the last litter off his hands, and, as he came to the
+window, shook his head. "These don't come from no garden outside," he
+declared. "They come from the dealers', and he pays solid cash for 'em.
+The invoice for this lot alone was thirty-one dollars and sixty cents.
+There it is on the table. You can see it for yourself."
+
+Mr. Ware did not offer to look. "Very likely these are for the garden I
+was speaking of," he said. "Of course you can't go on taking plants out
+of a garden indefinitely without putting others in."
+
+"I don't know anything about any garden that he takes plants out of,"
+answered Harvey, and looked meditatively for a minute or two out upon
+the street below. Then he turned to the minister. "Your wife's doing a
+good deal of gardening this spring, I notice," he said casually. "You'd
+hardly think it was the same place, she's fixed it up so. If she wants
+any extra hoeing done, I can always get off Saturday afternoons."
+
+"I will remember," said Theron. He also looked out of the window; and
+nothing more was said until, a few moments later, Mr. Gorringe himself
+came in.
+
+The lawyer seemed both surprised and pleased at discovering the
+identity of his visitor, with whom he shook hands in almost an excess of
+cordiality. He spread a large newspaper over the pile of seedling plants
+on the table, pushed the packing-box under the table with his foot, and
+said almost peremptorily to the boy, "You can go now!" Then he turned
+again to Theron.
+
+"Well, Mr. Ware, I'm glad to see you," he repeated, and drew up a chair
+by the window. "Things are going all right with you, I hope."
+
+Theron noted again the waving black hair, the dark skin, and the
+carefully trimmed mustache and chin-tuft which gave the lawyer's face
+a combined effect of romance and smartness. No; it was the eyes,
+cool, shrewd, dark-gray eyes, which suggested this latter quality. The
+recollection of having seen one of them wink, in deliberate hostility
+of sarcasm, when those other trustees had their backs turned, came
+mercifully at the moment to recall the young minister to his errand.
+
+"I thought I would drop in and have a chat with you," he said, getting
+better under way as he went on. "Quarterly Conference is only a
+fortnight off, and I am a good deal at sea about what is going to
+happen."
+
+"I'm not a church member, you know," interposed Gorringe. "That shuts me
+out of the Quarterly Conference."
+
+"Alas, yes!" said Theron. "I wish it didn't. I'm afraid I'm not going to
+have any friends to spare there."
+
+"What are you afraid of?" asked the lawyer, seeming now to be wholly at
+his ease again "They can't eat you."
+
+"No, they keep me too lean for that," responded Theron, with a pensive
+smile. "I WAS going to ask, you know, for an increase of salary, or an
+extra allowance. I don't see how I can go on as it is. The sum fixed by
+the last Quarterly Conference of the old year, and which I am getting
+now, is one hundred dollars less than my predecessor had. That isn't
+fair, and it isn't right. But so far from its looking as if I could get
+an increase, the prospect seems rather that they will make me pay for
+the gas and that sidewalk. I never recovered more than about half of my
+moving expenses, as you know, and--and, frankly, I don't know which way
+to turn. It keeps me miserable all the while."
+
+"That's where you're wrong," said Mr. Gorringe. "If you let things
+like that worry you, you'll keep a sore skin all your life. You take
+my advice and just go ahead your own gait, and let other folks do the
+worrying. They ARE pretty close-fisted here, for a fact, but you
+can manage to rub along somehow. If you should get into any real
+difficulties, why, I guess--" the lawyer paused to smile in a
+hesitating, significant way--"I guess some road out can be found all
+right. The main thing is, don't fret, and don't allow your wife to--to
+fret either."
+
+He stopped abruptly. Theron nodded in recognition of his amiable tone,
+and the found the nod lengthening itself out into almost a bow as the
+thought spread through his mind that this had been nothing more nor less
+than a promise to help him with money if worst came to worst. He looked
+at Levi Gorringe, and said to himself that the intuition of women was
+wonderful. Alice had picked him out as a friend of theirs merely by
+seeing him pass the house.
+
+"Yes," he said; "I am specially anxious to keep my wife from worrying.
+She was surrounded in her girlhood by a good deal of what, relatively,
+we should call luxury, and that makes it all the harder for her to be a
+poor minister's wife. I had quite decided to get her a hired girl, come
+what might, but she thinks she'd rather get on without one. Her health
+is better, I must admit, than it was when we came here. She works out in
+her garden a great deal, and that seems to agree with her."
+
+"Octavius is a healthy place--that's generally admitted," replied the
+lawyer, with indifference. He seemed not to be interested in Mrs. Ware's
+health, but looked intently out through the window at the buildings
+opposite, and drummed with his fingers on the arms of his chair.
+
+Theron made haste to revert to his errand. "Of course, your not being in
+the Quarterly Conference," he said, "renders certain things impossible.
+But I didn't know but you might have some knowledge of how matters are
+going, what plans the officials of the church had; they seem to have
+agreed to tell me nothing."
+
+"Well, I HAVE heard this much," responded Gorringe. "They're figuring on
+getting the Soulsbys here to raise the debt and kind o' shake things up
+generally. I guess that's about as good as settled. Hadn't you heard of
+it?"
+
+"Not a breath!" exclaimed Theron, mournfully. "Well," he added upon
+reflection, "I'm sorry, downright sorry. The debt-raiser seems to me
+about the lowest-down thing we produce. I've heard of those Soulsbys; I
+think I saw HIM indeed once at Conference, but I believe SHE is the head
+of the firm."
+
+"Yes; she wears the breeches, I understand," said Gorringe
+sententiously.
+
+"I HAD hoped," the young minister began with a rueful sigh, "in fact, I
+felt quite confident at the outset that I could pay off this debt, and
+put the church generally on a new footing, by giving extra attention to
+my pulpit work. It is hardly for me to say it, but in other places where
+I have been, my preaching has been rather--rather a feature in the town
+itself I have always been accustomed to attract to our services a good
+many non-members, and that, as you know, helps tremendously from a money
+point of view. But somehow that has failed here. I doubt if the average
+congregations are a whit larger now than they were when I came in April.
+I know the collections are not."
+
+"No," commented the lawyer, slowly; "you'll never do anything in that
+line in Octavius. You might, of course, if you were to stay here and
+work hard at it for five or six years--"
+
+"Heaven forbid!" groaned Mr. Ware.
+
+"Quite so," put in the other. "The point is that the Methodists here
+are a little set by themselves. I don't know that they like one another
+specially, but I do know that they are not what you might call popular
+with people outside. Now, a new preacher at the Presbyterian church,
+or even the Baptist--he might have a chance to create talk, and make
+a stir. But Methodist--no! People who don't belong won't come near the
+Methodist church here so long as there's any other place with a roof on
+it to go to. Give a dog a bad name, you know. Well, the Methodists here
+have got a bad name; and if you could preach like Henry Ward Beecher
+himself you wouldn't change it, or get folks to come and hear you."
+
+"I see what you mean," Theron responded. "I'm not particularly surprised
+myself that Octavius doesn't love us, or look to us for intellectual
+stimulation. I myself leave that pulpit more often than otherwise
+feeling like a wet rag--utterly limp and discouraged. But, if you don't
+mind my speaking of it, YOU don't belong, and yet YOU come."
+
+It was evident that the lawyer did not mind. He spoke freely in reply.
+"Oh, yes, I've got into the habit of it. I began going when I first came
+here, and--and so it grew to be natural for me to go. Then, of course,
+being the only lawyer you have, a considerable amount of my business is
+mixed up in one way or another with your membership; you see those are
+really the things which settle a man in a rut, and keep him there."
+
+"I suppose your people were Methodists," said Theron, to fill in the
+pause, "and that is how you originally started with us."
+
+Levi Gorringe shook his head. He leaned back, half closed his eyes,
+put his finger-tips together, and almost smiled as if something in
+retrospect pleased and moved him.
+
+"No," he said; "I went to the church first to see a girl who used to
+go there. It was long before your time. All her family moved away years
+ago. You wouldn't know any of them. I was younger then, and I didn't
+know as much as I do now. I worshipped the very ground that girl walked
+on, and like a fool I never gave her so much as a hint of it. Looking
+back now, I can see that I might have had her if I'd asked her. But
+I went instead and sat around and looked at her at church and
+Sunday-school and prayer-meetings Thursday nights, and class-meetings
+after the sermon. She was devoted to religion and church work; and,
+thinking it would please her, I joined the church on probation. Men can
+fool themselves easier than they can other people. I actually believed
+at the time that I had experienced religion. I felt myself full of all
+sorts of awakenings of the soul and so forth. But it was really that
+girl. You see I'm telling you the thing just as it was. I was very
+happy. I think it was the happiest time of my life. I remember there was
+a love-feast while I was on probation; and I sat down in front, right
+beside her, and we ate the little square chunks of bread and drank the
+water together, and I held one corner of her hymn-book when we stood up
+and sang. That was the nearest I ever got to her, or to full membership
+in the church. That very next week, I think it was, we learned that she
+had got engaged to the minister's son--a young man who had just become
+a minister himself. They got married, and went away--and I--somehow I
+never took up my membership when the six months' probation was over.
+That's how it was."
+
+"It is very interesting," remarked Theron, softly, after a little
+silence--"and very full of human nature."
+
+"Well, now you see," said the lawyer, "what I mean when I say that there
+hasn't been another minister here since, that I should have felt like
+telling this story to. They wouldn't have understood it at all. They
+would have thought it was blasphemy for me to say straight out that
+what I took for experiencing religion was really a girl. But you are
+different. I felt that at once, the first time I saw you. In a pulpit or
+out of it, what I like in a human being is that he SHOULD be human."
+
+"It pleases me beyond measure that you should like me, then" returned
+the young minister, with frank gratification shining on his face. "The
+world is made all the sweeter and more lovable by these--these elements
+of romance. I am not one of those who would wish to see them banished or
+frowned upon. I don't mind admitting to you that there is a good deal in
+Methodism--I mean the strict practice of its letter which you find here
+in Octavius--that is personally distasteful to me. I read the other day
+of an English bishop who said boldly, publicly, that no modern nation
+could practise the principles laid down in the Sermon on the Mount and
+survive for twenty-four hours."
+
+"Ha, ha! That's good!" laughed the lawyer.
+
+"I felt that it was good, too," pursued Theron. "I am getting to see
+a great many things differently, here in Octavius. Our Methodist
+Discipline is like the Beatitudes--very helpful and beautiful, if
+treated as spiritual suggestion, but more or less of a stumbling-block
+if insisted upon literally. I declare!" he added, sitting up in his
+chair, "I never talked like this to a living soul before in all my life.
+Your confidences were contagious."
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware rose as he spoke, and took up his hat.
+
+"Must you be going?" asked the lawyer, also rising. "Well, I'm glad I
+haven't shocked you. Come in oftener when you are passing. And if you
+see anything I can help you in, always tell me."
+
+The two men shook hands, with an emphatic and lingering clasp.
+
+"I am glad," said Theron, "that you didn't stop coming to church just
+because you lost the girl."
+
+Levi Gorringe answered the minister's pleasantry with a smile which
+curled his mustache upward, and expanded in little wrinkles at the ends
+of his eyes. "No," he said jestingly. "I'm death on collecting debts;
+and I reckon that the church still owes me a girl. I'll have one yet."
+
+So, with merriment the echoes of which pleasantly accompanied Theron
+down the stairway, the two men parted.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+Though time lagged in passing with a slowness which seemed born of
+studied insolence, there did arrive at last a day which had something
+definitive about it to Theron's disturbed and restless mind. It was a
+Thursday, and the prayer-meeting to be held that evening would be the
+last before the Quarterly Conference, now only four days off.
+
+For some reason, the young minister found himself dwelling upon this
+fact, and investing it with importance. But yesterday the Quarterly
+Conference had seemed a long way ahead. Today brought it alarmingly
+close to hand. He had not heretofore regarded the weekly assemblage
+for prayer and song as a thing calling for preparation, or for any
+preliminary thought. Now on this Thursday morning he went to his desk
+after breakfast, which was a sign that he wanted the room to himself,
+quite as if he had the task of a weighty sermon before him. He sat at
+the desk all the forenoon, doing no writing, it is true, but remembering
+every once in a while, when his mind turned aside from the book in his
+hands, that there was that prayer-meeting in the evening.
+
+Sometimes he reached the point of vaguely wondering why this strictly
+commonplace affair should be forcing itself thus upon his attention.
+Then, with a kind of mental shiver at the recollection that this was
+Thursday, and that the great struggle came on Monday, he would go back
+to his book.
+
+There were a half-dozen volumes on the open desk before him. He had
+taken them out from beneath a pile of old "Sunday-School Advocates" and
+church magazines, where they had lain hidden from Alice's view most of
+the week. If there had been a locked drawer in the house, he would have
+used it instead to hold these books, which had come to him in a neat
+parcel, which also contained an amiable note from Dr. Ledsmar, recalling
+a pleasant evening in May, and expressing the hope that the accompanying
+works would be of some service. Theron had glanced at the backs of the
+uppermost two, and discovered that their author was Renan. Then he had
+hastily put the lot in the best place he could think of to escape his
+wife's observation.
+
+He realized now that there had been no need for this secrecy. Of the
+other four books, by Sayce, Budge, Smith, and Lenormant, three indeed
+revealed themselves to be published under religious auspices. As for
+Renan, he might have known that the name would be meaningless to Alice.
+The feeling that he himself was not much wiser in this matter than his
+wife may have led him to pass over the learned text-books on Chaldean
+antiquity, and even the volume of Renan which appeared to be devoted
+to Oriental inscriptions, and take up his other book, entitled in
+the translation, "Recollections of my Youth." This he rather glanced
+through, at the outset, following with a certain inattention the
+introductory sketches and essays, which dealt with an unfamiliar, and,
+to his notion, somewhat preposterous Breton racial type. Then, little by
+little, it dawned upon him that there was a connected story in all this;
+and suddenly he came upon it, out in the open, as it were. It was
+the story of how a deeply devout young man, trained from his earliest
+boyhood for the sacred office, and desiring passionately nothing but
+to be worthy of it, came to a point where, at infinite cost of pain to
+himself and of anguish to those dearest to him, he had to declare that
+he could no longer believe at all in revealed religion.
+
+Theron Ware read this all with an excited interest which no book had
+ever stirred in him before. Much of it he read over and over again, to
+make sure that he penetrated everywhere the husk of French habits of
+thought and Catholic methods in which the kernel was wrapped. He broke
+off midway in this part of the book to go out to the kitchen to dinner,
+and began the meal in silence. To Alice's questions he replied briefly
+that he was preparing himself for the evening's prayer-meeting. She
+lifted her brows in such frank surprise at this that he made a further
+and somewhat rambling explanation about having again taken up the work
+on his book--the book about Abraham.
+
+"I thought you said you'd given that up altogether," she remarked.
+
+"Well," he said, "I WAS discouraged about it for a while. But a man
+never does anything big without getting discouraged over and over again
+while he's doing it. I don't say now that I shall write precisely
+THAT book--I'm merely reading scientific works about the period, just
+now--but if not that, I shall write some other book. Else how will you
+get that piano?" he added, with an attempt at a smile.
+
+"I thought you had given that up, too!" she replied ruefully. Then
+before he could speak, she went on: "Never mind the piano; that can
+wait. What I've got on my mind just now isn't piano; it's potatoes.
+Do you know, I saw some the other day at Rasbach's, splendid
+potatoes--these are some of them--and fifteen cents a bushel cheaper
+than those dried-up old things Brother Barnum keeps, and so I bought two
+bushels. And Sister Barnum met me on the street this morning, and threw
+it in my face that the Discipline commands us to trade with each other.
+Is there any such command?"
+
+"Yes," said the husband. "It's Section 33. Don't you remember? I looked
+it up in Tyre. We are to 'evidence our desire of salvation by doing
+good, especially to them that are of the household of faith, or groaning
+so to be; by employing them preferably to others; buying one of another;
+helping each other in business'--and so on. Yes, it's all there."
+
+"Well, I told her I didn't believe it was," put in Alice, "and I said
+that even if it was, there ought to be another section about selling
+potatoes to their minister for more than they're worth--potatoes that
+turn all green when you boil them, too. I believe I'll read up that old
+Discipline myself, and see if it hasn't got some things that I can talk
+back with."
+
+"The very section before that, Number 32, enjoins members against
+'uncharitable or unprofitable conversation--particularly speaking evil
+of magistrates or ministers.' You'd have 'em there, I think." Theron had
+begun cheerfully enough, but the careworn, preoccupied look returned now
+to his face. "I'm sorry if we've fallen out with the Barnums," he said.
+"His brother-in-law, Davis, the Sunday-school superintendent, is a
+member of the Quarterly Conference, you know, and I've been hoping that
+he was on my side. I've been taking a good deal of pains to make up to
+him."
+
+He ended with a sigh, the pathos of which impressed Alice. "If you think
+it will do any good," she volunteered, "I'll go and call on the Davises
+this very afternoon. I'm sure to find her at home,--she's tied hand
+and foot with that brood of hers--and you'd better give me some of that
+candy for them."
+
+Theron nodded his approval and thanks, and relapsed into silence. When
+the meal was over, he brought out the confectionery to his wife, and
+without a word went back to that remarkable book.
+
+When Alice returned toward the close of day, to prepare the simple tea
+which was always laid a half-hour earlier on Thursdays and Sundays,
+she found her husband where she had left him, still busy with those new
+scientific works. She recounted to him some incidents of her call
+upon Mrs. Davis, as she took off her hat and put on the big kitchen
+apron--how pleased Mrs. Davis seemed to be; how her affection for
+her sister-in-law, the grocer's wife, disclosed itself to be not even
+skin-deep; how the children leaped upon the candy as if they had never
+seen any before; and how, in her belief, Mr. Davis would be heart and
+soul on Theron's side at the Conference.
+
+To her surprise, the young minister seemed not at all interested.
+He hardly looked at her during her narrative, but reclined in the
+easy-chair with his head thrown back, and an abstracted gaze wandering
+aimlessly about the ceiling. When she avowed her faith in the
+Sunday-school superintendent's loyal partisanship, which she did with
+a pardonable pride in having helped to make it secure, her husband even
+closed his eyes, and moved his head with a gesture which plainly bespoke
+indifference.
+
+"I expected you'd be tickled to death," she remarked, with evident
+disappointment.
+
+"I've a bad headache," he explained, after a minute's pause.
+
+"No wonder!" Alice rejoined, sympathetically enough, but with a note of
+reproof as well. "What can you expect, staying cooped up in here all day
+long, poring over those books? People are all the while remarking that
+you study too much. I tell them, of course, that you're a great hand for
+reading, and always were; but I think myself it would be better if you
+got out more, and took more exercise, and saw people. You know lots
+and slathers more than THEY do now, or ever will, if you never opened
+another book."
+
+Theron regarded her with an expression which she had never seen on his
+face before. "You don't realize what you are saying," he replied slowly.
+He sighed as he added, with increased gravity, "I am the most ignorant
+man alive!"
+
+Alice began a little laugh of wifely incredulity, and then let it die
+away as she recognized that he was really troubled and sad in his mind.
+She bent over to kiss him lightly on the brow, and tiptoed her way out
+into the kitchen.
+
+"I believe I will let you make my excuses at the prayer-meeting this
+evening," he said all at once, as the supper came to an end. He
+had eaten next to nothing during the meal, and had sat in a sort of
+brown-study from which Alice kindly forbore to arouse him. "I don't
+know--I hardly feel equal to it. They won't take it amiss--for once--if
+you explain to them that I--I am not at all well."
+
+"Oh, I do hope you're not coming down with anything!" Alice had risen
+too, and was gazing at him with a solicitude the tenderness of which at
+once comforted, and in some obscure way jarred on his nerves. "Is there
+anything I can do--or shall I go for a doctor? We've got mustard in the
+house, and senna--I think there's some senna left--and Jamaica ginger."
+
+Theron shook his head wearily at her. "Oh, no,--no!" he expostulated.
+"It isn't anything that needs drugs, or doctors either. It's just mental
+worry and fatigue, that's all. An evening's quiet rest in the big chair,
+and early to bed--that will fix me up all right."
+
+"But you'll read; and that will make your head worse," said Alice.
+
+"No, I won't read any more," he promised her, walking slowly into the
+sitting-room, and settling himself in the big chair, the while she
+brought out a pillow from the adjoining best bedroom, and adjusted it
+behind his head. "That's nice! I'll just lie quiet here, and perhaps
+doze a little till you come back. I feel in the mood for the rest; it
+will do me all sorts of good."
+
+He closed his eyes; and Alice, regarding his upturned face anxiously,
+decided that already it looked more at peace than awhile ago.
+
+"Well, I hope you'll be better when I get back," she said, as she began
+preparations for the evening service. These consisted in combing
+stiffly back the strands of light-brown hair which, during the day, had
+exuberantly loosened themselves over her temples into something
+almost like curls; in fastening down upon this rebellious hair a plain
+brown-straw bonnet, guiltless of all ornament save a binding ribbon of
+dull umber hue; and in putting on a thin dark-gray shawl and a pair
+of equally subdued lisle-thread gloves. Thus attired, she made a
+mischievous little grimace of dislike at her puritanical image in
+the looking-glass over the mantel, and then turned to announce her
+departure.
+
+"Well, I'm off," she said. Theron opened his eyes to take in this figure
+of his wife dressed for prayer-meeting, and then closed them again
+abruptly. "All right," he murmured, and then he heard the door shut
+behind her.
+
+Although he had been alone all day, there seemed to be quite a unique
+value and quality in this present solitude. He stretched out his legs on
+the opposite chair, and looked lazily about him, with the feeling that
+at last he had secured some leisure, and could think undisturbed to his
+heart's content. There were nearly two hours of unbroken quiet before
+him; and the mere fact of his having stepped aside from the routine of
+his duty to procure it; marked it in his thoughts as a special occasion,
+which ought in the nature of things to yield more than the ordinary
+harvest of mental profit.
+
+Theron's musings were broken in upon from time to time by rumbling
+outbursts of hymn-singing from the church next door. Surely, he said to
+himself, there could be no other congregation in the Conference, or in
+all Methodism, which sang so badly as these Octavians did. The noise,
+as it came to him now and again, divided itself familiarly into a main
+strain of hard, high, sharp, and tinny female voices, with three or four
+concurrent and clashing branch strains of part-singing by men who did
+not know how. How well he already knew these voices! Through two wooden
+walls he could detect the conceited and pushing note of Brother Lovejoy,
+who tried always to drown the rest out, and the lifeless, unmeasured
+weight of shrill clamor which Sister Barnum hurled into every chorus,
+half closing her eyes and sticking out her chin as she did so. They
+drawled their hymns too, these people, till Theron thought he understood
+that injunction in the Discipline against singing too slowly. It had
+puzzled him heretofore; now he felt that it must have been meant in
+prophecy for Octavius.
+
+It was impossible not to recall in contrast that other church music
+he had heard, a month before, and the whole atmosphere of that other
+pastoral sitting room, from which he had listened to it. The startled
+and crowded impressions of that strange evening had been lying hidden
+in his mind all this while, driven into a corner by the pressure of more
+ordinary, everyday matters. They came forth now, and passed across
+his brain--no longer confusing and distorted, but in orderly and
+intelligible sequence. Their earlier effect had been one of frightened
+fascination. Now he looked them over calmly as they lifted themselves,
+one by one, and found himself not shrinking at all, or evading anything,
+but dwelling upon each in turn as a natural and welcome part of the most
+important experience of his life.
+
+The young minister had arrived, all at once, at this conclusion. He did
+not question at all the means by which he had reached it. Nothing was
+clearer to his mind than the conclusion itself--that his meeting, with
+the priest and the doctor was the turning-point in his career. They had
+lifted him bodily out of the slough of ignorance, of contact with low
+minds and sordid, narrow things, and put him on solid ground. This book
+he had been reading--this gentle, tender, lovable book, which had as
+much true piety in it as any devotional book he had ever read, and yet,
+unlike all devotional books, put its foot firmly upon everything which
+could not be proved in human reason to be true--must be merely one of a
+thousand which men like Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar knew by heart. The
+very thought that he was on the way now to know them, too, made Theron
+tremble. The prospect wooed him, and he thrilled in response, with the
+wistful and delicate eagerness of a young lover.
+
+Somehow, the fact that the priest and the doctor were not religious men,
+and that this book which had so impressed and stirred him was nothing
+more than Renan's recital of how he, too, ceased to be a religious man,
+did not take a form which Theron could look square in the face. It wore
+the shape, instead, of a vague premise that there were a great many
+different kinds of religions--the past and dead races had multiplied
+these in their time literally into thousands--and that each no doubt had
+its central support of truth somewhere for the good men who were in it,
+and that to call one of these divine and condemn all the others was
+a part fit only for untutored bigots. Renan had formally repudiated
+Catholicism, yet could write in his old age with the deepest filial
+affection of the Mother Church he had quitted. Father Forbes could talk
+coolly about the "Christ-myth" without even ceasing to be a priest,
+and apparently a very active and devoted priest. Evidently there was an
+intellectual world, a world of culture and grace, of lofty thoughts
+and the inspiring communion of real knowledge, where creeds were not of
+importance, and where men asked one another, not "Is your soul saved?"
+but "Is your mind well furnished?" Theron had the sensation of having
+been invited to become a citizen of this world. The thought so dazzled
+him that his impulses were dragging him forward to take the new oath
+of allegiance before he had had time to reflect upon what it was he was
+abandoning.
+
+The droning of the Doxology from the church outside stirred Theron
+suddenly out of his revery. It had grown quite dark, and he rose and lit
+the gas. "Blest be the Tie that Binds," they were singing. He paused,
+with hand still in air, to listen. That well-worn phrase arrested his
+attention, and gave itself a new meaning. He was bound to those people,
+it was true, but he could never again harbor the delusion that the tie
+between them was blessed. There was vaguely present in his mind the
+consciousness that other ties were loosening as well. Be that as it
+might, one thing was certain. He had passed definitely beyond pretending
+to himself that there was anything spiritually in common between him and
+the Methodist Church of Octavius. The necessity of his keeping up the
+pretence with others rose on the instant like a looming shadow before
+his mental vision. He turned away from it, and bent his brain to think
+of something else.
+
+The noise of Alice opening the front door came as a pleasant digression.
+A second later it became clear from the sound of voices that she had
+brought some one back with her, and Theron hastily stretched himself out
+again in the armchair, with his head back in the pillow, and his feet
+on the other chair. He had come mighty near forgetting that he was an
+invalid, and he protected himself the further now by assuming an air of
+lassitude verging upon prostration.
+
+"Yes; there's a light burning. It's all right," he heard Alice say. She
+entered the room, and Theron's head was too bad to permit him to turn
+it, and see who her companion was.
+
+"Theron dear," Alice began, "I knew you'd be glad to see HER, even if
+you were out of sorts; and I persuaded her just to run in for a minute.
+Let me introduce you to Sister Soulsby. Sister Soulsby--my husband."
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware sat upright with an energetic start, and fastened upon
+the stranger a look which conveyed anything but the satisfaction his
+wife had been so sure about. It was at the first blush an undisguised
+scowl, and only some fleeting memory of that reflection about needing
+now to dissemble, prevented him from still frowning as he rose to his
+feet, and perfunctorily held out his hand.
+
+"Delighted, I'm sure," he mumbled. Then, looking up, he discovered that
+Sister Soulsby knew he was not delighted, and that she seemed not to
+mind in the least.
+
+"As your good lady said, I just ran in for a moment," she remarked,
+shaking his limp hand with a brisk, business-like grasp, and dropping
+it. "I hate bothering sick people, but as we're to be thrown together
+a good deal this next week or so, I thought I'd like to lose no time in
+saying 'howdy.' I won't keep you up now. Your wife has been sweet enough
+to ask me to move my trunk over here in the morning, so that you'll see
+enough of me and to spare."
+
+Theron looked falteringly into her face, as he strove for words which
+should sufficiently mask the disgust this intelligence stirred within
+him. A debt-raiser in the town was bad enough! A debt-raiser quartered
+in the very parsonage!--he ground his teeth to think of it.
+
+Alice read his hesitation aright. "Sister Soulsby went to the hotel,"
+she hastily put in; "and Loren Pierce was after her to come and stay at
+his house, and I ventured to tell her that I thought we could make her
+more comfortable here." She accompanied this by so daring a grimace
+and nod that her husband woke up to the fact that a point in Conference
+politics was involved.
+
+He squeezed a doubtful smile upon his features. "We shall both do our
+best," he said. It was not easy, but he forced increasing amiability
+into his glance and tone. "Is Brother Soulsby here, too?" he asked.
+
+The debt-raiser shook her head--again the prompt, decisive movement, so
+like a busy man of affairs. "No," she answered. "He's doing supply
+down on the Hudson this week, but he'll be here in time for the Sunday
+morning love-feast. I always like to come on ahead, and see how the land
+lies. Well, good-night! Your head will be all right in the morning."
+
+Precisely what she meant by this assurance, Theron did not attempt to
+guess. He received her adieu, noted the masterful manner in which
+she kissed his wife, and watched her pass out into the hall, with the
+feeling uppermost that this was a person who decidedly knew her way
+about. Much as he was prepared to dislike her, and much as he detested
+the vulgar methods her profession typified, he could not deny that she
+seemed a very capable sort of woman.
+
+This mental concession did not prevent his fixing upon Alice, when she
+returned to the room, a glance of obvious disapproval.
+
+"Theron," she broke forth, to anticipate his reproach, "I did it for the
+best. The Pierces would have got her if I hadn't cut in. I thought it
+would help to have her on our side. And, besides, I like her. She's the
+first sister I've seen since we've been in this hole that's had a kind
+word for me--or--or sympathized with me! And--and--if you're going to be
+offended--I shall cry!"
+
+There were real tears on her lashes, ready to make good the threat.
+"Oh, I guess I wouldn't," said Theron, with an approach to his old,
+half-playful manner. "If you like her, that's the chief thing."
+
+Alice shook her tear-drops away. "No," she replied, with a wistful
+smile; "the chief thing is to have her like you. She's as smart as a
+steel trap--that woman is--and if she took the notion, I believe she
+could help get us a better place."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+The ensuing week went by with a buzz and whirl, circling about Theron
+Ware's dizzy consciousness like some huge, impalpable teetotum sent
+spinning under Sister Soulsby's resolute hands. Whenever his vagrant
+memory recurred to it, in after months, he began by marvelling, and
+ended with a shudder of repulsion.
+
+It was a week crowded with events, which seemed to him to shoot past
+so swiftly that in effect they came all of a heap. He never essayed the
+task, in retrospect, of arranging them in their order of sequence. They
+had, however, a definite and interdependent chronology which it is worth
+the while to trace.
+
+Mrs. Soulsby brought her trunk round to the parsonage bright and early
+on Friday morning, and took up her lodgement in the best bedroom,
+and her headquarters in the house at large, with a cheerful and
+business-like manner. She desired nothing so much, she said, as that
+people should not put themselves out on her account, or allow her to
+get in their way. She appeared to mean this, too, and to have very good
+ideas about securing its realization.
+
+During both Friday and the following day, indeed, Theron saw her only at
+the family meals. There she displayed a hearty relish for all that was
+set before her which quite won Mrs. Ware's heart, and though she talked
+rather more than Theron found himself expecting from a woman, he could
+not deny that her conversation was both seemly and entertaining. She had
+evidently been a great traveller, and referred to things she had seen in
+Savannah or Montreal or Los Angeles in as matter-of-fact fashion as
+he could have spoken of a visit to Tecumseh. Theron asked her many
+questions about these and other far-off cities, and her answers were
+all so pat and showed so keen and clear an eye that he began in spite of
+himself to think of her with a certain admiration.
+
+She in turn plied him with inquiries about the principal pew-holders
+and members of his congregation--their means, their disposition, and the
+measure of their devotion. She put these queries with such intelligence,
+and seemed to assimilate his replies with such an alert understanding,
+that the young minister was spurred to put dashes of character in
+his descriptions, and set forth the idiosyncrasies and distinguishing
+earmarks of his flock with what he felt afterward might have been too
+free a tongue. But at the time her fine air of appreciation led him
+captive. He gossiped about his parishioners as if he enjoyed it. He
+made a specially happy thumb-nail sketch for her of one of his trustees,
+Erastus Winch, the loud-mouthed, ostentatiously jovial, and really
+cold-hearted cheese-buyer. She was particularly interested in hearing
+about this man. The personality of Winch seemed to have impressed her,
+and she brought the talk back to him more than once, and prompted Theron
+to the very threshold of indiscretion in his confidences on the subject.
+
+Save at meal-times, Sister Soulsby spent the two days out around among
+the Methodists of Octavius. She had little or nothing to say about
+what she thus saw and heard, but used it as the basis for still further
+inquiries. She told more than once, however, of how she had been pressed
+here or there to stay to dinner or supper, and how she had excused
+herself. "I've knocked about too much," she would explain to the Wares,
+"not to fight shy of random country cooking. When I find such a born
+cook as you are--well I know when I'm well off." Alice flushed with
+pleased pride at this, and Theron himself felt that their visitor showed
+great good sense. By Saturday noon, the two women were calling each
+other by their first names. Theron learned with a certain interest that
+Sister Soulsby's Christian name was Candace.
+
+It was only natural that he should give even more thought to her than to
+her quaint and unfamiliar old Ethiopian name. She was undoubtedly a very
+smart woman. To his surprise she had never introduced in her talk any of
+the stock religious and devotional phrases which official Methodists
+so universally employed in mutual converse. She might have been an
+insurance agent, or a school-teacher, visiting in a purely secular
+household, so little parade of cant was there about her.
+
+He caught himself wondering how old she was. She seemed to have been
+pretty well over the whole American continent, and that must take years
+of time. Perhaps, however, the exertion of so much travel would tend
+to age one in appearance. Her eyes were still youthful--decidedly
+wise eyes, but still juvenile. They had sparkled with almost girlish
+merriment at some of his jokes. She turned them about a good deal when
+she spoke, making their glances fit and illustrate the things she said.
+He had never met any one whose eyes played so constant and prominent a
+part in their owner's conversation. Theron had never seen a play; but
+he had encountered the portraits of famous queens of the drama several
+times in illustrated papers or shop windows, and it occurred to him that
+some of the more marked contortions of Sister Soulsby's eyes--notably
+a trick she had of rolling them swiftly round and plunging them, so to
+speak, into an intent, yearning, one might almost say devouring, gaze
+at the speaker--were probably employed by eminent actresses like Ristori
+and Fanny Davenport.
+
+The rest of Sister Soulsby was undoubtedly subordinated in interest to
+those eyes of hers. Sometimes her face seemed to be reviving temporarily
+a comeliness which had been constant in former days; then again it would
+look decidedly, organically, plain. It was the worn and loose-skinned
+face of a nervous, middle-aged woman, who had had more than her share of
+trouble, and drank too much tea. She wore the collar of her dress rather
+low; and Theron found himself wondering at this, because, though long
+and expansive, her neck certainly showed more cords and cavities than
+consorted with his vague ideal of statuesque beauty. Then he wondered at
+himself for thinking about it, and abruptly reined up his fancy, only to
+find that it was playing with speculations as to whether her yellowish
+complexion was due to that tea-drinking or came to her as a legacy of
+Southern blood.
+
+He knew that she was born in the South because she said so. From the
+same source he learned that her father had been a wealthy planter, who
+was ruined by the war, and sank into a premature grave under the weight
+of his accumulated losses. The large dark rings around her eyes
+grew deeper still in their shadows when she told about this, and her
+ordinarily sharp voice took on a mellow cadence, with a soft, drawling
+accent, turning U's into O's, and having no R's to speak of. Theron had
+imbibed somewhere in early days the conviction that the South was the
+land of romance, of cavaliers and gallants and black eyes flashing
+behind mantillas and outspread fans, and somehow when Sister Soulsby
+used this intonation she suggested all these things.
+
+But almost all her talk was in another key--a brisk, direct, idiomatic
+manner of speech, with an intonation hinting at no section in
+particular. It was merely that of the city-dweller as distinguished from
+the rustic. She was of about Alice's height, perhaps a shade taller.
+It did not escape the attention of the Wares that she wore clothes of a
+more stylish cut and a livelier arrangement of hues than any Alice had
+ever dared own, even in lax-minded Tyre. The two talked of this in their
+room on Friday night; and Theron explained that congregations would
+tolerate things of this sort with a stranger which would be sharply
+resented in the case of local folk whom they controlled. It was on this
+occasion that Alice in turn told Theron she was sure Mrs. Soulsby had
+false teeth--a confidence which she immediately regretted as an act of
+treachery to her sex.
+
+On Saturday afternoon, toward evening, Brother Soulsby arrived, and was
+guided to the parsonage by his wife, who had gone to the depot to meet
+him. They must have talked over the situation pretty thoroughly on the
+way, for by the time the new-comer had washed his face and hands and
+put on a clean collar, Sister Soulsby was ready to announce her plan of
+campaign in detail.
+
+Her husband was a man of small stature and, like herself, of uncertain
+age. He had a gentle, if rather dry, clean-shaven face, and wore his
+dust-colored hair long behind. His little figure was clad in black
+clothes of a distinctively clerical fashion, and he had a white
+neck-cloth neatly tied under his collar. The Wares noted that he looked
+clean and amiable rather than intellectually or spiritually powerful, as
+he took the vacant seat between theirs, and joined them in concentrating
+attention upon Mrs. Soulsby.
+
+This lady, holding herself erect and alert on the edge of the low, big
+easy-chair had the air of presiding over a meeting.
+
+"My idea is," she began, with an easy implication that no one else's
+idea was needed, "that your Quarterly Conference, when it meets on
+Monday, must be adjourned to Tuesday. We will have the people all out
+tomorrow morning to love-feast, and announcement can be made there, and
+at the morning service afterward, that a series of revival meetings are
+to be begun that same evening. Mr. Soulsby and I can take charge in the
+evening, and we'll see to it that THAT packs the house--fills the church
+to overflowing Monday evening. Then we'll quietly turn the meeting into
+a debt-raising convention, before they know where they are, and we'll
+wipe off the best part of the load. Now, don't you see," she turned her
+eyes full upon Theron as she spoke, "you want to hold your Quarterly
+Conference AFTER this money's been raised, not before."
+
+"I see what you mean," Mr. Ware responded gravely. "But--"
+
+"But what!" Sister Soulsby interjected, with vivacity.
+
+"Well," said Theron, picking his words, "in the first place, it rests
+with the Presiding Elder to say whether an adjournment can be made until
+Tuesday, not with me."
+
+"That's all right. Leave that to me," said the lady.
+
+"In the second place," Theron went on, still more hesitatingly, "there
+seems a certain--what shall I say?--indirection in--in--"
+
+"In getting them together for a revival, and springing a debt-raising on
+them?" Sister Soulsby put in. "Why, man alive, that's the best part of
+it. You ought to be getting some notion by this time what these Octavius
+folks of yours are like. I've only been here two days, but I've got
+their measure down to an allspice. Supposing you were to announce
+tomorrow that the debt was to be raised Monday. How many men with
+bank-accounts would turn up, do you think? You could put them all in
+your eye, sir--all in your eye!"
+
+"Very possibly you're right," faltered the young minister.
+
+"Right? Why, of course I'm right," she said, with placid confidence.
+"You've got to take folks as you find them; and you've got to find them
+the best way you can. One place can be worked, managed, in one way,
+and another needs quite a different way, and both ways would be dead
+frosts--complete failures--in a third."
+
+Brother Soulsby coughed softly here, and shuffled his feet for an
+instant on the carpet. His wife resumed her remarks with slightly abated
+animation, and at a slower pace.
+
+"My experience," she said, "has shown me that the Apostle was right.
+To properly serve the cause, one must be all things to all men. I have
+known very queer things indeed turn out to be means of grace. You
+simply CAN'T get along without some of the wisdom of the serpent. We are
+commanded to have it, for that matter. And now, speaking of that, do
+you know when the Presiding Elder arrives in town today, and where he is
+going to eat supper and sleep?"
+
+Theron shook his head. "All I know is he isn't likely to come here," he
+said, and added sadly, "I'm afraid he's not an admirer of mine."
+
+"Perhaps that's not all his fault," commented Sister Soulsby. "I'll tell
+you something. He came in on the same train as my husband, and that old
+trustee Pierce of yours was waiting for him with his buggy, and I saw
+like a flash what was in the wind, and the minute the train stopped I
+caught the Presiding Elder, and invited him in your name to come
+right here and stay; told him you and Alice were just set on his
+coming--wouldn't take no for an answer. Of course he couldn't come--I
+knew well enough he had promised old Pierce--but we got in our
+invitation anyway, and it won't do you any harm. Now, that's what I call
+having some gumption--wisdom of the serpent, and so on."
+
+"I'm sure," remarked Alice, "I should have been mortified to death if he
+had come. We lost the extension-leaf to our table in moving, and four is
+all it'll seat decently."
+
+Sister Soulsby smiled winningly into the wife's honest face. "Don't you
+see, dear," she explained patiently, "I only asked him because I knew
+he couldn't come. A little butter spreads a long way, if it's only
+intelligently warmed."
+
+"It was certainly very ingenious of you," Theron began almost stiffly.
+Then he yielded to the humanities, and with a kindling smile added,
+"And it was as kind as kind could be. I'm afraid you're wrong about
+it's doing me any good, but I can see how well you meant it, and I'm
+grateful."
+
+"We COULD have sneaked in the kitchen table, perhaps, while he was out
+in the garden, and put on the extra long tablecloth," interjected Alice,
+musingly.
+
+Sister Soulsby smiled again at Sister Ware, but without any words this
+time; and Alice on the instant rose, with the remark that she must be
+going out to see about supper.
+
+"I'm going to insist on coming out to help you," Mrs. Soulsby declared,
+"as soon as I've talked over one little matter with your husband. Oh,
+yes, you must let me this time. I insist!"
+
+As the kitchen door closed behind Mrs. Ware, a swift and apparently
+significant glance shot its way across from Sister Soulsby's roving,
+eloquent eyes to the calmer and smaller gray orbs of her husband. He
+rose to his feet, made some little explanation about being a gardener
+himself, and desiring to inspect more closely some rhododendrons he had
+noticed in the garden, and forthwith moved decorously out by the other
+door into the front hall. They heard his footsteps on the gravel beneath
+the window before Mrs. Soulsby spoke again.
+
+"You're right about the Presiding Elder, and you're wrong," she said.
+"He isn't what one might call precisely in love with you. Oh, I know the
+story--how you got into debt at Tyre, and he stepped in and insisted on
+your being denied Tecumseh and sent here instead."
+
+"HE was responsible for that, then, was he?" broke in Theron, with
+contracted brows.
+
+"Why, don't you make any effort to find out anything at ALL?" she asked
+pertly enough, but with such obvious good-nature that he could not but
+have pleasure in her speech. "Why, of course he did it! Who else did you
+suppose?"
+
+"Well," said the young minister, despondently, "if he's as much against
+me as all that, I might as well hang up my fiddle and go home."
+
+Sister Soulsby gave a little involuntary groan of impatience. She
+bent forward, and, lifting her eyes, rolled them at him in a curve of
+downward motion which suggested to his fancy the image of two eagles in
+a concerted pounce upon a lamb.
+
+"My friend," she began, with a new note of impressiveness in her voice,
+"if you'll pardon my saying it, you haven't got the spunk of a mouse.
+If you're going to lay down, and let everybody trample over you just as
+they please, you're right! You MIGHT as well go home. But now here, this
+is what I wanted to say to you: Do you just keep your hands off these
+next few days, and leave this whole thing to me. I'll pull it into
+shipshape for you. No--wait a minute--don't interrupt now. I have taken
+a liking to you. You've got brains, and you've got human nature in you,
+and heart. What you lack is SABE--common-sense. You'll get that, too, in
+time, and meanwhile I'm not going to stand by and see you cut up and fed
+to the dogs for want of it. I'll get you through this scrape, and put
+you on your feet again, right-side-up-with care, because, as I said, I
+like you. I like your wife, too, mind. She's a good, honest little soul,
+and she worships the very ground you tread on. Of course, as long as
+people WILL marry in their teens, the wrong people will get yoked up
+together. But that's neither here nor there. She's a kind sweet little
+body, and she's devoted to you, and it isn't every intellectual man
+that gets even that much. But now it's a go, is it? You promise to keep
+quiet, do you, and leave the whole show absolutely to me? Shake hands on
+it."
+
+Sister Soulsby had risen, and stood now holding out her hand in a frank,
+manly fashion. Theron looked at the hand, and made mental notes that
+there were a good many veins discernible on the small wrist, and that
+the forearm seemed to swell out more than would have been expected in a
+woman producing such a general effect of leanness. He caught the
+shine of a thin bracelet-band of gold under the sleeve. A delicate,
+significant odor just hinted its presence in the air about this
+outstretched arm--something which was not a perfume, yet deserved as
+gracious a name.
+
+He rose to his feet, and took the proffered hand with a deliberate
+gesture, as if he had been cautiously weighing all the possible
+arguments for and against this momentous compact.
+
+"I promise," he said gravely, and the two palms squeezed themselves
+together in an earnest clasp.
+
+"Right you are," exclaimed the lady, once more with cheery vivacity.
+"Mind, when it's all over, I'm going to give you a good, serious,
+downright talking to--a regular hoeing-over. I'm not sure I shan't give
+you a sound shaking into the bargain. You need it. And now I'm going out
+to help Alice."
+
+The Reverend Mr. Ware remained standing after his new friend had
+left the room, and his meditative face wore an even unusual air of
+abstraction. He strolled aimlessly over, after a time, to the desk by
+the window, and stood there looking out at the slight figure of Brother
+Soulsby, who was bending over and attentively regarding some pink
+blossoms on a shrub through what seemed to be a pocket magnifying-glass.
+
+What remained uppermost in his mind was not this interesting woman's
+confident pledge of championship in his material difficulties. He found
+himself dwelling instead upon her remark about the incongruous results
+of early marriages. He wondered idly if the little man in the white
+tie, fussing out there over that rhododendron-bush, had figured in her
+thoughts as an example of these evils. Then he reflected that they had
+been mentioned in clear relation to talk about Alice.
+
+Now that he faced this question, it was as if he had been consciously
+ignoring and putting it aside for a long time. How was it, he asked
+himself now, that Alice, who had once seemed so bright and keen-witted,
+who had in truth started out immeasurably his superior in swiftness of
+apprehension and readiness in humorous quips and conceits, should
+have grown so dull? For she was undoubtedly slow to understand things
+nowadays. Her absurd lugging in of the extension-table problem, when
+the great strategic point of that invitation foisted upon the
+Presiding Elder came up, was only the latest sample of a score of these
+heavy-minded exhibitions that recalled themselves to him. And outsiders
+were apparently beginning to notice it. He knew by intuition what
+those phrases, "good, honest little soul" and "kind, sweet little body"
+signified, when another woman used them to a husband about his wife. The
+very employment of that word "little" was enough, considering that there
+was scarcely more than a hair's difference between Mrs. Soulsby and
+Alice, and that they were both rather tall than otherwise, as the
+stature of women went.
+
+What she had said about the chronic misfortunes of intellectual men in
+such matters gave added point to those meaning phrases. Nobody could
+deny that geniuses and men of conspicuous talent had as a rule, all
+through history, contracted unfortunate marriages. In almost every case
+where their wives were remembered at all, it was on account of their
+abnormal stupidity, or bad temper, or something of that sort. Take
+Xantippe, for example, and Shakespeare's wife, and--and--well, there was
+Byron, and Bulwer-Lytton, and ever so many others.
+
+Of course there was nothing to be done about it. These things happened,
+and one could only put the best possible face on them, and live one's
+appointed life as patiently and contentedly as might be. And Alice
+undoubtedly merited all the praise which had been so generously bestowed
+upon her. She was good and honest and kindly, and there could be no
+doubt whatever as to her utter devotion to him. These were tangible,
+solid qualities, which must always secure respect for her. It was true
+that she no longer seemed to be very popular among people. He questioned
+whether men, for instance, like Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar would care
+much about her. Visions of the wifeless and academic calm in which
+these men spent their lives--an existence consecrated to literature and
+knowledge and familiarity with all the loftiest and noblest thoughts of
+the past--rose and enveloped him in a cloud of depression. No such
+lot would be his! He must labor along among ignorant and spiteful
+narrow-minded people to the end of his days, pocketing their insults and
+fawning upon the harsh hands of jealous nonentities who happened to
+be his official masters, just to keep a roof over his head--or rather
+Alice's. He must sacrifice everything to this, his ambitions, his
+passionate desires to do real good in the world on a large scale,
+his mental freedom, yes, even his chance of having truly elevating,
+intellectual friendships. For it was plain enough that the men whose
+friendship would be of genuine and stimulating profit to him would not
+like her. Now that he thought of it, she seemed latterly to make no
+friends at all.
+
+Suddenly, as he watched in a blank sort of way Brother Soulsby take
+out a penknife, and lop an offending twig from a rose-bush against the
+fence, something occurred to him. There was a curious exception to
+that rule of Alice's isolation. She had made at least one friend. Levi
+Gorringe seemed to like her extremely.
+
+As if his mind had been a camera, Theron snapped a shutter down upon
+this odd, unbidden idea, and turned away from the window.
+
+The sounds of an active, almost strenuous conversation in female voices
+came from the kitchen. Theron opened the door noiselessly, and put in
+his head, conscious of something furtive in his intention.
+
+"You must dreen every drop of water off the spinach, mind, before you
+put it over, or else--"
+
+It was Sister Soulsby's sharp and penetrating tones which came to him.
+Theron closed the door again, and surrendered himself once more to the
+circling whirl of his thoughts.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+A love-feast at nine in the morning opened the public services of a
+Sunday still memorable in the annals of Octavius Methodism.
+
+This ceremony, which four times a year preceded the sessions of the
+Quarterly Conference, was not necessarily an event of importance. It
+was an occasion upon which the brethren and sisters who clung to the
+old-fashioned, primitive ways of the itinerant circuit-riders, let
+themselves go with emphasized independence, putting up more vehement
+prayers than usual, and adding a special fervor of noise to their
+"Amens!" and other interjections--and that was all.
+
+It was Theron's first love-feast in Octavius, and as the big class-room
+in the church basement began to fill up, and he noted how the men with
+ultra radical views and the women clad in the most ostentatious drabs
+and grays were crowding into the front seats, he felt his spirits
+sinking. He had literally to force himself from sentence to sentence,
+when the time came for him to rise and open the proceedings with an
+exhortation. He had eagerly offered this function to the Presiding
+Elder, the Rev. Aziel P. Larrabee, who sat in severe silence on the
+little platform behind him, but had been informed that the dignitary
+would lead off in giving testimony later on. So Theron, feeling all the
+while the hostile eyes of the Elder burning holes in his back, dragged
+himself somehow through the task. He had never known any such difficulty
+of speech before. The relief was almost overwhelming when he came to
+the customary part where all are adjured to be as brief as possible in
+witnessing for the Lord, because the time belongs to all the people, and
+the Discipline forbids the feast to last more than ninety minutes. He
+delivered this injunction to brevity with marked earnestness, and then
+sat down abruptly.
+
+There was some rather boisterous singing, during which the stewards,
+beginning with the platform, passed plates of bread cut in small
+cubes, and water in big plated pitchers and tumblers, about among
+the congregation, threading their way between the long wooden benches
+ordinarily occupied at this hour by the children of the Sunday-school,
+and helping each brother and sister in turn. They held by the old
+custom, here in Octavius, and all along the seats the sexes alternated,
+as they do at a polite dinner-table.
+
+Theron impassively watched the familiar scene. The early nervousness had
+passed away. He felt now that he was not in the least afraid of these
+people, even with the Presiding Elder thrown in. Folks who sang with
+such unintelligence, and who threw themselves with such undignified
+fervor into this childish business of the bread and water, could not
+be formidable antagonists for a man of intellect. He had never realized
+before what a spectacle the Methodist love-feast probably presented to
+outsiders. What must they think of it!
+
+He had noticed that the Soulsbys sat together, in the centre and toward
+the front. Next to Brother Soulsby sat Alice. He thought she looked pale
+and preoccupied, and set it down in passing to her innate distaste for
+the somber garments she was wearing, and for the company she perforce
+found herself in. Another head was in the way, and for a time Theron did
+not observe who sat beside Alice on the other side. When at last he saw
+that it was Levi Gorringe, his instinct was to wonder what the lawyer
+must be saying to himself about these noisy and shallow enthusiasts. A
+recurring emotion of loyalty to the simple people among whom, after all,
+he had lived his whole life, prompted him to feel that it wasn't wholly
+nice of Gorringe to come and enjoy this revelation of their foolish
+side, as if it were a circus. There was some vague memory in his mind
+which associated Gorringe with other love-feasts, and with a cynical
+attitude toward them. Oh, yes! he had told how he went to one just for
+the sake of sitting beside the girl he admired--and was pursuing.
+
+The stewards had completed their round, and the loud, discordant singing
+came to an end. There ensued a little pause, during which Theron turned
+to the Presiding Elder with a gesture of invitation to take charge
+of the further proceedings. The Elder responded with another gesture,
+calling his attention to something going on in front.
+
+Brother and Sister Soulsby, to the considerable surprise of everybody,
+had risen to their feet, and were standing in their places, quite
+motionless, and with an air of professional self-assurance dimly
+discernible under a large show of humility. They stood thus until
+complete silence had been secured. Then the woman, lifting her head,
+began to sing. The words were "Rock of Ages," but no one present had
+heard the tune to which she wedded them. Her voice was full and very
+sweet, and had in it tender cadences which all her hearers found
+touching. She knew how to sing, and she put forth the words so that each
+was distinctly intelligible. There came a part where Brother Soulsby,
+lifting his head in turn, took up a tuneful second to her air. Although
+the two did not, as one could hear by listening closely, sing the same
+words at the same time, they produced none the less most moving and
+delightful harmonies of sound.
+
+The experience was so novel and charming that listeners ran ahead in
+their minds to fix the number of verses there were in the hymn, and
+to hope that none would be left out. Toward the end, when some of the
+intolerably self-conceited local singers, fancying they had caught the
+tune, started to join in, they were stopped by an indignant "sh-h!"
+which rose from all parts of the class-room; and the Soulsbys, with a
+patient and pensive kindliness written on their uplifted faces, gave
+that verse over again.
+
+What followed seemed obviously restrained and modified by the effect of
+this unlooked-for and tranquillizing overture. The Presiding Elder
+was known to enjoy visits to old-fashioned congregations like that
+of Octavius, where he could indulge to the full his inner passion for
+high-pitched passionate invocations and violent spiritual demeanor, but
+this time he spoke temperately, almost soothingly. The most tempestuous
+of the local witnesses for the Lord gave in their testimony in
+relatively pacific tones, under the influence of the spell which good
+music had laid upon the gathering. There was the deepest interest as to
+what the two visitors would do in this way. Brother Soulsby spoke first,
+very briefly and in well rounded and well-chosen, if conventional,
+phrases. His wife, following him, delivered in a melodious monotone some
+equally hackneyed remarks. The assemblage, listening in rapt attention,
+felt the suggestion of reserved power in every sentence she uttered, and
+burst forth, as she dropped into her seat, in a loud chorus of approving
+ejaculations. The Soulsbys had captured Octavius with their first outer
+skirmish line.
+
+Everything seemed to move forward now with a new zest and spontaneity.
+Theron had picked out for the occasion the best of those sermons which
+he had prepared in Tyre, at the time when he was justifying his ambition
+to be accounted a pulpit orator. It was orthodox enough, but had been
+planned as the framework for picturesque and emotional rhetoric rather
+than doctrinal edification. He had never dreamed of trying it on
+Octavius before, and only on the yesterday had quavered at his own
+daring in choosing it now. Nothing but the desire to show Sister Soulsby
+what was in him had held him to the selection.
+
+Something of this same desire no doubt swayed and steadied him now in
+the pulpit. The labored slowness of his beginning seemed to him to be
+due to nervous timidity, until suddenly, looking down into those big
+eyes of Sister Soulsby's, which were bent gravely upon him from where
+she sat beside Alice in the minister's pew, he remembered that it was
+instead the studied deliberation which art had taught him. He went on,
+feeling more and more that the skill and histrionic power of his best
+days were returning to him, were as marked as ever--nay, had never
+triumphed before as they were triumphing now. The congregation watched
+and listened with open, steadfast eyes and parted lips. For the first
+time in all that weary quarter, their faces shone. The sustaining
+sparkle of their gaze lifted him to a peroration unrivalled in his own
+recollection of himself.
+
+He sat down, and bent his head forward upon the open Bible, breathing
+hard, but suffused with a glow of satisfaction. His ears caught the
+music of that sighing rustle through the audience which bespeaks a
+profound impression. He could scarcely keep the fingers of his hands,
+covering his bowed face in a devotional posture as they were, from
+drumming a jubilant tattoo. His pulses did this in every vein, throbbing
+with excited exultation. The insistent whim seized him, as he still
+bent thus before his people, to whisper to his own heart, "At last!--The
+dogs!"
+
+The announcement that in the evening a series of revival meetings was to
+be inaugurated, had been made at the love-feast, and it was repeated
+now from the pulpit, with the added statement that for the once
+the class-meetings usually following this morning service would be
+suspended. Then Theron came down the steps, conscious after a fashion
+that the Presiding Elder had laid a propitiatory hand on his shoulder
+and spoken amiably about the sermon, and that several groups of more or
+less important parishioners were waiting in the aisle and the vestibule
+to shake hands and tell him how much they had enjoyed the sermon. His
+mind perversely kept hold of the thought that all this came too late. He
+politely smiled his way along out, and, overtaking the Soulsbys and his
+wife near the parsonage gate, went in with them.
+
+At the cold, picked-up noonday meal which was the Sunday rule of the
+house, Theron rather expected that his guests would talk about the
+sermon, or at any rate about the events of the morning. A Sabbath chill
+seemed to have settled upon both their tongues. They ate almost in
+silence, and their sparse remarks touched upon topics far removed from
+church affairs. Alice too, seemed strangely disinclined to conversation.
+The husband knew her face and its varying moods so well that he could
+see she was laboring under some very powerful and deep emotion. No doubt
+it was the sermon, the oratorical swing of which still tingled in his
+own blood, that had so affected her. If she had said so, it would have
+pleased him, but she said nothing.
+
+After dinner, Brother Soulsby disappeared in his bedroom, with the
+remark that he guessed he would lie down awhile. Sister Soulsby put
+on her bonnet, and, explaining that she always prepared herself for an
+evening's work by a long solitary walk, quitted the house. Alice, after
+she had put the dinner things away, went upstairs, and stayed there.
+Left to himself, Theron spent the afternoon in the easy-chair, and,
+in the intervals of confused introspection, read "Recollections of my
+Youth" through again from cover to cover.
+
+He went through the remarkable experiences attending the opening of the
+revival, when evening came, as one in a dream. Long before the hour for
+the service arrived, the sexton came in to tell him that the church was
+already nearly full, and that it was going to be impossible to present
+any distinction in the matter of pews. When the party from the parsonage
+went over--after another cold and mostly silent meal--it was to find the
+interior of the church densely packed, and people being turned away from
+the doors.
+
+Theron was supposed to preside over what followed, and he did sit on
+the central chair in the pulpit, between the Presiding Elder and Brother
+Soulsby, and on the several needful occasions did rise and perfunctorily
+make the formal remarks required of him. The Elder preached a short,
+but vigorously phrased sermon. The Soulsbys sang three or four times--on
+each occasion with familiar hymnal words set to novel, concerted
+music--and then separately exhorted the assemblage. The husband's part
+seemed well done. If his speech lacked some of the fire of the divine
+girdings which older Methodists recalled, it still led straight, and
+with kindling fervency, up to a season of power. The wife took up the
+word as he sat down. She had risen from one of the side-seats; and,
+speaking as she walked, she moved forward till she stood within the
+altar-rail, immediately under the pulpit, and from this place, facing
+the listening throng, she delivered her harangue. Those who watched
+her words most intently got the least sense of meaning from them.
+The phrases were all familiar enough--"Jesus a very present help,"
+"Sprinkled by the Blood," "Comforted by the Word," "Sanctified by the
+Spirit," "Born into the Kingdom," and a hundred others--but it was as in
+the case of her singing: the words were old; the music was new.
+
+What Sister Soulsby said did not matter. The way she said it--the
+splendid, searching sweep of her great eyes; the vibrating roll of
+her voice, now full of tears, now scornful, now boldly, jubilantly
+triumphant; the sympathetic swaying of her willowy figure under the
+stress of her eloquence--was all wonderful. When she had finished, and
+stood, flushed and panting, beneath the shadow of the pulpit, she
+held up a hand deprecatingly as the resounding "Amens!" and "Bless the
+Lords!" began to well up about her.
+
+"You have heard us sing," she said, smiling to apologize for her
+shortness of breath. "Now we want to hear you sing!"
+
+Her husband had risen as she spoke, and on the instant, with a far
+greater volume of voice than they had hitherto disclosed, the two began
+"From Greenland's Icy Mountains," in the old, familiar tune. It did
+not need Sister Soulsby's urgent and dramatic gesture to lift people to
+their feet. The whole assemblage sprang up, and, under the guidance of
+these two powerful leading voices, thundered the hymn out as Octavius
+had never heard it before.
+
+While its echoes were still alive, the woman began speaking again.
+"Don't sit down!" she cried. "You would stand up if the President of the
+United States was going by, even if he was only going fishing. How much
+more should you stand up in honor of living souls passing forward to
+find their Saviour!"
+
+The psychological moment was upon them. Groans and cries arose, and
+a palpable ferment stirred the throng. The exhortation to sinners
+to declare themselves, to come to the altar, was not only on the
+revivalist's lips: it seemed to quiver in the very air, to be borne on
+every inarticulate exclamation in the clamor of the brethren. A young
+woman, with a dazed and startled look in her eyes, rose in the body of
+the church tremblingly hesitated for a moment, and then, with bowed head
+and blushing cheeks, pressed her way out from the end of a crowded
+pew and down the aisle to the rail. A triumphant outburst of welcoming
+ejaculations swelled to the roof as she knelt there, and under its
+impetus others followed her example. With interspersed snatches of song
+and shouted encouragements the excitement reached its height only when
+twoscore people, mostly young, were tightly clustered upon their knees
+about the rail, and in the space opening upon the aisle. Above the
+confusion of penitential sobs and moans, and the hysterical murmurings
+of members whose conviction of entire sanctity kept them in their seats,
+could be heard the voices of the Presiding Elder, the Soulsbys, and
+the elderly deacons of the church, who moved about among the kneeling
+mourners, bending over them and patting their shoulders, and calling
+out to them: "Fasten your thoughts on Jesus!" "Oh, the Precious Blood!"
+"Blessed be His Name!" "Seek Him, and you shall find Him!" "Cling to
+Jesus, and Him Crucified!"
+
+The Rev. Theron Ware did not, with the others, descend from the pulpit.
+Seated where he could not see Sister Soulsby, he had failed utterly to
+be moved by the wave of enthusiasm she had evoked. What he heard her say
+disappointed him. He had expected from her more originality, more spice
+of her own idiomatic, individual sort. He viewed with a cold sense of
+aloofness the evidences of her success when they began to come forward
+and abase themselves at the altar. The instant resolve that, come what
+might, he would not go down there among them, sprang up ready-made in
+his mind. He saw his two companions pass him and descend the pulpit
+stairs, and their action only hardened his resolution. If an excuse were
+needed, he was presiding, and the place to preside in was the pulpit.
+But he waived in his mind the whole question of an excuse.
+
+After a little, he put his hand over his face, leaning the elbow forward
+on the reading-desk. The scene below would have thrilled him to the
+marrow six months--yes, three months ago. He put a finger across his
+eyes now, to half shut it out. The spectacle of these silly young
+"mourners"--kneeling they knew not why, trembling at they could not tell
+what, pledging themselves frantically to dogmas and mysteries they knew
+nothing of, under the influence of a hubbub of outcries as meaningless
+in their way, and inspiring in much the same way, as the racket of a
+fife and drum corps--the spectacle saddened and humiliated him now.
+He was conscious of a dawning sense of shame at being even tacitly
+responsible for such a thing. His fancy conjured up the idea of Dr.
+Ledsmar coming in and beholding this maudlin and unseemly scene, and he
+felt his face grow hot at the bare thought.
+
+Looking through his fingers, Theron all at once saw something which
+caught at his breath with a sharp clutch. Alice had risen from the
+minister's pew--the most conspicuous one in the church--and was moving
+down the aisle toward the rail, her uplifted face chalk-like in its
+whiteness, and her eyes wide-open, looking straight ahead.
+
+The young pastor could scarcely credit his sight. He thrust aside his
+hand, and bent forward, only to see his wife sink upon her knees among
+the rest, and to hear this notable accession to the "mourners" hailed
+by a tumult of approving shouts. Then, remembering himself, he drew back
+and put up his hand, shutting out the strange scene altogether. To see
+nothing at all was a relief, and under cover he closed his eyes, and bit
+his teeth together.
+
+A fresh outburst of thanksgivings, spreading noisily through the
+congregation, prompted him to peer through his fingers again. Levi
+Gorringe was making his way down the aisle--was at the moment quite in
+front. Theron found himself watching this man with the stern composure
+of a fatalist. The clamant brethren down below were stirred to new
+excitement by the thought that the sceptical lawyer, so long with them,
+yet not of them, had been humbled and won by the outpourings of the
+Spirit. Theron's perceptions were keener. He knew that Gorringe was
+coming forward to kneel beside Alice; The knowledge left him curiously
+undisturbed. He saw the lawyer advance, gently insinuate himself past
+the form of some kneeling mourner who was in his way, and drop on his
+knees close beside the bowed figure of Alice. The two touched shoulders
+as they bent forward beneath Sister Soulsby's outstretched hands, held
+over them as in a blessing. Theron looked fixedly at them, and professed
+to himself that he was barely interested.
+
+A little afterward, he was standing up in his place, and reading aloud
+a list of names which one of the stewards had given him. They were the
+names of those who had asked that evening to be taken into the church
+as members on probation. The sounds of the recent excitement were all
+hushed now, save as two or three enthusiasts in a corner raised their
+voices in abrupt greeting of each name in its turn, but Theron felt
+somehow that this noise had been transferred to the inside of his head.
+A continuous buzzing went on there, so that the sound of his voice was
+far-off and unfamiliar in his ears.
+
+He read through the list--comprising some fifteen items--and pronounced
+the names with great distinctness. It was necessary to take pains with
+this, because the only name his blurred eyes seemed to see anywhere on
+the foolscap sheet was that of Levi Gorringe. When he had finished and
+was taking his seat, some one began speaking to him from the body of the
+church. He saw that this was the steward, who was explaining to him that
+the most important name of the lot--that of Brother Gorringe--had not
+been read out.
+
+Theron smiled and shook his head. Then, when the Presiding Elder touched
+him on the arm, and assured him that he had not mentioned the name in
+question, he replied quite simply, and with another smile, "I thought it
+was the only name I did read out."
+
+Then he sat down abruptly, and let his head fall to one side. There
+were hurried movements inside the pulpit, and people in the audience had
+begun to stand up wonderingly, when the Presiding Elder, with uplifted
+hands, confronted them.
+
+"We will omit the Doxology, and depart quietly after the benediction,"
+he said. "Brother Ware seems to have been overcome by the heat."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+When Theron woke next morning, Alice seemed to have dressed and left the
+room--a thing which had never happened before.
+
+This fact connected itself at once in his brain with the recollection
+of her having made an exhibition of herself the previous evening--going
+forward before all eyes to join the unconverted and penitent sinners, as
+if she were some tramp or shady female, instead of an educated lady, a
+professing member from her girlhood, and a minister's wife. It crossed
+his mind that probably she had risen and got away noiselessly, for very
+shame at looking him in the face, after such absurd behavior.
+
+Then he remembered more, and grasped the situation. He had fainted in
+church, and had been brought home and helped to bed. Dim memories of
+unaccustomed faces in the bedroom, of nauseous drugs and hushed voices,
+came to him out of the night-time. Now that he thought of it, he was a
+sick man. Having settled this, he went off to sleep again, a feverish
+and broken sleep, and remained in this state most of the time for the
+following twenty-four hours. In the brief though numerous intervals of
+waking, he found certain things clear in his mind. One was that he was
+annoyed with Alice, but would dissemble his feelings. Another was that
+it was much pleasanter to be ill than to be forced to attend and take
+part in those revival meetings. These two ideas came and went in a lazy,
+drowsy fashion, mixing themselves up with other vagrant fancies, yet
+always remaining on top.
+
+In the evening the singing from the church next door filled his room.
+The Soulsbys' part of it was worth keeping awake for. He turned over and
+deliberately dozed when the congregation sang.
+
+Alice came up a number of times during the day to ask how he felt, and
+to bring him broth or toast-water. On several occasions, when he heard
+her step, the perverse inclination mastered him to shut his eyes, and
+pretend to be asleep, so that she might tip-toe out again. She had a
+depressed and thoughtful air, and spoke to him like one whose mind was
+on something else. Neither of them alluded to what had happened the
+previous evening. Toward the close of the long day, she came to ask him
+whether he would prefer her to remain in the house, instead of attending
+the meeting.
+
+"Go, by all means," he said almost curtly.
+
+The Presiding Elder and the Sunday-school superintendent called early
+Tuesday morning at the parsonage to make brotherly inquiries, and
+Theron was feeling so much better that he himself suggested their
+coming upstairs to see him. The Elder was in good spirits; he
+smiled approvingly, and even put in a jocose word or two while the
+superintendent sketched for the invalid in a cheerful way the leading
+incidents of the previous evening.
+
+There had been an enormous crowd, even greater than that of Sunday
+night, and everybody had been looking forward to another notable and
+exciting season of grace. These expectations were especially heightened
+when Sister Soulsby ascended the pulpit stairs and took charge of the
+proceedings. She deferred to Paul's views about women preachers on
+Sundays, she said; but on weekdays she had just as much right to snatch
+brands from the burning as Paul, or Peter, or any other man. She went
+on like that, in a breezy, off-hand fashion which tickled the audience
+immensely, and led to the liveliest anticipations of what would happen
+when she began upon the evening's harvest of souls.
+
+But it was something else that happened. At a signal from Sister Soulsby
+the steward got up, and, in an unconcerned sort of way, went through the
+throng to the rear of the church, locked the doors, and put the keys
+in their pockets. The sister dryly explained now to the surprised
+congregation that there was a season for all things, and that on the
+present occasion they would suspend the glorious work of redeeming
+fallen human nature, and take up instead the equally noble task of
+raising some fifteen hundred dollars which the church needed in its
+business. The doors would only be opened again when this had been
+accomplished.
+
+The brethren were much taken aback by this trick, and they permitted
+themselves to exchange a good many scowling and indignant glances, the
+while their professional visitors sang another of their delightfully
+novel sacred duets. Its charm of harmony for once fell upon
+unsympathetic ears. But then Sister Soulsby began another monologue,
+defending this way of collecting money, chaffing the assemblage with
+bright-eyed impudence on their having been trapped, and scoring,
+one after another, neat and jocose little personal points on local
+characteristics, at which everybody but the individual touched grinned
+broadly. She was so droll and cheeky, and withal effective in her talk,
+that she quite won the crowd over. She told a story about a woodchuck
+which fairly brought down the house.
+
+"A man," she began, with a quizzical twinkle in her eye, "told me once
+about hunting a woodchuck with a pack of dogs, and they chased it so
+hard that it finally escaped only by climbing a butternut-tree. 'But, my
+friend,' I said to him, 'woodchucks can't climb trees--butternut-trees
+or any other kind--and you know it!' All he said in reply to me was:
+'This woodchuck had to climb a tree!' And that's the way with this
+congregation. You think you can't raise $1,500, but you've GOT to."
+
+So it went on. She set them all laughing; and then, with a twist of the
+eyes and a change of voice, lo, and behold, she had them nearly crying
+in the same breath. Under the pressure of these jumbled emotions,
+brethren began to rise up in their pews and say what they would give.
+The wonderful woman had something smart and apt to say about each fresh
+contribution, and used it to screw up the general interest a notch
+further toward benevolent hysteria. With songs and jokes and impromptu
+exhortations and prayers she kept the thing whirling, until a sort of
+duel of generosity began between two of the most unlikely men--Erastus
+Winch and Levi Gorringe. Everybody had been surprised when Winch gave
+his first $50; but when he rose again, half an hour afterward, and said
+that, owing to the high public position of some of the new members on
+probation, he foresaw a great future for the church, and so felt moved
+to give another $25, there was general amazement. Moved by a common
+instinct, all eyes were turned upon Levi Gorringe, and he, without the
+slightest hesitation, stood up and said he would give $100. There was
+something in his tone which must have annoyed Brother Winch, for he shot
+up like a dart, and called out, "Put me down for fifty more;" and that
+brought Gorringe to his feet with an added $50, and then the two went
+on raising each other till the assemblage was agape with admiring
+stupefaction.
+
+This gladiatorial combat might have been going on till now, the
+Sunday-school superintendent concluded, if Winch hadn't subsided. The
+amount of the contributions hadn't been figured up yet, for Sister
+Soulsby kept the list; but there had been a tremendous lot of money
+raised. Of that there could be no doubt.
+
+The Presiding Elder now told Theron that the Quarterly Conference had
+been adjourned yesterday till today. He and Brother Davis were even now
+on their way to attend the session in the church next door. The Elder
+added, with an obvious kindly significance, that though Theron was too
+ill to attend it, he guessed his absence would do him no harm. Then the
+two men left the room, and Theron went to sleep again.
+
+Another almost blank period ensued, this time lasting for forty-eight
+hours. The young minister was enfolded in the coils of a fever of some
+sort, which Brother Soulsby, who had dabbled considerably in medicine,
+admitted that he was puzzled about. Sometimes he thought that it was
+typhoid, and then again there were symptoms which looked suspiciously
+like brain fever. The Methodists of Octavius counted no physician among
+their numbers, and when, on the second day, Alice grew scared, and
+decided, with Brother Soulsby's assent, to call in professional advice,
+the only doctor's name she could recall was that of Ledsmar. She was
+conscious of an instinctive dislike for the vague image of him her fancy
+had conjured up, but the reflection that he was Theron's friend, and so
+probably would be more moderate in his charges, decided her.
+
+Brother Soulsby showed a most comforting tact and swiftness of
+apprehension when Alice, in mentioning Dr. Ledsmar's name, disclosed by
+her manner a fear that his being sent for would create talk among the
+church people. He volunteered at once to act as messenger himself, and,
+with no better guide than her dim hints at direction, found the doctor
+and brought him back to the parsonage.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar expressly disclaimed to Soulsby all pretence of professional
+skill, and made him understand that he went along solely because
+he liked Mr. Ware, and was interested in him, and in any case would
+probably be of as much use as the wisest of strange physicians--a view
+which the little revivalist received with comprehending nods of tacit
+acquiescence. Ledsmar came, and was taken up to the sick-room. He sat
+on the bedside and talked with Theron awhile, and then went downstairs
+again. To Alice's anxious inquiries, he replied that it seemed to him
+merely a case of over-work and over-worry, about which there was not the
+slightest occasion for alarm.
+
+"But he says the strangest things," the wife put in. "He has been quite
+delirious at times."
+
+"That means only that his brain is taking a rest as well as his body,"
+remarked Ledsmar. "That is Nature's way of securing an equilibrium of
+repose--of recuperation. He will come out of it with his mind all the
+fresher and clearer."
+
+"I don't believe he knows shucks!" was Alice's comment when she closed
+the street door upon Dr. Ledsmar. "Anybody could have come in and looked
+at a sick man and said, 'Leave him alone.' You expect something more
+from a doctor. It's his business to say what to do. And I suppose he'll
+charge two dollars for just telling me that my husband was resting!"
+
+"No," said Brother Soulsby, "he said he never practised, and that he
+would come only as a friend."
+
+"Well, it isn't my idea of a friend--not to prescribe a single thing,"
+protested Alice.
+
+Yet it seemed that no prescription was needed, after all. The next
+morning Theron woke to find himself feeling quite restored in spirits
+and nerves. He sat up in bed, and after an instant of weakly giddiness,
+recognized that he was all right again. Greatly pleased, he got up,
+and proceeded to dress himself. There were little recurring hints of
+faintness and vertigo, while he was shaving, but he had the sense
+to refer these to the fact that he was very, very hungry. He went
+downstairs, and smiled with the pleased pride of a child at the surprise
+which his appearance at the door created. Alice and the Soulsbys were
+at breakfast. He joined them, and ate voraciously, declaring that it was
+worth a month's illness to have things taste so good once more.
+
+"You still look white as a sheet," said Alice, warningly. "If I were
+you, I'd be careful in my diet for a spell yet."
+
+For answer, Theron let Sister Soulsby help him again to ham and eggs.
+He talked exclusively to Sister Soulsby, or rather invited her by
+his manner to talk to him, and listened and watched her with indolent
+content. There was a sort of happy and purified languor in his physical
+and mental being, which needed and appreciated just this--to sit next a
+bright and attractive woman at a good breakfast, and be ministered to by
+her sprightly conversation, by the flash of her informing and inspiring
+eyes, and the nameless sense of support and repose which her near
+proximity exhaled. He felt himself figuratively leaning against Sister
+Soulsby's buoyant personality, and resting.
+
+Brother Soulsby, like the intelligent creature he was, ate his breakfast
+in peace; but Alice would interpose remarks from time to time. Theron
+was conscious of a certain annoyance at this, and knew that he was
+showing it by an exaggerated display of interest in everything Sister
+Soulsby said, and persisted in it. There trembled in the background of
+his thoughts ever and again the recollection of a grievance against
+his wife--an offence which she had committed--but he put it aside as
+something to be grappled and dealt with when he felt again like taking
+up the serious and disagreeable things of life. For the moment, he
+desired only to be amused by Sister Soulsby. Her casual mention of the
+fact that she and her husband were taking their departure that very day,
+appealed to him as an added reason for devoting his entire attention to
+her.
+
+"You mustn't forget that famous talking-to you threatened me with--that
+'regular hoeing-over,' you know," he reminded her, when he found
+himself alone with her after breakfast. He smiled as he spoke, in frank
+enjoyment of the prospect.
+
+Sister Soulsby nodded, and aided with a roll of her eyes the effect of
+mock-menace in her uplifted forefinger. "Oh, never fear," she cried.
+"You'll catch it hot and strong. But that'll keep till afternoon.
+Tell me, do you feel strong enough to go in next door and attend the
+trustees' meeting this forenoon? It's rather important that you should
+be there, if you can spur yourself up to it. By the way, you haven't
+asked what happened at the Quarterly Conference yesterday."
+
+Theron sighed, and made a little grimace of repugnance. "If you knew how
+little I cared!" he said. "I did hope you'd forget all about mentioning
+that--and everything else connected with--the next door. You talk so
+much more interestingly about other things."
+
+"Here's gratitude for you!" exclaimed Sister Soulsby, with a gay
+simulation of despair. "Why, man alive, do you know what I've done for
+you? I got around on the Presiding Elder's blind side, I captured old
+Pierce, I wound Winch right around my little finger, I worked two or
+three of the class-leaders--all on your account. The result was you
+went through as if you'd had your ears pinned back, and been greased all
+over. You've got an extra hundred dollars added to your salary; do you
+hear? On the sixth question of the order of business the Elder ruled
+that the recommendation of the last conference's estimating committee
+could be revised (between ourselves he was wrong, but that doesn't
+matter), and so you're in clover. And very friendly things were said
+about you, too."
+
+"It was very kind of you," said Theron. "I am really extremely grateful
+to you." He shook her by the hand to make up for what he realized to be
+a lack of fervor in his tones.
+
+"Well, then," Sister Soulsby replied, "you pull yourself together, and
+take your place as chairman of the trustees' meeting, and see to it
+that, whatever comes up, you side with old Pierce and Winch."
+
+"Oh, THEY'RE my friends now, are they?" asked Theron, with a faint play
+of irony about his lips.
+
+"Yes, that's your ticket this election," she answered briskly, "and mind
+you vote it straight. Don't bother about reasons now. Just take it from
+me, as the song says, 'that things have changed since Willie died.'
+That's all. And then come back here, and this afternoon we'll have a
+good old-fashioned jaw."
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware, walking with ostentatious feebleness, and forcing
+a conventional smile upon his wan face, duly made his unexpected
+appearance at the trustees' meeting in one of the smaller classrooms. He
+received their congratulations gravely, and shook hands with all three.
+It required an effort to do this impartially, because, upon sight of
+Levi Gorringe, there rose up suddenly within him an emotion of fierce
+dislike and enmity. In some enigmatic way his thoughts had kept
+themselves away from Gorringe ever since Sunday evening. Now they
+concentrated with furious energy and swiftness upon him. Theron
+seemed able in a flash of time to coordinate many recollections of
+Gorringe--the early liking Alice had professed for him, the mystery of
+those purchased plants in her garden, the story of the girl he had lost
+in church, his offer to lend him money, the way in which he had sat
+beside Alice at the love-feast and followed her to the altar-rail in
+the evening. These raced abreast through the young minister's brain, yet
+with each its own image, and its relation to the others clearly defined.
+
+He found the nerve, all the same, to take this third trustee by the
+hand, and to thank him for his congratulations, and even to say, with a
+surface smile of welcome, "It is BROTHER Gorringe, now, I remember."
+
+The work before the meeting was chiefly of a routine kind. In most
+places this would have been transacted by the stewards; but in Octavius
+these minor officials had degenerated into mere ceremonial abstractions,
+who humbly ratified, or by arrangement anticipated, the will of the
+powerful, mortgage-owning trustees. Theron sat languidly at the head
+of the table while these common-place matters passed in their course,
+noting the intonations of Gorringe's voice as he read from his
+secretary's book, and finding his ear displeased by them. No issue arose
+upon any of these trivial affairs, and the minister, feeling faint
+and weary in the heat, wondered why Sister Soulsby had insisted on his
+coming.
+
+All at once he sat up straight, with an instinctive warning in his
+mind that here was the thing. Gorringe had taken up the subject of the
+"debt-raising" evening, and read out its essentials as they had been
+embodied in a report of the stewards. The gross sum obtained, in cash
+and promises, was $1,860. The stewards had collected of this a trifle
+less than half, but hoped to get it all in during the ensuing quarter.
+There were, also, the bill of Mr. and Mrs. Soulsby for $150, and the
+increases of $100 in the pastor's salary and $25 in the apportioned
+contribution of the charge toward the Presiding Elder's maintenance, the
+two latter items of which the Quarterly Conference had sanctioned.
+
+"I want to hear the names of the subscribers and their amounts read
+out," put in Brother Pierce.
+
+When this was done, it became apparent that much more than half of the
+entire amount had been offered by two men. Levi Gorringe's $450 and
+Erastus Winch's $425 left only $985 to be divided up among some seventy
+or eighty other members of the congregation.
+
+Brother Pierce speedily stopped the reading of these subordinate names.
+"They're of no concern whatever," he said, despite the fact that his
+own might have been reached in time. "Those first names are what I was
+getting at. Have those two first amounts, the big ones, be'n paid?"
+
+"One has--the other not," replied Gorringe.
+
+"PRE-cisely," remarked the senior trustee. "And I'm goin' to move that
+it needn't be paid, either. When Brother Winch, here, began hollerin'
+out those extra twenty-fives and fifties, that evening, it was under a
+complete misapprehension. He'd be'n on the Cheese Board that same Monday
+afternoon, and he'd done what he thought was a mighty big stroke of
+business, and he felt liberal according. I know just what that feelin'
+is myself. If I'd be'n makin' a mint o' money, instead o' losin' all the
+while, as I do, I'd 'a' done just the same. But the next day, lo, and
+behold, Brother Winch found that it was all a mistake--he hadn't made a
+single penny."
+
+"Fact is, I lost by the whole transaction," put in Erastus Winch,
+defiantly.
+
+"Just so," Brother Pierce went on. "He lost money. You have his own word
+for it. Well, then, I say it would be a burning shame for us to consent
+to touch one penny of what he offered to give, in the fullness of his
+heart, while he was laborin' under that delusion. And I move he be not
+asked for it. We've got quite as much as we need, without it. I put my
+motion."
+
+"That is, YOU don't put it," suggested Winch, correctingly. "You move
+it, and Brother Ware, whom we're all so glad to see able to come and
+preside--he'll put it."
+
+There was a moment's silence. "You've heard the motion," said Theron,
+tentatively, and then paused for possible remarks. He was not going to
+meddle in this thing himself, and Gorringe was the only other who might
+have an opinion to offer. The necessities of the situation forced him
+to glance at the lawyer inquiringly. He did so, and turned his eyes away
+again like a shot. Gorringe was looking him squarely in the face, and
+the look was freighted with satirical contempt.
+
+The young minister spoke between clinched teeth. "All those in favor
+will say aye."
+
+Brothers Pierce and Winch put up a simultaneous and confident "Aye."
+
+"No, you don't!" interposed the lawyer, with deliberate, sneering
+emphasis. "I decidedly protest against Winch's voting. He's directly
+interested, and he mustn't vote. Your chairman knows that perfectly
+well."
+
+"Yes, I think Brother Winch ought not to vote," decided Theron, with
+great calmness. He saw now what was coming, and underneath his surface
+composure there were sharp flutterings.
+
+"Very well, then," said Gorringe. "I vote no, and it's a tie. It rests
+with the chairman now to cast the deciding vote, and say whether this
+interesting arrangement shall go through or not."
+
+"Me?" said Theron, eying the lawyer with a cool self-control which had
+come all at once to him. "Me? Oh, I vote Aye."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+"Well, I did what you told me to do," Theron Ware remarked to Sister
+Soulsby, when at last they found themselves alone in the sitting-room
+after the midday meal.
+
+It had taken not a little strategic skirmishing to secure the room to
+themselves for the hospitable Alice, much touched by the thought of her
+new friend's departure that very evening had gladly proposed to let all
+the work stand over until night, and devote herself entirely to Sister
+Soulsby. When, finally, Brother Soulsby conceived and deftly executed
+the coup of interesting her in the budding of roses, and then leading
+her off into the garden to see with her own eyes how it was done, Theron
+had a sense of being left alone with a conspirator. The notion impelled
+him to plunge at once into the heart of their mystery.
+
+"I did what you told me to do," he repeated, looking up from his low
+easy-chair to where she sat by the desk; "and I dare say you won't be
+surprised when I add that I have no respect for myself for doing it."
+
+"And yet you would go and do it right over again, eh?" the woman
+said, in bright, pert tones, nodding her head, and smiling at him with
+roguish, comprehending eyes. "Yes, that's the way we're built. We spend
+our lives doing that sort of thing."
+
+"I don't know that you would precisely grasp my meaning," said the young
+minister, with a polite effort in his words to mask the untoward side of
+the suggestion. "It is a matter of conscience with me; and I am pained
+and shocked at myself."
+
+Sister Soulsby drummed for an absent moment with her thin, nervous
+fingers on the desk-top. "I guess maybe you'd better go and lie down
+again," she said gently. "You're a sick man, still, and it's no good
+your worrying your head just now with things of this sort. You'll see
+them differently when you're quite yourself again."
+
+"No, no," pleaded Theron. "Do let us have our talk out! I'm all right.
+My mind is clear as a bell. Truly, I've really counted on this talk with
+you."
+
+"But there's something else to talk about, isn't there, besides--besides
+your conscience?" she asked. Her eyes bent upon him a kindly pressure as
+she spoke, which took all possible harshness from her meaning.
+
+Theron answered the glance rather than her words. "I know that you are
+my friend," he said simply.
+
+Sister Soulsby straightened herself, and looked down upon him with a new
+intentness. "Well, then," she began, "let's thrash this thing out right
+now, and be done with it. You say it's hurt your conscience to do
+just one little hundredth part of what there was to be done here. Ask
+yourself what you mean by that. Mind, I'm not quarrelling, and I'm not
+thinking about anything except just your own state of mind. You think
+you soiled your hands by doing what you did. That is to say, you wanted
+ALL the dirty work done by other people. That's it, isn't it?"
+
+"The Rev. Mr. Ware sat up, in turn, and looked doubtingly into his
+companion's face.
+
+"Oh, we were going to be frank, you know," she added, with a pleasant
+play of mingled mirth and honest liking in her eyes.
+
+"No," he said, picking his words, "my point would rather be that--that
+there ought not to have been any of what you yourself call this--this
+'dirty work.' THAT is my feeling."
+
+"Now we're getting at it," said Sister Soulsby, briskly. "My dear
+friend, you might just as well say that potatoes are unclean and unfit
+to eat because manure is put into the ground they grow in. Just look at
+the case. Your church here was running behind every year. Your people
+had got into a habit of putting in nickels instead of dimes, and letting
+you sweat for the difference. That's a habit, like tobacco, or biting
+your fingernails, or anything else. Either you were all to come to smash
+here, or the people had to be shaken up, stood on their heads, broken
+of their habit. It's my business--mine and Soulsby's--to do that sort
+of thing. We came here and we did it--did it up brown, too. We not
+only raised all the money the church needs, and to spare, but I took a
+personal shine to you, and went out of my way to fix up things for
+you. It isn't only the extra hundred dollars, but the whole tone of
+the congregation is changed toward you now. You'll see that they'll be
+asking to have you back here, next spring. And you're solid with your
+Presiding Elder, too. Well, now, tell me straight--is that worth while,
+or not?"
+
+"I've told you that I am very grateful," answered the minister, "and I
+say it again, and I shall never be tired of repeating it. But--but it
+was the means I had in mind."
+
+"Quite so," rejoined the sister, patiently. "If you saw the way a hotel
+dinner was cooked, you wouldn't be able to stomach it. Did you ever see
+a play? In a theatre, I mean. I supposed not. But you'll understand when
+I say that the performance looks one way from where the audience sit,
+and quite a different way when you are behind the scenes. THERE you see
+that the trees and houses are cloth, and the moon is tissue paper,
+and the flying fairy is a middle-aged woman strung up on a rope.
+That doesn't prove that the play, out in front, isn't beautiful and
+affecting, and all that. It only shows that everything in this world is
+produced by machinery--by organization. The trouble is that you've
+been let in on the stage, behind the scenes, so to speak, and you're so
+green--if you'll pardon me--that you want to sit down and cry because
+the trees ARE cloth, and the moon IS a lantern. And I say, don't be such
+a goose!"
+
+"I see what you mean," Theron said, with an answering smile. He added,
+more gravely, "All the same, the Winch business seems to me--"
+
+"Now the Winch business is my own affair," Sister Soulsby broke in
+abruptly. "I take all the responsibility for that. You need know nothing
+about it. You simply voted as you did on the merits of the case as he
+presented them--that's all."
+
+"But--" Theron began, and then paused. Something had occurred to him,
+and he knitted his brows to follow its course of expansion in his mind.
+Suddenly he raised his head. "Then you arranged with Winch to make those
+bogus offers--just to lead others on?" he demanded.
+
+Sister Soulsby's large eyes beamed down upon him in reply, at first in
+open merriment, then more soberly, till their regard was almost pensive.
+
+"Let us talk of something else," she said. "All that is past and gone.
+It has nothing to do with you, anyway. I've got some advice to give you
+about keeping up this grip you've got on your people."
+
+The young minister had risen to his feet while she spoke. He put his
+hands in his pockets, and with rounded shoulders began slowly pacing the
+room. After a turn or two he came to the desk, and leaned against it.
+
+"I doubt if it's worth while going into that," he said, in the solemn
+tone of one who feels that an irrevocable thing is being uttered. She
+waited to hear more, apparently. "I think I shall go away--give up the
+ministry," he added.
+
+Sister Soulsby's eyes revealed no such shock of consternation as he,
+unconsciously, had looked for. They remained quite calm; and when she
+spoke, they deepened, to fit her speech, with what he read to be a
+gaze of affectionate melancholy--one might say pity. She shook her head
+slowly.
+
+"No--don't let any one else hear you say that," she replied. "My poor
+young friend, it's no good to even think it. The real wisdom is to
+school yourself to move along smoothly, and not fret, and get the best
+of what's going. I've known others who felt as you do--of course there
+are times when every young man of brains and high notions feels that
+way--but there's no help for it. Those who tried to get out only broke
+themselves. Those who stayed in, and made the best of it--well, one of
+them will be a bishop in another ten years."
+
+Theron had started walking again. "But the moral degradation of it!"
+he snapped out at her over his shoulder. "I'd rather earn the meanest
+living, at an honest trade, and be free from it."
+
+"That may all be," responded Sister Soulsby. "But it isn't a question of
+what you'd rather do. It's what you can do. How could you earn a living?
+What trade or business do you suppose you could take up now, and get a
+living out of? Not one, my man, not one."
+
+Theron stopped and stared at her. This view of his capabilities came
+upon him with the force and effect of a blow.
+
+"I don't discover, myself," he began stumblingly, "that I'm so
+conspicuously inferior to the men I see about me who do make livings,
+and very good ones, too."
+
+"Of course you're not," she replied with easy promptness; "you're
+greatly the other way, or I shouldn't be taking this trouble with you.
+But you're what you are because you're where you are. The moment you try
+on being somewhere else, you're done for. In all this world nobody else
+comes to such unmerciful and universal grief as the unfrocked priest."
+
+The phrase sent Theron's fancy roving. "I know a Catholic priest," he
+said irrelevantly, "who doesn't believe an atom in--in things."
+
+"Very likely," said Sister Soulsby. "Most of us do. But you don't hear
+him talking about going and earning his living, I'll bet! Or if he
+does, he takes powerful good care not to go, all the same. They've got
+horse-sense, those priests. They're artists, too. They know how to allow
+for the machinery behind the scenes."
+
+"But it's all so different," urged the young minister; "the same things
+are not expected of them. Now I sat the other night and watched those
+people you got up around the altar-rail, groaning and shouting and
+crying, and the others jumping up and down with excitement, and Sister
+Lovejoy--did you see her?--coming out of her pew and regularly waltzing
+in the aisle, with her eyes shut, like a whirling dervish--I positively
+believe it was all that made me ill. I couldn't stand it. I can't stand
+it now. I won't go back to it! Nothing shall make me!"
+
+"Oh-h, yes, you will," she rejoined soothingly. "There's nothing else to
+do. Just put a good face on it, and make up your mind to get through by
+treading on as few corns as possible, and keeping your own toes well in,
+and you'll be surprised how easy it'll all come to be. You were
+speaking of the revival business. Now that exemplifies just what I was
+saying--it's a part of our machinery. Now a church is like everything
+else,--it's got to have a boss, a head, an authority of some sort, that
+people will listen to and mind. The Catholics are different, as you say.
+Their church is chuck-full of authority--all the way from the Pope
+down to the priest--and accordingly they do as they're told. But the
+Protestants--your Methodists most of all--they say 'No, we won't have
+any authority, we won't obey any boss.' Very well, what happens? We
+who are responsible for running the thing, and raising the money and
+so on--we have to put on a spurt every once in a while, and work up a
+general state of excitement; and while it's going, don't you see that
+THAT is the authority, the motive power, whatever you like to call it,
+by which things are done? Other denominations don't need it. We do, and
+that's why we've got it."
+
+"But the mean dishonesty of it all!" Theron broke forth. He moved about
+again, his bowed face drawn as with bodily suffering. "The low-born
+tricks, the hypocrisies! I feel as if I could never so much as look at
+these people here again without disgust."
+
+"Oh, now that's where you make your mistake," Sister Soulsby put in
+placidly. "These people of yours are not a whit worse than other people.
+They've got their good streaks and their bad streaks, just like the rest
+of us. Take them by and large, they're quite on a par with other folks
+the whole country through."
+
+"I don't believe there's another congregation in the Conference
+where--where this sort of thing would have been needed, or, I might say,
+tolerated," insisted Theron.
+
+"Perhaps you're right," the other assented; "but that only shows that
+your people here are different from the others--not that they're worse.
+You don't seem to realize: Octavius, so far as the Methodists are
+concerned, is twenty or thirty years behind the times. Now that has its
+advantages and its disadvantages. The church here is tough and coarse,
+and full of grit, like a grindstone; and it does ministers from other
+more niminy-piminy places all sorts of good to come here once in a while
+and rub themselves up against it. It scours the rust and mildew off from
+their piety, and they go back singing and shouting. But of course
+it's had a different effect with you. You're razor-steel instead of
+scythe-steel, and the grinding's been too rough and violent for you.
+But you see what I mean. These people here really take their primitive
+Methodism seriously. To them the profession of entire sanctification is
+truly a genuine thing. Well, don't you see, when people just know that
+they're saved, it doesn't seem to them to matter so much what they
+do. They feel that ordinary rules may well be bent and twisted in the
+interest of people so supernaturally good as they are. That's pure human
+nature. It's always been like that."
+
+Theron paused in his walk to look absently at her. "That thought,"
+he said, in a vague, slow way, "seems to be springing up in my path,
+whichever way I turn. It oppresses me, and yet it fascinates me--this
+idea that the dead men have known more than we know, done more than we
+do; that there is nothing new anywhere; that--"
+
+"Never mind the dead men," interposed Sister Soulsby. "Just you come
+and sit down here. I hate to have you straddling about the room when I'm
+trying to talk to you."
+
+Theron obeyed, and as he sank into the low seat, Sister Soulsby drew up
+her chair, and put her hand on his shoulder. Her gaze rested upon his
+with impressive steadiness.
+
+"And now I want to talk seriously to you, as a friend," she began. "You
+mustn't breathe to any living soul the shadow of a hint of this nonsense
+about leaving the ministry. I could see how you were feeling--I saw the
+book you were reading the first time I entered this room--and that made
+me like you; only I expected to find you mixing up more worldly gumption
+with your Renan. Well, perhaps I like you all the better for not having
+it--for being so delightfully fresh. At any rate, that made me sail in
+and straighten your affairs for you. And now, for God's sake, keep them
+straight. Just put all notions of anything else out of your head. Watch
+your chief men and women, and be friends with them. Keep your eye open
+for what they think you ought to do, and do it. Have your own ideas as
+much as you like, read what you like, say 'Damn' under your breath as
+much as you like, but don't let go of your job. I've knocked about
+too much, and I've seen too many promising young fellows cut their own
+throats for pure moonshine, not to have a right to say that."
+
+Theron could not be insensible to the friendly hand on his shoulder, or
+to the strenuous sincerity of the voice which thus adjured him.
+
+"Well," he said vaguely, smiling up into her earnest eyes, "if we agree
+that it IS moonshine."
+
+"See here!" she exclaimed, with renewed animation, patting his shoulder
+in a brisk, automatic way, to point the beginnings of her confidences:
+"I'll tell you something. It's about myself. I've got a religion of my
+own, and it's got just one plank in it, and that is that the time to
+separate the sheep from the goats is on Judgment Day, and that it can't
+be done a minute before."
+
+The young minister took in the thought, and turned it about in his mind,
+and smiled upon it.
+
+"And that brings me to what I'm going to tell you," Sister Soulsby
+continued. She leaned back in her chair, and crossed her knees so
+that one well-shaped and artistically shod foot poised itself close to
+Theron's hand. Her eyes dwelt upon his face with an engaging candor.
+
+"I began life," she said, "as a girl by running away from a stupid home
+with a man that I knew was married already. After that, I supported
+myself for a good many years--generally, at first, on the stage. I've
+been a front-ranker in Amazon ballets, and I've been leading lady in
+comic opera companies out West. I've told fortunes in one room of a
+mining-camp hotel where the biggest game of faro in the Territory went
+on in another. I've been a professional clairvoyant, and I've been a
+professional medium, and I've been within one vote of being indicted
+by a grand jury, and the money that bought that vote was put up by the
+smartest and most famous train-gambler between Omaha and 'Frisco, a
+gentleman who died in his boots and took three sheriff's deputies along
+with him to Kingdom-Come. Now, that's MY record."
+
+Theron looked earnestly at her, and said nothing.
+
+"And now take Soulsby," she went on. "Of course I take it for granted
+there's a good deal that he has never felt called upon to mention. He
+hasn't what you may call a talkative temperament. But there is also a
+good deal that I do know. He's been an actor, too, and to this day I'd
+back him against Edwin Booth himself to recite 'Clarence's Dream.' And
+he's been a medium, and then he was a travelling phrenologist, and for
+a long time he was advance agent for a British Blondes show, and when I
+first saw him he was lecturing on female diseases--and he had HIS little
+turn with a grand jury too. In fact, he was what you may call a regular
+bad old rooster."
+
+Again Theron suffered the pause to lapse without comment--save for an
+amorphous sort of conversation which he felt to be going on between his
+eyes and those of Sister Soulsby.
+
+"Well, then," she resumed, "so much for us apart. Now about us together.
+We liked each other from the start. We compared notes, and we found that
+we had both soured on living by fakes, and that we were tired of the
+road, and wanted to settle down and be respectable in our old age. We
+had a little money--enough to see us through a year or two. Soulsby had
+always hungered and longed to own a garden and raise flowers, and had
+never been able to stay long enough in one place to see so much as a
+bean-pod ripen. So we took a little place in a quiet country village
+down on the Southern Tier, and he planted everything three deep all over
+the place, and I bought a roomful of cheap good books, and we started
+in. We took to it like ducks to water for a while, and I don't say that
+we couldn't have stood it out, just doing nothing, to this very day; but
+as luck would have it, during the first winter there was a revival at
+the local Methodist church, and we went every evening--at first just to
+kill time, and then because we found we liked the noise and excitement
+and general racket of the thing. After it was all over each of us found
+that the other had been mighty near going up to the rail and joining the
+mourners. And another thing had occurred to each of us, too--that is,
+what tremendous improvements there were possible in the way that amateur
+revivalist worked up his business. This stuck in our crops, and we
+figured on it all through the winter.--Well, to make a long story short,
+we finally went into the thing ourselves."
+
+"Tell me one thing," interposed Theron. "I'm anxious to understand
+it all as we go along. Were you and he at any time sincerely
+converted?--that is, I mean, genuinely convicted of sin and conscious
+of--you know what I mean!"
+
+"Oh, bless you, yes," responded Sister Soulsby. "Not only once--dozens
+of times--I may say every time. We couldn't do good work if we weren't.
+But that's a matter of temperament--of emotions."
+
+"Precisely. That was what I was getting at," explained Theron.
+
+"Well, then, hear what I was getting at," she went on. "You were talking
+very loudly here about frauds and hypocrisies and so on, a few minutes
+ago. Now I say that Soulsby and I do good, and that we're good fellows.
+Now take him, for example. There isn't a better citizen in all
+Chemung County than he is, or a kindlier neighbor, or a better or more
+charitable man. I've known him to stay up a whole winter's night in
+a poor Irishman's stinking and freezing stable, trying to save his
+cart-horse for him, that had been seized with some sort of fit. The
+man's whole livelihood, and his family's, was in that horse; and when it
+died, Soulsby bought him another, and never told even ME about it. Now
+that I call real piety, if you like."
+
+"So do I," put in Theron, cordially.
+
+"And this question of fraud," pursued his companion,--"look at it in
+this light. You heard us sing. Well, now, I was a singer, of course, but
+Soulsby hardly knew one note from another. I taught him to sing, and he
+went at it patiently and diligently, like a little man. And I invented
+that scheme of finding tunes which the crowd didn't know, and so
+couldn't break in on and smother. I simply took Chopin--he is full of
+sixths, you know--and I got all sorts of melodies out of his waltzes
+and mazurkas and nocturnes and so on, and I trained Soulsby just to sing
+those sixths so as to make the harmony, and there you are. He couldn't
+sing by himself any more than a crow, but he's got those sixths of his
+down to a hair. Now that's machinery, management, organization. We take
+these tunes, written by a devil-may-care Pole who was living with George
+Sand openly at the time, and pass 'em off on the brethren for hymns.
+It's a fraud, yes; but it's a good fraud. So they are all good frauds.
+I say frankly that I'm glad that the change and the chance came to help
+Soulsby and me to be good frauds."
+
+"And the point is that I'm to be a good fraud, too," commented the young
+minister.
+
+She had risen, and he got to his feet as well. He instinctively sought
+for her hand, and pressed it warmly, and held it in both his, with an
+exuberance of gratitude and liking in his manner.
+
+Sister Soulsby danced her eyes at him with a saucy little shake of the
+head. "I'm afraid you'll never make a really GOOD fraud," she said. "You
+haven't got it in you. Your intentions are all right, but your execution
+is hopelessly clumsy. I came up to your bedroom there twice while you
+were sick, just to say 'howdy,' and you kept your eyes shut, and all the
+while a blind horse could have told that you were wide awake."
+
+"I must have thought it was my wife," said Theron.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+When the lingering dusk finally settled down upon this long summer
+evening, the train bearing the Soulsbys homeward was already some score
+of miles on its way, and the Methodists of Octavius had nearly finished
+their weekly prayer-meeting.
+
+After the stirring events of the revival, it was only to be expected
+that this routine, home-made affair should suffer from a reaction. The
+attendance was larger than usual, perhaps, but the proceedings were
+spiritless and tame. Neither the pastor nor his wife was present at
+the beginning, and the class-leader upon whom control devolved made but
+feeble headway against the spell of inertia which the hot night-air
+laid upon the gathering. Long pauses intervened between the perfunctory
+praise-offerings and supplications, and the hymns weariedly raised from
+time to time fell again in languor by the wayside.
+
+Alice came in just as people were beginning to hope that some one
+would start the Doxology, and bring matters to a close. Her appearance
+apparently suggested this to the class-leader, for in a few moments the
+meeting had been dismissed, and some of the members, on their way out,
+were shaking hands with their minister's wife, and expressing the polite
+hope that he was better. The worried look in her face, and the obvious
+stains of recent tears upon her cheeks imparted an added point and
+fervor to these inquiries, but she replied to all in tones of
+studied tranquillity that, although not feeling well enough to attend
+prayer-meeting, Brother Ware was steadily recovering strength, and
+confidently expected to be in complete health by Sunday. They left her,
+and could hardly wait to get into the vestibule to ask one another in
+whispers what on earth she could have been crying about.
+
+Meanwhile Brother Ware improved his convalescent state by pacing slowly
+up and down under the elms on the side of the street opposite the
+Catholic church. There were no houses here for a block and more; the
+sidewalk was broken in many places, so that passers-by avoided it; the
+overhanging boughs shrouded it all in obscurity; it was preeminently a
+place to be alone in.
+
+Theron had driven to the depot with his guests an hour before, and after
+a period of pleasant waiting on the platform, had said good-bye to
+them as the train moved away. Then he turned to Alice, who had also
+accompanied them in the carriage, and was conscious of a certain
+annoyance at her having come. That long familiar talk of the afternoon
+had given him the feeling that he was entitled to bid farewell to Sister
+Soulsby--to both the Soulsbys--by himself.
+
+"I am afraid folks will think it strange--neither of us attending the
+prayer-meeting," he said, with a suggestion of reproof in his tone, as
+they left the station-yard.
+
+"If we get back in time, I'll run in for a minute," answered Alice, with
+docility.
+
+"No--no," he broke in. "I'm not equal to walking so fast. You run on
+ahead, and explain matters, and I will come along slowly."
+
+"The hack we came in is still there in the yard," the wife suggested.
+"We could drive home in that. I don't believe it would cost more than a
+quarter--and if you're feeling badly--"
+
+"But I am NOT feeling badly," Theron replied, with frank impatience.
+"Only I feel--I feel that being alone with my thoughts would be good for
+me."
+
+"Oh, certainly--by all means!" Alice had said, and turned sharply on her
+heel.
+
+Being alone with these thoughts, Theron strolled aimlessly about, and
+did not think at all. The shadows gathered, and fireflies began to
+disclose their tiny gleams among the shrubbery in the gardens.
+A lamp-lighter came along, and passed him, leaving in his wake a
+straggling double line of lights, glowing radiantly against the
+black-green of the trees. This recalled to Theron that he had heard that
+the town council lit the street lamps by the almanac, and economized gas
+when moonshine was due. The idea struck him as droll, and he dwelt
+upon it in various aspects, smiling at some of its comic possibilities.
+Looking up in the middle of one of these whimsical conceits, the
+sportive impulse died suddenly within him. He realized that it was dark,
+and that the massive black bulk reared against the sky on the other side
+of the road was the Catholic church. The other fact, that he had been
+there walking to and fro for some time, was borne in upon him more
+slowly. He turned, and resumed the pacing up and down with a still more
+leisurely step, musing upon the curious way in which people's minds all
+unconsciously follow about where instincts and intuitions lead.
+
+No doubt it was what Sister Soulsby had said about Catholics which had
+insensibly guided his purposeless stroll in this direction. What a
+woman that was! Somehow the purport of her talk--striking, and even
+astonishing as he had found it--did not stand out so clearly in his
+memory as did the image of the woman herself. She must have
+been extremely pretty once. For that matter she still was a most
+attractive-looking woman. It had been a genuine pleasure to have her in
+the house--to see her intelligent responsive face at the table--to have
+it in one's power to make drafts at will upon the fund of sympathy and
+appreciation, of facile mirth and ready tenderness in those big eyes of
+hers. He liked that phrase she had used about herself--"a good fellow."
+It seemed to fit her to a "t." And Soulsby was a good fellow too. All at
+once it occurred to him to wonder whether they were married or not.
+
+But really that was no affair of his, he reflected. A citizen of the
+intellectual world should be above soiling his thoughts with mean
+curiosities of that sort, and he drove the impertinent query down again
+under the surface of his mind. He refused to tolerate, as well, sundry
+vagrant imaginings which rose to cluster about and literalize the
+romance of her youth which Sister Soulsby had so frankly outlined.
+He would think upon nothing but her as he knew her,--the kindly,
+quick-witted, capable and charming woman who had made such a brilliant
+break in the monotony of life at that dull parsonage of his. The
+only genuine happiness in life must consist in having bright, smart,
+attractive women like that always about.
+
+The lights were visible now in the upper rooms of Father Forbes'
+pastorate across the way. Theron paused for a second to consider whether
+he wanted to go over and call on the priest. He decided that mentally he
+was too fagged and flat for such an undertaking. He needed another sort
+of companionship--some restful, soothing human contact, which should
+exact nothing from him in return, but just take charge of him,
+with soft, wise words and pleasant plays of fancy, and jokes
+and--and--something of the general effect created by Sister Soulsby's
+eyes. The thought expanded itself, and he saw that he had never realized
+before--nay, never dreamt before--what a mighty part the comradeship of
+talented, sweet-natured and beautiful women must play in the development
+of genius, the achievement of lofty aims, out in the great world of
+great men. To know such women--ah, that would never fall to his hapless
+lot.
+
+The priest's lamps blinked at him through the trees. He remembered that
+priests were supposed to be even further removed from the possibilities
+of such contact than he was himself. His memory reverted to that
+horribly ugly old woman whom Father Forbes had spoken of as his
+housekeeper. Life under the same roof with such a hag must be even worse
+than--worse than--
+
+The young minister did not finish the comparison, even in the privacy
+of his inner soul. He stood instead staring over at the pastorate, in a
+kind of stupor of arrested thought. The figure of a woman passed in view
+at the nearest window--a tall figure with pale summer clothes of some
+sort, and a broad summer hat--a flitting effect of diaphanous shadow
+between him and the light which streamed from the casement.
+
+Theron felt a little shiver run over him, as if the delicate coolness of
+the changing night-air had got into his blood. The window was open, and
+his strained hearing thought it caught the sound of faint laughter. He
+continued to gaze at the place where the vision had appeared, the while
+a novel and strange perception unfolded itself upon his mind.
+
+He had come there in the hope of encountering Celia Madden.
+
+Now that he looked this fact in the face, there was nothing remarkable
+about it. In truth, it was simplicity itself. He was still a sick man,
+weak in body and dejected in spirits. The thought of how unhappy and
+unstrung he was came to him now with an insistent pathos that brought
+tears to his eyes. He was only obeying the universal law of nature--the
+law which prompts the pallid spindling sprout of the potato in the
+cellar to strive feebly toward the light.
+
+From where he stood in the darkness he stretched out his hands in the
+direction of that open window. The gesture was his confession to the
+overhanging boughs, to the soft night-breeze, to the stars above--and
+it bore back to him something of the confessional's vague and wistful
+solace. He seemed already to have drawn down into his soul a taste
+of the refreshment it craved. He sighed deeply, and the hot moisture
+smarted again upon his eyelids, but this time not all in grief. With
+his tender compassion for himself there mingled now a flutter of buoyant
+prescience, of exquisite expectancy.
+
+Fate walked abroad this summer night. The street door of the pastorate
+opened, and in the flood of illumination which spread suddenly forth
+over the steps and sidewalk, Theron saw again the tall form, with the
+indefinitely light-hued flowing garments and the wide straw hat. He
+heard a tuneful woman's voice call out "Good-night, Maggie," and caught
+no response save the abrupt closing of the door, which turned everything
+black again with a bang. He listened acutely for another instant, and
+then with long, noiseless strides made his way down his deserted side of
+the street. He moderated his pace as he turned to cross the road at the
+corner, and then, still masked by the trees, halted altogether, in a
+momentary tumult of apprehension. No--yes--it was all right. The girl
+sauntered out from the total darkness into the dim starlight of the open
+corner.
+
+"Why, bless me, is that you, Miss Madden?"
+
+Celia seemed to discern readily enough, through the accents of surprise,
+the identity of the tall, slim man who addressed her from the shadows.
+
+"Good-evening, Mr. Ware," she said, with prompt affability. "I'm so glad
+to find you out again. We heard you were ill."
+
+"I have been very ill," responded Theron, as they shook hands and walked
+on together. He added, with a quaver in his voice, "I am still far
+from strong. I really ought not to be out at all. But--but the longing
+for--for--well, I COULDN'T stay in any longer. Even if it kills me, I
+shall be glad I came out tonight."
+
+"Oh, we won't talk of killing," said Celia. "I don't believe in
+illnesses myself."
+
+"But you believe in collapses of the nerves," put in Theron, with gentle
+sadness, "in moral and spiritual and mental breakdowns. I remember how I
+was touched by the way you told me YOU suffered from them. I had to take
+what you said then for granted. I had had no experience of it myself.
+But now I know what it is." He drew a long, pathetic sigh. "Oh, DON'T I
+know what it is!" he repeated gloomily.
+
+"Come, my friend, cheer up," Celia purred at him, in soothing tones. He
+felt that there was a deliciously feminine and sisterly intuition in
+her speech, and in the helpful, nurse-like way in which she drew his arm
+through hers. He leaned upon this support, and was glad of it in every
+fibre of his being.
+
+"Do you remember? You promised--that last time I saw you--to play for
+me," he reminded her. They were passing the little covered postern door
+at the side and rear of the church as he spoke, and he made a half halt
+to point the coincidence.
+
+"Oh, there's no one to blow the organ," she said, divining his
+suggestion. "And I haven't the key--and, besides, the organ is too heavy
+and severe for an invalid. It would overwhelm you tonight."
+
+"Not as you would know how to play it for me," urged Theron, pensively.
+"I feel as if good music to-night would make me well again. I am really
+very ill and weak--and unhappy!"
+
+The girl seemed moved by the despairing note in his voice. She invited
+him by a sympathetic gesture to lean even more directly on her arm.
+
+"Come home with me, and I'll play Chopin to you," she said, in
+compassionate friendliness. "He is the real medicine for bruised and
+wounded nerves. You shall have as much of him as you like."
+
+The idea thus unexpectedly thrown forth spread itself like some vast and
+inexpressibly alluring vista before Theron's imagination. The spice of
+adventure in it fascinated his mind as well, but for a shrinking moment
+the flesh was weak.
+
+"I'm afraid your people would--would think it strange," he faltered--and
+began also to recall that he had some people of his own who would be
+even more amazed.
+
+"Nonsense," said Celia, in fine, bold confidence, and with a reassuring
+pressure on his arm. "I allow none of my people to question what I do.
+They never dream of such a preposterous thing. Besides, you will see
+none of them. Mrs. Madden is at the seaside, and my father and brother
+have their own part of the house. I shan't listen for a minute to your
+not coming. Come, I'm your doctor. I'm to make you well again."
+
+There was further conversation, and Theron more or less knew that he was
+bearing a part in it, but his whole mind seemed concentrated, in a
+sort of delicious terror, upon the wonderful experience to which every
+footstep brought him nearer. His magnetized fancy pictured a great
+spacious parlor, such as a mansion like the Maddens' would of course
+contain, and there would be a grand piano, and lace curtains, and
+paintings in gold frames, and a chandelier, and velvet easy-chairs, and
+he would sit in one of these, surrounded by all the luxury of the rich,
+while Celia played to him. There would be servants about, he presumed,
+and very likely they would recognize him, and of course they would
+talk about it to Tom, Dick and Harry afterward. But he said to himself
+defiantly that he didn't care.
+
+He withdrew his arm from hers as they came upon the well-lighted main
+street. He passed no one who seemed to know him. Presently they came
+to the Madden place, and Celia, without waiting for the gravelled walk,
+struck obliquely across the lawn. Theron, who had been lagging behind
+with a certain circumspection, stepped briskly to her side now. Their
+progress over the soft, close-cropped turf in the dark together, with
+the scent of lilies and perfumed shrubs heavy on the night air, and
+the majestic bulk of the big silent house rising among the trees before
+them, gave him a thrilling sense of the glory of individual freedom.
+
+"I feel a new man already," he declared, as they swung along on the
+grass. He breathed a long sigh of content, and drew nearer, so that
+their shoulders touched now and again as they walked. In a minute more
+they were standing on the doorstep, and Theron heard the significant
+jingle of a bunch of keys which his companion was groping for in her
+elusive pocket. He was conscious of trembling a little at the sound.
+
+It seemed that, unlike other people, the Maddens did not have their
+parlor on the ground-floor, opening off the front hall. Theron stood in
+the complete darkness of this hall, till Celia had lit one of several
+candles which were in their hand-sticks on a sort of sideboard next the
+hat-rack. She beckoned him with a gesture of her head, and he followed
+her up a broad staircase, magnificent in its structural appointments
+of inlaid woods, and carpeted with what to his feet felt like down. The
+tiny light which his guide bore before her half revealed, as they passed
+in their ascent, tall lengths of tapestry, and the dull glint of
+armor and brazen discs in shadowed niches on the nearer wall. Over the
+stair-rail lay an open space of such stately dimensions, bounded by
+terminal lines of decoration so distant in the faint candle-flicker,
+that the young country minister could think of no word but "palatial" to
+fit it all.
+
+At the head of the flight, Celia led the way along a wide corridor to
+where it ended. Here, stretched from side to side, and suspended from
+broad hoops of a copper-like metal, was a thick curtain, of a uniform
+color which Theron at first thought was green, and then decided must be
+blue. She pushed its heavy folds aside, and unlocked another door. He
+passed under the curtain behind her, and closed the door.
+
+The room into which he had made his way was not at all after the fashion
+of any parlor he had ever seen. In the obscure light it was difficult
+to tell what it resembled. He made out what he took to be a painter's
+easel, standing forth independently in the centre of things. There were
+rows of books on rude, low shelves. Against one of the two windows was
+a big, flat writing-table--or was it a drawing-table?--littered with
+papers. Under the other window was a carpenter's bench, with a large
+mound of something at one end covered with a white cloth. On a table
+behind the easel rose a tall mechanical contrivance, the chief feature
+of which was a thick upright spiral screw. The floor was of bare
+wood stained brown. The walls of this queer room had photographs and
+pictures, taken apparently from illustrated papers, pinned up at random
+for their only ornament.
+
+Celia had lighted three or four other candles on the mantel. She
+caught the dumfounded expression with which her guest was surveying his
+surroundings, and gave a merry little laugh.
+
+"This is my workshop," she explained. "I keep this for the things I do
+badly--things I fool with. If I want to paint, or model in clay, or bind
+books, or write, or draw, or turn on the lathe, or do some carpentering,
+here's where I do it. All the things that make a mess which has to
+be cleaned up--they are kept out here--because this is as far as the
+servants are allowed to come."
+
+She unlocked still another door as she spoke--a door which was also
+concealed behind a curtain.
+
+"Now," she said, holding up the candle so that its reddish flare rounded
+with warmth the creamy fulness of her chin and throat, and glowed upon
+her hair in a flame of orange light--"now I will show you what is my
+very own."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+Theron Ware looked about him with frankly undisguised astonishment.
+
+The room in which he found himself was so dark at first that it
+yielded little to the eye, and that little seemed altogether beyond his
+comprehension. His gaze helplessly followed Celia and her candle
+about as she busied herself in the work of illumination. When she had
+finished, and pinched out the taper, there were seven lights in the
+apartment--lights beaming softly through half-opaque alternating
+rectangles of blue and yellow glass. They must be set in some sort of
+lanterns around against the wall, he thought, but the shape of these he
+could hardly make out.
+
+Gradually his sight adapted itself to this subdued light, and he began
+to see other things. These queer lamps were placed, apparently, so as to
+shed a special radiance upon some statues which stood in the corners of
+the chamber, and upon some pictures which were embedded in the walls.
+Theron noted that the statues, the marble of which lost its aggressive
+whiteness under the tinted lights, were mostly of naked men and women;
+the pictures, four or five in number, were all variations of a single
+theme--the Virgin Mary and the Child.
+
+A less untutored vision than his would have caught more swiftly the
+scheme of color and line in which these works of art bore their share.
+The walls of the room were in part of flat upright wooden columns,
+terminating high above in simple capitals, and they were all painted in
+pale amber and straw and primrose hues, irregularly wavering here and
+there toward suggestions of white. Between these pilasters were broader
+panels of stamped leather, in gently varying shades of peacock blue.
+These contrasted colors vaguely interwove and mingled in what he
+could see of the shadowed ceiling far above. They were repeated in the
+draperies and huge cushions and pillows of the low, wide divan which ran
+about three sides of the room. Even the floor, where it revealed itself
+among the scattered rugs, was laid in a mosaic pattern of matched woods,
+which, like the rugs, gave back these same shifting blues and uncertain
+yellows.
+
+The fourth side of the apartment was broken in outline at one end by the
+door through which they had entered, and at the other by a broad, square
+opening, hung with looped-back curtains of a thin silken stuff. Between
+the two apertures rose against the wall what Theron took at first glance
+to be an altar. There were pyramidal rows of tall candles here on either
+side, each masked with a little silken hood; below, in the centre, a
+shelf-like projection supported what seemed a massive, carved casket,
+and in the beautiful intricacies of this, and the receding canopy of
+delicate ornamentation which depended above it, the dominant color was
+white, deepening away in its shadows, by tenderly minute gradations, to
+the tints which ruled the rest of the room.
+
+Celia lighted some of the high, thick tapers in these candelabra, and
+opened the top of the casket. Theron saw with surprise that she had
+uncovered the keyboard of a piano. He viewed with much greater amazement
+her next proceeding--which was to put a cigarette between her lips, and,
+bending over one of the candles with it for an instant, turn to him with
+a filmy, opalescent veil of smoke above her head.
+
+"Make yourself comfortable anywhere," she said, with a gesture which
+comprehended all the divans and pillows in the place. "Will you smoke?"
+
+"I have never tried since I was a little boy," said Theron, "but I think
+I could. If you don't mind, I should like to see."
+
+Lounging at his ease on the oriental couch, Theron experimented
+cautiously upon the unaccustomed tobacco, and looked at Celia with what
+he felt to be the confident quiet of a man of the world. She had thrown
+aside her hat, and in doing so had half released some of the heavy
+strands of hair coiled at the back of her head. His glance instinctively
+rested upon this wonderful hair of hers. There was no mistaking the
+sudden fascination its disorder had for his eye.
+
+She stood before him with the cigarette poised daintily between thumb
+and finger of a shapely hand, and smiled comprehendingly down on her
+guest.
+
+"I suffered the horrors of the damned with this hair of mine when I was
+a child," she said. "I daresay all children have a taste for persecuting
+red-heads; but it's a specialty with Irish children. They get hold
+somehow of an ancient national superstition, or legend, that red hair
+was brought into Ireland by the Danes. It's been a term of reproach with
+us since Brian Boru's time to call a child a Dane. I used to be pursued
+and baited with it every day of my life, until the one dream of my
+ambition was to get old enough to be a Sister of Charity, so that I
+might hide my hair under one of their big beastly white linen caps. I've
+got rather away from that ideal since, I'm afraid," she added, with a
+droll downward curl of her lip.
+
+"Your hair is very beautiful," said Theron, in the calm tone of a
+connoisseur.
+
+"I like it myself," Celia admitted, and blew a little smoke-ring toward
+him. "I've made this whole room to match it. The colors, I mean," she
+explained, in deference to his uplifted brows. "Between us, we make up
+what Whistler would call a symphony. That reminds me--I was going to
+play for you. Let me finish the cigarette first."
+
+Theron felt grateful for her reticence about the fact that he had laid
+his own aside. "I have never seen a room at all like this," he remarked.
+"You are right; it does fit you perfectly."
+
+She nodded her sense of his appreciation. "It is what I like," she
+said. "It expresses ME. I will not have anything about me--or anybody
+either--that I don't like. I suppose if an old Greek could see it, it
+would make him sick, but it represents what I mean by being a Greek. It
+is as near as an Irishman can get to it."
+
+"I remember your puzzling me by saying that you were a Greek."
+
+Celia laughed, and tossed the cigarette-end away. "I'd puzzle you more,
+I'm afraid, if I tried to explain to you what I really meant by it. I
+divide people up into two classes, you know--Greeks and Jews. Once you
+get hold of that principle, all other divisions and classifications,
+such as by race or language or nationality, seem pure foolishness. It
+is the only true division there is. It is just as true among negroes
+or wild Indians who never heard of Greece or Jerusalem, as it is among
+white folks. That is the beauty of it. It works everywhere, always."
+
+"Try it on me," urged Theron, with a twinkling eye. "Which am I?"
+
+"Both," said the girl, with a merry nod of the head. "But now I'll play.
+I told you you were to hear Chopin. I prescribe him for you. He is the
+Greekiest of the Greeks. THERE was a nation where all the people were
+artists, where everybody was an intellectual aristocrat, where the
+Philistine was as unknown, as extinct, as the dodo. Chopin might have
+written his music for them."
+
+"I am interested in Shopang," put in Theron, suddenly recalling
+Sister Soulsby's confidences as to the source of her tunes. "He lived
+with--what's his name--George something. We were speaking about him only
+this afternoon."
+
+Celia looked down into her visitor's face at first inquiringly, then
+with a latent grin about her lips. "Yes--George something," she said, in
+a tone which mystified him.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Ware was sitting up, a minute afterward, in a ferment of
+awakened consciousness that he had never heard the piano played before.
+After a little, he noiselessly rearranged the cushions, and settled
+himself again in a recumbent posture. It was beyond his strength to
+follow that first impulse, and keep his mind abreast with what his ears
+took in. He sighed and lay back, and surrendered his senses to the mere
+unthinking charm of it all.
+
+It was the Fourth Prelude that was singing in the air about him--a
+simple, plaintive strain wandering at will over a surface of steady
+rhythmic movement underneath, always creeping upward through mysteries
+of sweetness, always sinking again in cadences of semi-tones. With only
+a moment's pause, there came the Seventh Waltz--a rich, bold confusion
+which yet was not confused. Theron's ears dwelt with eager delight upon
+the chasing medley of swift, tinkling sounds, but it left his thoughts
+free.
+
+From where he reclined, he turned his head to scrutinize, one by one,
+the statues in the corners. No doubt they were beautiful--for this was a
+department in which he was all humility--and one of them, the figure of
+a broad-browed, stately, though thick-waisted woman, bending slightly
+forward and with both arms broken off, was decently robed from the hips
+downward. The others were not robed at all. Theron stared at them with
+the erratic, rippling jangle of the waltz in his ears, and felt that he
+possessed a new and disturbing conception of what female emancipation
+meant in these later days. Roving along the wall, his glance rested
+again upon the largest of the Virgin pictures--a full-length figure
+in sweeping draperies, its radiant, aureoled head upturned in rapt
+adoration, its feet resting on a crescent moon which shone forth in
+bluish silver through festooned clouds of cherubs. The incongruity
+between the unashamed statues and this serene incarnation of holy
+womanhood jarred upon him for the instant. Then his mind went to the
+piano.
+
+Without a break the waltz had slowed and expanded into a passage of what
+might be church music, an exquisitely modulated and gently solemn chant,
+through which a soft, lingering song roved capriciously, forcing the
+listener to wonder where it was coming out, even while it caressed and
+soothed to repose.
+
+He looked from the Madonna to Celia. Beyond the carelessly drooping
+braids and coils of hair which blazed between the candles, he could see
+the outline of her brow and cheek, the noble contour of her lifted chin
+and full, modelled throat, all pink as the most delicate rose leaf
+is pink, against the cool lights of the altar-like wall. The sight
+convicted him in the court of his own soul as a prurient and mean-minded
+rustic. In the presence of such a face, of such music, there ceased to
+be any such thing as nudity, and statues no more needed clothes than
+did those slow, deep, magnificent chords which came now, gravely
+accumulating their spell upon him.
+
+"It is all singing!" the player called out to him over her shoulder, in
+a minute of rest. "That is what Chopin does--he sings!"
+
+She began, with an effect of thinking of something else, the Sixth
+Nocturne, and Theron at first thought she was not playing anything in
+particular, so deliberately, haltingly, did the chain of charm unwind
+itself into sequence. Then it came closer to him than the others had
+done. The dreamy, wistful, meditative beauty of it all at once oppressed
+and inspired him. He saw Celia's shoulders sway under the impulse of the
+RUBATO license--the privilege to invest each measure with the stress of
+the whole, to loiter, to weep, to run and laugh at will--and the music
+she made spoke to him as with a human voice. There was the wooing sense
+of roses and moonlight, of perfumes, white skins, alluring languorous
+eyes, and then--
+
+"You know this part, of course," he heard her say.
+
+On the instant they had stepped from the dark, scented, starlit garden,
+where the nightingale sang, into a great cathedral. A sombre and lofty
+anthem arose, and filled the place with the splendor of such dignified
+pomp of harmony and such suggestions of measureless choral power and
+authority that Theron sat abruptly up, then was drawn resistlessly to
+his feet. He stood motionless in the strange room, feeling most of all
+that one should kneel to hear such music.
+
+"This you'll know too--the funeral march from the Second Sonata," she
+was saying, before he realized that the end of the other had come. He
+sank upon the divan again, bending forward and clasping his hands tight
+around his knees. His heart beat furiously as he listened to the weird,
+mediaeval processional, with its wild, clashing chords held down in
+the bondage of an orderly sadness. There was a propelling motion in
+the thing--a sense of being borne bodily along--which affected him
+like dizziness. He breathed hard through the robust portions of stern,
+vigorous noise, and rocked himself to and fro when, as rosy morn
+breaks upon a storm-swept night, the drums are silenced for the sweet,
+comforting strain of solitary melody. The clanging minor harmonies into
+which the march relapses came to their abrupt end. Theron rose once
+more, and moved with a hesitating step to the piano.
+
+"I want to rest a little," he said, with his hand on her shoulder.
+
+"Whew! so do I," exclaimed Celia, letting her hands fall with an
+exaggerated gesture of weariness. "The sonatas take it out of one! They
+are hideously difficult, you know. They are rarely played."
+
+"I didn't know," remarked Theron. She seemed not to mind his hand upon
+her shoulder, and he kept it there. "I didn't know anything about music
+at all. What I do know now is that--that this evening is an event in my
+life."
+
+She looked up at him and smiled. He read unsuspected tendernesses and
+tolerances of friendship in the depths of her eyes, which emboldened
+him to stir the fingers of that audacious hand in a lingering, caressing
+trill upon her shoulder. The movement was of the faintest, but having
+ventured it, he drew his hand abruptly away.
+
+"You are getting on," she said to him. There was an enigmatic twinkle
+in the smile with which she continued to regard him. "We are Hellenizing
+you at a great rate."
+
+A sudden thought seemed to strike her. She shifted her eyes toward
+vacancy with a swift, abstracted glance, reflected for a moment, then
+let a sparkling half-wink and the dimpling beginnings of an almost
+roguish smile mark her assent to the conceit, whatever it might be.
+
+"I will be with you in a moment," he heard her say; and while the words
+were still in his ears she had risen and passed out of sight through
+the broad, open doorway to the right. The looped curtains fell together
+behind her. Presently a mellow light spread over their delicately
+translucent surface--a creamy, undulating radiance which gave the effect
+of moving about among the myriad folds of the silk.
+
+Theron gazed at these curtains for a little, then straightened his
+shoulders with a gesture of decision, and, turning on his heel, went
+over and examined the statues in the further corners minutely.
+
+"If you would like some more, I will play you the Berceuse now."
+
+Her voice came to him with a delicious shock. He wheeled round and
+beheld her standing at the piano, with one hand resting, palm upward,
+on the keys. She was facing him. Her tall form was robed now in some
+shapeless, clinging drapery, lustrous and creamy and exquisitely soft,
+like the curtains. The wonderful hair hung free and luxuriant about her
+neck and shoulders, and glowed with an intensity of fiery color which
+made all the other hues of the room pale and vague. A fillet of faint,
+sky-like blue drew a gracious span through the flame of red above her
+temples, and from this there rose the gleam of jewels. Her head inclined
+gently, gravely, toward him--with the posture of that armless woman in
+marble he had been studying--and her brown eyes, regarding him from the
+shadows, emitted light.
+
+"It is a lullaby--the only one he wrote," she said, as Theron,
+pale-faced and with tightened lips, approached her. "No--you mustn't
+stand there," she added, sinking into the seat before the instrument;
+"go back and sit where you were."
+
+The most perfect of lullabies, with its swaying abandonment to cooing
+rhythm, ever and again rising in ripples to the point of insisting on
+something, one knows not what, and then rocking, melting away once
+more, passed, so to speak, over Theron's head. He leaned back upon the
+cushions, and watched the white, rounded forearm which the falling folds
+of this strange, statue-like drapery made bare.
+
+There was more that appealed to his mood in the Third Ballade. It
+seemed to him that there were words going along with it--incoherent and
+impulsive yet very earnest words, appealing to him in strenuous argument
+and persuasion. Each time he almost knew what they said, and strained
+after their meaning with a passionate desire, and then there would come
+a kind of cuckoo call, and everything would swing dancing off again into
+a mockery of inconsequence.
+
+Upon the silence there fell the pure, liquid, mellifluous melody of a
+soft-throated woman singing to her lover.
+
+"It is like Heine--simply a love-poem," said the girl, over her
+shoulder.
+
+Theron followed now with all his senses, as she carried the Ninth
+Nocturne onward. The stormy passage, which she banged finely forth,
+was in truth a lover's quarrel; and then the mild, placid flow of sweet
+harmonies into which the furore sank, dying languorously away upon a
+silence all alive with tender memories of sound--was that not also a
+part of love?
+
+They sat motionless through a minute--the man on the divan, the girl
+at the piano--and Theron listened for what he felt must be the audible
+thumping of his heart.
+
+Then, throwing back her head, with upturned face, Celia began what she
+had withheld for the last--the Sixteenth Mazurka. This strange foreign
+thing she played with her eyes closed, her head tilted obliquely so that
+Theron could see the rose-tinted, beautiful countenance, framed as if
+asleep in the billowing luxuriance of unloosed auburn hair. He fancied
+her beholding visions as she wrought the music--visions full of barbaric
+color and romantic forms. As his mind swam along with the gliding,
+tricksy phantom of a tune, it seemed as if he too could see these
+visions--as if he gazed at them through her eyes.
+
+It could not be helped. He lifted himself noiselessly to his feet, and
+stole with caution toward her. He would hear the rest of this weird,
+voluptuous fantasy standing thus, so close behind her that he could look
+down upon her full, uplifted lace--so close that, if she moved, that
+glowing nimbus of hair would touch him.
+
+There had been some curious and awkward pauses in this last piece, which
+Theron, by some side cerebration, had put down to her not watching
+what her fingers did. There came another of these pauses now--an odd,
+unaccountable halt in what seemed the middle of everything. He stared
+intently down upon her statuesque, dreaming face during the hush, and
+caught his breath as he waited. There fell at last a few faltering
+ascending notes, making a half-finished strain, and then again there was
+silence.
+
+Celia opened her eyes, and poured a direct, deep gaze into the face
+above hers. Its pale lips were parted in suspense, and the color had
+faded from its cheeks.
+
+"That is the end," she said, and, with a turn of her lithe body, stood
+swiftly up, even while the echoes of the broken melody seemed panting in
+the air about her for completion.
+
+Theron put his hands to his face, and pressed them tightly against eyes
+and brow for an instant. Then, throwing them aside with an expansive
+downward sweep of the arms, and holding them clenched, he returned
+Celia's glance. It was as if he had never looked into a woman's eyes
+before.
+
+"It CAN'T be the end!" he heard himself saying, in a low voice charged
+with deep significance. He held her gaze in the grasp of his with
+implacable tenacity. There was a trouble about breathing, and the mosaic
+floor seemed to stir under his feet. He clung defiantly to the one idea
+of not releasing her eyes.
+
+"How COULD it be the end?" he demanded, lifting an uncertain hand to
+his breast as he spoke, and spreading it there as if to control the
+tumultuous fluttering of his heart. "Things don't end that way!"
+
+A sharp, blinding spasm of giddiness closed upon and shook him, while
+the brave words were on his lips. He blinked and tottered under it, as
+it passed, and then backed humbly to his divan and sat down, gasping a
+little, and patting his hand on his heart. There was fright written all
+over his whitened face.
+
+"We--we forgot that I am a sick man," he said feebly, answering Celia's
+look of surprised inquiry with a forced, wan smile. "I was afraid my
+heart had gone wrong."
+
+She scrutinized him for a further moment, with growing reassurance
+in her air. Then, piling up the pillows and cushions behind him for
+support, for all the world like a big sister again, she stepped into the
+inner room, and returned with a flagon of quaint shape and a tiny glass.
+She poured this latter full to the brim of a thick yellowish, aromatic
+liquid, and gave it him to drink.
+
+"This Benedictine is all I happen to have," she said. "Swallow it down.
+It will do you good."
+
+Theron obeyed her. It brought tears to his eyes; but, upon reflection,
+it was grateful and warming. He did feel better almost immediately. A
+great wave of comfort seemed to enfold him as he settled himself back
+on the divan. For that one flashing instant he had thought that he was
+dying. He drew a long grateful breath of relief, and smiled his content.
+
+Celia had seated herself beside him, a little away. She sat with her
+head against the wall, and one foot curled under her, and almost faced
+him.
+
+"I dare say we forced the pace a little," she remarked, after a pause,
+looking down at the floor, with the puckers of a ruminating amusement
+playing in the corners of her mouth. "It doesn't do for a man to get to
+be a Greek all of a sudden. He must work along up to it gradually."
+
+He remembered the music. "Oh, if I only knew how to tell you," he
+murmured ecstatically, "what a revelation your playing has been to me!
+I had never imagined anything like it. I shall think of it to my dying
+day."
+
+He began to remember as well the spirit that was in the air when the
+music ended. The details of what he had felt and said rose vaguely in
+his mind. Pondering them, his eye roved past Celia's white-robed figure
+to the broad, open doorway beyond. The curtains behind which she had
+disappeared were again parted and fastened back. A dim light was burning
+within, out of sight, and its faint illumination disclosed a room filled
+with white marbles, white silks, white draperies of varying sorts, which
+shaped themselves, as he looked, into the canopy and trappings of an
+extravagantly over-sized and sumptuous bed. He looked away again.
+
+"I wish you would tell me what you really mean by that Greek idea of
+yours," he said with the abruptness of confusion.
+
+Celia did not display much enthusiasm in the tone of her answer. "Oh,"
+she said almost indifferently, "lots of things. Absolute freedom from
+moral bugbears, for one thing. The recognition that beauty is the only
+thing in life that is worth while. The courage to kick out of one's life
+everything that isn't worth while; and so on."
+
+"But," said Theron, watching the mingled delicacy and power of the bared
+arm and the shapely grace of the hand which she had lifted to her
+face, "I am going to get you to teach it ALL to me." The memories began
+crowding in upon him now, and the baffling note upon which the mazurka
+had stopped short chimed like a tuning-fork in his ears. "I want to be
+a Greek myself, if you're one. I want to get as close to you--to your
+ideal, that is, as I can. You open up to me a whole world that I had not
+even dreamed existed. We swore our friendship long ago, you know: and
+now, after tonight--you and the music have decided me. I am going to put
+the things out of MY life that are not worthwhile. Only you must help
+me; you must tell me how to begin."
+
+He looked up as he spoke, to enforce the almost tender entreaty of his
+words. The spectacle of a yawn, only fractionally concealed behind those
+talented fingers, chilled his soft speech, and sent a flush over his
+face. He rose on the instant.
+
+Celia was nothing abashed at his discovery. She laughed gayly in
+confession of her fault, and held her hand out to let him help her
+disentangle her foot from her draperies, and get off the divan. It
+seemed to be her meaning that he should continue holding her hand after
+she was also standing.
+
+"You forgive me, don't you?" she urged smilingly. "Chopin always first
+excites me, then sends me to sleep. You see how YOU sleep tonight!"
+
+The brown, velvety eyes rested upon him, from under their heavy lids,
+with a languorous kindliness. Her warm, large palm clasped his in frank
+liking.
+
+"I don't want to sleep at all," Mr. Ware was impelled to say. "I want to
+lie awake and think about--about everything all over again."
+
+She smiled drowsily. "And you're sure you feel strong enough to walk
+home?"
+
+"Yes," he replied, with a lingering dilatory note, which deepened upon
+reflection into a sigh. "Oh, yes."
+
+He followed her and her candle down the magnificent stairway again. She
+blew the light out in the hall, and, opening the front door, stood with
+him for a silent moment on the threshold. Then they shook hands once
+more, and with a whispered good-night, parted.
+
+Celia, returning to the blue and yellow room, lighted a cigarette and
+helped herself to some Benedictine in the glass which Theron had used.
+She looked meditatively at this little glass for a moment, turning it
+about in her fingers with a smile. The smile warmed itself suddenly into
+a joyous laugh. She tossed the glass aside, and, holding out her flowing
+skirts with both hands, executed a swinging pirouette in front of the
+gravely beautiful statue of the armless woman.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+It was apparent to the Rev. Theron Ware, from the very first moment of
+waking next morning, that both he and the world had changed over night.
+The metamorphosis, in the harsh toils of which he had been laboring
+blindly so long, was accomplished. He stood forth, so to speak, in a new
+skin, and looked about him, with perceptions of quite an altered kind,
+upon what seemed in every way a fresh existence. He lacked even the
+impulse to turn round and inspect the cocoon from which he had emerged.
+Let the past bury the past. He had no vestige of interest in it.
+
+The change was not premature. He found himself not in the least confused
+by it, or frightened. Before he had finished shaving, he knew himself
+to be easily and comfortably at home in his new state, and master of all
+its requirements.
+
+It seemed as if Alice, too, recognized that he had become another man,
+when he went down and took his chair at the breakfast table. They had
+exchanged no words since their parting in the depot-yard the previous
+evening--an event now faded off into remote vagueness in Theron's
+mind. He smiled brilliantly in answer to the furtive, half-sullen,
+half-curious glance she stole at him, as she brought the dishes in.
+
+"Ah! potatoes warmed up in cream!" he said, with hearty pleasure in his
+tone. "What a mind-reader you are, to be sure!"
+
+"I'm glad you're feeling so much better," she said briefly, taking her
+seat.
+
+"Better?" he returned. "I'm a new being!"
+
+She ventured to look him over more freely, upon this assurance. He
+perceived and catalogued, one by one, the emotions which the small brain
+was expressing through those shallow blue eyes of hers. She was
+turning over this, that, and the other hostile thought and childish
+grievance--most of all she was dallying with the idea of asking him
+where he had been till after midnight. He smiled affably in the face of
+this scattering fire of peevish glances, and did not dream of resenting
+any phase of them all.
+
+"I am going down to Thurston's this morning, and order that piano sent
+up today," he announced presently, in a casual way.
+
+"Why, Theron, can we afford it?" the wife asked, regarding him with
+surprise.
+
+"Oh, easily enough," he replied light-heartedly. "You know they've
+increased my salary."
+
+She shook her head. "No, I didn't. How should I? You don't realize it,"
+she went on, dolefully, "but you're getting so you don't tell me the
+least thing about your affairs nowadays."
+
+Theron laughed aloud. "You ought to be grateful--such melancholy affairs
+as mine have been till now," he declared--"that is, if it weren't absurd
+to think such a thing." Then, more soberly, he explained: "No, my girl,
+it is you who don't realize. I am carrying big projects in my mind--big,
+ambitious thoughts and plans upon which great things depend. They no
+doubt make me seem preoccupied and absent-minded; but it is a wife's
+part to understand, and make allowances, and not intrude trifles which
+may throw everything out of gear. Don't think I'm scolding, my girl. I
+only speak to reassure you and--and help you to comprehend. Of course I
+know that you wouldn't willingly embarrass my--my career."
+
+"Of course not," responded Alice, dubiously; "but--but--"
+
+"But what? Theron felt compelled by civility to say, though on the
+instant he reproached himself for the weakness of it.
+
+"Well--I hardly know how to say it," she faltered, "but it was nicer in
+the old days, before you bothered your head about big projects, and
+your career, as you call it, and were just a good, earnest, simple young
+servant of the Lord. Oh, Theron!" she broke forth suddenly, with tearful
+zeal, "I get sometimes lately almost scared lest you should turn out to
+be a--a BACKSLIDER!"
+
+The husband sat upright, and hardened his countenance. But yesterday the
+word would have had in it all sorts of inherited terrors for him. This
+morning's dawn of a new existence revealed it as merely an empty and
+stupid epithet.
+
+"These are things not to be said," he admonished her, after a moment's
+pause, and speaking with carefully measured austerity. "Least of all are
+they to be said to a clergyman--by his wife."
+
+It was on the tip of Alice's tongue to retort, "Better by his wife than
+by outsiders!" but she bit her lips, and kept the gibe back. A rebuke of
+this form and gravity was a novelty in their relations. The fear that it
+had been merited troubled, even while it did not convince, her mind, and
+the puzzled apprehension was to be read plainly enough on her face.
+
+Theron, noting it, saw a good deal more behind. Really, it was amazing
+how much wiser he had grown all at once. He had been married for years,
+and it was only this morning that he suddenly discovered how a wife
+ought to be handled. He continued to look sternly away into space for a
+little. Then his brows relaxed slowly and under the visible influence of
+melting considerations. He nodded his head, turned toward her abruptly,
+and broke the silence with labored amiability.
+
+"Come, come--the day began so pleasantly--it was so good to feel well
+again--let us talk about the piano instead. That is," he added, with an
+obvious overture to playfulness, "if the thought of having a piano is
+not too distasteful to you."
+
+Alice yielded almost effusively to his altered mood. They went together
+into the sitting-room, to measure and decide between the two available
+spaces which were at their disposal, and he insisted with resolute
+magnanimity on her settling this question entirely by herself. When at
+last he mentioned the fact that it was Friday, and he would look over
+some sermon memoranda before he went out, Alice retired to the kitchen
+in openly cheerful spirits.
+
+Theron spread some old manuscript sermons before him on his desk,
+and took down his scribbling-book as well. But there his application
+flagged, and he surrendered himself instead, chin on hand, to staring
+out at the rhododendron in the yard. He recalled how he had seen Soulsby
+patiently studying this identical bush. The notion of Soulsby, not
+knowing at all how to sing, yet diligently learning those sixths,
+brought a smile to his mind; and then he seemed to hear Celia calling
+out over her shoulder, "That's what Chopin does--he sings!" The spirit
+of that wonderful music came back to him, enfolded him in its wings. It
+seemed to raise itself up--a palpable barrier between him and all that
+he had known and felt and done before. That was his new birth--that
+marvellous night with the piano. The conceit pleased him--not the less
+because there flashed along with it the thought that it was a poet that
+had been born. Yes; the former country lout, the narrow zealot, the
+untutored slave groping about in the dark after silly superstitions,
+cringing at the scowl of mean Pierces and Winches, was dead. There was
+an end of him, and good riddance. In his place there had been born a
+Poet--he spelled the word out now unabashed--a child of light, a
+lover of beauty and sweet sounds, a recognizable brother to Renan and
+Chopin--and Celia!
+
+Out of the soothing, tenderly grateful revery, a practical suggestion
+suddenly took shape. He acted upon it without a moment's delay, getting
+out his letter-pad, and writing hurriedly--
+
+"Dear Miss Madden,--Life will be more tolerable to me if before
+nightfall I can know that there is a piano under my roof. Even if it
+remains dumb, it will be some comfort to have it here and look at it,
+and imagine how a great master might make it speak.
+
+"Would it be too much to beg you to look in at Thurston's, say at eleven
+this forenoon, and give me the inestimable benefit of your judgment in
+selecting an instrument?
+
+"Do not trouble to answer this, for I am leaving home now, but shall
+call at Thurston's at eleven, and wait.
+
+"Thanking you in anticipation,
+
+"I am--"
+
+Here Theron's fluency came to a sharp halt. There were adverbs enough
+and to spare on the point of his pen, but the right one was not easy to
+come at. "Gratefully," "faithfully," "sincerely," "truly"--each in turn
+struck a false note. He felt himself not quite any of these things. At
+last he decided to write just the simple word "yours," and then wavered
+between satisfaction at his boldness, dread lest he had been over-bold,
+and, worst of the lot, fear that she would not notice it one way or
+the other--all the while he sealed and addressed the letter, put it
+carefully in an inner pocket, and got his hat.
+
+There was a moment's hesitation as to notifying the kitchen of his
+departure. The interests of domestic discipline seemed to point the
+other way. He walked softly through the hall, and let himself out by the
+front door without a sound.
+
+Down by the canal bridge he picked out an idle boy to his mind--a lad
+whose aspect appeared to promise intelligence as a messenger, combined
+with large impartiality in sectarian matters. He was to have ten
+cents on his return; and he might report himself to his patron at the
+bookstore yonder.
+
+Theron was grateful to the old bookseller for remaining at his desk in
+the rear. There was a tacit compliment in the suggestion that he was
+not a mere customer, demanding instant attention. Besides, there was no
+keeping "Thurston's" out of conversations in this place.
+
+Loitering along the shelves, the young minister's eye suddenly found
+itself arrested by a name on a cover. There were a dozen narrow volumes
+in uniform binding, huddled together under a cardboard label of "Eminent
+Women Series." Oddly enough, one of these bore the title "George Sand."
+Theron saw there must be some mistake, as he took the book down, and
+opened it. His glance hit by accident upon the name of Chopin. Then he
+read attentively until almost the stroke of eleven.
+
+"We have to make ourselves acquainted with all sorts of queer phases of
+life," he explained in self-defence to the old bookseller, then counting
+out the money for the book from his lean purse. He smiled as he added,
+"There seems something almost wrong about taking advantage of the
+clergyman's discount for a life of George Sand."
+
+"I don't know," answered the other, pleasantly. "Guess she wasn't
+so much different from the rest of 'em--except that she didn't mind
+appearances. We know about her. We don't know about the others."
+
+"I must hurry," said Theron, turning on his heel. The haste with which
+he strode out of the store, crossed the street, and made his way toward
+Thurston's, did not prevent his thinking much upon the astonishing
+things he had encountered in this book. Their relation to Celia forced
+itself more and more upon his mind. He could recall the twinkle in
+her eye, the sub-mockery in her tone, as she commented with that
+half-contemptuous "Yes--George something!" upon his blundering
+ignorance. His mortification at having thus exposed his dull rusticity
+was swallowed up in conjectures as to just what her tolerant familiarity
+with such things involved. He had never before met a young unmarried
+woman who would have confessed to him any such knowledge. But then, of
+course, he had never known a girl who resembled Celia in any other way.
+He recognized vaguely that he must provide himself with an entire new
+set of standards by which to measure and comprehend her. But it was for
+the moment more interesting to wonder what her standards were. Did she
+object to George Sand's behavior? Or did she sympathize with that sort
+of thing? Did those statues, and the loose-flowing diaphonous toga
+and unbound hair, the cigarettes, the fiery liqueur, the deliberately
+sensuous music--was he to believe that they signified--?
+
+"Good-morning, Mr. Ware. You have managed by a miracle to hit on one of
+my punctual days," said Celia.
+
+She was standing on the doorstep, at the entrance to the musical
+department of Thurston's. He had not noticed before the fact that the
+sun was shining. The full glare of its strong light, enveloping her
+figure as she stood, and drawing the dazzled eye for relief to the bower
+of softened color, close beneath her parasol of creamy silk and lace,
+was what struck him now first of all. It was as if Celia had brought the
+sun with her.
+
+Theron shook hands with her, and found joy in the perception, that his
+own hand trembled. He put boldly into words the thought that came to
+him.
+
+"It was generous of you," he said, "to wait for me out here, where all
+might delight in the sight of you, instead of squandering the privilege
+on a handful of clerks inside."
+
+Miss Madden beamed upon him, and nodded approval.
+
+"Alcibiades never turned a prettier compliment," she remarked. They went
+in together at this, and Theron made a note of the name.
+
+During the ensuing half-hour, the young minister followed about even
+more humbly than the clerks in Celia's commanding wake. There were a
+good many pianos in the big show-room overhead, and Theron found himself
+almost awed by their size and brilliancy of polish, and the thought of
+the tremendous sum of money they represented altogether. Not so with the
+organist. She ordered them rolled around this way or that, as if they
+had been so many checkers on a draught-board. She threw back their
+covers with the scant ceremony of a dispensary dentist opening paupers'
+mouths. She exploited their several capacities with masterful hands,
+not deigning to seat herself, but just slightly bending forward, and
+sweeping her fingers up and down their keyboards--able, domineering
+fingers which pounded, tinkled, meditated, assented, condemned, all in
+a flash, and amid what affected the layman's ears as a hopelessly
+discordant hubbub.
+
+Theron moved about in the group, nursing her parasol in his arms, and
+watching her. The exaggerated deference which the clerks and salesmen
+showed to her as the rich Miss Madden, seemed to him to be mixed with a
+certain assertion of the claims of good-fellowship on the score of her
+being a musician. There undoubtedly was a sense of freemasonry between
+them. They alluded continually in technical terms to matters of which he
+knew nothing, and were amused at remarks of hers which to him carried no
+meaning whatever. It was evident that the young men liked her, and that
+their liking pleased her. It thrilled him to think that she knew he
+liked her, too, and to recall what abundant proofs she had given that
+here, also, she had pleasure in the fact. He clung insistently to the
+memory of these evidences. They helped him to resist a disagreeable
+tendency to feel himself an intruder, an outsider, among these
+pianoforte experts.
+
+When it was all over, Celia waved the others aside, and talked with
+Theron. "I suppose you want me to tell you the truth," she said.
+"There's nothing here really good. It is always much better to buy of
+the makers direct."
+
+"Do they sell on the instalment plan?" he asked. There was a wistful
+effect in his voice which caught her attention.
+
+She looked away--out through the window on the street below--for
+a moment. Then her eyes returned to his, and regarded him with a
+comforting, friendly, half-motherly glance, recalling for all the world
+the way Sister Soulsby had looked at him at odd times.
+
+"Oh, you want it at once--I see," she remarked softly. "Well, this
+Adelberger is the best value for the money."
+
+Mr. Ware followed her finger, and beheld with dismay that it pointed
+toward the largest instrument in the room--a veritable leviathan among
+pianos. The price of this had been mentioned as $600. He turned over the
+fact that this was two-thirds his yearly salary, and found the courage
+to shake his head.
+
+"It would be too large--much too large--for the room," he explained.
+"And, besides, it is more than I like to pay--or CAN pay, for that
+matter." It was pitiful to be explaining such details, but there was no
+help for it.
+
+They picked out a smaller one, which Celia said was at least of fair
+quality. "Now leave all the bargaining to me," she adjured him. "These
+prices that they talk about in the piano trade are all in the air. There
+are tremendous discounts, if one knows how to insist upon them. All
+you have to do is to tell them to send it to your house--you wanted it
+today, you said?"
+
+"Yes--in memory of yesterday," he murmured.
+
+She herself gave the directions, and Thurston's people, now all salesmen
+again, bowed grateful acquiescence. Then she sailed regally across the
+room and down the stairs, drawing Theron in her train. The hirelings
+made salaams to him as well; it would have been impossible to interpose
+anything so trivial and squalid as talk about terms and dates of
+payment.
+
+"I am ever so much obliged to you," he said fervently, in the
+comparative solitude of the lower floor. She had paused to look at
+something in the book-department.
+
+"Of course I was entirely at your service; don't mention it," she
+replied, reaching forth her hand in an absent way for her parasol.
+
+He held up instead the volume he had purchased. "Guess what that is! You
+never would guess in this wide world!" His manner was surcharged with a
+sense of the surreptitious.
+
+"Well, then, there's no good trying, IS there?" commented Celia, her
+glance roving again toward the shelves.
+
+"It is a life of George Sand," whispered Theron. "I've been reading it
+this morning--all the Chopin part--while I was waiting for you."
+
+To his surprise, there was an apparently displeased contraction of her
+brows as he made this revelation. For the instant, a dreadful fear of
+having offended her seized upon and sickened him. But then her face
+cleared, as by magic. She smiled, and let her eyes twinkle in laughter
+at him, and lifted a forefinger in the most winning mockery of
+admonition.
+
+"Naughty! naughty!" she murmured back, with a roguishly solemn wink.
+
+He had no response ready for this, but mutely handed her the parasol.
+The situation had suddenly grown too confused for words, or even sequent
+thoughts. Uppermost across the hurly-burly of his mind there scudded the
+singular reflection that he should never hear her play on that new piano
+of his. Even as it flashed by out of sight, he recognized it for one of
+the griefs of his life; and the darkness which followed seemed nothing
+but a revolt against the idea of having a piano at all. He would
+countermand the order. He would--but she was speaking again.
+
+They had strolled toward the door, and her voice was as placidly
+conventional as if the talk had never strayed from the subject of
+pianos. Theron with an effort pulled himself together, and laid hold of
+her words.
+
+"I suppose you will be going the other way," she was saying. "I shall
+have to be at the church all day. We have just got a new Mass over from
+Vienna, and I'm head over heels in work at it. I can have Father Forbes
+to myself today, too. That bear of a doctor has got the rheumatism, and
+can't come out of his cave, thank Heaven!"
+
+And then she was receding from view, up the sunlit, busy sidewalk, and
+Theron, standing on the doorstep, ruefully rubbed his chin. She had said
+he was going the other way, and, after a little pause, he made her words
+good, though each step he took seemed all in despite of his personal
+inclinations. Some of the passers-by bowed to him, and one or two
+paused as if to shake hands and exchange greetings. He nodded responses
+mechanically, but did not stop. It was as if he feared to interrupt the
+process of lifting his reluctant feet and propelling them forward, lest
+they should wheel and scuttle off in the opposite direction.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+Deliberate as his progress was, the diminishing number of store-fronts
+along the sidewalk, and the increasing proportion of picket-fences
+enclosing domestic lawns, forced upon Theron's attention the fact that
+he was nearing home. It was a trifle past the hour for his midday meal.
+He was not in the least hungry; still less did he feel any desire just
+now to sit about in that library living-room of his. Why should he go
+home at all? There was no reason whatever--save that Alice would be
+expecting him. Upon reflection, that hardly amounted to a reason. Wives,
+with their limited grasp of the realities of life, were always expecting
+their husbands to do things which it turned out not to be feasible for
+them to do. The customary male animal spent a considerable part of his
+life in explaining to his mate why it had been necessary to disappoint
+or upset her little plans for his comings and goings. It was in the very
+nature of things that it should be so.
+
+Sustained by these considerations, Mr. Ware slackened his steps, then
+halted irresolutely, and after a minute's hesitation, entered the small
+temperance restaurant before which, as by intuition, he had paused. The
+elderly woman who placed on the tiny table before him the tea and rolls
+he ordered, was entirely unknown to him, he felt sure, yet none the less
+she smiled at him, and spoke almost familiarly--"I suppose Mrs. Ware is
+at the seaside, and you are keeping bachelor's hall?"
+
+"Not quite that," he responded stiffly, and hurried through the meagre
+and distasteful repast, to avoid any further conversation.
+
+There was an idea underlying her remark, however, which recurred to him
+when he had paid his ten cents and got out on the street again. There
+was something interesting in the thought of Alice at the seaside.
+Neither of them had ever laid eyes on salt water, but Theron took for
+granted the most extravagant landsman's conception of its curative and
+invigorating powers. It was apparent to him that he was going to pay
+much greater attention to Alice's happiness and well-being in the future
+than he had latterly done. He had bought her, this very day, a superb
+new piano. He was going to simply insist on her having a hired girl. And
+this seaside notion--why, that was best of all.
+
+His fancy built up pleasant visions of her feasting her delighted eyes
+upon the marvel of a great ocean storm, or roaming along a beach strewn
+with wonderful marine shells, exhibiting an innocent joy in their
+beauty. The fresh sea-breeze blew through her hair, as he saw her in
+mind's eye, and brought the hardy flush of health back upon her rather
+pallid cheeks. He was prepared already hardly to know her, so robust and
+revivified would she have become, by the time he went down to the depot
+to meet her on her return.
+
+For his imagination stopped short of seeing himself at the seaside.
+It sketched instead pictures of whole weeks of solitary academic calm,
+alone with his books and his thoughts. The facts that he had no books,
+and that nobody dreamed of interfering with his thoughts, subordinated
+themselves humbly to his mood. The prospect, as he mused fondly upon
+it, expanded to embrace the priest's and the doctor's libraries; the
+thoughts which he longed to be alone with involved close communion
+with their thoughts. It could not but prove a season of immense mental
+stimulation and ethical broadening. It would have its lofty poetic and
+artistic side as well; the languorous melodies of Chopin stole over his
+revery, as he dwelt upon these things, and soft azure and golden lights
+modelled forth the exquisite outlines of tall marble forms.
+
+He opened the gate leading to Dr. Ledsmar's house. His walk had brought
+him quite out of the town, and up, by a broad main highway which
+yet took on all sorts of sylvan charms, to a commanding site on the
+hillside. Below, in the valley, lay Octavius, at one end half-hidden in
+factory smoke, at the other, where narrow bands of water gleamed upon
+the surface of a broad plain piled symmetrically with lumber, presenting
+an oddly incongruous suggestion of forest odors and the simplicity of
+the wilderness. In the middle distance, on gradually rising ground,
+stretched a wide belt of dense, artificial foliage, peeping through
+which tiled turrets and ornamented chimneys marked the polite residences
+of those who, though they neither stoked the furnace fires to the west,
+nor sawed the lumber on the east, lived in purple and fine linen from
+the profits of this toil. Nearer at hand, pastures with grazing cows on
+the one side of the road, and the nigh, weather-stained board fence
+of the race-course on the other, completed the jumble of primitive
+rusticity and urban complications characterizing the whole picture.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar's house, toward which Theron's impulses had been secretly
+leading him ever since Celia's parting remark about the rheumatism, was
+of that spacious and satisfying order of old-fashioned houses which men
+of leisure and means built for themselves while the early traditions of
+a sparse and contented homogeneous population were still strong in the
+Republic. There was a hospitable look about its wide veranda, its broad,
+low bulk, and its big, double front door, which did not fit at all with
+the sketch of a man-hating recluse that the doctor had drawn of himself.
+
+Theron had prepared his mind for the effect of being admitted by a
+Chinaman, and was taken somewhat aback when the door was opened by the
+doctor himself. His reception was pleasant enough, almost cordial, but
+the sense of awkwardness followed him into his host's inner room and
+rested heavily upon his opening speech.
+
+"I heard, quite by accident, that you were ill," he said, laying aside
+his hat.
+
+"It's nothing at all," replied Ledsmar. "Merely a stiff shoulder that I
+wear from time to time in memory of my father. It ought to be quite gone
+by nightfall. It was good of you to come, all the same. Sit down if you
+can find a chair. As usual, we are littered up to our eyes here. That's
+it--throw those things on the floor."
+
+Mr. Ware carefully deposited an armful of pamphlets on the rug at his
+feet, and sat down. Litter was indeed the word for what he saw about
+him. Bookcases, chairs, tables, the corners of the floor, were all
+buried deep under disorderly strata of papers, diagrams, and opened
+books. One could hardly walk about without treading on them. The dust
+which danced up into the bar of sunshine streaming in from the window,
+as the doctor stepped across to another chair, gave Theron new ideas
+about the value of Chinese servants.
+
+"I must thank you, first of all, doctor," he began, "for your kindness
+in coming when I was ill. 'I was sick, and ye visited me.'"
+
+"You mustn't think of it that way," said Ledsmar; "your friend came for
+me, and of course I went; and gladly too. There was nothing that I
+could do, or that anybody could do. Very interesting man, that friend
+of yours. And his wife, too--both quite out of the common. I don't know
+when I've seen two such really genuine people. I should like to have
+known more of them. Are they still here?"
+
+"They went yesterday," Theron replied. His earlier shyness had worn off,
+and he felt comfortably at his ease. "I don't know," he went on, "that
+the word 'genuine' is just what would have occurred to me to describe
+the Soulsbys. They are very interesting people, as you say--MOST
+interesting--and there was a time, I dare say, when I should have
+believed in their sincerity. But of course I saw them and their
+performance from the inside--like one on the stage of a theatre, you
+know, instead of in the audience, and--well, I understand things better
+than I used to."
+
+The doctor looked over his spectacles at him with a suggestion of
+inquiry in his glance, and Theron continued: "I had several long talks
+with her; she told me very frankly the whole story of her life--and and
+it was decidedly queer, I can assure you! I may say to you--you will
+understand what I mean--that since my talk with you, and the books you
+lent me, I see many things differently. Indeed, when I think upon it
+sometimes my old state of mind seems quite incredible to me. I can use
+no word for my new state short of illumination."
+
+Dr. Ledsmar continued to regard his guest with that calm, interrogatory
+scrutiny of his. He did not seem disposed to take up the great issue of
+illumination. "I suppose," he said after a little, "no woman can come
+in contact with a priest for any length of time WITHOUT telling him the
+'story of her life,' as you call it. They all do it. The thing amounts
+to a law."
+
+The young minister's veins responded with a pleasurable thrill to the
+use of the word "priest" in obvious allusion to himself. "Perhaps in
+fairness I ought to explain," he said, "that in her case it was only
+done in the course of a long talk about myself. I might say that it was
+by way of kindly warning to me. She saw how I had become unsettled in
+many--many of my former views--and she was nervous lest this should lead
+me to--to--"
+
+"To throw up the priesthood," the doctor interposed upon his hesitation.
+"Yes, I know the tribe. Why, my dear sir, your entire profession would
+have perished from the memory of mankind, if it hadn't been for women.
+It is a very curious subject. Lots of thinkers have dipped into it,
+but no one has gone resolutely in with a search-light and exploited the
+whole thing. Our boys, for instance, traverse in their younger years all
+the stages of the childhood of the race. They have terrifying dreams
+of awful monsters and giant animals of which they have never so much
+as heard in their waking hours; they pass through the lust for digging
+caves, building fires, sleeping out in the woods, hunting with bows
+and arrows--all remote ancestral impulses; they play games with stones,
+marbles, and so on at regular stated periods of the year which they
+instinctively know, just as they were played in the Bronze Age, and
+heaven only knows how much earlier. But the boy goes through all this,
+and leaves it behind him--so completely that the grown man feels himself
+more a stranger among boys of his own place who are thinking and doing
+precisely the things he thought and did a few years before, than he
+would among Kurds or Esquimaux. But the woman is totally different. She
+is infinitely more precocious as a girl. At an age when her slow brother
+is still stubbing along somewhere in the neolithic period, she has flown
+way ahead to a kind of mediaeval stage, or dawn of mediaevalism, which
+is peculiarly her own. Having got there, she stays there; she dies
+there. The boy passes her, as the tortoise did the hare. He goes on,
+if he is a philosopher, and lets her remain in the dark ages, where she
+belongs. If he happens to be a fool, which is customary, he stops and
+hangs around in her vicinity."
+
+Theron smiled. "We priests," he said, and paused again to enjoy the
+words--"I suppose I oughtn't to inquire too closely just where we belong
+in the procession."
+
+"We are considering the question impersonally," said the doctor. "First
+of all, what you regard as religion is especially calculated to attract
+women. They remain as superstitious today, down in the marrow of their
+bones, as they were ten thousand years ago. Even the cleverest of
+them are secretly afraid of omens, and respect auguries. Think of the
+broadest women you know. One of them will throw salt over her shoulder
+if she spills it. Another drinks money from her cup by skimming the
+bubbles in a spoon. Another forecasts her future by the arrangement of
+tea-grounds. They make the constituency to which an institution based
+on mysteries, miracles, and the supernatural generally, would naturally
+appeal. Secondly, there is the personality of the priest."
+
+"Yes," assented Ware. There rose up before him, on the instant, the
+graceful, portly figure and strong, comely face of Father Forbes.
+
+"Women are not a metaphysical people. They do not easily follow
+abstractions. They want their dogmas and religious sentiments embodied
+in a man, just as they do their romantic fancies. Of course you
+Protestants, with your married clergy, see less of the effects of this
+than celibates do, but even with you there is a great deal in it.
+Why, the very institution of celibacy itself was forced upon the early
+Christian Church by the scandal of rich Roman ladies loading bishops
+and handsome priests with fabulous gifts until the passion for currying
+favor with women of wealth, and marrying them or wheedling their
+fortunes from them, debauched the whole priesthood. You should read your
+Jerome."
+
+"I will--certainly," said the listener, resolving to remember the name
+and refer it to the old bookseller.
+
+"Well, whatever laws one sect or another makes, the woman's attitude
+toward the priest survives. She desires to see him surrounded by
+flower-pots and candles, to have him smelling of musk. She would like
+to curl his hair, and weave garlands in it. Although she is not learned
+enough to have ever heard of such things, she intuitively feels in his
+presence a sort of backwash of the old pagan sensuality and lascivious
+mysticism which enveloped the priesthood in Greek and Roman days. Ugh!
+It makes one sick!"
+
+Dr. Ledsmar rose, as he spoke, and dismissed the topic with a dry little
+laugh. "Come, let me show you round a bit," he said. "My shoulder is
+easier walking than sitting."
+
+"Have you never written a book yourself?" asked Theron, getting to his
+feet.
+
+"I have a thing on serpent-worship," the scientist replied--"written
+years ago."
+
+"I can't tell you how I should enjoy reading it," urged the other.
+
+The doctor laughed again. "You'll have to learn German, then, I 'm
+afraid. It is still in circulation in Germany, I believe, on its merits
+as a serious book. I haven't a copy of the edition in English. THAT was
+all exhausted by collectors who bought it for its supposed obscenity,
+like Burton's 'Arabian Nights.' Come this way, and I will show you my
+laboratory."
+
+They moved out of the room, and through a passage, Ledsmar talking as
+he led the way. "I took up that subject, when I was at college, by a
+curious chance. I kept a young monkey in my rooms, which had been born
+in captivity. I brought home from a beer hall--it was in Germany--some
+pretzels one night, and tossed one toward the monkey. He jumped toward
+it, then screamed and ran back shuddering with fright. I couldn't
+understand it at first. Then I saw that the curled pretzel, lying there
+on the floor, was very like a little coiled-up snake. The monkey had
+never seen a snake, but it was in his blood to be afraid of one.
+That incident changed my whole life for me. Up to that evening, I had
+intended to be a lawyer."
+
+Theron did not feel sure that he had understood the point of the
+anecdote. He looked now, without much interest, at some dark little
+tanks containing thick water, a row of small glass cases with adders and
+other lesser reptiles inside, and a general collection of boxes, jars,
+and similar receptacles connected with the doctor's pursuits. Further
+on was a smaller chamber, with a big empty furnace, and shelves bearing
+bottles and apparatus like a drugstore.
+
+It was pleasanter in the conservatory--a low, spacious structure with
+broad pathways between the plants, and an awning over the sunny side
+of the roof. The plants were mostly orchids, he learned. He had read
+of them, but never seen any before. No doubt they were curious; but he
+discovered nothing to justify the great fuss made about them. The heat
+grew oppressive inside, and he was glad to emerge into the garden. He
+paused under the grateful shade of a vine-clad trellis, took off his
+hat, and looked about him with a sigh of relief. Everything seemed
+old-fashioned and natural and delightfully free from pretence in the
+big, overgrown field of flowers and shrubs.
+
+Theron recalled with some surprise Celia's indictment of the doctor as a
+man with no poetry in his soul. "You must be extremely fond of flowers,"
+he remarked.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar shrugged his well shoulder. "They have their points," he
+said briefly. "These are all dioecious here. Over beyond are monoecious
+species. My work is to test the probabilities for or against Darwin's
+theory that hermaphroditism in plants is a late by-product of these
+earlier forms."
+
+"And is his theory right?" asked Mr. Ware, with a polite show of
+interest.
+
+"We may know in the course of three or four hundred years," replied
+Ledsmar. He looked up into his guest's face with a quizzical half-smile.
+"That is a very brief period for observation when such a complicated
+question as sex is involved," he added. "We have been studying the
+female of our own species for some hundreds of thousands of years, and
+we haven't arrived at the most elementary rules governing her actions."
+
+They had moved along to a bed of tall plants, the more forward of which
+were beginning to show bloom. "Here another task will begin next month,"
+the doctor observed. "These are salvias, pentstemons, and antirrhinums,
+or snapdragons, planted very thick for the purpose. Humble-bees bore
+holes through their base, to save the labor of climbing in and out of
+the flowers, and we don't quite know yet why some hive-bees discover and
+utilize these holes at once, while others never do. It may be merely the
+old-fogy conservatism of the individual, or there may be a law in it."
+
+These seemed very paltry things for a man of such wisdom to bother
+his head about. Theron looked, as he was bidden, at the rows of hives
+shining in the hot sun on a bench along the wall, but offered no comment
+beyond a casual, "My mother was always going to keep bees, but somehow
+she never got around to it. They say it pays very well, though."
+
+"The discovery of the reason why no bee will touch the nectar of the
+EPIPACTIS LATIFOLIA, though it is sweet to our taste, and wasps are
+greedy for it, WOULD pay," commented the doctor. "Not like a blue
+rhododendron, in mere money, but in recognition. Lots of men have
+achieved a half-column in the 'Encyclopedia Britannica' on a smaller
+basis than that."
+
+They stood now at the end of the garden, before a small, dilapidated
+summer-house. On the bench inside, facing him, Theron saw a strange
+recumbent figure stretched at full length, apparently sound asleep, or
+it might be dead. Looking closer, with a startled surprise, he made out
+the shaven skull and outlandish garb of a Chinaman. He turned toward his
+guide in the expectation of a scene.
+
+The doctor had already taken out a note-book and pencil, and was drawing
+his watch from his pocket. He stepped into the summer-house, and,
+lifting the Oriental's limp arm, took account of his pulse. Then, with
+head bowed low, side-wise, he listened for the heart-action. Finally, he
+somewhat brusquely pushed back one of the Chinaman's eyelids, and made
+a minute inspection of what the operation disclosed. Returning to the
+light, he inscribed some notes in his book, put it back in his pocket,
+and came out. In answer to Theron's marvelling stare, he pointed toward
+a pipe of odd construction lying on the floor beneath the sleeper.
+
+"This is one of my regular afternoon duties," he explained, again with
+the whimsical half-smile. "I am increasing his dose monthly by regular
+stages, and the results promise to be rather remarkable. Heretofore,
+observations have been made mostly on diseased or morbidly deteriorated
+subjects. This fellow of mine is strong as an ox, perfectly nourished,
+and watched over intelligently. He can assimilate opium enough to kill
+you and me and every other vertebrate creature on the premises, without
+turning a hair, and he hasn't got even fairly under way yet."
+
+The thing was unpleasant, and the young minister turned away. They
+walked together up the path toward the house. His mind was full now of
+the hostile things which Celia had said about the doctor. He had vaguely
+sympathized with her then, upon no special knowledge of his own. Now he
+felt that his sentiments were vehemently in accord with hers. The doctor
+WAS a beast.
+
+And yet--as they moved slowly along through the garden the thought took
+sudden shape in his mind--it would be only justice for him to get also
+the doctor's opinion of Celia. Even while they offended and repelled
+him, he could not close his eyes to the fact that the doctor's
+experiments and occupations were those of a patient and exact man of
+science--a philosopher. And what he had said about women--there was
+certainly a great deal of acumen and shrewd observation in that. If
+he would only say what he really thought about Celia, and about her
+relations with the priest! Yes, Theron recognized now there was nothing
+else that he so much needed light upon as those puzzling ties between
+Celia and Father Forbes.
+
+He paused, with a simulated curiosity, about one of the flower-beds.
+"Speaking of women and religion"--he began, in as casual a tone as he
+could command--"I notice curiously enough in my own case, that as I
+develop in what you may call the--the other direction, my wife, who
+formerly was not especially devote, is being strongly attracted by the
+most unthinking and hysterical side of--of our church system."
+
+The doctor looked at him, nodded, and stooped to nip some buds from a
+stalk in the bed.
+
+"And another case," Theron went on--"of course it was all so new and
+strange to me--but the position which Miss Madden seems to occupy about
+the Catholic Church here--I suppose you had her in mind when you spoke."
+
+Ledsmar stood up. "My mind has better things to busy itself with than
+mad asses of that description," he replied. "She is not worth talking
+about--a mere bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed lewdness. If
+she were even a type, she might be worth considering; but she is simply
+an abnormal sport, with a little brain addled by notions that she is
+like Hypatia, and a large impudence rendered intolerable by the fact
+that she has money. Her father is a decent man. He ought to have her
+whipped."
+
+Mr. Ware drew himself erect, as he listened to these outrageous words.
+It would be unmanly, he felt, to allow such comments upon an absent
+friend to pass unrebuked. Yet there was the courtesy due to a host to
+be considered. His mind, fluttering between these two extremes,
+alighted abruptly upon a compromise. He would speak so as to show his
+disapproval, yet not so as to prevent his finding out what he wanted to
+know. The desire to hear Ledsmar talk about Celia and the priest
+seemed now to have possessed him for a long time, to have dictated his
+unpremeditated visit out here, to have been growing in intensity all the
+while he pretended to be interested in orchids and bees and the drugged
+Chinaman. It tugged passionately at his self-control as he spoke.
+
+"I cannot in the least assent to your characterization of the lady," he
+began with rhetorical dignity.
+
+"Bless me!" interposed the doctor, with deceptive cheerfulness, "that is
+not required of you at all. It is a strictly personal opinion, offered
+merely as a contribution to the general sum of hypotheses."
+
+"But," Theron went on, feeling his way, "of course, I gathered that
+evening that you had prejudices in the matter; but these are rather
+apart from the point I had in view. We were speaking, you will remember,
+of the traditional attitude of women toward priests--wanting to curl
+their hair and put flowers in it, you know, and that suggested to me
+some individual illustrations, and it occurred to me to wonder just what
+were the relations between Miss Madden and--and Father Forbes. She
+said this morning, for instance--I happened to meet her, quite by
+accident--that she was going to the church to practise a new piece, and
+that she could have Father Forbes to herself all day. Now that would
+be quite an impossible remark in our--that is, in any Protestant
+circles--and purely as a matter of comparison, I was curious to ask you
+just how much there was in it. I ask you, because going there so much
+you have had exceptional opportunities for--"
+
+A sharp exclamation from his companion interrupted the clergyman's
+hesitating monologue. It began like a high-pitched, violent word, but
+dwindled suddenly into a groan of pain. The doctor's face, too, which
+had on the flash of Theron's turning seemed given over to unmixed anger,
+took on an expression of bodily suffering instead.
+
+"My shoulder has grown all at once excessively painful," he said
+hastily. "I'm afraid I must ask you to excuse me, Mr. Ware."
+
+Carrying the afflicted side with ostentatious caution, he led the way
+without ado round the house to the front gate on the road. He had put
+his left hand under his coat to press it against his aching shoulder,
+and his right hung palpably helpless. This rendered it impossible for
+him to shake hands with his guest in parting.
+
+"You're sure there's nothing I can do," said Theron, lingering on the
+outer side of the gate. "I used to rub my father's shoulders and back;
+I'd gladly--"
+
+"Oh, not for worlds!" groaned the doctor. His anguish was so impressive
+that Theron, as he walked down the road, quite missed the fact that
+there had been no invitation to come again.
+
+Dr. Ledsmar stood for a minute or two, his gaze meditatively following
+the retreating figure. Then he went in, opening the front door with
+his right hand, and carrying himself once more as if there were no such
+thing as rheumatism in the world. He wandered on through the hall into
+the laboratory, and stopped in front of the row of little tanks full of
+water.
+
+Some deliberation was involved in whatever his purpose might be, for he
+looked from one tank to another with a pondering, dilatory gaze. At last
+he plunged his hand into the opaque fluid and drew forth a long, slim,
+yellowish-green lizard, with a coiling, sinuous tail and a pointed, evil
+head. The reptile squirmed and doubled itself backward around his wrist,
+darting out and in with dizzy swiftness its tiny forked tongue.
+
+The doctor held the thing up to the light, and, scrutinizing it through
+his spectacles, nodded his head in sedate approval. A grim smile curled
+in his beard.
+
+"Yes, you are the type," he murmured to it, with evident enjoyment in
+the conceit. "Your name isn't Johnny any more. It's the Rev. Theron
+Ware."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+The annual camp-meeting of the combined Methodist districts of Octavius
+and Thessaly was held this year in the second half of September, a
+little later than usual. Of the nine days devoted to this curious
+survival of primitive Wesleyanism, the fifth fell upon a Saturday. On
+the noon of that day the Rev. Theron Ware escaped for some hours from
+the burden of work and incessant observation which he shared with twenty
+other preachers, and walked alone in the woods.
+
+The scene upon which he turned his back was one worth looking at. A
+spacious, irregularly defined clearing in the forest lay level as a
+tennis-court, under the soft haze of autumn sunlight. In the centre was
+a large, roughly constructed frame building, untouched by paint, but
+stained and weather-beaten with time. Behind it were some lines of
+horse-sheds, and still further on in that direction, where the trees
+began, the eye caught fragmentary glimpses of low roofs and the fronts
+of tiny cottages, withdrawn from full view among the saplings and
+underbrush. At the other side of the clearing, fully fourscore tents
+were pitched, some gray and mended, others dazzlingly white in their
+newness. The more remote of these tents fell into an orderly arrangement
+of semi-circular form, facing that part of the engirdling woods where
+the trees were largest, and their canopy of overhanging foliage was
+lifted highest from the ground. Inside this half-ring of tents were many
+rounded rows of benches, which followed in narrowing lines the idea of
+an amphitheatre cut in two. In the centre, just under the edge of the
+roof of boughs, rose a wooden pagoda, in form not unlike an open-air
+stand for musicians. In front of this, and leading from it on the level
+of its floor, there projected a platform, railed round with aggressively
+rustic woodwork. The nearest benches came close about this platform.
+
+At the hour when Theron started away, there were few enough signs of
+life about this encampment. The four or five hundred people who were in
+constant residence were eating their dinners in the big boarding-house,
+or the cottages or the tents. It was not the time of day for strangers.
+Even when services were in progress by daylight, the regular attendants
+did not make much of a show, huddled in a gray-black mass at the front
+of the auditorium, by comparison with the great green and blue expanses
+of nature about them.
+
+The real spectacle was in the evening when, as the shadows gathered, big
+clusters of kerosene torches, hung on the trees facing the audience were
+lighted. The falling darkness magnified the glow of the lights, and
+the size and importance of what they illumined. The preacher, bending
+forward over the rails of the platform, and fastening his eyes upon the
+abashed faces of those on the "anxious seat" beneath him, borrowed an
+effect of druidical mystery from the wall of blackness about him, from
+the flickering reflections on the branches far above, from the cool
+night air which stirred across the clearing. The change was in the blood
+of those who saw and heard him, too. The decorum and half-heartedness
+of their devotions by day deepened under the glare of the torches into a
+fervent enthusiasm, even before the services began. And if there was in
+the rustic pulpit a man whose prayers or exhortations could stir their
+pulses, they sang and groaned and bellowed out their praises with an
+almost barbarous license, such as befitted the wilderness.
+
+But in the evening not all were worshippers. For a dozen miles round
+on the country-side, young farm-workers and their girls regarded the
+camp-meeting as perhaps the chief event of the year--no more to be
+missed than the country fair or the circus, and offering, from many
+points of view, more opportunities for genuine enjoyment than either.
+Their behavior when they came was pretty bad--not the less so because
+all the rules established by the Presiding Elders for the regulation of
+strangers took it for granted that they would act as viciously as
+they knew how. These sight-seers sometimes ventured to occupy the back
+benches where the light was dim. More often they stood outside, in the
+circular space between the tents and the benches, and mingled cat-calls,
+drovers' yelps, and all sorts of mocking cries and noises with the
+"Amens" of the earnest congregation. Their rough horse-play on the
+fringe of the sanctified gathering was grievous enough; everybody knew
+that much worse things went on further out in the surrounding darkness.
+Indeed, popular report gave to these external phases of the
+camp-meeting an even more evil fame than attached to the later moonlight
+husking-bees, or the least reputable of the midwinter dances at Dave
+Randall's low halfway house.
+
+Cynics said that the Methodists found consolation for this scandal in
+the large income they derived from their unruly visitors' gate-money.
+This was unfair. No doubt the money played its part, but there was
+something else far more important. The pious dwellers in the camp,
+intent upon reviving in their poor modern way the character and
+environment of the heroic early days, felt the need of just this hostile
+and scoffing mob about them to bring out the spirit they sought. Theirs
+was pre-eminently a fighting religion, which languished in peaceful
+fair weather, but flamed high in the storm. The throng of loafers and
+light-minded worldlings of both sexes, with their jeering interruptions
+and lewd levity of conduct, brought upon the scene a kind of visible
+personal devil, with whom the chosen could do battle face to face. The
+daylight services became more and more perfunctory, as the sojourn in
+the woods ran its course, and interest concentrated itself upon the
+night meetings, for the reason that THEN came the fierce wrestle with
+a Beelzebub of flesh and blood. And it was not so one-sided a contest,
+either!
+
+No evening passed without its victories for the pulpit. Careless or
+mischievous young people who were pushed into the foremost ranks of the
+mockers, and stood grinning and grimacing under the lights, would of
+a sudden feel a spell clamped upon them. They would hear a strange,
+quavering note in the preacher's voice, catch the sense of a piercing,
+soul-commanding gleam in his eye--not at all to be resisted. These
+occult forces would take control of them, drag them forward as in a
+dream to the benches under the pulpit, and abase them there like
+worms in the dust. And then the preacher would descend, and the elders
+advance, and the torch-fires would sway and dip before the wind of the
+mighty roar that went up in triumph from the brethren.
+
+These combats with Satan at close quarters, if they made the week-day
+evenings exciting, reacted with an effect of crushing dulness upon the
+Sunday services. The rule was to admit no strangers to the grounds
+from Saturday night to Monday morning. Every year attempts were made to
+rescind or modify this rule, and this season at least three-fourths of
+the laymen in attendance had signed a petition in favor of opening
+the gates. The two Presiding Elders, supported by a dozen of the older
+preachers, resisted the change, and they had the backing of the more
+bigoted section of the congregation from Octavius. The controversy
+reached a point where Theron's Presiding Elder threatened to quit the
+grounds, and the leaders of the open-Sunday movement spoke freely of the
+ridiculous figure which its cranks and fanatics made poor Methodism cut
+in the eyes of modern go-ahead American civilization. Then Theron Ware
+saw his opportunity, and preached an impromptu sermon upon the sanctity
+of the Sabbath, which ended all discussion. Sometimes its arguments
+seemed to be on one side, sometimes on the other, but always they were
+clothed with so serene a beauty of imagery, and moved in such a lofty
+and rarefied atmosphere of spiritual exaltation, that it was impossible
+to link them to so sordid a thing as this question of gate-money. When
+he had finished, nobody wanted the gates opened. The two factions found
+that the difference between them had melted out of existence. They sat
+entranced by the charm of the sermon; then, glancing around at the empty
+benches, glaringly numerous in the afternoon sunlight, they whispered
+regrets that ten thousand people had not been there to hear that
+marvellous discourse. Theron's conquest was of exceptional dimensions.
+The majority, whose project he had defeated, were strangers who
+appreciated and admired his effort most. The little minority of his own
+flock, though less susceptible to the influence of graceful diction
+and delicately balanced rhetoric, were proud of the distinction he had
+reflected upon them, and delighted with him for having won their
+fight. The Presiding Elders wrung his hand with a significant grip. The
+extremists of his own charge beamed friendship upon him for the first
+time. He was the veritable hero of the week.
+
+The prestige of this achievement made it the easier for Theron to get
+away by himself next day, and walk in the woods. A man of such power
+had a right to solitude. Those who noted his departure from the camp
+remembered with pleasure that he was to preach again on the morrow.
+He was going to commune with God in the depths of the forest, that the
+Message next day might be clearer and more luminous still.
+
+Theron strolled for a little, with an air of aimlessness, until he was
+well outside the more or less frequented neighborhood of the camp.
+Then he looked at the sun and the lay of the land with that informing
+scrutiny of which the farm-bred boy never loses the trick, turned, and
+strode at a rattling pace down the hillside. He knew nothing personally
+of this piece of woodland--a spur of the great Adirondack wilderness
+thrust southward into the region of homesteads and dairies and
+hop-fields--but he had prepared himself by a study of the map, and
+he knew where he wanted to go. Very Soon he hit upon the path he had
+counted upon finding, and at this he quickened his gait.
+
+Three months of the new life had wrought changes in Theron. He bore
+himself more erectly, for one thing; his shoulders were thrown back, and
+seemed thicker. The alteration was even more obvious in his face. The
+effect of lank, wistful, sallow juvenility had vanished. It was the
+countenance of a mature, well-fed, and confident man, firmer and more
+rounded in its outlines, and with a glow of health on its whole surface.
+Under the chin were the suggestions of fulness which bespeak an easy
+mind. His clothes were new; the frock-coat fitted him, and the thin,
+dark-colored autumn overcoat, with its silk lining exposed at the
+breast, gave a masculine bulk and shape to his figure. He wore a shining
+tall hat, and, in haste though he was, took pains not to knock it
+against low-hanging branches.
+
+All had gone well--more than well--with him. The second Quarterly
+Conference had passed without a ripple. Both the attendance and the
+collections at his church were larger than ever before, and the tone of
+the congregation toward him was altered distinctly for the better. As
+for himself, he viewed with astonished delight the progress he had made
+in his own estimation. He had taken Sister Soulsby's advice, and the
+results were already wonderful. He had put aside, once and for all, the
+thousand foolish trifles and childish perplexities which formerly had
+racked his brain, and worried him out of sleep and strength. He borrowed
+all sorts of books boldly now from the Octavius public library, and
+could swim with a calm mastery and enjoyment upon the deep waters into
+which Draper and Lecky and Laing and the rest had hurled him. He dallied
+pleasurably, a little languorously, with a dozen aspects of the case
+against revealed religion, ranging from the mild heterodoxy of Andover's
+qualms to the rude Ingersoll's rollicking negation of God himself, as a
+woman of coquetry might play with as many would-be lovers. They amused
+him; they were all before him to choose; and he was free to postpone
+indefinitely the act of selection. There was a sense of the luxurious in
+this position which softened bodily as well as mental fibres. He ceased
+to grow indignant at things below or outside his standards, and he
+bought a small book which treated of the care of the hand and finger
+nails.
+
+Alice had accepted with deference his explanation that shapely hands
+played so important a part in pulpit oratory. For that matter, she now
+accepted whatever he said or did with admirable docility. It was months
+since he could remember her venturing upon a critical attitude toward
+him.
+
+She had not wished to leave home, for the seaside or any other resort,
+during the summer, but had worked outside in her garden more than usual.
+This was inexpensive, and it seemed to do her as much good as a holiday
+could have done. Her new devotional zeal was now quite an odd thing; it
+had not slackened at all from the revival pitch. At the outset she had
+tried several times to talk with her husband upon this subject. He
+had discouraged conversation about her soul and its welfare, at first
+obliquely, then, under compulsion, with some directness. His thoughts
+were absorbed, he said, by the contemplation of vast, abstract schemes
+of creation and the government of the universe, and it only diverted and
+embarrassed his mind to try to fasten it upon the details of personal
+salvation. Thereafter the topic was not broached between them.
+
+She bestowed a good deal of attention, too, upon her piano. The knack of
+a girlish nimbleness of touch had returned to her after a few weeks, and
+she made music which Theron supposed was very good--for her. It pleased
+him, at all events, when he sat and listened to it; but he had a far
+greater pleasure, as he listened, in dwelling upon the memories of the
+yellow and blue room which the sounds always brought up. Although three
+months had passed, Thurston's had never asked for the first payment
+on the piano, or even sent in a bill. This impressed him as being
+peculiarly graceful behavior on his part, and he recognized its delicacy
+by not going near Thurston's at all.
+
+An hour's sharp walk, occasionally broken by short cuts across open
+pastures, but for the most part on forest paths, brought Theron to the
+brow of a small knoll, free from underbrush, and covered sparsely with
+beech-trees. The ground was soft with moss and the powdered remains of
+last year's foliage; the leaves above him were showing the first yellow
+stains of autumn. A sweet smell of ripening nuts was thick upon the
+air, and busy rustlings and chirpings through the stillness told how the
+chipmunks and squirrels were attending to their harvest.
+
+Theron had no ears for these noises of the woodland. He had halted, and
+was searching through the little vistas offered between the stout gray
+trunks of the beeches for some sign of a more sophisticated sort. Yes!
+there were certainly voices to be heard, down in the hollow. And
+now, beyond all possibility of mistake, there came up to him the low,
+rhythmic throb of music. It was the merest faint murmur of music, made
+up almost wholly of groaning bass notes, but it was enough. He moved
+down the slope, swiftly at first, then with increasing caution. The
+sounds grew louder as he advanced, until he could hear the harmony of
+the other strings in its place beside the uproar of the big fiddles, and
+distinguish from both the measured noise of many feet moving as one.
+
+He reached a place from which, himself unobserved, he could overlook
+much of what he had come to see.
+
+The bottom of the glade below him lay out in the full sunshine, as flat
+and as velvety in its fresh greenness as a garden lawn. Its open expanse
+was big enough to accommodate several distinct crowds, and here the
+crowds were--one massed about an enclosure in which young men were
+playing at football, another gathered further off in a horse-shoe curve
+at the end of a baseball diamond, and a third thronging at a point where
+the shade of overhanging woods began, focussed upon a centre of interest
+which Theron could not make out. Closer at hand, where a shallow stream
+rippled along over its black-slate bed, some little boys, with legs
+bared to the thighs, were paddling about, under the charge of two men
+clad in long black gowns. There were others of these frocked monitors
+scattered here and there upon the scene--pallid, close-shaven, monkish
+figures, who none the less wore modern hats, and superintended with
+knowledge the games of the period. Theron remembered that these were the
+Christian Brothers, the semi-monastic teachers of the Catholic school.
+
+And this was the picnic of the Catholics of Octavius. He gazed in
+mingled amazement and exhilaration upon the spectacle. There seemed
+to be literally thousands of people on the open fields before him, and
+apparently there were still other thousands in the fringes of the woods
+round about. The noises which arose from this multitude--the shouts of
+the lads in the water, the playful squeals of the girls in the swings,
+the fused uproar of the more distant crowds, and above all the diligent,
+ordered strains of the dance-music proceeding from some invisible
+distance in the greenwood--charmed his ears with their suggestion of
+universal merriment. He drew a long breath--half pleasure, half wistful
+regret--as he remembered that other gathering in the forest which he had
+left behind.
+
+At any rate, it should be well behind him today, whatever the morrow
+might bring! Evidently he was on the wrong side of the circle for the
+headquarters of the festivities. He turned and walked to the right
+through the beeches, making a detour, under cover, of the crowds at
+play. At last he rounded the long oval of the clearing, and found
+himself at the very edge of that largest throng of all, which had been
+too far away for comprehension at the beginning. There was no mystery
+now. A rough, narrow shed, fully fifty feet in length, imposed itself
+in an arbitrary line across the face of this crowd, dividing it into two
+compact halves. Inside this shed, protected all round by a waist-high
+barrier of boards, on top of which ran a flat, table-like covering, were
+twenty men in their shirt-sleeves, toiling ceaselessly to keep abreast
+of the crowd's thirst for beer. The actions of these bartenders greatly
+impressed Theron. They moved like so many machines, using one
+hand, apparently, to take money and give change, and with the other
+incessantly sweeping off rows of empty glasses, and tossing forward in
+their place fresh, foaming glasses five at a time. Hundreds of arms and
+hands were continually stretched out, on both sides of the shed, toward
+this streaming bar, and through the babel of eager cries rose without
+pause the racket of mallets tapping new kegs.
+
+Theron had never seen any considerable number of his fellow-citizens
+engaged in drinking lager beer before. His surprise at the facility of
+those behind the bar began to yield, upon observation, to a profound
+amazement at the thirst of those before it. The same people seemed to
+be always in front, emptying the glasses faster than the busy men inside
+could replenish them, and clamoring tirelessly for more. Newcomers had
+to force their way to the bar by violent efforts, and once there they
+stayed until pushed bodily aside. There were actually women to be seen
+here and there in the throng, elbowing and shoving like the rest for a
+place at the front. Some of the more gallant young men fought their
+way outward, from time to time, carrying for safety above their heads
+glasses of beer which they gave to young and pretty girls standing on
+the fringe of the crowd, among the trees.
+
+Everywhere a remarkable good-humor prevailed. Once a sharp fight broke
+out, just at the end of the bar nearest Theron, and one young man was
+knocked down. A rush of the onlookers confused everything before the
+minister's eyes for a minute, and then he saw the aggrieved combatant up
+on his legs again, consenting under the kindly pressure of the crowd to
+shake hands with his antagonist, and join him in more beer. The incident
+caught his fancy. There was something very pleasingly human, he thought,
+in this primitive readiness to resort to fisticuffs, and this frank and
+genial reconciliation.
+
+Perhaps there was something contagious in this wholesale display of
+thirst, for the Rev. Mr. Ware became conscious of a notion that he
+should like to try a glass of beer. He recalled having heard that
+lager was really a most harmless beverage. Of course it was out of the
+question that he should show himself at the bar. Perhaps some one would
+bring him out a glass, as if he were a pretty girl. He looked about for
+a possible messenger. Turning, he found himself face to face with two
+smiling people, into whose eyes he stared for an instant in dumfounded
+blankness. Then his countenance flashed with joy, and he held out both
+hands in greeting. It was Father Forbes and Celia.
+
+"We stole down upon you unawares," said the priest, in his cheeriest
+manner. He wore a brown straw hat, and loose clothes hardly at all
+clerical in form, and had Miss Madden's arm drawn lightly within his
+own. "We could barely believe our eyes--that it could be you whom we
+saw, here among the sinners!"
+
+"I am in love with your sinners," responded Theron, as he shook hands
+with Celia, and trusted himself to look fully into her eyes. "I've had
+five days of the saints, over in another part of the woods, and they've
+bored the head off me."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+At the command of Father Forbes, a lad who was loitering near them went
+down through the throng to the bar, and returned with three glasses of
+beer. It pleased the Rev. Mr. Ware that the priest should have taken
+it for granted that he would do as the others did. He knocked his glass
+against theirs in compliance with a custom strange to him, but which
+they seemed to understand very well. The beer itself was not so
+agreeable to the taste as he had expected, but it was cold and
+refreshing.
+
+When the boy had returned with the glasses, the three stood for a moment
+in silence, meditatively watching the curious scene spread below them.
+Beyond the bar, Theron could catch now through the trees regularly
+recurring glimpses of four or five swings in motion. These were nearest
+him, and clearest to the vision as well, at the instant when they
+reached their highest forward point. The seats were filled with girls,
+some of them quite grown young women, and their curving upward sweep
+through the air was disclosing at its climax a remarkable profusion of
+white skirts and black stockings. The sight struck him as indecorous in
+the extreme, and he turned his eyes away. They met Celia's; and there
+was something latent in their brown depths which prompted him, after a
+brief dalliance of interchanging glances, to look again at the swings.
+
+"That old maid Curran is really too ridiculous, with those white
+stockings of hers," remarked Celia; "some friend ought to tell her to
+dye them."
+
+"Or pad them," suggested Father Forbes, with a gay little chuckle. "I
+daresay the question of swings and ladies' stockings hardly arises with
+you, over at the camp-meeting, Mr. Ware?"
+
+Theron laughed aloud at the conceit. "I should say not!" he replied.
+
+"I'm just dying to see a camp-meeting!" said Celia. "You hear such racy
+accounts of what goes on at them."
+
+"Don't go, I beg of you!" urged Theron, with doleful emphasis. "Don't
+let's even talk about them. I should like to feel this afternoon as if
+there was no such thing within a thousand miles of me as a camp-meeting.
+Do you know, all this interests me enormously. It is a revelation to me
+to see these thousands of good, decent, ordinary people, just frankly
+enjoying themselves like human beings. I suppose that in this whole huge
+crowd there isn't a single person who will mention the subject of his
+soul to any other person all day long."
+
+"I should think the assumption was a safe one," said the priest,
+smilingly, "unless," he added on afterthought, "it be by way of a genial
+profanity. There used to be some old Clare men who said 'Hell to my
+soul!' when they missed at quoits, but I haven't heard it for a long
+time. I daresay they're all dead."
+
+"I shall never forget that death-bed--where I saw you first," remarked
+Theron, musingly. "I date from that experience a whole new life. I have
+been greatly struck lately, in reading our 'Northern Christian Advocate'
+to see in the obituary notices of prominent Methodists how over and over
+again it is recorded that they got religion in their youth through being
+frightened by some illness of their own, or some epidemic about them.
+The cholera year of 1832 seems to have made Methodists hand over
+fist. Even to this day our most successful revivalists, those who work
+conversions wholesale wherever they go, do it more by frightful pictures
+of hell-fire surrounding the sinner's death-bed than anything else.
+You could hear the same thing at our camp-meeting tonight, if you were
+there."
+
+"There isn't so much difference as you think," said Father Forbes,
+dispassionately. "Your people keep examining their souls, just as
+children keep pulling up the bulbs they have planted to see are there
+any roots yet. Our people are more satisfied to leave their souls alone,
+once they have been planted, so to speak, by baptism. But fear of hell
+governs them both, pretty much alike. As I remember saying to you once
+before, there is really nothing new under the sun. Even the saying isn't
+new. Though there seem to have been the most tremendous changes in
+races and civilizations and religions, stretching over many thousands
+of years, yet nothing is in fact altered very much. Where religions are
+concerned, the human race are still very like savages in a dangerous
+wood in the dark, telling one another ghost stories around a camp-fire.
+They have always been like that."
+
+"What nonsense!" cried Celia. "I have no patience with such gloomy
+rubbish. The Greeks had a religion full of beauty and happiness and
+light-heartedness, and they weren't frightened of death at all. They
+made the image of death a beautiful boy, with a torch turned down. Their
+greatest philosophers openly preached and practised the doctrine of
+suicide when one was tired of life. Our own early Church was full of
+these broad and beautiful Greek ideas. You know that yourself! And it
+was only when your miserable Jeromes and Augustines and Cyrils brought
+in the abominable meannesses and cruelties of the Jewish Old Testament,
+and stamped out the sane and lovely Greek elements in the Church,
+that Christians became the poor, whining, cowardly egotists they are,
+troubling about their little tin-pot souls, and scaring themselves in
+their churches by skulls and crossbones."
+
+"My dear Celia," interposed the priest, patting her shoulder gently, "we
+will have no Greek debate today. Mr. Ware has been permitted to taboo
+camp-meetings, and I claim the privilege to cry off on Greeks. Look at
+those fellows down there, trampling over one another to get more beer.
+What have they to do with Athens, or Athens with them? I take it, Mr.
+Ware," he went on, with a grave face but a twinkling eye, "that what we
+are observing here in front of us is symbolical of a great ethical
+and theological revolution, which in time will modify and control the
+destiny of the entire American people. You see those young Irishmen
+there, struggling like pigs at a trough to get their fill of German
+beer. That signifies a conquest of Teuton over Kelt more important and
+far-reaching in its results than the landing of Hengist and Horsa.
+The Kelt has come to grief heretofore--or at least been forced to play
+second fiddle to other races--because he lacked the right sort of a
+drink. He has in his blood an excess of impulsive, imaginative, even
+fantastic qualities. It is much easier for him to make a fool of
+himself, to begin with, than it is for people of slower wits and more
+sluggish temperaments. When you add whiskey to that, or that essence of
+melancholia which in Ireland they call 'porther,' you get the Kelt at
+his very weakest and worst. These young men down there are changing all
+that. They have discovered lager. Already many of them can outdrink
+the Germans at their own beverage. The lager-drinking Irishman in a few
+generations will be a new type of humanity--the Kelt at his best. He
+will dominate America. He will be THE American. And his church--with
+the Italian element thrown clean out of it, and its Pope living, say, in
+Baltimore or Georgetown--will be the Church of America."
+
+"Let us have some more lager at once," put in Celia. "This revolution
+can't be hurried forward too rapidly."
+
+Theron could not feel sure how much of the priest's discourse was in
+jest, how much in earnest. "It seems to me," he said, "that as things
+are going, it doesn't look much as if the America of the future will
+trouble itself about any kind of a church. The march of science must
+very soon produce a universal scepticism. It is in the nature of human
+progress. What all intelligent men recognize today, the masses must
+surely come to see in time."
+
+Father Forbes laughed outright this time. "My dear Mr. Ware," he said,
+as they touched glasses again, and sipped the fresh beer that had been
+brought them, "of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless
+and empty as this idea that humanity progresses. The savage's natural
+impression is that the world he sees about him was made for him, and
+that the rest of the universe is subordinated to him and his world, and
+that all the spirits and demons and gods occupy themselves exclusively
+with him and his affairs. That idea was the basis of every pagan
+religion, and it is the basis of the Christian religion, simply because
+it is the foundation of human nature. That foundation is just as firm
+and unshaken today as it was in the Stone Age. It will always
+remain, and upon it will always be built some kind of a religious
+superstructure. 'Intelligent men,' as you call them, really have very
+little influence, even when they all pull one way. The people as a whole
+soon get tired of them. They give too much trouble. The most powerful
+forces in human nature are self-protection and inertia. The middle-aged
+man has found out that the chief wisdom in life is to bend to the
+pressures about him, to shut up and do as others do. Even when he thinks
+he has rid his own mind of superstitions, he sees that he will best
+enjoy a peaceful life by leaving other peoples' superstitions alone.
+That is always the ultimate view of the crowd."
+
+"But I don't see," observed Theron, "granting that all this is true, how
+you think the Catholic Church will come out on top. I could understand
+it of Unitarianism, or Universalism, or the Episcopal Church, where
+nobody seems to have to believe particularly in anything except the
+beauty of its burial service, but I should think the very rigidity of
+the Catholic creed would make it impossible. There everything is hard
+and fast; nothing is elastic; there is no room for compromise."
+
+"The Church is always compromising," explained the priest, "only it does
+it so slowly that no one man lives long enough to quite catch it at the
+trick. No; the great secret of the Catholic Church is that it doesn't
+debate with sceptics. No matter what points you make against it, it
+is never betrayed into answering back. It simply says these things are
+sacred mysteries, which you are quite free to accept and be saved, or
+reject and be damned. There is something intelligible and fine about
+an attitude like that. When people have grown tired of their absurd and
+fruitless wrangling over texts and creeds which, humanly speaking, are
+all barbaric nonsense, they will come back to repose pleasantly under
+the Catholic roof, in that restful house where things are taken for
+granted. There the manners are charming, the service excellent, the
+decoration and upholstery most acceptable to the eye, and the music"--he
+made a little mock bow here to Celia--"the music at least is divine.
+There you have nothing to do but be agreeable, and avoid scandal, and
+observe the convenances. You are no more expected to express doubts
+about the Immaculate Conception than you are to ask the lady whom you
+take down to dinner how old she is. Now that is, as I have said,
+an intelligent and rational church for people to have. As the Irish
+civilize themselves--you observe them diligently engaged in the process
+down below there--and the social roughness of their church becomes
+softened and ameliorated, Americans will inevitably be attracted toward
+it. In the end, it will embrace them all, and be modified by them, and
+in turn influence their development, till you will have a new nation and
+a new national church, each representative of the other."
+
+"And all this is to be done by lager beer!" Theron ventured to comment,
+jokingly. He was conscious of a novel perspiration around the bridge of
+his nose, which was obviously another effect of the drink.
+
+The priest passed the pleasantry by. "No," he said seriously; "what you
+must see is that there must always be a church. If one did not exist, it
+would be necessary to invent it. It is needed, first and foremost, as a
+police force. It is needed, secondly, so to speak, as a fire insurance.
+It provides the most even temperature and pure atmosphere for the growth
+of young children. It furnishes the best obtainable social machinery for
+marrying off one's daughters, getting to know the right people, patching
+up quarrels, and so on. The priesthood earn their salaries as the agents
+for these valuable social arrangements. Their theology is thrown in as
+a sort of intellectual diversion, like the ritual of a benevolent
+organization. There are some who get excited about this part of it, just
+as one hears of Free-Masons who believe that the sun rises and sets to
+exemplify their ceremonies. Others take their duties more quietly, and,
+understanding just what it all amounts to, make the best of it, like you
+and me."
+
+Theron assented to the philosophy and the compliment by a grave bow.
+"Yes, that is the idea--to make the best of it," he said, and fastened
+his regard boldly this time upon the swings.
+
+"We were both ordained by our bishops," continued the priest, "at an
+age when those worthy old gentlemen would not have trusted our combined
+wisdom to buy a horse for them."
+
+"And I was married," broke in Theron, with an eagerness almost vehement,
+"when I had only just been ordained! At the worst, YOU had only the
+Church fastened upon your back, before you were old enough to know
+what you wanted. It is easy enough to make the best of THAT, but it is
+different with me."
+
+A marked silence followed this outburst. The Rev. Mr. Ware had never
+spoken of his marriage to either of these friends before; and something
+in their manner seemed to suggest that they did not find the subject
+inviting, now that it had been broached. He himself was filled with a
+desire to say more about it. He had never clearly realized before what
+a genuine grievance it was. The moisture at the top of his nose merged
+itself into tears in the corners of his eyes, as the cruel enormity of
+the sacrifice he had made in his youth rose before him. His whole life
+had been fettered and darkened by it. He turned his gaze from the swings
+toward Celia, to claim the sympathy he knew she would feel for him.
+
+But Celia was otherwise engaged. A young man had come up to her--a tall
+and extremely thin young man, soberly dressed, and with a long, gaunt,
+hollow-eyed face, the skin of which seemed at once florid and pale. He
+had sandy hair and the rough hands of a workman; but he was speaking to
+Miss Madden in the confidential tones of an equal.
+
+"I can do nothing at all with him," this newcomer said to her. "He'll
+not be said by me. Perhaps he'd listen to you!"
+
+"It's likely I'll go down there!" said Celia. "He may do what he likes
+for all me! Take my advice, Michael, and just go your way, and leave
+him to himself. There was a time when I would have taken out my eyes
+for him, but it was love wasted and thrown away. After the warnings he's
+had, if he WILL bring trouble on himself, let's make it no affair of
+ours."
+
+Theron had found himself exchanging glances of inquiry with this young
+man. "Mr. Ware," said Celia, here, "let me introduce you to my brother
+Michael--my full brother."
+
+Mr. Ware remembered him now, and began, in response to the other's
+formal bow, to say something about their having met in the dark, inside
+the church. But Celia held up her hand. "I'm afraid, Mr. Ware," she said
+hurriedly, "that you are in for a glimpse of the family skeleton. I will
+apologize for the infliction in advance."
+
+Wonderingly, Theron followed her look, and saw another young man who
+had come up the path from the crowd below, and was close upon them. The
+minister recognized in him a figure which had seemed to be the centre of
+almost every group about the bar that he had studied in detail. He was
+a small, dapper, elegantly attired youth, with dark hair, and the
+handsome, regularly carved face of an actor. He advanced with a smiling
+countenance and unsteady step--his silk hat thrust back upon his head,
+his frock-coat and vest unbuttoned, and his neckwear disarranged--and
+saluted the company with amiability.
+
+"I saw you up here, Father Forbes," he said, with a thickened and
+erratic utterance. "Whyn't you come down and join us? I'm setting 'em up
+for everybody. You got to take care of the boys, you know. I'll blow in
+the last cent I've got in the world for the boys, every time, and they
+know it. They're solider for me than they ever were for anybody. That's
+how it is. If you stand by the boys, the boys'll stand by you. I'm going
+to the Assembly for this district, and they ain't nobody can stop me.
+The boys are just red hot for me. Wish you'd come down, Father Forbes,
+and address a few words to the meeting--just mention that I'm a
+candidate, and say I'm bound to win, hands down. That'll make you solid
+with the boys, and we'll be all good fellows together. Come on down!"
+
+The priest affably disengaged his arm from the clutch which the speaker
+had laid upon it, and shook his head in gentle deprecation. "No, no; you
+must excuse me, Theodore," he said. "We mustn't meddle in politics, you
+know."
+
+"Politics be damned!" urged Theodore, grabbing the priest's other arm,
+and tugging at it stoutly to pull him down the path. "I say, boys" he
+shouted to those below, "here's Father Forbes, and he's going to come
+down and address the meeting. Come on, Father! Come down, and have a
+drink with the boys!"
+
+It was Celia who sharply pulled his hand away from the priest's arm
+this time. "Go away with you!" she snapped in low, angry tones at the
+intruder. "You should be ashamed of yourself! If you can't keep sober
+yourself, you can at least keep your hands off the priest. I should
+think you'd have more decency, when you're in such a state as this, than
+to come where I am. If you've no respect for yourself, you might have
+that much respect for me! And before strangers, too!
+
+"Oh, I mustn't come where YOU are, eh?" remarked the peccant Theodore,
+straightening himself with an elaborate effort. "You've bought these
+woods, have you? I've got a hundred friends here, all the same, for
+every one you'll ever have in your life, Red-head, and don't you forget
+it."
+
+"Go and spend your money with them, then, and don't come insulting
+decent people," said Celia.
+
+"Before strangers, too!" the young man called out, with beery sarcasm.
+"Oh, we'll take care of the strangers all right." He had not seemed to
+be aware of Theron's presence, much less his identity, before; but he
+turned to him now with a knowing grin. "I'm running for the Assembly,
+Mr. Ware," he said, speaking loudly and with deliberate effort to avoid
+the drunken elisions and comminglings to which his speech tended, "and I
+want you to fix up the Methodists solid for me. I'm going to drive over
+to the camp-meeting tonight, me and some of the boys in a barouche, and
+I'll put a twenty-dollar bill on their plate. Here it is now, if you
+want to see it."
+
+As the young man began fumbling in a vest-pocket, Theron gathered his
+wits together.
+
+"You'd better not go this evening," he said, as convincingly as he
+knew how; "because the gates will be closed very early, and the
+Saturday-evening services are of a particularly special nature, quite
+reserved for those living on the grounds."
+
+"Rats!" said Theodore, raising his head, and abandoning the search for
+the bill. "Why don't you speak out like a man, and say you think I'm too
+drunk?"
+
+"I don't think that is a question which need arise between us, Mr.
+Madden," murmured Theron, confusedly.
+
+"Oh, don't you make any mistake! A hell of a lot of questions arise
+between us, Mr. Ware," cried Theodore, with a sudden accession of vigor
+in tone and mien. "And one of 'em is--go away from me, Michael!--one of
+'em is, I say, why don't you leave our girls alone? They've got their
+own priests to make fools of themselves over, without any sneak of a
+Protestant parson coming meddling round them. You're a married man into
+the bargain; and you've got in your house this minute a piano that my
+sister bought and paid for. Oh, I've seen the entry in Thurston's books!
+You have the cheek to talk to me about being drunk--why--"
+
+These remarks were never concluded, for Father Forbes here clapped a
+hand abruptly over the offending mouth, and flung his free arm in a
+tight grip around the young man's waist. "Come with me, Michael!" he
+said, and the two men led the reluctant and resisting Theodore at a
+sharp pace off into the woods.
+
+Theron and Celia stood and watched them disappear among the undergrowth.
+"It's the dirty Foley blood that's in him," he heard her say, as if
+between clenched teeth.
+
+The girl's big brown eyes, when Theron looked into them again, were
+still fixed upon the screen of foliage, and dilated like those of a
+Medusa mask. The blood had gone away, and left the fair face and neck
+as white, it seemed to him, as marble. Even her lips, fiercely bitten
+together, appeared colorless. The picture of consuming and powerless
+rage which she presented, and the shuddering tremor which ran over her
+form, as visible as the quivering track of a gust of wind across a pond,
+awed and frightened him.
+
+Tenderness toward her helpless state came too, and uppermost. He drew
+her arm into his, and turned their backs upon the picnic scene.
+
+"Let us walk a little up the path into the woods," he said, "and get
+away from all this."
+
+"The further away the better," she answered bitterly, and he felt the
+shiver run through her again as she spoke.
+
+The methodical waltz-music from that unseen dancing platform rose again
+above all other sounds. They moved up the woodland path, their steps
+insensibly falling into the rhythm of its strains, and vanished from
+sight among the trees.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+Theron and Celia walked in silence for some minutes, until the noises
+of the throng they had left behind were lost. The path they followed had
+grown indefinite among the grass and creepers of the forest carpet;
+now it seemed to end altogether in a little copse of young birches, the
+delicately graceful stems of which were clustered about a parent stump,
+long since decayed and overgrown with lichens and layers of thick moss.
+
+As the two paused, the girl suddenly sank upon her knees, then threw
+herself face forward upon the soft green bark which had formed itself
+above the roots of the ancient mother-tree. Her companion looked down
+in pained amazement at what he saw. Her body shook with the violence
+of recurring sobs, or rather gasps of wrath and grief Her hands, with
+stiffened, claw-like fingers, dug into the moss and tangle of tiny
+vines, and tore them by the roots. The half-stifled sounds of weeping
+that arose from where her face grovelled in the leaves were terrible
+to his ears. He knew not what to say or do, but gazed in resourceless
+suspense at the strange figure she made. It seemed a cruelly long time
+that she lay there, almost at his feet, struggling fiercely with the
+fury that was in her.
+
+All at once the paroxysms passed away, the sounds of wild weeping
+ceased. Celia sat up, and with her handkerchief wiped the tears and
+leafy fragments from her face. She rearranged her hat and the braids of
+her hair with swift, instinctive touches, brushed the woodland debris
+from her front, and sprang to her feet.
+
+"I'm all right now," she said briskly. There was palpable effort in her
+light tone, and in the stormy sort of smile which she forced upon her
+blotched and perturbed countenance, but they were only too welcome to
+Theron's anxious mood.
+
+"Thank God!" he blurted out, all radiant with relief. "I feared you were
+going to have a fit--or something."
+
+Celia laughed, a little artificially at first, then with a genuine
+surrender to the comic side of his visible fright. The mirth came back
+into the brown depths of her eyes again, and her face cleared itself of
+tear-stains and the marks of agitation. "I AM a nice quiet party for
+a Methodist minister to go walking in the woods with, am I not?" she
+cried, shaking her skirts and smiling at him.
+
+"I am not a Methodist minister--please!" answered Theron--"at least not
+today--and here--with you! I am just a man--nothing more--a man who has
+escaped from lifelong imprisonment, and feels for the first time what it
+is to be free!"
+
+"Ah, my friend," Celia said, shaking her head slowly, "I'm afraid you
+deceive yourself. You are not by any means free. You are only looking
+out of the window of your prison, as you call it. The doors are locked,
+just the same."
+
+"I will smash them!" he declared, with confidence. "Or for that matter,
+I HAVE smashed them--battered them to pieces. You don't realize what
+progress I have made, what changes there have been in me since that
+night, you remember that wonderful night! I am quite another being, I
+assure you! And really it dates from way beyond that--why, from the very
+first evening, when I came to you in the church. The window in Father
+Forbes' room was open, and I stood by it listening to the music next
+door, and I could just faintly see on the dark window across the
+alley-way a stained-glass picture of a woman. I suppose it was the
+Virgin Mary. She had hair like yours, and your face, too; and that is
+why I went into the church and found you. Yes, that is why."
+
+Celia regarded him with gravity. "You will get yourself into great
+trouble, my friend," she said.
+
+"That's where you're wrong," put in Theron. "Not that I'd mind any
+trouble in this wide world, so long as you called me 'my friend,' but
+I'm not going to get into any at all. I know a trick worth two of that.
+I've learned to be a showman. I can preach now far better than I used
+to, and I can get through my work in half the time, and keep on the
+right side of my people, and get along with perfect smoothness. I
+was too green before. I took the thing seriously, and I let every
+mean-fisted curmudgeon and crazy fanatic worry me, and keep me on pins
+and needles. I don't do that any more. I've taken a new measure of life.
+I see now what life is really worth, and I'm going to have my share of
+it. Why should I deliberately deny myself all possible happiness for the
+rest of my days, simply because I made a fool of myself when I was in my
+teens? Other men are not eternally punished like that, for what they
+did as boys, and I won't submit to it either. I will be as free to enjoy
+myself as--as Father Forbes."
+
+Celia smiled softly, and shook her head again. "Poor man, to call HIM
+free!" she said: "why, he is bound hand and foot. You don't in the least
+realize how he is hedged about, the work he has to do, the thousand
+suspicious eyes that watch his every movement, eager to bring the Bishop
+down upon him. And then think of his sacrifice--the great sacrifice of
+all--to never know what love means, to forswear his manhood, to live
+a forlorn, celibate life--you have no idea how sadly that appeals to a
+woman."
+
+"Let us sit down here for a little," said Theron; "we seem at the end of
+the path." She seated herself on the root-based mound, and he reclined
+at her side, with an arm carelessly extended behind her on the moss.
+
+"I can see what you mean," he went on, after a pause. "But to me, do you
+know, there is an enormous fascination in celibacy. You forget that I
+know the reverse of the medal. I know how the mind can be cramped, the
+nerves harassed, the ambitions spoiled and rotted, the whole existence
+darkened and belittled, by--by the other thing. I have never talked to
+you before about my marriage."
+
+"I don't think we'd better talk about it now," observed Celia. "There
+must be many more amusing topics."
+
+He missed the spirit of her remark. "You are right," he said slowly. "It
+is too sad a thing to talk about. But there! it is my load, and I bear
+it, and there's nothing more to be said."
+
+Theron drew a heavy sigh, and let his fingers toy abstractedly with a
+ribbon on the outer edge of Celia's penumbra of apparel.
+
+"No," she said. "We mustn't snivel, and we mustn't sulk. When I get into
+a rage it makes me ill, and I storm my way through it and tear things,
+but it doesn't last long, and I come out of it feeling all the better.
+I don't know that I've ever seen your wife. I suppose she hasn't got red
+hair?"
+
+"I think it's a kind of light brown," answered Theron, with an effect of
+exerting his memory.
+
+"It seems that you only take notice of hair in stained-glass windows,"
+was Celia's comment.
+
+"Oh-h!" he murmured reproachfully, "as if--as if--but I won't say what I
+was going to."
+
+"That's not fair!" she said. The little touch of whimsical mockery which
+she gave to the serious declaration was delicious to him. "You have me
+at such a disadvantage! Here am I rattling out whatever comes into my
+head, exposing all my lightest emotions, and laying bare my very heart
+in candor, and you meditate, you turn things over cautiously in your
+mind, like a second Machiavelli. I grow afraid of you; you are so subtle
+and mysterious in your reserves."
+
+Theron gave a tug at the ribbon, to show the joy he had in her delicate
+chaff. "No, it is you who are secretive," he said. "You never told me
+about--about the piano."
+
+The word was out! A minute before it had seemed incredible to him that
+he should ever have the courage to utter it--but here it was. He laid
+firm hold upon the ribbon, which it appeared hung from her waist, and
+drew himself a trifle nearer to her. "I could never have consented to
+take it, I'm afraid," he went on in a low voice, "if I had known. And
+even as it is, I fear it won't be possible."
+
+"What are you afraid of?" asked Celia. "Why shouldn't you take it?
+People in your profession never do get anything unless it's given to
+them, do they? I've always understood it was like that. I've often
+read of donation parties--that's what they're called, isn't it?--where
+everybody is supposed to bring some gift to the minister. Very well,
+then, I've simply had a donation party of my own, that's all. Unless
+you mean that my being a Catholic makes a difference. I had supposed you
+were quite free from that kind of prejudice."
+
+"So I am! Believe me, I am!" urged Theron. "When I'm with you, it seems
+impossible to realize that there are people so narrow and contracted
+in their natures as to take account of such things. It is another
+atmosphere that I breathe near you. How could you imagine that such a
+thought--about our difference of creed--would enter my head? In
+fact," he concluded with a nervous half-laugh, "there isn't any such
+difference. Whatever your religion is, it's mine too. You remember--you
+adopted me as a Greek."
+
+"Did I?" she rejoined. "Well, if that's the case, it leaves you without
+a leg to stand on. I challenge you to find any instance where a Greek
+made any difficulties about accepting a piano from a friend. But
+seriously--while we are talking about it--you introduced the subject:
+I didn't--I might as well explain to you that I had no such intention,
+when I picked the instrument out. It was later, when I was talking to
+Thurston's people about the price, that the whim seized me. Now it is
+the one fixed rule of my life to obey my whims. Whatever occurs to me as
+a possibly pleasant thing to do, straight like a hash, I go and do it.
+It is the only way that a person with means, with plenty of money, can
+preserve any freshness of character. If they stop to think what it would
+be prudent to do, they get crusted over immediately. That is the curse
+of rich people--they teach themselves to distrust and restrain every
+impulse toward unusual actions. They get to feel that it is more
+necessary for them to be cautious and conventional than it is for
+others. I would rather work at a wash-tub than occupy that attitude
+toward my bank account. I fight against any sign of it that I detect
+rising in my mind. The instant a wish occurs to me, I rush to gratify
+it. That is my theory of life. That accounts for the piano; and I don't
+see that you've anything to say about it at all."
+
+It seemed very convincing, this theory of life. Somehow, the thought
+of Miss Madden's riches had never before assumed prominence in Theron's
+mind. Of course her father was very wealthy, but it had not occurred
+to him that the daughter's emancipation might run to the length of a
+personal fortune. He knew so little of rich people and their ways!
+
+He lifted his head, and looked up at Celia with an awakened humility and
+awe in his glance. The glamour of a separate banking-account shone upon
+her. Where the soft woodland light played in among the strands of her
+disordered hair, he saw the veritable gleam of gold. A mysterious new
+suggestion of power blended itself with the beauty of her face, was
+exhaled in the faint perfume of her garments. He maintained a timorous
+hold upon the ribbon, wondering at his hardihood in touching it, or
+being near her at all.
+
+"What surprises me," he heard himself saying, "is that you are
+contented to stay in Octavius. I should think that you would travel--go
+abroad--see the beautiful things of the world, surround yourself with
+the luxuries of big cities--and that sort of thing."
+
+Celia regarded the forest prospect straight in front of her with
+a pensive gaze. "Sometime--no doubt I will sometime," she said
+abstractedly.
+
+"One reads so much nowadays," he went on, "of American heiresses going
+to Europe and marrying dukes and noblemen. I suppose you will do that
+too. Princes would fight one another for you."
+
+The least touch of a smile softened for an instant the impassivity of
+her countenance. Then she stared harder than ever at the vague, leafy
+distance. "That is the old-fashioned idea," she said, in a musing tone,
+"that women must belong to somebody, as if they were curios, or statues,
+or race-horses. You don't understand, my friend, that I have a different
+view. I am myself, and I belong to myself, exactly as much as any man.
+The notion that any other human being could conceivably obtain the
+slightest property rights in me is as preposterous, as ridiculous,
+as--what shall I say?--as the notion of your being taken out with a
+chain on your neck and sold by auction as a slave, down on the canal
+bridge. I should be ashamed to be alive for another day, if any other
+thought were possible to me."
+
+"That is not the generally accepted view, I should think," faltered
+Theron.
+
+"No more is it the accepted view that young married Methodist ministers
+should sit out alone in the woods with red-headed Irish girls. No, my
+friend, let us find what the generally accepted views are, and as fast
+as we find them set our heels on them. There is no other way to live
+like real human beings. What on earth is it to me that other women crawl
+about on all-fours, and fawn like dogs on any hand that will buckle
+a collar onto them, and toss them the leavings of the table? I am not
+related to them. I have nothing to do with them. They cannot make any
+rules for me. If pride and dignity and independence are dead in them,
+why, so much the worse for them! It is no affair of mine. Certainly it
+is no reason why I should get down and grovel also. No; I at least stand
+erect on my legs."
+
+Mr. Ware sat up, and stared confusedly, with round eyes and parted lips,
+at his companion. Instinctively his brain dragged forth to the surface
+those epithets which the doctor had hurled in bitter contempt at
+her--"mad ass, a mere bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed
+lewdness." The words rose in their order on his memory, hard and
+sharp-edged, like arrow-heads. But to sit there, quite at her side; to
+breathe the same air, and behold the calm loveliness of her profile; to
+touch the ribbon of her dress--and all the while to hold these poisoned
+darts of abuse levelled in thought at her breast--it was monstrous. He
+could have killed the doctor at that moment. With an effort, he drove
+the foul things from his mind--scattered them back into the darkness.
+He felt that he had grown pale, and wondered if she had heard the groan
+that seemed to have been forced from him in the struggle. Or was the
+groan imaginary?
+
+Celia continued to sit unmoved, composedly looking upon vacancy.
+Theron's eyes searched her face in vain for any sign of consciousness
+that she had astounded and bewildered him. She did not seem to be
+thinking of him at all. The proud calm of her thoughtful countenance
+suggested instead occupation with lofty and remote abstractions and
+noble ideals. Contemplating her, he suddenly perceived that what she had
+been saying was great, wonderful, magnificent. An involuntary thrill ran
+through his veins at recollection of her words. His fancy likened it to
+the sensation he used to feel as a youth, when the Fourth of July reader
+bawled forth that opening clause: "When, in the course of human events,
+it becomes necessary," etc. It was nothing less than another Declaration
+of Independence he had been listening to.
+
+He sank again recumbent at her side, and stretched the arm behind her,
+nearer than before. "Apparently, then, you will never marry." His voice
+trembled a little.
+
+"Most certainly not!" said Celia.
+
+"You spoke so feelingly a little while ago," he ventured along, with
+hesitation, "about how sadly the notion of a priest's sacrificing
+himself--never knowing what love meant--appealed to a woman. I should
+think that the idea of sacrificing herself would seem to her even sadder
+still."
+
+"I don't remember that we mentioned THAT," she replied. "How do you
+mean--sacrificing herself?"
+
+Theron gathered some of the outlying folds of her dress in his hand, and
+boldly patted and caressed them. "You, so beautiful and so free, with
+such fine talents and abilities," he murmured; "you, who could have the
+whole world at your feet--are you, too, never going to know what love
+means? Do you call that no sacrifice? To me it is the most terrible that
+my imagination can conceive."
+
+Celia laughed--a gentle, amused little laugh, in which Theron's ears
+traced elements of tenderness. "You must regulate that imagination of
+yours," she said playfully. "It conceives the thing that is not. Pray,
+when"--and here, turning her head, she bent down upon his face a gaze of
+arch mock-seriousness--"pray, when did I describe myself in these terms?
+When did I say that I should never know what love meant?"
+
+For answer Theron laid his head down upon his arm, and closed his
+eyes, and held his face against the draperies encircling her. "I cannot
+think!" he groaned.
+
+The thing that came uppermost in his mind, as it swayed and rocked in
+the tempest of emotion, was the strange reminiscence of early childhood
+in it all. It was like being a little boy again, nestling in an
+innocent, unthinking transport of affection against his mother's skirts.
+The tears he felt scalding his eyes were the spontaneous, unashamed
+tears of a child; the tremulous and exquisite joy which spread,
+wave-like, over him, at once reposeful and yearning, was full of
+infantile purity and sweetness. He had not comprehended at all before
+what wellsprings of spiritual beauty, what limpid depths of idealism,
+his nature contained.
+
+"We were speaking of our respective religions," he heard Celia say, as
+imperturbably as if there had been no digression worth mentioning.
+
+"Yes," he assented, and moved his head so that he looked up at her back
+hair, and the leaves high above, mottled against the sky. The wish
+to lie there, where now he could just catch the rose-leaf line of her
+under-chin as well, was very strong upon him. "Yes?" he repeated.
+
+"I cannot talk to you like that," she said; and he sat up again
+shamefacedly.
+
+"Yes--I think we were speaking of religions--some time ago," he
+faltered, to relieve the situation. The dreadful thought that she might
+be annoyed began to oppress him.
+
+"Well, you said whatever my religion was, it was yours too. That
+entitles you at least to be told what the religion is. Now, I am a
+Catholic."
+
+Theron, much mystified, nodded his head. Could it be possible--was there
+coming a deliberate suggestion that he should become a convert? "Yes--I
+know," he murmured.
+
+"But I should explain that I am only a Catholic in the sense that its
+symbolism is pleasant to me. You remember what Schopenhauer said--you
+cannot have the water by itself: you must also have the jug that it is
+in. Very well; the Catholic religion is my jug. I put into it the things
+I like. They were all there long ago, thousands of years ago. The Jews
+threw them out; we will put them back again. We will restore art and
+poetry and the love of beauty, and the gentle, spiritual, soulful life.
+The Greeks had it; and Christianity would have had it too, if it hadn't
+been for those brutes they call the Fathers. They loved ugliness and
+dirt and the thought of hell-fire. They hated women. In all the earlier
+stages of the Church, women were very prominent in it. Jesus himself
+appreciated women, and delighted to have them about him, and talk with
+them and listen to them. That was the very essence of the Greek spirit;
+and it breathed into Christianity at its birth a sweetness and a grace
+which twenty generations of cranks and savages like Paul and Jerome
+and Tertullian weren't able to extinguish. But the very man, Cyril, who
+killed Hypatia, and thus began the dark ages, unwittingly did another
+thing which makes one almost forgive him. To please the Egyptians, he
+secured the Church's acceptance of the adoration of the Virgin. It is
+that idea which has kept the Greek spirit alive, and grown and grown,
+till at last it will rule the world. It was only epileptic Jews who
+could imagine a religion without sex in it."
+
+"I remember the pictures of the Virgin in your room," said Theron,
+feeling more himself again. "I wondered if they quite went with the
+statues."
+
+The remark won a smile from Celia's lips.
+
+"They get along together better than you suppose," she answered.
+"Besides, they are not all pictures of Mary. One of them, standing on
+the moon, is of Isis with the infant Horus in her arms. Another might as
+well be Mahamie, bearing the miraculously born Buddha, or Olympias with
+her child Alexander, or even Perictione holding her babe Plato--all
+these were similar cases, you know. Almost every religion had its
+Immaculate Conception. What does it all come to, except to show us that
+man turns naturally toward the worship of the maternal idea? That is the
+deepest of all our instincts--love of woman, who is at once daughter and
+wife and mother. It is that that makes the world go round."
+
+Brave thoughts shaped themselves in Theron's mind, and shone forth in a
+confident yet wistful smile on his face.
+
+"It is a pity you cannot change estates with me for one minute," he
+said, in steady, low tone. "Then you would realize the tremendous truth
+of what you have been saying. It is only your intellect that has reached
+out and grasped the idea. If you were in my place, you would discover
+that your heart was bursting with it as well."
+
+Celia turned and looked at him.
+
+"I myself," he went on, "would not have known, half an hour ago, what
+you meant by the worship of the maternal idea. I am much older than
+you. I am a strong, mature man. But when I lay down there, and shut my
+eyes--because the charm and marvel of this whole experience had for
+the moment overcome me--the strangest sensation seized upon me. It was
+absolutely as if I were a boy again, a good, pure-minded, fond little
+child, and you were the mother that I idolized."
+
+Celia had not taken her eyes from his face. "I find myself liking you
+better at this moment," she said, with gravity, "than I have ever liked
+you before."
+
+Then, as by a sudden impulse, she sprang to her feet. "Come!" she cried,
+her voice and manner all vivacity once more, "we have been here long
+enough."
+
+Upon the instant, as Theron was more laboriously getting up, it became
+apparent to them both that perhaps they had been there too long.
+
+A boy with a gun under his arm, and two gray squirrels tied by the tails
+slung across his shoulder, stood at the entrance to the glade, some
+dozen paces away, regarding them with undisguised interest. Upon the
+discovery that he was in turn observed, he resumed his interrupted
+progress through the woods, whistling softly as he went, and vanished
+among the trees.
+
+"Heavens above!" groaned Theron, shudderingly.
+
+"Know him?" he went on, in answer to the glance of inquiry on his
+companion's face. "I should think I did! He spades my--my wife's garden
+for her. He used to bring our milk. He works in the law office of one
+of my trustees--the one who isn't friendly to me, but is very friendly
+indeed with my--with Mrs. Ware. Oh, what shall I do? It may easily mean
+my ruin!"
+
+Celia looked at him attentively. The color had gone out of his face, and
+with it the effect of earnestness and mental elevation which, a minute
+before, had caught her fancy. "Somehow, I fear that I do not like you
+quite so much just now, my friend," she remarked.
+
+"In God's name, don't say that!" urged Theron. He raised his voice in
+agitated entreaty. "You don't know what these people are--how they would
+leap at the barest hint of a scandal about me. In my position I am a
+thousand times more defenceless than any woman. Just a single whisper,
+and I am done for!"
+
+"Let me point out to you, Mr. Ware," said Celia, slowly, "that to be
+seen sitting and talking with me, whatever doubts it may raise as to
+a gentleman's intellectual condition, need not necessarily blast his
+social reputation beyond all hope whatever."
+
+Theron stared at her, as if he had not grasped her meaning. Then he
+winced visibly under it, and put out his hands to implore her. "Forgive
+me! Forgive me!" he pleaded. "I was beside myself for the moment with
+the fright of the thing. Oh, say you do forgive me, Celia!" He made
+haste to support this daring use of her name. "I have been so happy
+today--so deeply, so vastly happy--like the little child I spoke of--and
+that is so new in my lonely life--that--the suddenness of the thing--it
+just for the instant unstrung me. Don't be too hard on me for it! And
+I had hoped, too--I had had such genuine heartfelt pleasure in the
+thought--that, an hour or two ago, when you were unhappy, perhaps it had
+been some sort of consolation to you that I was with you."
+
+Celia was looking away. When he took her hand she did not withdraw it,
+but turned and nodded in musing general assent to what he had said.
+"Yes, we have both been unstrung, as you call it, today," she said,
+decidedly out of pitch. "Let each forgive the other, and say no more
+about it."
+
+She took his arm, and they retraced their steps along the path, again
+in silence. The labored noise of the orchestra, as it were, returned to
+meet them. They halted at an intersecting footpath.
+
+"I go back to my slavery--my double bondage," said Theron, letting his
+voice sink to a sigh. "But even if I am put on the rack for it, I shall
+have had one day of glory."
+
+"I think you may kiss me, in memory of that one day--or of a few minutes
+in that day," said Celia.
+
+Their lips brushed each other in a swift, almost perfunctory caress.
+
+Theron went his way at a hurried pace, the sobered tones of her
+"good-bye" beating upon his brain with every measure of the droning
+waltz-music.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+The memory of the kiss abode with Theron. Like Aaron's rod, it swallowed
+up one by one all competing thoughts and recollections, and made his
+brain its slave.
+
+Even as he strode back through the woods to the camp-meeting, it was the
+kiss that kept his feet in motion, and guided their automatic course.
+All along the watches of the restless night, it was the kiss that bore
+him sweet company, and wandered with him from one broken dream of bliss
+to another. Next day, it was the kiss that made of life for him a sort
+of sunlit wonderland. He preached his sermon in the morning, and took
+his appointed part in the other services of afternoon and evening,
+apparently to everybody's satisfaction: to him it was all a vision.
+
+When the beautiful full moon rose, this Sunday evening, and glorified
+the clearing and the forest with its mellow harvest radiance, he could
+have groaned with the burden of his joy. He went out alone into the
+light, and bared his head to it, and stood motionless for a long time.
+In all his life, he had never been impelled as powerfully toward earnest
+and soulful thanksgiving. The impulse to kneel, there in the pure,
+tender moonlight, and lift up offerings of praise to God, kept uppermost
+in his mind. Some formless resignation restrained him from the act
+itself, but the spirit of it hallowed his mood. He gazed up at the broad
+luminous face of the satellite. "You are our God," he murmured. "Hers
+and mine! You are the most beautiful of heavenly creatures, as she is of
+the angels on earth. I am speechless with reverence for you both."
+
+It was not until the camp-meeting broke up, four days later, and Theron
+with the rest returned to town, that the material aspects of what had
+happened, and might be expected to happen, forced themselves upon his
+mind. The kiss was a child of the forest. So long as Theron remained in
+the camp, the image of the kiss, which was enshrined in his heart and
+ministered to by all his thoughts, continued enveloped in a haze of
+sylvan mystery, like a dryad. Suggestions of its beauty and holiness
+came to him in the odors of the woodland, at the sight of wild flowers
+and water-lilies. When he walked alone in unfamiliar parts of the
+forest, he carried about with him the half-conscious idea of somewhere
+coming upon a strange, hidden pool which mortal eye had not seen
+before--a deep, sequestered mere of spring-fed waters, walled in by
+rich, tangled growths of verdure, and bearing upon its virgin bosom only
+the shadows of the primeval wilderness, and the light of the eternal
+skies. His fancy dwelt upon some such nook as the enchanted home of
+the fairy that possessed his soul. The place, though he never found it,
+became real to him. As he pictured it, there rose sometimes from among
+the lily-pads, stirring the translucent depths and fluttering over the
+water's surface drops like gems, the wonderful form of a woman, with
+pale leaves wreathed in her luxuriant red hair, and a skin which gave
+forth light.
+
+With the homecoming to Octavius, his dreams began to take more account
+of realities. In a day or two he was wide awake, and thinking hard. The
+kiss was as much as ever the ceaseless companion of his hours, but it no
+longer insisted upon shrouding itself in vines and woodland creepers, or
+outlining itself in phosphorescent vagueness against mystic backgrounds
+of nymph-haunted glades. It advanced out into the noonday, and assumed
+tangible dimensions and substance. He saw that it was related to the
+facts of his daily life, and had, in turn, altered his own relations to
+all these facts.
+
+What ought he to do? What COULD he do? Apparently, nothing but wait.
+He waited for a week--then for another week. The conclusion that the
+initiative had been left to him began to take shape in his mind. From
+this it seemed but a step to the passionate resolve to act at once.
+
+Turning the situation over and over in his anxious thoughts, two things
+stood out in special prominence. One was that Celia loved him. The other
+was that the boy in Gorringe's law office, and possibly Gorringe, and
+heaven only knew how many others besides, had reasons for suspecting
+this to be true.
+
+And what about Celia? Side by side with the moving rapture of thinking
+about her as a woman, there rose the substantial satisfaction of
+contemplating her as Miss Madden. She had kissed him, and she was very
+rich. The things gradually linked themselves before his eyes. He tried
+a thousand varying guesses at what she proposed to do, and each time
+reined up his imagination by the reminder that she was confessedly a
+creature of whims, who proposed to do nothing, but was capable of all
+things.
+
+And as to the boy. If he had blabbed what he saw, it was incredible that
+somebody should not take the subject up, and impart a scandalous twist
+to it, and send it rolling like a snowball to gather up exaggeration and
+foul innuendo till it was big enough to overwhelm him. What would happen
+to him if a formal charge were preferred against him? He looked it up
+in the Discipline. Of course, if his accusers magnified their mean
+suspicions and calumnious imaginings to the point of formulating a
+charge, it would be one of immorality. They could prove nothing; there
+was nothing to prove. At the worst, it was an indiscretion, which would
+involve his being admonished by his Presiding Elder. Or if these narrow
+bigots confused slanders with proofs, and showed that they intended to
+convict him, then it would be open to him to withdraw from the ministry,
+in advance of his condemnation. His relation to the church would be
+the same as if he had been expelled, but to the outer world it would be
+different. And supposing he did withdraw from the ministry?
+
+Yes; this was the important point. What if he did abandon this mistaken
+profession of his? On its mental side the relief would be prodigious,
+unthinkable. But on the practical side, the bread-and-butter side? For
+some days Theron paused with a shudder when he reached this question.
+The thought of the plunge into unknown material responsibilities gave
+him a sinking heart. He tried to imagine himself lecturing, canvassing
+for books or insurance policies, writing for newspapers--and remained
+frightened. But suddenly one day it occurred to him that these qualms
+and forebodings were sheer folly. Was not Celia rich? Would she not with
+lightning swiftness draw forth that check-book, like the flashing sword
+of a champion from its scabbard, and run to his relief? Why, of course.
+It was absurd not to have thought of that before.
+
+He recalled her momentary anger with him, that afternoon in the woods,
+when he had cried out that discovery would mean ruin to him. He saw
+clearly enough now that she had been grieved at his want of faith in her
+protection. In his flurry of fright, he had lost sight of the fact that,
+if exposure and trouble came to him, she would naturally feel that she
+had been the cause of his martyrdom. It was plain enough now. If he got
+into hot water, it would be solely on account of his having been seen
+with her. He had walked into the woods with her--"the further the
+better" had been her own words--out of pure kindliness, and the
+desire to lead her away from the scene of her brother's and her own
+humiliation. But why amplify arguments? Her own warm heart would tell
+her, on the instant, how he had been sacrificed for her sake, and would
+bring her, eager and devoted, to his succor.
+
+That was all right, then. Slowly, from this point, suggestions expanded
+themselves. The future could be, if he willed it, one long serene
+triumph of love, and lofty intellectual companionship, and existence
+softened and enriched at every point by all that wealth could command,
+and the most exquisite tastes suggest. Should he will it! Ah! the
+question answered itself. But he could not enter upon this beckoning
+heaven of a future until he had freed himself. When Celia said to him,
+"Come!" he must not be in the position to reply, "I should like to, but
+unfortunately I am tied by the leg." He should have to leave Octavius,
+leave the ministry, leave everything. He could not begin too soon to
+face these contingencies.
+
+Very likely Celia had not thought it out as far as this. With her,
+it was a mere vague "sometime I may." But the harder masculine sense,
+Theron felt, existed for the very purpose of correcting and giving point
+to these loose feminine notions of time and space. It was for him to
+clear away the obstacles, and map the plans out with definite decision.
+
+One warm afternoon, as he lolled in his easy-chair under the open
+window of his study, musing upon the ever-shifting phases of this vast,
+complicated, urgent problem, some chance words from the sidewalk in
+front came to his ears, and, coming, remained to clarify his thoughts.
+
+Two ladies whose voices were strange to him had stopped--as so many
+people almost daily stopped--to admire the garden of the parsonage. One
+of them expressed her pleasure in general terms. Said the other--
+
+"My husband declares those dahlias alone couldn't be matched for thirty
+dollars, and that some of those gladiolus must have cost three or four
+dollars apiece. I know we've spent simply oceans of money on our garden,
+and it doesn't begin to compare with this."
+
+"It seems like a sinful waste to me," said her companion.
+
+"No-o," the other hesitated. "No, I don't think quite that--if you can
+afford it just as well as not. But it does seem to me that I'd rather
+live in a little better house, and not spend it ALL on flowers. Just
+LOOK at that cactus!"
+
+The voices died away. Theron sat up, with a look of arrested thought
+upon his face, then sprang to his feet and moved hurriedly through the
+parlor to an open front window. Peering out with caution he saw that the
+two women receding from view were fashionably dressed and evidently
+came from homes of means. He stared after them in a blank way until they
+turned a corner.
+
+He went into the hall then, put on his frock-coat and hat, and stepped
+out into the garden. He was conscious of having rather avoided it
+heretofore--not altogether without reasons of his own, lying unexamined
+somewhere in the recesses of his mind. Now he walked slowly about, and
+examined the flowers with great attentiveness. The season was
+advancing, and he saw that many plants had gone out of bloom. But what a
+magnificent plenitude of blossoms still remained!
+
+Thirty dollars' worth of dahlias--that was what the stranger had said.
+Theron hardly brought himself to credit the statement; but all the same
+it was apparent to even his uninformed eye that these huge, imbricated,
+flowering masses, with their extraordinary half-colors, must be unusual.
+He remembered that the boy in Gorringe's office had spoken of just one
+lot of plants costing thirty-one dollars and sixty cents, and there had
+been two other lots as well. The figures remained surprisingly distinct
+in his memory. It was no good deceiving himself any longer: of course
+these were the plants that Gorringe had spent his money upon, here all
+about him.
+
+As he surveyed them with a sour regard, a cool breeze stirred across the
+garden. The tall, over-laden flower-spikes of gladioli bent and nodded
+at him; the hollyhocks and flaming alvias, the clustered blossoms on the
+standard roses, the delicately painted lilies on their stilt-like stems,
+fluttered in the wind, and seemed all bowing satirically to him. "Yes,
+Levi Gorringe paid for us!" He almost heard their mocking declaration.
+
+Out in the back-yard, where a longer day of sunshine dwelt, there were
+many other flowers, and notably a bed of geraniums which literally made
+the eye ache. Standing at this rear corner of the house, he caught the
+droning sound of Alice's voice, humming a hymn to herself as she went
+about her kitchen work. He saw her through the open window. She was
+sweeping, and had a sort of cap on her head which did not add to the
+graces of her appearance. He looked at her with a hard glance, recalling
+as a fresh grievance the ten days of intolerable boredom he had spent
+cooped up in a ridiculous little tent with her, at the camp-meeting. She
+must have realized at the time how odious the enforced companionship was
+to him. Yes, beyond doubt she did. It came back to him now that they
+had spoken but rarely to each other. She had not even praised his sermon
+upon the Sabbath-question, which every one else had been in raptures
+over. For that matter she no longer praised anything he did, and took
+obvious pains to preserve toward him a distant demeanor. So much the
+better, he felt himself thinking. If she chose to behave in that
+offish and unwifely fashion, she could blame no one but herself for its
+results.
+
+She had seen him, and came now to the window, watering-pot and broom
+in hand. She put her head out, to breathe a breath of dustless air, and
+began as if she would smile on him. Then her face chilled and stiffened,
+as she caught his look.
+
+"Shall you be home for supper?" she asked, in her iciest tone.
+
+He had not thought of going out before. The question, and the manner of
+it, gave immediate urgency to the idea of going somewhere. "I may or I
+may not," he replied. "It is quite impossible for me to say." He turned
+on his heel with this, and walked briskly out of the yard and down the
+street.
+
+It was the most natural thing that presently he should be strolling past
+the Madden house, and letting a covert glance stray over its front and
+the grounds about it, as he loitered along. Every day since his return
+from the woods he had given the fates this chance of bringing Celia
+to meet him, without avail. He had hung about in the vicinity of the
+Catholic church on several evenings as well, but to no purpose. The
+organ inside was dumb, and he could detect no signs of Celia's presence
+on the curtains of the pastorate next door. This day, too, there was
+no one visible at the home of the Maddens, and he walked on, a little
+sadly. It was weary work waiting for the signal that never came.
+
+But there were compensations. His mind reverted doggedly to the flowers
+in his garden, and to Alice's behavior toward him. They insisted upon
+connecting themselves in his thoughts. Why should Levi Gorringe, a
+money-lender, and therefore the last man in the world to incur reckless
+expenditure, go and buy perhaps a hundred dollars, worth of flowers for
+his wife's garden? It was time--high time--to face this question. And
+his experiencing religion afterward, just when Alice did, and marching
+down to the rail to kneel beside her--that was a thing to be thought of,
+too.
+
+Meditation, it is true, hardly threw fresh light upon the matter. It
+was incredible, of course, that there should be anything wrong. To even
+shape a thought of Alice in connection with gallantry would be wholly
+impossible. Nor could it be said that Gorringe, in his new capacity as a
+professing church-member, had disclosed any sign of ulterior motives,
+or of insincerity. Yet there the facts were. While Theron pondered them,
+their mystery, if they involved a mystery, baffled him altogether.
+But when he had finished, he found himself all the same convinced that
+neither Alice nor Gorringe would be free to blame him for anything
+he might do. He had grounds for complaint against them. If he did not
+himself know just what these grounds were, it was certain enough that
+THEY knew. Very well, then, let them take the responsibility for what
+happened.
+
+It was indeed awkward that at the moment, as Theron chanced to emerge
+temporarily from his brown-study, his eyes fell full upon the spare,
+well-knit form of Levi Gorringe himself, standing only a few feet away,
+in the staircase entrance to his law office. His lean face, browned by
+the summer's exposure, had a more Arabian aspect than ever. His hands
+were in his pockets, and he held an unlighted cigar between his teeth.
+He looked the Rev. Mr. Ware over calmly, and nodded recognition.
+
+Theron had halted instinctively. On the instant he would have given
+a great deal not to have stopped at all. It was stupid of him to have
+paused, but it would not do now to go on without words of some sort. He
+moved over to the door-way, and made a half-hearted pretence of looking
+at the photographs in one of the show-cases at its side. As Mr. Gorringe
+did not take his hands from his pockets, there was no occasion for any
+formal greeting.
+
+"I had no idea that they took such good pictures in Octavius," Theron
+remarked after a minute's silence, still bending in examination of the
+photographs.
+
+"They ought to; they charge New York prices," observed the lawyer,
+sententiously.
+
+Theron found in the words confirmation of his feeling that Gorringe was
+not naturally a lavish or extravagant man. Rather was he a careful and
+calculating man, who spent money only for a purpose. Though the minister
+continued gazing at the stiff presentments of local beauties and
+swains, his eyes seemed to see salmon-hued hollyhocks and spotted lilies
+instead. Suddenly a resolve came to him. He stood erect, and faced his
+trustee.
+
+"Speaking of the price of things," he said, with an effort of arrogance
+in his measured tone, "I have never had an opportunity before of
+mentioning the subject of the flowers you have so kindly furnished for
+my--for MY garden."
+
+"Why mention it now?" queried Gorringe, with nonchalance. He turned his
+cigar about with a movement of his lips, and worked it into the corner
+of his mouth. He did not find it necessary to look at Theron at all.
+
+"Because--" began Mr. Ware, and then hesitated--"because--well, it
+raises a question of my being under obligation, which I--"
+
+"Oh, no, sir," said the lawyer; "put that out of your mind. You are no
+more under obligation to me than I am to you. Oh, no, make yourself easy
+about that. Neither of us owes the other anything."
+
+"Not even good-will--I take that to be your meaning," retorted Theron,
+with some heat.
+
+"The words are yours, sir," responded Gorringe, coolly. "I do not object
+to them."
+
+"As you like," put in the other. "If it be so, why, then all the more
+reason why I should, under the circumstances--"
+
+"Under what circumstances?" interposed the lawyer. "Let us be clear
+about this thing as we go along. To what circumstances do you refer?"
+
+He had turned his eyes now, and looked Theron in the face. A slight
+protrusion of his lower jaw had given the cigar an upward tilt under the
+black mustache.
+
+"The circumstances are that you have brought or sent to my garden a
+great many very expensive flower-plants and bushes and so on."
+
+"And you object? I had not supposed that clergymen in general--and you
+in particular--were so sensitive. Have donation parties, then, gone out
+of date?"
+
+"I understand your sneer well enough," retorted Theron, "but that
+can pass. The main point is, that you did me the honor to send these
+plants--or to smuggle them in--but never once deigned to hint to me that
+you had done so. No one told me. Except by mere accident, I should not
+have known to this day where they came from."
+
+Mr. Gorringe twisted the cigar at another angle, with lines of grim
+amusement about the corner of his mouth. "I should have thought," he
+said with dry deliberation, "that possibly this fact might have raised
+in your mind the conceivable hypothesis that the plants might not be
+intended for you at all."
+
+"That is precisely it, sir," said Theron. There were people passing, and
+he was forced to keep his voice down. It would have been a relief, he
+felt, to shout. "That is it--they were not intended for me."
+
+"Well, then, what are you talking about?" The lawyer's speech had become
+abrupt almost to incivility.
+
+"I think my remarks have been perfectly clear," said the minister, with
+dignity. It was a new experience to be addressed in that fashion.
+It occurred to him to add, "Please remember that I am not in the
+witness-box, to be bullied or insulted by a professional."
+
+Gorringe studied Theron's face attentively with a cold, searching
+scrutiny. "You may thank your stars you're not!" he said, with
+significance.
+
+What on earth could he mean? The words and the menacing tone greatly
+impressed Theron. Indeed, upon reflection, he found that they frightened
+him. The disposition to adopt a high tone with the lawyer was melting
+away.
+
+"I do not see," he began, and then deliberately allowed his voice to
+take on an injured and plaintive inflection--"I do not see why you
+should adopt this tone toward me--Brother Gorringe."
+
+The lawyer scowled, and bit sharply into the cigar, but said nothing.
+
+"If I have unconsciously offended you in any way," Theron went on, "I
+beg you to tell me how. I liked you from the beginning of my pastorate
+here, and the thought that latterly we seemed to be drifting apart has
+given me much pain. But now it is still more distressing to find you
+actually disposed to quarrel with me. Surely, Brother Gorringe, between
+a pastor and a probationer who--"
+
+"No," Gorringe broke in; "quarrel isn't the word for it. There isn't any
+quarrel, Mr. Ware." He stepped down from the door-stone to the sidewalk
+as he spoke, and stood face to face with Theron. Working-men with
+dinner-pails, and factory girls, were passing close to them, and he
+lowered his voice to a sharp, incisive half-whisper as he added, "It
+wouldn't be worth any grown man's while to quarrel with so poor a
+creature as you are."
+
+Theron stood confounded, with an empty stare of bewilderment on his
+face. It rose in his mind that the right thing to feel was rage,
+righteous indignation, fury; but for the life of him, he could not
+muster any manly anger. The character of the insult stupefied him.
+
+"I do not know that I have anything to say to you in reply," he
+remarked, after what seemed to him a silence of minutes. His lips
+framed the words automatically, but they expressed well enough the blank
+vacancy of his mind. The suggestion that anybody deemed him a "poor
+creature" grew more astounding, incomprehensible, as it swelled in his
+brain.
+
+"No, I suppose not," snapped Gorringe. "You're not the sort to stand up
+to men; your form is to go round the corner and take it out of somebody
+weaker than yourself--a defenceless woman, for instance."
+
+"Oh--ho!" said Theron. The exclamation had uttered itself. The sound of
+it seemed to clarify his muddled thoughts; and as they ranged themselves
+in order, he began to understand. "Oh--ho!" he said again, and nodded
+his head in token of comprehension.
+
+The lawyer, chewing his cigar with increased activity, glared at him.
+"What do you mean?" he demanded peremptorily.
+
+"Mean?" said the minister. "Oh, nothing that I feel called upon to
+explain to you."
+
+It was passing strange, but his self-possession had all at once returned
+to him. As it became more apparent that the lawyer was losing his
+temper, Theron found the courage to turn up the corners of his lips in
+show of a bitter little smile of confidence. He looked into the other's
+dusky face, and flaunted this smile at it in contemptuous defiance. "It
+is not a subject that I can discuss with propriety--at this stage," he
+added.
+
+"Damn you! Are you talking about those flowers?"
+
+"Oh, I am not talking about anything in particular," returned Theron,
+"not even the curious choice of language which my latest probationer
+seems to prefer."
+
+"Go and strike my name off the list!" said Gorringe, with rising
+passion. "I was a fool to ever have it there. To think of being a
+probationer of yours--my God!"
+
+"That will be a pity--from one point of view," remarked Theron, still
+with the ironical smile on his lips. "You seemed to enter upon the new
+life with such deliberation and fixity of purpose, too! I can imagine
+the regrets your withdrawal will cause, in certain quarters. I only hope
+that it will not discourage those who accompanied you to the altar,
+and shared your enthusiasm at the time." He had spoken throughout with
+studied slowness and an insolent nicety of utterance.
+
+"You had better go away!" broke forth Gorringe. "If you don't, I shall
+forget myself."
+
+"For the first time?" asked Theron. Then, warned by the flash in the
+lawyer's eye, he turned on his heel and sauntered, with a painstaking
+assumption of a mind quite at ease, up the street.
+
+Gorringe's own face twitched and his veins tingled as he looked after
+him. He spat the shapeless cigar out of his mouth into the gutter, and,
+drawing forth another from his pocket, clenched it between his teeth,
+his gaze following the tall form of the Methodist minister till it was
+merged in the crowd.
+
+"Well, I'm damned!" he said aloud to himself.
+
+The photographer had come down to take in his showcases for the night.
+He looked up from his task at the exclamation, and grinned inquiringly.
+
+"I've just been talking to a man," said the lawyer, "who's so much
+meaner than any other man I ever heard of that it takes my breath away.
+He's got a wife that's as pure and good as gold, and he knows it, and
+she worships the ground he walks on, and he knows that too. And yet the
+scoundrel is around trying to sniff out some shadow of a pretext for
+misusing her worse than he's already done. Yes, sir; he'd be actually
+tickled to death if he could nose up some hint of a scandal about
+her--something that he could pretend to believe, and work for his own
+advantage to levy blackmail, or get rid of her, or whatever suited his
+book. I didn't think there was such an out-and-out cur on this whole
+footstool. I almost wish, by God, I'd thrown him into the canal!"
+
+"Yes, you lawyers must run against some pretty snide specimens,"
+remarked the photographer, lifting one of the cases from its sockets.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+Theron spent half an hour in aimless strolling about the streets. From
+earliest boyhood his mind had always worked most clearly when he walked
+alone. Every mental process which had left a mark upon his memory and
+his career--the daydreams of future academic greatness and fame which
+had fashioned themselves in his brain as a farm lad; the meditations,
+raptures, and high resolves of his student period at the seminary; the
+more notable sermons and powerful discourse by which he had revealed the
+genius that was in him to astonished and delighted assemblages--all were
+associated in his retrospective thoughts with solitary rambles.
+
+He had a very direct and vivid consciousness now that it was good to be
+on his legs, and alone. He had never in his life been more sensible of
+the charm of his own companionship. The encounter with Gorringe seemed
+to have cleared all the clouds out of his brain, and restored lightness
+to his heart. After such an object lesson, the impossibility of his
+continuing to sacrifice himself to a notion of duty to these low-minded
+and coarse-natured villagers was beyond all argument. There could no
+longer be any doubt about his moral right to turn his back upon them, to
+wash his hands of the miserable combination of hypocrisy and hysterics
+which they called their spiritual life.
+
+And the question of Gorringe and Alice, that too stood precisely where
+he wanted it. Even in his own thoughts, he preferred to pursue it no
+further. Between them somewhere an offence of concealment, it might be
+of conspiracy, had been committed against him. It was no business of his
+to say more, or to think more. He rested his case simply on the fact,
+which could not be denied, and which he was not in the least interested
+to have explained, one way or the other. The recollection of Gorringe's
+obvious disturbance of mind was especially pleasant to him. He himself
+had been magnanimous almost to the point of weakness. He had gone out
+of his way to call the man "brother," and to give him an opportunity of
+behaving like a gentleman; but his kindly forbearance had been wasted.
+Gorringe was not the man to understand generous feelings, much less rise
+to their level. He had merely shown that he would be vicious if he knew
+how. It was more important and satisfactory to recall that he had also
+shown a complete comprehension of the injured husband's grievance. The
+fact that he had recognized it was enough--was, in fact, everything.
+
+In the background of his thoughts Theron had carried along a notion of
+going and dining with Father Forbes when the time for the evening meal
+should arrive. The idea in itself attracted him, as a fitting capstone
+to his resolve not to go home to supper. It gave just the right kind
+of character to his domestic revolt. But when at last he stood on the
+doorstep of the pastorate, waiting for an answer to the tinkle of the
+electric bell he had heard ring inside, his mind contained only the
+single thought that now he should hear something about Celia. Perhaps he
+might even find her there; but he put that suggestion aside as slightly
+unpleasant.
+
+The hag-faced housekeeper led him, as before, into the dining-room. It
+was still daylight, and he saw on the glance that the priest was alone
+at the table, with a book beside him to read from as he ate.
+
+Father Forbes rose and came forward, greeting his visitor with profuse
+urbanity and smiles. If there was a perfunctory note in the invitation
+to sit down and share the meal, Theron did not catch it. He frankly
+displayed his pleasure as he laid aside his hat, and took the chair
+opposite his host.
+
+"It is really only a few months since I was here, in this room, before,"
+he remarked, as the priest closed his book and tossed it to one side,
+and the housekeeper came in to lay another place. "Yet it might have
+been years, many long years, so tremendous is the difference that the
+lapse of time has wrought in me."
+
+"I am afraid we have nothing to tempt you very much, Mr. Ware," remarked
+Father Forbes, with a gesture of his plump white hand which embraced the
+dishes in the centre of the table. "May I send you a bit of this boiled
+mutton? I have very homely tastes when I am by myself."
+
+"I was saying," Theron observed, after some moments had passed in
+silence, "that I date such a tremendous revolution in my thoughts, my
+beliefs, my whole mind and character, from my first meeting with you,
+my first coming here. I don't know how to describe to you the enormous
+change that has come over me; and I owe it all to you."
+
+"I can only hope, then, that it is entirely of a satisfactory nature,"
+said the priest, politely smiling.
+
+"Oh, it is so splendidly satisfactory!" said Theron, with fervor. "I
+look back at myself now with wonder and pity. It seems incredible
+that, such a little while ago, I should have been such an ignorant
+and unimaginative clod of earth, content with such petty ambitions and
+actually proud of my limitations."
+
+"And you have larger ambitions now?" asked the other. "Pray let me help
+you to some potatoes. I am afraid that ambitions only get in our way and
+trip us up. We clergymen are like street-car horses. The more steadily
+we jog along between the rails, the better it is for us."
+
+"Oh, I don't intend to remain in the ministry," declared Theron. The
+statement seemed to him a little bald, now that he had made it; and as
+his companion lifted his brows in surprise, he added stumblingly: "That
+is, as I feel now, it seems to me impossible that I should remain much
+longer. With you, of course, it is different. You have a thousand things
+to interest and pleasantly occupy you in your work and its ceremonies,
+so that mere belief or non-belief in the dogma hardly matters. But in
+our church dogma is everything. If you take that away, or cease to have
+its support, the rest is intolerable, hideous."
+
+Father Forbes cut another slice of mutton for himself. "It is a pretty
+serious business to make such a change at your time of life. I take it
+for granted you will think it all over very carefully before you commit
+yourself." He said this with an almost indifferent air, which rather
+chilled his listener's enthusiasm.
+
+"Oh, yes,", Theron made answer; "I shall do nothing rash. But I have a
+good many plans for the future."
+
+Father Forbes did not ask what these were, and a brief further period of
+silence fell upon the table.
+
+"I hope everything went off smoothly at the picnic," Theron ventured, at
+last. "I have not seen any of you since then."
+
+The priest shook his head and sighed. "No," he said. "It is a bad
+business. I have had a great deal of unhappiness out of it this past
+fortnight. That young man who was rude to you--of course it was mere
+drunken, irresponsible nonsense on his part--has got himself into a
+serious scrape, I'm afraid. It is being kept quite within the family,
+and we hope to manage so that it will remain there, but it has terribly
+upset his father and his sister. But that, after all, is not so hard
+to bear as the other affliction that has come upon the Maddens. You
+remember Michael, the other brother? He seems to have taken cold that
+evening, or perhaps over-exerted himself. He has been seized with quick
+consumption. He will hardly last till snow flies."
+
+"Oh, I am GRIEVED to hear that!" Theron spoke with tremulous
+earnestness. It seemed to him as if Michael were in some way related to
+him.
+
+"It is very hard upon them all," the priest went on. "Michael is as
+sweet and holy a character as it is possible for any one to think of. He
+is the apple of his father's eye. They were inseparable, those two. Do
+you know the father, Mr. Madden?"
+
+Theron shook his head. "I think I have seen him," he said. "A small man,
+with gray whiskers."
+
+"A peasant," said Father Forbes, "but with a heart of gold. Poor man! he
+has had little enough out of his riches. Ah, the West Coast people, what
+tragedies I have seen among them over here! They have rudimentary lung
+organizations, like a frog's, to fit the mild, wet soft air they live
+in. The sharp air here kills them off like flies in a frost. Whole
+families go. I should think there are a dozen of old Jeremiah's children
+in the cemetery. If Michael could have passed his twenty-eighth year,
+there would have been hope for him, at least till his thirty-fifth.
+These pulmonary things seem to go by sevens, you know."
+
+"I didn't know," said Theron. "It is very strange--and very sad." His
+startled mind was busy, all at once, with conjectures as to Celia's age.
+
+"The sister--Miss Madden--seems extremely strong," he remarked
+tentatively.
+
+"Celia may escape the general doom," said the priest. His guest noted
+that he clenched his shapely white hand on the table as he spoke, and
+that his gentle, carefully modulated voice had a gritty hardness in its
+tone. "THAT would be too dreadful to think of," he added.
+
+Theron shuddered in silence, and strove to shut his mind against the
+thought.
+
+"She has taken Michael's illness so deeply to heart," the priest
+proceeded, "and devoted herself to him so untiringly that I get a little
+nervous about her. I have been urging her to go away and get a change of
+air and scene, if only for a few days. She does not sleep well, and that
+is always a bad thing."
+
+"I think I remember her telling me once that sometimes she had sleepless
+spells," said Theron. "She said that then she banged on her piano at
+all hours, or dragged the cushions about from room to room, like a wild
+woman. A very interesting young lady, don't you find her so?"
+
+Father Forbes let a wan smile play on his lips. "What, our Celia?"
+he said. "Interesting! Why, Mr. Ware, there is no one like her in the
+world. She is as unique as--what shall I say?--as the Irish are among
+races. Her father and mother were both born in mud-cabins, and she--she
+might be the daughter of a hundred kings, except that they seem mostly
+rather under-witted than otherwise. She always impresses me as a sort of
+atavistic idealization of the old Kelt at his finest and best. There in
+Ireland you got a strange mixture of elementary early peoples, walled
+off from the outer world by the four seas, and free to work out their
+own racial amalgam on their own lines. They brought with them at the
+outset a great inheritance of Eastern mysticism. Others lost it, but the
+Irish, all alone on their island, kept it alive and brooded on it, and
+rooted their whole spiritual side in it. Their religion is full of it;
+their blood is full of it; our Celia is fuller of it than anybody else.
+The Ireland of two thousand years ago is incarnated in her. They are the
+merriest people and the saddest, the most turbulent and the most docile,
+the most talented and the most unproductive, the most practical and the
+most visionary, the most devout and the most pagan. These impossible
+contradictions war ceaselessly in their blood. When I look at Celia,
+I seem to see in my mind's eye the fair young-ancestral mother of them
+all."
+
+Theron gazed at the speaker with open admiration. "I love to hear you
+talk," he said simply.
+
+An unbidden memory flitted upward in his mind. Those were the very words
+that Alice had so often on her lips in their old courtship days. How
+curious it was! He looked at the priest, and had a quaint sensation of
+feeling as a romantic woman must feel in the presence of a specially
+impressive masculine personality. It was indeed strange that this
+soft-voiced, portly creature in a gown, with his white, fat hands and
+his feline suavity of manner, should produce such a commanding and
+unique effect of virility. No doubt this was a part of the great sex
+mystery which historically surrounded the figure of the celibate priest
+as with an atmosphere. Women had always been prostrating themselves
+before it. Theron, watching his companion's full, pallid face in the
+lamp-light, tried to fancy himself in the priest's place, looking down
+upon these worshipping female forms. He wondered what the celibate's
+attitude really was. The enigma fascinated him.
+
+Father Forbes, after his rhetorical outburst, and been eating. He pushed
+aside his cheese-plate. "I grow enthusiastic on the subject of my race
+sometimes," he remarked, with the suggestion of an apology. "But I make
+up for it other times--most of the time--by scolding them. If it were
+not such a noble thing to be an Irishman, it would be ridiculous."
+
+"Ah," said Theron, deprecatingly, "who would not be enthusiastic in
+talking of Miss Madden? What you said about her was perfect. As you
+spoke, I was thinking how proud and thankful we ought to be for the
+privilege of knowing her--we who do know her well--although of course
+your friendship with her is vastly more intimate than mine--than mine
+could ever hope to be."
+
+The priest offered no comment, and Theron went on: "I hardly know how to
+describe the remarkable impression she makes upon me. I can't imagine to
+myself any other young woman so brilliant or broad in her views, or so
+courageous. Of course, her being so rich makes it easier for her to do
+just what she wants to do, but her bravery is astonishing all the same.
+We had a long and very sympathetic talk in the woods, that day of the
+picnic, after we left you. I don't know whether she spoke to you about
+it?"
+
+Father Forbes made a movement of the head and eyes which seemed to
+negative the suggestion.
+
+"Her talk," continued Theron, "gave me quite new ideas of the range and
+capacity of the female mind. I wonder that everybody in Octavius isn't
+full of praise and admiration for her talents and exceptional character.
+In such a small town as this, you would think she would be the centre of
+attention--the pride of the place."
+
+"I think she has as much praise as is good for her," remarked the
+priest, quietly.
+
+"And here's a thing that puzzles me," pursued Mr. Ware. "I was immensely
+surprised to find that Dr. Ledsmar doesn't even think she is smart--or
+at least he professes the utmost intellectual contempt for her, and says
+he dislikes her into the bargain. But of course she dislikes him, too,
+so that's only natural. But I can't understand his denying her great
+ability."
+
+The priest smiled in a dubious way. "Don't borrow unnecessary alarm
+about that, Mr. Ware," he said, with studied smoothness of modulated
+tones. "These two good friends of mine have much enjoyment out of
+the idea that they are fighting for the mastery over my poor unstable
+character. It has grown to be a habit with them, and a hobby as well,
+and they pursue it with tireless zest. There are not many intellectual
+diversions open to us here, and they make the most of this one. It
+amuses them, and it is not without its charms for me, in my capacity
+as an interested observer. It is a part of the game that they should
+pretend to themselves that they detest each other. In reality I fancy
+that they like each other very much. At any rate, there is nothing to be
+disturbed about."
+
+His mellifluous tones had somehow the effect of suggesting to Theron
+that he was an outsider and would better mind his own business. Ah, if
+this purring pussy-cat of a priest only knew how little of an outsider
+he really was! The thought gave him an easy self-control.
+
+"Of course," he said, "our warm mutual friendship makes the observation
+of these little individual vagaries merely a part of a delightful whole.
+I should not dream of discussing Miss Madden's confidences to me, or the
+doctor's either, outside our own little group."
+
+Father Forbes reached behind him and took from a chair his black
+three-cornered cap with the tassel. "Unfortunately I have a sick call
+waiting me," he said, gathering up his gown and slowly rising.
+
+"Yes, I saw the man sitting in the hall," remarked Theron, getting to
+his feet.
+
+"I would ask you to go upstairs and wait," the priest went on, "but my
+return, unhappily, is quite uncertain. Another evening I may be more
+fortunate. I am leaving town tomorrow for some days, but when I get
+back--"
+
+The polite sentence did not complete itself. Father Forbes had come out
+into the hall, giving a cool nod to the working-man, who rose from the
+bench as they passed, and shook hands with his guest on the doorstep.
+
+When the door had closed upon Mr. Ware, the priest turned to the man.
+"You have come about those frames," he said. "If you will come upstairs,
+I will show you the prints, and you can give me a notion of what can
+be done with them. I rather fancy the idea of a triptych in carved old
+English, if you can manage it."
+
+After the workman had gone away, Father Forbes put on slippers and an
+old loose soutane, lighted a cigar, and, pushing an easy-chair over to
+the reading lamp, sat down with a book. Then something occurred to him,
+and he touched the house-bell at his elbow.
+
+"Maggie," he said gently, when the housekeeper appeared at the door, "I
+will have the coffee and FINE CHAMPAGNE up here, if it is no trouble.
+And--oh, Maggie--I was compelled this evening to turn the blameless
+visit of the framemaker into a venial sin, and that involves a needless
+wear and tear of conscience. I think that--hereafter--you understand?--I
+am not invariably at home when the Rev. Mr. Ware does me the honor to
+call."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+That night brought the first frost of the season worth counting. In
+the morning, when Theron came downstairs, his casual glance through
+the window caught a desolate picture of blackened dahlia stalks and
+shrivelled blooms. The gayety and color of the garden were gone, and in
+their place was shabby and dishevelled ruin. He flung the sash up and
+leaned out. The nipping autumn air was good to breathe. He looked about
+him, surveying the havoc the frost had wrought among the flowers, and
+smiled.
+
+At breakfast he smiled again--a mirthless and calculated smile. "I
+see that Brother Gorringe's flowers have come to grief over night," he
+remarked.
+
+Alice looked at him before she spoke, and saw on his face a confirmation
+of the hostile hint in his voice. She nodded in a constrained way, and
+said nothing.
+
+"Or rather, I should say," Theron went on, with deliberate words, "the
+late Brother Gorringe's flowers."
+
+"How do you mean--LATE" asked his wife, swiftly.
+
+"Oh, calm yourself!" replied the husband. "He is not dead. He has only
+intimated to me his desire to sever his connection. I may add that he
+did so in a highly offensive manner."
+
+"I am very sorry," said Alice, in a low tone, and with her eyes on her
+plate.
+
+"I took it for granted you would be grieved at his backsliding,"
+remarked Theron, making his phrases as pointed as he could. "He was
+such a promising probationer, and you took such a keen interest in his
+spiritual awakening. But the frost has nipped his zeal--along with the
+hundred or more dollars' worth of flowers by which he testified his
+faith. I find something interesting in their having been blasted
+simultaneously."
+
+Alice dropped all pretence of interest in her breakfast. With a flushed
+face and lips tightly compressed, she made a movement as if to rise from
+her chair. Then, changing her mind, she sat bolt upright and faced her
+husband.
+
+"I think we had better have this out right now," she said, in a voice
+which Theron hardly recognized. "You have been hinting round the subject
+long enough--too long. There are some things nobody is obliged to put
+up with, and this is one of them. You will oblige me by saying out in so
+many words what it is you are driving at."
+
+The outburst astounded Theron. He laid down his knife and fork, and
+gazed at his wife in frank surprise. She had so accustomed him, of late,
+to a demeanor almost abject in its depressed docility that he had quite
+forgotten the Alice of the old days, when she had spirit and courage
+enough for two, and a notable tongue of her own. The flash in her
+eyes and the lines of resolution about her mouth and chin for a moment
+daunted him. Then he observed by a flutter of the frill at her wrist
+that she was trembling.
+
+"I am sure I have nothing to 'say out in so many words,' as you put
+it," he replied, forcing his voice into cool, impassive tones. "I merely
+commented upon a coincidence, that was all. If, for any reason under
+the sun, the subject chances to be unpleasant to you, I have no earthly
+desire to pursue it."
+
+"But I insist upon having it pursued!" returned Alice. "I've had just
+all I can stand of your insinuations and innuendoes, and it's high time
+we had some plain talk. Ever since the revival, you have been dropping
+sly, underhand hints about Mr. Gorringe and--and me. Now I ask you what
+you mean by it."
+
+Yes, there was a shake in her voice, and he could see how her bosom
+heaved in a tremor of nervousness. It was easy for him to be very calm.
+
+"It is you who introduce these astonishing suggestions, not I," he
+replied coldly. "It is you who couple your name with his--somewhat to my
+surprise, I admit--but let me suggest that we drop the subject. You
+are excited just now, and you might say things that you would prefer to
+leave unsaid. It would surely be better for all concerned to say no more
+about it."
+
+Alice, staring across the table at him with knitted brows, emitted a
+sharp little snort of indignation. "Well, I never! Theron, I wouldn't
+have thought it of you!"
+
+"There are so many things you wouldn't have thought, on such a variety
+of subjects," he observed, with a show of resuming his breakfast. "But
+why continue? We are only angering each other."
+
+"Never mind that," she replied, with more control over her speech. "I
+guess things have come to a pass where a little anger won't do any harm.
+I have a right to insist on knowing what you mean by your insinuations."
+
+Theron sighed. "Why will you keep harping on the thing?" he asked
+wearily. "I have displayed no curiosity. I don't ask for any
+explanations. I think I mentioned that the man had behaved insultingly
+to me--but that doesn't matter. I don't bring it up as a grievance. I
+am very well able to take care of myself I have no wish to recur to the
+incident in any way. So far as I am concerned, the topic is dismissed."
+
+"Listen to me!" broke in Alice, with eager gravity. She hesitated, as he
+looked up with a nod of attention, and reflected as well as she was able
+among her thoughts for a minute or two. "This is what I want to say to
+you. Ever since we came to this hateful Octavius, you and I have been
+drifting apart--or no, that doesn't express it--simply rushing away from
+each other. It only began last spring, and now the space between us
+is so wide that we are worse than complete strangers. For strangers at
+least don't hate each other, and I've had a good many occasions lately
+to see that you positively do hate me--"
+
+"What grotesque absurdity" interposed Theron, impatiently.
+
+"No, it isn't absurdity; it's gospel truth," retorted Alice. "And--don't
+interrupt me--there have been times, too, when I have had to ask myself
+if I wasn't getting almost to hate you in return. I tell you this
+frankly."
+
+"Yes, you are undoubtedly frank," commented the husband, toying with his
+teaspoon. "A hypercritical person might consider, almost too frank."
+
+Alice scanned his face closely while he spoke, and held her breath as
+if in expectant suspense. Her countenance clouded once more. "You don't
+realize, Theron," she said gravely; "your voice when you speak to me,
+your look, your manner, they have all changed. You are like another
+man--some man who never loved me, and doesn't even know me, much less
+like me. I want to know what the end of it is to be. Up to the time of
+your sickness last summer, until after the Soulsbys went away, I didn't
+let myself get downright discouraged. It seemed too monstrous for
+belief that you should go away out of my life like that. It didn't seem
+possible that God could allow such a thing. It came to me that I had
+been lax in my Christian life, especially in my position as a minister's
+wife, and that this was my punishment. I went to the altar, to intercede
+with Him, and to try to loose my burden at His feet. But nothing has
+come of it. I got no help from you."
+
+"Really, Alice," broke in Theron, "I explained over and over again to
+you how preoccupied I was--with the book--and affairs generally."
+
+"I got no assistance from Heaven either," she went on, declining the
+diversion he offered. "I don't want to talk impiously, but if there is a
+God, he has forgotten me, his poor heart-broken hand-maiden."
+
+"You are talking impiously, Alice," observed her husband. "And you are
+doing me cruel injustice, into the bargain."
+
+"I only wish I were!" she replied; "I only wish to God I were!"
+
+"Well, then, accept my complete assurance that you ARE--that your whole
+conception of me, and of what you are pleased to describe as my change
+toward you, is an entire and utter mistake. Of course, the married
+state is no more exempt from the universal law of growth, development,
+alteration, than any other human institution. On its spiritual side, of
+course, viewed either as a sacrament, or as--"
+
+"Don't let us go into that," interposed Alice, abruptly. "In fact, there
+is no good in talking any more at all. It is as if we didn't speak the
+same language. You don't understand what I say; it makes no impression
+upon your mind."
+
+"Quite to the contrary," he assured her; "I have been deeply interested
+and concerned in all you have said. I think you are laboring under a
+great delusion, and I have tried my best to convince you of it; but
+I have never heard you speak more intelligibly or, I might say,
+effectively."
+
+A little gleam of softness stole over Alice's face. "If you only gave me
+a little more credit for intelligence," she said, "you would find that I
+am not such a blockhead as you think I am."
+
+"Come, come!" he said, with a smiling show of impatience. "You really
+mustn't impute things to me wholesale, like that."
+
+She was glad to answer the smile in kind. "No; but truly," she pleaded,
+"you don't realize it, but you have grown into a way of treating me as
+if I had absolutely no mind at all."
+
+"You have a very admirable mind," he responded, and took up his teaspoon
+again. She reached for his cup, and poured out hot coffee for him. An
+almost cheerful spirit had suddenly descended upon the breakfast table.
+
+"And now let me say the thing I have been aching to say for months," she
+began in less burdened voice.
+
+He lifted his brows. "Haven't things been discussed pretty fully
+already?" he asked.
+
+The doubtful, harassed expression clouded upon her face at his
+words, and she paused. "No," she said resolutely, after an
+instant's reflection; "it is my duty to discuss this, too. It is a
+misunderstanding all round. You remember that I told you Mr. Gorringe
+had given me some plants, which he got from some garden or other?"
+
+"If you really wish to go on with the subject--yes I have a recollection
+of that particular falsehood of his."
+
+"He did it with the kindest and friendliest motives in the world!"
+protested Alice. "He saw how down-in-the-mouth and moping I was here,
+among these strangers--and I really was getting quite peaked and
+run-down--and he said I stayed indoors too much and it would do me all
+sorts of good to work in the garden, and he would send me some plants.
+The next I knew, here they were, with a book about mixing soils and
+planting, and so on. When I saw him next, and thanked him, I suppose I
+showed some apprehension about his having laid out money on them, and
+he, just to ease my mind, invented the story about his getting them for
+nothing. When I found out the truth--I got it out of that boy, Harvey
+Semple--he admitted it quite frankly--said he was wrong to deceive me."
+
+"This was in the fine first fervor of his term of probation, I suppose,"
+put in Theron. He made no effort to dissemble the sneer in his voice.
+
+"Well," answered Alice, with a touch of acerbity, "I have told you
+now, and it is off my mind. There never would have been the slightest
+concealment about it, if you hadn't begun by keeping me at arm's length,
+and making it next door to impossible to speak to you at all, and if--"
+
+"And if he hadn't lied." Theron, as he finished her sentence for her,
+rose from the table. Dallying for a brief moment by his chair, there
+seemed the magnetic premonition in the air of some further and kindlier
+word. Then he turned and walked sedately into the next room, and closed
+the door behind him. The talk was finished; and Alice, left alone,
+passed the knuckle of her thumb over one swimming eye and then the
+other, and bit her lips and swallowed down the sob that rose in her
+throat.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+It was early afternoon when Theron walked out of his yard, bestowing no
+glance upon the withered and tarnished show of the garden, and started
+with a definite step down the street. The tendency to ruminative
+loitering, which those who saw him abroad always associated with his
+tall, spare figure, was not suggested today. He moved forward like a man
+with a purpose.
+
+All the forenoon in the seclusion of the sitting-room, with a book
+opened before him, he had been thinking hard. It was not the talk with
+Alice that occupied his thoughts. That rose in his mind from time to
+time, only as a disagreeable blur, and he refused to dwell upon it. It
+was nothing to him, he said to himself, what Gorringe's motives in lying
+had been. As for Alice, he hardened his heart against her. Just now
+it was her mood to try and make up to him. But it had been something
+different yesterday, and who could say what it would be tomorrow? He
+really had passed the limit of patience with her shifting emotional
+vagaries, now lurching in this direction, now in that. She had had her
+chance to maintain a hold upon his interest and imagination, and had
+let it slip. These were the accidents of life, the inevitable harsh
+happenings in the great tragedy of Nature. They could not be helped, and
+there was nothing more to be said.
+
+He had bestowed much more attention upon what the priest had said the
+previous evening. He passed in review all the glowing tributes Father
+Forbes had paid to Celia. They warmed his senses as he recalled them,
+but they also, in a curious, indefinite way, caused him uneasiness.
+There had been a personal fervor about them which was something more
+than priestly. He remembered how the priest had turned pale and faltered
+when the question whether Celia would escape the general doom of her
+family came up. It was not a merely pastoral agitation that, he felt
+sure.
+
+A hundred obscure hints, doubts, stray little suspicions, crowded upward
+together in his thoughts. It became apparent to him now that from the
+outset he had been conscious of something queer--yes, from that very
+first day when he saw the priest and Celia together, and noted their
+glance of recognition inside the house of death. He realized now, upon
+reflection, that the tone of other people, his own parishioners and his
+casual acquaintances in Octavius alike, had always had a certain note of
+reservation in it when it touched upon Miss Madden. Her running in and
+out of the pastorate at all hours, the way the priest patted her on
+the shoulder before others, the obvious dislike the priest's ugly old
+housekeeper bore her, the astonishing freedom of their talk with each
+other--these dark memories loomed forth out of a mass of sinister
+conjecture.
+
+He could bear the uncertainty no longer. Was it indeed not entirely his
+own fault that it had existed thus long? No man with the spirit of a
+mouse would have shilly-shallied in this preposterous fashion, week
+after week, with the fever of a beautiful woman's kiss in his blood, and
+the woman herself living only round the corner. The whole world had been
+as good as offered to him--a bewildering world of wealth and beauty and
+spiritual exaltation and love--and he, like a weak fool, had waited for
+it to be brought to him on a salver, as it were, and actually forced
+upon his acceptance! "That is my failing," he reflected; "these
+miserable ecclesiastical bandages of mine have dwarfed my manly side.
+The meanest of Thurston's clerks would have shown a more adventurous
+spirit and a bolder nerve. If I do not act at once, with courage and
+resolution, everything will be lost. Already she must think me unworthy
+of the honor it was in her sweet will to bestow." Then he remembered
+that she was now always at home. "Not another hour of foolish
+indecision!" he whispered to himself. "I will put my destiny to the
+test. I will see her today!"
+
+A middle-aged, plain-faced servant answered his ring at the door-bell
+of the Madden mansion. She was palpably Irish, and looked at him with a
+saddened preoccupation in her gray eyes, holding the door only a little
+ajar.
+
+Theron had got out one of his cards. "I wish to make inquiry about
+young Mr. Madden--Mr. Michael Madden," he said, holding the card forth
+tentatively. "I have only just heard of his illness, and it has been a
+great grief to me."
+
+"He is no better," answered the woman, briefly.
+
+"I am the Rev. Mr. Ware," he went on, "and you may say that, if he is
+well enough, I should be glad to see him."
+
+The servant peered out at him with a suddenly altered expression, then
+shook her head. "I don't think he would be wishing to see YOU," she
+replied. It was evident from her tone that she suspected the visitor's
+intentions.
+
+Theron smiled in spite of himself. "I have not come as a clergyman," he
+explained, "but as a friend of the family. If you will tell Miss Madden
+that I am here, it will do just as well. Yes, we won't bother him. If
+you will kindly hand my card to his sister."
+
+When the domestic turned at this and went in, Theron felt like throwing
+his hat in the air, there where he stood. The woman's churlish sectarian
+prejudices had played ideally into his hands. In no other imaginable way
+could he have asked for Celia so naturally. He wondered a little that a
+servant at such a grand house as this should leave callers standing on
+the doorstep. Still more he wondered what he should say to the lady of
+his dream when he came into her presence.
+
+"Will you please to walk this way?" The woman had returned. She closed
+the door noiselessly behind him, and led the way, not up the sumptuous
+staircase, as Theron had expected, but along through the broad hall,
+past several large doors, to a small curtained archway at the end.
+She pushed aside this curtain, and Theron found himself in a sort of
+conservatory, full of the hot, vague light of sunshine falling through
+ground-glass. The air was moist and close, and heavy with the smell of
+verdure and wet earth. A tall bank of palms, with ferns sprawling at
+their base, reared itself directly in front of him. The floor was of
+mosaic, and he saw now that there were rugs upon it, and that there were
+chairs and sofas, and other signs of habitation. It was, indeed, only
+half a greenhouse, for the lower part of it was in rosewood panels, with
+floral paintings on them, like a room.
+
+Moving to one side of the barrier of palms, he discovered, to his great
+surprise, the figure of Michael, sitting propped up with pillows in
+a huge easy-chair. The sick man was looking at him with big, gravely
+intent eyes. His face did not show as much change as Theron had in fancy
+pictured. It had seemed almost as bony and cadaverous on the day of the
+picnic. The hands spread out on the chair-arms were very white and
+thin, though, and the gaze in the blue eyes had a spectral quality which
+disturbed him.
+
+Michael raised his right hand, and Theron, stepping forward, took it
+limply in his for an instant. Then he laid it down again. The touch of
+people about to die had always been repugnant to him. He could feel on
+his own warm palm the very damp of the grave.
+
+"I only heard from Father Forbes last evening of your--your ill-health,"
+he said, somewhat hesitatingly. He seated himself on a bench beneath
+the palms, facing the invalid, but still holding his hat. "I hope very
+sincerely that you will soon be all right again."
+
+"My sister is lying down in her room," answered Michael. He had not once
+taken his sombre and embarrassing gaze from the other's face. The voice
+in which he uttered this uncalled-for remark was thin in fibre, cold
+and impassive. It fell upon Theron's ears with a suggestion of hidden
+meaning. He looked uneasily into Michael's eyes, and then away again.
+They seemed to be looking straight through him, and there was no
+shirking the sensation that they saw and comprehended things with an
+unnatural prescience.
+
+"I hope she is feeling better," Theron found himself saying. "Father
+Forbes mentioned that she was a little under the weather. I dined with
+him last night."
+
+"I am glad that you came," said Michael, after a little pause. His
+earnest, unblinking eyes seemed to supplement his tongue with speech of
+their own. "I do be thinking a great deal about you. I have matters to
+speak of to you, now that you are here."
+
+Theron bowed his head gently, in token of grateful attention. He tried
+the experiment of looking away from Michael, but his glance went back
+again irresistibly, and fastened itself upon the sick man's gaze, and
+clung there.
+
+"I am next door to a dead man," he went on, paying no heed to the
+other's deprecatory gesture. "It is not years or months with me, but
+weeks. Then I go away to stand up for judgment on my sins, and if it is
+His merciful will, I shall see God. So I say my good-byes now, and so
+you will let me speak plainly, and not think ill of what I say. You
+are much changed, Mr. Ware, since you came to Octavius, and it is not a
+change for the good."
+
+Theron lifted his brows in unaffected surprise, and put inquiry into his
+glance.
+
+"I don't know if Protestants will be saved, in God's good time, or not,"
+continued Michael. "I find there are different opinions among the clergy
+about that, and of course it is not for me, only a plain mechanic, to be
+sure where learned and pious scholars are in doubt. But I am sure about
+one thing. Those Protestants, and others too, mind you, who profess
+and preach good deeds, and themselves do bad deeds--they will never be
+saved. They will have no chance at all to escape hell-fire."
+
+"I think we are all agreed upon that, Mr. Madden," said Theron, with
+surface suavity.
+
+"Then I say to you, Mr. Ware, you are yourself in a bad path. Take the
+warning of a dying man, sir, and turn from it!"
+
+The impulse to smile tugged at Theron's facial muscles. This was
+really too droll. He looked up at the ceiling, the while he forced his
+countenance into a polite composure, then turned again to Michael, with
+some conciliatory commonplace ready for utterance. But he said nothing,
+and all suggestion of levity left his mind, under the searching
+inspection bent upon him by the young man's hollow eyes. What did
+Michael suspect? What did he know? What was he hinting at, in this
+strange talk of his?
+
+"I saw you often on the street when first you came here," continued
+Michael. "I knew the man who was here before you--that is, by sight--and
+he was not a good man. But your face, when you came, pleased me. I liked
+to look at you. I was tormented just then, do you see, that so many
+decent, kindly people, old school-mates and friends and neighbors of
+mine--and, for that matter, others all over the country must lose their
+souls because they were Protestants. At my boyhood and young manhood,
+that thought took the joy out of me. Sometimes I usen't to sleep a whole
+night long, for thinking that some lad I had been playing with, perhaps
+in his own house, that very day, would be taken when he died, and his
+mother too, when she died, and thrown into the flames of hell for
+all eternity. It made me so unhappy that finally I wouldn't go to any
+Protestant boy's house, and have his mother be nice to me, and give me
+cake and apples--and me thinking all the while that they were bound to
+be damned, no matter how good they were to me."
+
+The primitive humanity of this touched Theron, and he nodded approbation
+with a tender smile in his eyes, forgetting for the moment that a
+personal application of the monologue had been hinted at.
+
+"But then later, as I grew up," the sick man went on, "I learned that it
+was not altogether certain. Some of the authorities, I found, maintained
+that it was doubtful, and some said openly that there must be salvation
+possible for good people who lived in ignorance of the truth through no
+fault of their own. Then I had hope one day, and no hope the next, and
+as I did my work I thought it over, and in the evenings my father and
+I talked it over, and we settled nothing of it at all. Of course, how
+could we?"
+
+"Did you ever discuss the question with your sister?" it occurred
+suddenly to Theron to interpose. He was conscious of some daring in
+doing so, and he fancied that Michael's drawn face clouded a little at
+his words.
+
+"My sister is no theologian," he answered briefly. "Women have no call
+to meddle with such matters. But I was saying--it was in the middle of
+these doubtings of mine that you came here to Octavius, and I noticed
+you on the streets, and once in the evening--I made no secret of it to
+my people--I sat in the back of your church and heard you preach. As I
+say, I liked you. It was your face, and what I thought it showed of the
+man underneath it, that helped settle my mind more than anything else. I
+said to myself: 'Here is a young man, only about my own age, and he has
+education and talents, and he does not seek to make money for himself,
+or a great name, but he is content to live humbly on the salary of a
+book-keeper, and devote all his time to prayer and the meditation of
+his religion, and preaching, and visiting the sick and the poor, and
+comforting them. His very face is a pleasure and a help for those in
+suffering and trouble to look at. The very sight of it makes one believe
+in pure thoughts and merciful deeds. I will not credit it that God
+intends damning such a man as that, or any like him!'"
+
+Theron bowed, with a slow, hesitating gravity of manner, and deep, not
+wholly complacent, attention on his face. Evidently all this was by way
+of preparation for something unpleasant.
+
+"That was only last spring," said Michael. His tired voice sank for
+a sentence or two into a meditative half-whisper. "And it was MY last
+spring of all. I shall not be growing weak any more, or drawing hard
+breaths, when the first warm weather comes. It will be one season to
+me hereafter, always the same." He lifted his voice with perceptible
+effort. "I am talking too much. The rest I can say in a word. Only half
+a year has gone by, and you have another face on you entirely. I had
+noticed the small changes before, one by one. I saw the great change,
+all of a sudden, the day of the picnic. I see it a hundred times more
+now, as you sit there. If it seemed to me like the face of a saint
+before, it is more like the face of a bar-keeper now!"
+
+This was quite too much. Theron rose, flushed to the temples, and
+scowled down at the helpless man in the chair. He swallowed the sharp
+words which came uppermost, and bit and moistened his lips as he forced
+himself to remember that this was a dying man, and Celia's brother, to
+whom she was devoted, and whom he himself felt he wanted to be very fond
+of. He got the shadow of a smile on to his countenance.
+
+"I fear you HAVE tired yourself unduly," he said, in as non-contentious
+a tone as he could manage. He even contrived a little deprecatory laugh.
+"I am afraid your real quarrel is with the air of Octavius. It agrees
+with me so wonderfully--I am getting as fat as a seal. But I do hope I
+am not paying for it by such a wholesale deterioration inside. If my own
+opinion could be of any value, I should assure you that I feel myself
+an infinitely better and broader and stronger man than I was when I came
+here."
+
+Michael shook his head dogmatically. "That is the greatest pity of all,"
+he said, with renewed earnestness. "You are entirely deceived about
+yourself. You do not at all realize how you have altered your direction,
+or where you are going. It was a great misfortune for you, sir, that
+you did not keep among your own people. That poor half-brother of mine,
+though the drink was in him when he said that same to you, never spoke
+a truer word. Keep among your own people, Mr. Ware! When you go among
+others--you know what I mean--you have no proper understanding of what
+their sayings and doings really mean. You do not realize that they are
+held up by the power of the true Church, as a little child learning to
+walk is held up with a belt by its nurse. They can say and do things,
+and no harm at all come to them, which would mean destruction to you,
+because they have help, and you are walking alone. And so be said by me,
+Mr. Ware! Go back to the way you were brought up in, and leave alone the
+people whose ways are different from yours. You are a married man, and
+you are the preacher of a religion, such as it is. There can be nothing
+better for you than to go and strive to be a good husband, and to set a
+good example to the people of your Church, who look up to you--and mix
+yourself up no more with outside people and outside notions that only do
+you mischief. And that is what I wanted to say to you."
+
+Theron took up his hat. "I take in all kindness what you have felt it
+your duty to say to me, Mr. Madden," he said. "I am not sure that I have
+altogether followed you, but I am very sure you mean it well."
+
+"I mean well by you," replied Michael, wearily moving his head on the
+pillow, and speaking in an undertone of languor and pain, "and I mean
+well by others, that are nearer to me, and that I have a right to care
+more about. When a man lies by the site of his open grave, he does not
+be meaning ill to any human soul."
+
+"Yes--thanks--quite so!" faltered Theron. He dallied for an instant
+with the temptation to seek some further explanation, but the sight of
+Michael's half-closed eyes and worn-out expression decided him against
+it. It did not seem to be expected, either, that he should shake hands,
+and with a few perfunctory words of hope for the invalid's recovery,
+which fell with a jarring note of falsehood upon his own ears, he turned
+and left the room. As he did so, Michael touched a bell on the table
+beside him.
+
+Theron drew a long breath in the hall, as the curtain fell behind him.
+It was an immense relief to escape from the oppressive humidity and heat
+of the flower-room, and from that ridiculous bore of a Michael as well.
+
+The middle-aged, grave-faced servant, warned by the bell, stood waiting
+to conduct him to the door.
+
+"I am sorry to have missed Miss Madden," he said to her. "She must be
+quite worn out. Perhaps later in the day--"
+
+"She will not be seeing anybody today," returned the woman. "She is
+going to New York this evening, and she is taking some rest against the
+journey."
+
+"Will she be away long?" he asked mechanically. The servant's answer, "I
+have no idea," hardly penetrated his consciousness at all.
+
+He moved down the steps, and along the gravel to the street, in a maze
+of mental confusion. When he reached the sidewalk, under the familiar
+elms, he paused, and made a definite effort to pull his thoughts
+together, and take stock of what had happened, of what was going to
+happen; but the thing baffled him. It was as if some drug had stupefied
+his faculties.
+
+He began to walk, and gradually saw that what he was thinking about was
+the fact of Celia's departure for New York that evening. He stared
+at this fact, at first in its nakedness, then clothed with reassuring
+suggestions that this was no doubt a trip she very often made. There was
+a blind sense of comfort in this idea, and he rested himself upon it.
+Yes, of course, she travelled a great deal. New York must be as familiar
+to her as Octavius was to him. Her going there now was quite a matter of
+course--the most natural thing in the world.
+
+Then there burst suddenly uppermost in his mind the other fact--that
+Father Forbes was also going to New York that evening. The two things
+spindled upward, side by side, yet separately, in his mental vision;
+then they twisted and twined themselves together. He followed their
+convolutions miserably, walking as if his eyes were shut.
+
+In slow fashion matters defined and arranged themselves before him.
+The process of tracing their sequence was all torture, but there was no
+possibility, no notion, of shirking any detail of the pain. The priest
+had spoken of his efforts to persuade Celia to go away for a few days,
+for rest and change of air and scene. He must have known only too well
+that she was going, but of that he had been careful to drop no hint. The
+possibility of accident was too slight to be worth considering. People
+on such intimate terms as Celia and the priest--people with such
+facilities for seeing each other whenever they desired--did not find
+themselves on the same train of cars, with the same long journey in
+view, by mere chance.
+
+Theron walked until dusk began to close in upon the autumn day. It grew
+colder, as he turned his face homeward. He wondered if it would freeze
+again over-night, and then remembered the shrivelled flowers in his
+wife's garden. For a moment they shaped themselves in a picture before
+his mind's eye; he saw their blackened foliage, their sicklied, drooping
+stalks, and wilted blooms, and as he looked, they restored themselves to
+the vigor and grace and richness of color of summer-time, as vividly as
+if they had been painted on a canvas. Or no, the picture he stared at
+was not on canvas, but on the glossy, varnished panel of a luxurious
+sleeping-car. He shook his head angrily and blinked his eyes again and
+again, to prevent their seeing, seated together in the open window above
+this panel, the two people he knew were there, gloved and habited for
+the night's journey, waiting for the train to start.
+
+
+
+"Very much to my surprise," he found himself saying to Alice, watching
+her nervously as she laid the supper-table, "I find I must go to Albany
+tonight. That is, it isn't absolutely necessary, for that matter, but
+I think it may easily turn out to be greatly to my advantage to go.
+Something has arisen--I can't speak about it as yet--but the sooner I
+see the Bishop about it the better. Things like that occur in a man's
+life, where boldly striking out a line of action, and following it up
+without an instant's delay, may make all the difference in the world
+to him. Tomorrow it might be too late; and, besides, I can be home the
+sooner again."
+
+Alice's face showed surprise, but no trace of suspicion. She spoke with
+studied amiability during the meal, and deferred with such unexpected
+tact to his implied desire not to be questioned as to the mysterious
+motives of the journey, that his mood instinctively softened and warmed
+toward her, as they finished supper.
+
+He smiled a little. "I do hope I shan't have to go on tomorrow to New
+York; but these Bishops of ours are such gad-abouts one never knows
+where to catch them. As like as not Sanderson may be down in New York,
+on Book-Concern business or something; and if he is, I shall have to
+chase him up. But, after all, perhaps the trip will do me good--the
+change of air and scene, you know."
+
+"I'm sure I hope so," said Alice, honestly enough. "If you do go on to
+New York, I suppose you'll go by the river-boat. Everybody talks so much
+of that beautiful sail down the Hudson."
+
+"That's an idea!" exclaimed Theron, welcoming it with enthusiasm. "It
+hadn't occurred to me. If I do have to go, and it is as lovely as they
+make out, the next time I promise I won't go without you, my girl. I
+HAVE been rather out of sorts lately," he continued. "When I come back,
+I daresay I shall be feeling better, more like my old self. Then I'm
+going to try, Alice, to be nicer to you than I have been of late. I'm
+afraid there was only too much truth in what you said this morning."
+
+"Never mind what I said this morning--or any other time," broke in
+Alice, softly. "Don't ever remember it again, Theron, if only--only--"
+
+He rose as she spoke, moved round the table to where she sat, and,
+bending over her, stopped the faltering sentence with a kiss. When was
+it, he wondered, that he had last kissed her? It seemed years, ages,
+ago.
+
+An hour later, with hat and overcoat on, and his valise in his hand, he
+stood on the doorstep of the parsonage, and kissed her once more before
+he turned and descended into the darkness. He felt like whistling as his
+feet sounded firmly on the plank sidewalk beyond the gate. It seemed as
+if he had never been in such capital good spirits before in his life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+The train was at a standstill somewhere, and the dull, ashen beginnings
+of daylight had made a first feeble start toward effacing the lamps in
+the car-roof, when the new day opened for Theron. A man who had just
+come in stopped at the seat upon which he had been stretched through the
+night, and, tapping him brusquely on the knee, said, "I'm afraid I must
+trouble you, sir." After a moment of sleep-burdened confusion, he sat
+up, and the man took the other half of the seat and opened a newspaper,
+still damp from the press. It was morning, then.
+
+Theron rubbed a clear space upon the clouded window with his thumb, and
+looked out. There was nothing to be seen but a broad stretch of tracks,
+and beyond this the shadowed outlines of wagons and machinery in a yard,
+with a background of factory buildings.
+
+The atmosphere in the car was vile beyond belief. He thought of opening
+the window, but feared that the peremptory-looking man with the paper,
+who had wakened him and made him sit up, might object. They were the
+only people in the car who were sitting up. Backwards and forwards,
+on either side of the narrow aisle, the dim light disclosed recumbent
+forms, curled uncomfortably into corners, or sprawling at difficult
+angles which involved the least interference with one another. Here and
+there an upturned face gave a livid patch of surface for the mingled
+play of the gray dawn and the yellow lamp-light. A ceaseless noise of
+snoring was in the air.
+
+He got up and walked to the tank of ice-water at the end of the aisle,
+and took a drink from the most inaccessible portion of the common
+tin-cup's rim. The happy idea of going out on the platform struck him,
+and he acted upon it. The morning air was deliciously cool and fresh
+by contrast, and he filled his lungs with it again and again. Standing
+here, he could discern beyond the buildings to the right the faint
+purplish outlines of great rounded hills. Some workmen, one of them
+bearing a torch, were crouching along under the side of the train,
+pounding upon the resonant wheels with small hammers. He recalled having
+heard the same sound in the watches of the night, during a prolonged
+halt. Some one had said it was Albany. He smiled in spite of himself at
+the thought that Bishop Sanderson would never know about the visit he
+had missed.
+
+Swinging himself to the ground, he bent sidewise and looked forward down
+the long train. There were five, six, perhaps more, sleeping-cars on
+in front. Which one of them, he wondered--and then there came the sharp
+"All aboard!" from the other side, and he bundled up the steps again,
+and entered the car as the train slowly resumed its progress.
+
+He was wide-awake now, and quite at his ease. He took his seat, and
+diverted himself by winking gravely at a little child facing him on the
+next seat but one. There were four other children in the family party,
+encamped about the tired and still sleeping mother whose back was turned
+to Theron. He recalled now having noticed this poor woman last night,
+in the first stage of his journey--how she fed her brood from one of the
+numerous baskets piled under their feet, and brought water in a tin dish
+of her own from the tank to use in washing their faces with a rag, and
+loosened their clothes to dispose them for the night's sleep. The face
+of the woman, her manner and slatternly aspect, and the general effect
+of her belongings, bespoke squalid ignorance and poverty. Watching her,
+Theron had felt curiously interested in the performance. In one sense,
+it was scarcely more human than the spectacle of a cat licking her
+kittens, or a cow giving suck to her calf. Yet, in another, was there
+anything more human?
+
+The child who had wakened before the rest regarded him with placidity,
+declining to be amused by his winkings, but exhibiting no other emotion.
+She had been playing by herself with a couple of buttons tied on
+a string, and after giving a civil amount of attention to Theron's
+grimaces, she turned again to the superior attractions of this toy. Her
+self-possession, her capacity for self-entertainment, the care she took
+not to arouse the others, all impressed him very much. He felt in his
+pocket for a small coin, and, reaching forward, offered it to her. She
+took it calmly, bestowed a tranquil gaze upon him for a moment, and went
+back to the buttons. Her indifference produced an unpleasant sensation
+upon him somehow, and he rubbed the steaming window clear again, and
+stared out of it.
+
+The wide river lay before him, flanked by a precipitous wall of
+cliffs which he knew instantly must be the Palisades. There was an
+advertisement painted on them which he tried in vain to read. He was
+surprised to find they interested him so slightly. He had heard all his
+life of the Hudson, and especially of it just at this point. The reality
+seemed to him almost commonplace. His failure to be thrilled depressed
+him for the moment.
+
+"I suppose those ARE the Palisades?" he asked his neighbor.
+
+The man glanced up from his paper, nodded, and made as if to resume his
+reading. But his eye had caught something in the prospect through the
+window which arrested his attention. "By George!" he exclaimed, and
+lifted himself to get a clearer view.
+
+"What is it?" asked Theron, peering forth as well.
+
+"Nothing; only Barclay Wendover's yacht is still there. There's been a
+hitch of some sort. They were to have left yesterday."
+
+"Is that it--that long black thing?" queried Theron. "That can't be a
+yacht, can it?"
+
+"What do you think it is?" answered the other. They were looking at a
+slim, narrow hull, lying at anchor, silent and motionless on the drab
+expanse of water. "If that ain't a yacht, they haven't begun building
+any yet. They're taking her over to the Mediterranean for a cruise, you
+know--around India and Japan for the winter, and home by the South Sea
+islands. Friend o' mine's in the party. Wouldn't mind the trip myself."
+
+"But do you mean to say," asked Theron, "that that little shell of a
+thing can sail across the ocean? Why, how many people would she hold?"
+
+The man laughed. "Well," he said, "there's room for two sets of
+quadrilles in the chief saloon, if the rest keep their legs well up on
+the sofas. But there's only ten or a dozen in the party this time.
+More than that rather get in one another's way, especially with so many
+ladies on board."
+
+Theron asked no more questions, but bent his head to see the last of
+this wonderful craft. The sight of it, and what he had heard about it,
+suddenly gave point and focus to his thoughts. He knew at last what it
+was that had lurked, formless and undesignated, these many days in the
+background of his dreams. The picture rose in his mind now of Celia as
+the mistress of a yacht. He could see her reclining in a low easy-chair
+upon the polished deck, with the big white sails billowing behind her,
+and the sun shining upon the deep blue waves, and glistening through the
+splash of spray in the air, and weaving a halo of glowing gold about
+her fair head. Ah, how the tender visions crowded now upon him! Eternal
+summer basked round this enchanted yacht of his fancy--summer sought
+now in Scottish firths or Norwegian fiords, now in quaint old Southern
+harbors, ablaze with the hues of strange costumes and half-tropical
+flowers and fruits, now in far-away Oriental bays and lagoons, or among
+the coral reefs and palm-trees of the luxurious Pacific. He dwelt upon
+these new imaginings with the fervent longing of an inland-born boy.
+Every vague yearning he had ever felt toward salt-water stirred again in
+his blood at the thought of the sea--with Celia.
+
+Why not? She had never visited any foreign land. "Sometime," she had
+said, "sometime, no doubt I will." He could hear again the wistful,
+musing tone of her voice. The thought had fascinations for her, it was
+clear. How irresistibly would it not appeal to her, presented with the
+added charm of a roving, vagrant independence on the high seas, free
+to speed in her snow-winged chariot wherever she willed over the deep,
+loitering in this place, or up-helm-and-away to another, with no more
+care or weight of responsibility than the gulls tossing through the air
+in her wake!
+
+Theron felt, rather than phrased to himself, that there would not be
+"ten or a dozen in the party" on that yacht. Without defining anything
+in his mind, he breathed in fancy the same bold ocean breeze which
+filled the sails, and toyed with Celia's hair; he looked with her as she
+sat by the rail, and saw the same waves racing past, the same vast dome
+of cloud and ether that were mirrored in her brown eyes, and there was
+no one else anywhere near them. Even the men in sailors' clothes,
+who would be pulling at ropes, or climbing up tarred ladders, kept
+themselves considerately outside the picture. Only Celia sat there, and
+at her feet, gazing up again into her face as in the forest, the man
+whose whole being had been consecrated to her service, her worship, by
+the kiss.
+
+"You've passed it now. I was trying to point out the Jumel house to
+you--where Aaron Burr lived, you know."
+
+Theron roused himself from his day-dream, and nodded with a confused
+smile at his neighbor. "Thanks," he faltered; "I didn't hear you. The
+train makes such a noise, and I must have been dozing."
+
+He looked about him. The night aspect, as of a tramps' lodging-house,
+had quite disappeared from the car. Everybody was sitting up; and the
+more impatient were beginning to collect their bundles and hand-bags
+from the racks and floor. An expressman came through, jangling a huge
+bunch of brass checks on leathern thongs over his arm, and held parley
+with passengers along the aisle. Outside, citified streets, with stores
+and factories, were alternating in the moving panorama with open fields;
+and, even as he looked, these vacant spaces ceased altogether, and
+successive regular lines of pavement, between two tall rows of houses
+all alike, began to stretch out, wheel to the right, and swing off out
+of view, for all the world like the avenues of hop-poles he remembered
+as a boy. Then was a long tunnel, its darkness broken at stated
+intervals by brief bursts of daylight from overhead, and out of this all
+at once the train drew up its full length in some vast, vaguely lighted
+enclosure, and stopped.
+
+"Yes, this is New York," said the man, folding up his paper, and
+springing to his feet. The narrow aisle was filled with many others who
+had been prompter still; and Theron stood, bag in hand, waiting till
+this energetic throng should have pushed itself bodily past him forth
+from the car. Then he himself made his way out, drifting with a sense of
+helplessness in their resolute wake. There rose in his mind the sudden
+conviction that he would be too late. All the passengers in the forward
+sleepers would be gone before he could get there. Yet even this terror
+gave him no new power to get ahead of anybody else in the tightly packed
+throng.
+
+Once on the broad platform, the others started off briskly; they all
+seemed to know just where they wanted to go, and to feel that no instant
+of time was to be lost in getting there. Theron himself caught some of
+this urgent spirit, and hurled himself along in the throng with reckless
+haste, knocking his bag against peoples' legs, but never pausing for
+apology or comment until he found himself abreast of the locomotive at
+the head of the train. He drew aside from the main current here, and
+began searching the platform, far and near, for those he had travelled
+so far to find.
+
+The platform emptied itself. Theron lingered on in puzzled hesitation,
+and looked about him. In the whole immense station, with its acres of
+tracks and footways, and its incessantly shifting processions of people,
+there was visible nobody else who seemed also in doubt, or who appeared
+capable of sympathizing with indecision in any form. Another train came
+in, some way over to the right, and before it had fairly stopped,
+swarms of eager men began boiling out of each end of each car, literally
+precipitating themselves over one another, it seemed to Theron, in their
+excited dash down the steps. As they caught their footing below, they
+started racing pell-mell down the platform to its end; there he saw
+them, looking more than ever like clustered bees in the distance,
+struggling vehemently in a dense mass up a staircase in the remote
+corner of the building.
+
+"What are those folks running for? Is there a fire?" he asked an
+amiable-faced young mulatto, in the uniform of the sleeping-car service,
+who passed him with some light hand-bags.
+
+"No; they's Harlem people, I guess--jes' catchin' the Elevated--that's
+all, sir," he answered obligingly.
+
+At the moment some passengers emerged slowly from one of the
+sleeping-cars, and came loitering toward him.
+
+"Why, are there people still in these cars?" he asked eagerly. "Haven't
+they all gone?"
+
+"Some has; some ain't," the porter replied. "They most generally take
+their time about it. They ain't no hurry, so long's they get out 'fore
+we're drawn round to the drill-yard."
+
+There was still hope, then. Theron took up his bag and walked forward,
+intent upon finding some place from which he could watch unobserved the
+belated stragglers issuing from the sleeping-cars. He started back
+all at once, confronted by a semi-circle of violent men with whips
+and badges, who stunned his hearing by a sudden vociferous outburst of
+shouts and yells. They made furious gestures at him with their whips
+and fists, to enforce the incoherent babel of their voices; and in these
+gestures, as in their faces and cries, there seemed a great deal of
+menace and very little invitation. There was a big policeman sauntering
+near by, and Theron got the idea that it was his presence alone which
+protected him from open violence at the hands of these savage hackmen.
+He tightened his clutch on his valise, and, turning his back on them
+and their uproar, tried to brave it out and stand where he was. But the
+policeman came lounging slowly toward him, with such authority in his
+swaying gait, and such urban omniscience written all over his broad,
+sandy face, that he lost heart, and beat an abrupt retreat off to the
+right, where there were a number of doorways, near which other people
+had ventured to put down baggage on the floor.
+
+Here, somewhat screened from observation, he stood for a long time,
+watching at odd moments the ceaselessly varying phases of the strange
+scene about him, but always keeping an eye on the train he had himself
+arrived in. It was slow and dispiriting work. A dozen times his heart
+failed him, and he said to himself mournfully that he had had his
+journey for nothing. Then some new figure would appear, alighting from
+the steps of a sleeper, and hope revived in his breast.
+
+At last, when over half an hour of expectancy had been marked off by the
+big clock overhead, his suspense came to an end. He saw Father Forbes'
+erect and substantial form, standing on the car platform nearest of
+all, balancing himself with his white hands on the rails, waiting for
+something. Then after a little he came down, followed by a black porter,
+whose arms were burdened by numerous bags and parcels. The two stood
+a minute or so more in hesitation at the side of the steps. Then Celia
+descended, and the three advanced.
+
+The importance of not being discovered was uppermost in Theron's mind,
+now that he saw them actually coming toward him. He had avoided this the
+previous evening, in the Octavius depot, with some skill, he flattered
+himself. It gave him a pleasurable sense of being a man of affairs,
+almost a detective, to be confronted by the necessity now of baffling
+observation once again. He was still rather without plans for keeping
+them in view, once they left the station. He had supposed that he would
+be able to hear what hotel they directed their driver to take them to,
+and, failing that, he had fostered a notion, based upon a story he had
+read when a boy, of throwing himself into another carriage, and bidding
+his driver to pursue them in hot haste, and on his life not fail to
+track them down. These devices seemed somewhat empty, now that the
+urgent moment was at hand; and as he drew back behind some other
+loiterers, out of view, he sharply racked his wits for some way of
+coping with this most pressing problem.
+
+It turned out, however, that there was no difficulty at all. Father
+Forbes and Celia seemed to have no use for the hackmen, but moved
+straight forward toward the street, through the doorway next to that
+in which Theron cowered. He stole round, and followed them at a safe
+distance, making Celia's hat, and the portmanteau perched on the
+shoulder of the porter behind her, his guides. To his surprise, they
+still kept on their course when they had reached the sidewalk, and went
+over the pavement across an open square which spread itself directly
+in front of the station. Hanging as far behind as he dared, he saw them
+pass to the other sidewalk diagonally opposite, proceed for a block or
+so along this, and then separate at a corner. Celia and the negro lad
+went down a side street, and entered the door of a vast, tall red-brick
+building which occupied the whole block. The priest, turning on his
+heel, came back again and went boldly up the broad steps of the front
+entrance to this same structure, which Theron now discovered to be the
+Murray Hill Hotel.
+
+Fortune had indeed favored him. He not only knew where they were, but he
+had been himself a witness to the furtive way in which they entered
+the house by different doors. Nothing in his own limited experience of
+hotels helped him to comprehend the notion of a separate entrance
+for ladies and their luggage. He did not feel quite sure about the
+significance of what he had observed, in his own mind. But it was
+apparent to him that there was something underhanded about it.
+
+After lingering awhile on the steps of the hotel, and satisfying himself
+by peeps through the glass doors that the coast was clear, he ventured
+inside. The great corridor contained many people, coming, going, or
+standing about, but none of them paid any attention to him. At last
+he made up his mind, and beckoned a colored boy to him from a group
+gathered in the shadows of the big central staircase. Explaining that
+he did not at that moment wish a room, but desired to leave his bag, the
+boy took him to a cloak-room, and got him a check for the thing. With
+this in his pocket he felt himself more at his ease, and turned to walk
+away. Then suddenly he wheeled, and, bending his body over the counter
+of the cloak-room, astonished the attendant inside by the eagerness with
+which he scrutinized the piled rows of portmanteaus, trunks, overcoats,
+and bundles in the little enclosure.
+
+"What is it you want? Here's your bag, if you're looking for that," this
+man said to him.
+
+"No, thanks; it's nothing," replied Theron, straightening himself again.
+He had had a narrow escape. Father Forbes and Celia, walking side by
+side, had come down the small passage in which he stood, and had passed
+him so closely that he had felt her dress brush against him. Fortunately
+he had seen them in time, and by throwing himself half into the
+cloak-room, had rendered recognition impossible.
+
+He walked now in the direction they had taken, till he came to the
+polite colored man at an open door on the left, who was bowing people
+into the breakfast room. Standing in the doorway, he looked about him
+till his eye lighted upon his two friends, seated at a small table by
+a distant window, with a black waiter, card in hand, bending over in
+consultation with them.
+
+Returning to the corridor, he made bold now to march up to the desk and
+examine the register. The priest's name was not there. He found only the
+brief entry, "Miss Madden, Octavius," written, not by her, but by Father
+Forbes. On the line were two numbers in pencil, with an "and" between
+them. An indirect question to one of the clerks helped him to an
+explanation of this. When there were two numbers, it meant that the
+guest in question had a parlor as well as a bedroom.
+
+Here he drew a long, satisfied breath, and turned away. The first half
+of his quest stood completed--and that much more fully and easily than
+he had dared to hope. He could not but feel a certain new respect for
+himself as a man of resource and energy. He had demonstrated that people
+could not fool with him with impunity.
+
+It remained to decide what he would do with his discovery, now that
+it had been so satisfactorily made. As yet, he had given this hardly a
+thought. Even now, it did not thrust itself forward as a thing demanding
+instant attention. It was much more important, first of all, to get a
+good breakfast. He had learned that there was another and less formal
+eating-place, downstairs in the basement by the bar, with an entrance
+from the street. He walked down by the inner stairway instead, feeling
+himself already at home in the big hotel. He ordered an ample breakfast,
+and came out while it was being served to wash and have his boots
+blacked, and he gave the man a quarter of a dollar. His pockets were
+filled with silver quarters, half-dollars, and dollars almost to a
+burdensome point, and in his valise was a bag full of smaller change,
+including many rolls of copper cents which Alice always counted and
+packed up on Mondays. In the hurry of leaving he had brought with him
+the church collections for the past two weeks. It occurred to him that
+he must keep a strict account of his expenditure. Meanwhile he gave ten
+cents to another man in a silk-sleeved cardigan jacket, who had merely
+stood by and looked at him while his boots were being polished. There
+was a sense of metropolitan affluence in the very atmosphere.
+
+The little table in the adjoining room, on which Theron found his meal
+in waiting for him, seemed a vision of delicate napery and refined
+appointments in his eyes. He was wolfishly hungry, and the dishes he
+looked upon gave him back assurances by sight and smell that he was very
+happy as well. The servant in attendance had an extremely white apron
+and a kindly black face. He bowed when Theron looked at him, with the
+air of a lifelong admirer and humble friend.
+
+"I suppose you'll have claret with your breakfast, sir?" he remarked, as
+if it were a matter of course.
+
+"Why, certainly," answered Theron, stretching his legs contentedly
+under the table, and tucking the corner of his napkin in his
+neckband.--"Certainly, my good man."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+At ten o'clock Theron, loitering near the bookstall in the corridor, saw
+Father Forbes come downstairs, pass out through the big front doors, get
+into a carriage, and drive away.
+
+This relieved him of a certain sense of responsibility, and he retired
+to a corner sofa and sat down. The detective side of him being off duty,
+so to speak, there was leisure at last for reflection upon the other
+aspects of his mission. Yes; it was high time for him to consider what
+he should do next.
+
+It was easier to recognize this fact, however, than to act upon it.
+His mind was full of tricksy devices for eluding this task of serious
+thought which he sought to impose upon it. It seemed so much pleasanter
+not to think at all--but just to drift. He found himself watching with
+envy the men who, as they came out from their breakfast, walked over to
+the bookstall, and bought cigars from the row of boxes nestling there
+among the newspaper piles. They had such evident delight in the work
+of selection; they took off the ends of the cigars so carefully, and
+lighted them with such meditative attention,--he could see that he was
+wofully handicapped by not knowing how to smoke. He had had the most
+wonderful breakfast of his life, but even in the consciousness of
+comfortable repletion which pervaded his being, there was an obstinate
+sense of something lacking. No doubt a good cigar was the thing needed
+to round out the perfection of such a breakfast. He half rose once,
+fired by a sudden resolution to go over and get one. But of course that
+was nonsense; it would only make him sick. He sat down, and determinedly
+set himself to thinking.
+
+The effort finally brought fruit--and of a kind which gave him a very
+unhappy quarter of an hour. The lover part of him was uppermost now,
+insistently exposing all its raw surfaces to the stings and scalds of
+jealousy. Up to this moment, his brain had always evaded the direct
+question of how he and the priest relatively stood in Celia's
+estimation. It forced itself remorselessly upon him now; and his
+thoughts, so far from shirking the subject, seemed to rise up to meet
+it. It was extremely unpleasant, all this.
+
+But then a calmer view asserted itself. Why go out of his way to
+invent anguish for himself? The relations between Celia and the priest,
+whatever they might be, were certainly of old standing. They had begun
+before his time. His own romance was a more recent affair, and must take
+its place, of course, subject to existing conditions.
+
+It was all right for him to come to New York, and satisfy his legitimate
+curiosity as to the exact character and scope of these conditions. But
+it was foolish to pretend to be amazed or dismayed at the discovery of
+their existence. They were a part of the situation which he, with his
+eyes wide open, had accepted. It was his function to triumph over them,
+to supplant them, to rear the edifice of his own victorious passion upon
+their ruins. It was to this that Celia's kiss had invited him. It was
+for this that he had come to New York. To let his purpose be hampered or
+thwarted now by childish doubts and jealousies would be ridiculous.
+
+He rose, and holding himself very erect, walked with measured
+deliberation across the corridor and up the broad staircase. There was
+an elevator near at hand, he had noticed, but he preferred the stairs.
+One or two of the colored boys clustered about the foot of the stairs
+looked at him, and he had a moment of dreadful apprehension lest they
+should stop his progress. Nothing was said, and he went on. The numbers
+on the first floor were not what he wanted, and after some wandering
+about he ascended to the next, and then to the third. Every now and then
+he encountered attendants, but intuitively he bore himself with an air
+of knowing what he was about which protected him from inquiry.
+
+Finally he came upon the hall-way he sought. Passing along, he found
+the doors bearing the numbers he had memorized so well. They were quite
+close together, and there was nothing to help him guess which belonged
+to the parlor. He hesitated, gazing wistfully from one to the other. In
+the instant of indecision, even while his alert ear caught the sound of
+feet coming along toward the passage in which he stood, a thought came
+to quicken his resolve. It became apparent to him that his discovery
+gave him a certain new measure of freedom with Celia, a sort of right to
+take things more for granted than heretofore. He chose a door at random,
+and rapped distinctly on the panel.
+
+"Come!"
+
+The voice he knew for Celia's. The single word, however, recalled
+the usage of Father Forbes, which he had noted more than once at the
+pastorate, when Maggie had knocked.
+
+He straightened his shoulders, took his hat off, and pushed open the
+door. It WAS the parlor--a room of sofas, pianos, big easy-chairs, and
+luxurious bric-a-brac. A tall woman was walking up and down in it, with
+bowed head. Her back was at the moment toward him; and he looked at her,
+saying to himself that this was the lady of his dreams, the enchantress
+of the kiss, the woman who loved him--but somehow it did not seem to his
+senses to be Celia.
+
+She turned, and moved a step or two in his direction before she
+mechanically lifted her eyes and saw who was standing in her doorway.
+She stopped short, and regarded him. Her face was in the shadow, and he
+could make out nothing of its expression, save that there was a general
+effect of gravity about it.
+
+"I cannot receive you," she said. "You must go away. You have no
+business to come like this without sending up your card."
+
+Theron smiled at her. The notion of taking in earnest her inhospitable
+words did not at all occur to him. He could see now that her face had
+vexed and saddened lines upon it, and the sharpness of her tone remained
+in his ears. But he smiled again gently, to reassure her.
+
+"I ought to have sent up my name, I know," he said, "but I couldn't bear
+to wait. I just saw your name on the register and--you WILL forgive me,
+won't you?--I ran to you at once. I know you won't have the heart to
+send me away!"
+
+She stood where she had halted, her arms behind her, looking him fixedly
+in the face. He had made a movement to advance, and offer his hand in
+greeting, but her posture checked the impulse. His courage began to
+falter under her inspection.
+
+"Must I really go down again?" he pleaded. "It's a crushing penalty to
+suffer for such little indiscretion. I was so excited to find you were
+here--I never stopped to think. Don't send me away; please don't!"
+
+Celia raised her head. "Well, shut the door, then," she said, "since you
+are so anxious to stay. You would have done much better, though, very
+much better indeed, to have taken the hint and gone away."
+
+"Will you shake hands with me, Celia?" he asked softly, as he came near
+her.
+
+"Sit there, please!" she made answer, indicating a chair in the middle
+of the room. He obeyed her, but to his surprise, instead of seating
+herself as well, she began walking up and down the length of the floor
+again. After a turn or two she stopped in front of him, and looked him
+full in the eye. The light from the windows was on her countenance now,
+and its revelations vaguely troubled him. It was a Celia he had never
+seen before who confronted him.
+
+"I am much occupied by other matters," she said, speaking with cold
+impassivity, "but still I find myself curious to know just what limits
+you set to your dishonesty."
+
+Theron stared up at her. His lips quivered, but no speech came to them.
+If this was all merely fond playfulness, it was being carried to a
+heart-aching point.
+
+"I saw you hiding about in the depot at home last evening," she went on.
+"You come up here, pretending to have discovered me by accident, but I
+saw you following me from the Grand Central this morning."
+
+"Yes, I did both these things," said Theron, boldly. A fine bravery
+tingled in his veins all at once. He looked into her face and found the
+spirit to disregard its frowning aspect. "Yes, I did them," he repeated
+defiantly. "That is not the hundredth part, or the thousandth part,
+of what I would do for your sake. I have got way beyond caring for any
+consequences. Position, reputation, the good opinion of fools--what are
+they? Life itself--what does it amount to? Nothing at all--with you in
+the balance!"
+
+"Yes--but I am not in the balance," observed Celia, quietly. "That is
+where you have made your mistake."
+
+Theron laid aside his hat. Women were curious creatures, he reflected.
+Some were susceptible to one line of treatment, some to another. His own
+reading of Celia had always been that she liked opposition, of a smart,
+rattling, almost cheeky, sort. One got on best with her by saying bright
+things. He searched his brain now for some clever quip that would strike
+sparks from the adamantine mood which for the moment it was her whim to
+assume. To cover the process, he smiled a little. Then her beauty,
+as she stood before him, her queenly form clad in a more stiffly
+fashionable dress than he had seen her wearing before, appealed afresh
+and overwhelmingly to him. He rose to his feet.
+
+"Have you forgotten our talk in the woods?" he murmured with a wooing
+note. "Have you forgotten the kiss?"
+
+She shook her head calmly. "I have forgotten nothing."
+
+"Then why play with me so cruelly now?" he went on, in a voice of tender
+deprecation. "I know you don't mean it, but all the same it bruises my
+heart a little. I build myself so wholly upon you, I have made existence
+itself depend so completely upon your smile, upon a soft glance in your
+eyes, that when they are not there, why, I suffer, I don't know how to
+live at all. So be kinder to me, Celia!"
+
+"I was kinder, as you call it, when you came in," she replied. "I
+told you to go away. That was pure kindness--more kindness than you
+deserved."
+
+Theron looked at his hat, where it stood on the carpet by his feet. He
+felt tears coming into his eyes. "You tell me that you remember," he
+said, in depressed tones, "and yet you treat me like this! Perhaps I am
+wrong. No doubt it is my own fault. I suppose I ought not to have come
+down here at all."
+
+Celia nodded her head in assent to this view.
+
+"But I swear that I was helpless in the matter," he burst forth. "I HAD
+to come! It would have been literally impossible for me to have stayed
+at home, knowing that you were here, and knowing also that--that--"
+
+"Go on!" said Celia, thrusting forth her under-lip a trifle, and
+hardening still further the gleam in her eye, as he stumbled over his
+sentence and left it unfinished. "What was the other thing that you were
+'knowing'?"
+
+"Knowing--" he took up the word hesitatingly--"knowing that life would
+be insupportable to me if I could not be near you."
+
+She curled her lip at him. "You skated over the thin spot very well,"
+she commented. "It was on the tip of your tongue to mention the fact
+that Father Forbes came with me. Oh, I can read you through and through,
+Mr. Ware."
+
+In a misty way Theron felt things slipping from his grasp. The rising
+moisture blurred his eyes as their gaze clung to Celia.
+
+"Then if you do read me," he protested, "you must know how utterly my
+heart and brain are filled with you. No other man in all the world can
+yield himself so absolutely to the woman he worships as I can. You have
+taken possession of me so wholly, I am not in the least master of myself
+any more. I don't know what I say or what I do. I am not worthy of you,
+I know. No man alive could be that. But no one else will idolize and
+reverence you as I do. Believe me when I say that, Celia! And how can
+you blame me, in your heart, for following you? 'Whither thou goest,
+I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my
+people, and thy God my God; where thou diest, will I die, and there will
+I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death
+part thee and me!'"
+
+Celia shrugged her shoulders, and moved a few steps away from him.
+Something like despair seized upon him.
+
+"Surely," he urged with passion, "surely I have a right to remind you of
+the kiss!"
+
+She turned. "The kiss," she said meditatively. "Yes, you have a right
+to remind me of it. Oh, yes, an undoubted right. You have another right
+too--the right to have the kiss explained to you. It was of the good-bye
+order. It signified that we weren't to meet again, and that just for one
+little moment I permitted myself to be sorry for you. That was all."
+
+He held himself erect under the incredible words, and gazed blankly at
+her. The magnitude of what he confronted bewildered him; his mind was
+incapable of taking it in. "You mean--" he started to say, and then
+stopped, helplessly staring into her face, with a dropped jaw. It was
+too much to try to think what she meant.
+
+A little side-thought sprouted in the confusion of his brain. It grew
+until it spread a bitter smile over his pale face. "I know so little
+about kisses," he said; "I am such a greenhorn at that sort of thing.
+You should have had pity on my inexperience, and told me just what brand
+of kiss it was I was getting. Probably I ought to have been able to
+distinguish, but you see I was brought up in the country--on a farm.
+They don't have kisses in assorted varieties there."
+
+She bowed her head slightly. "Yes, you are entitled to say that," she
+assented. "I was to blame, and it is quite fair that you should tell
+me so. You spoke of your inexperience, your innocence. That was why I
+kissed you in saying good-bye. It was in memory of that innocence of
+yours, to which you yourself had been busy saying good-bye ever since I
+first saw you. The idea seemed to me to mean something at the moment. I
+see now that it was too subtle. I do not usually err on that side."
+
+Theron kept his hold upon her gaze, as if it afforded him bodily
+support. He felt that he ought to stoop and take up his hat, but he
+dared not look away from her. "Do you not err now, on the side of
+cruelty?" he asked her piteously.
+
+It seemed for the instant as if she were wavering, and he swiftly thrust
+forth other pleas. "I admit that I did wrong to follow you to New York.
+I see that now. But it was an offence committed in entire good faith.
+Think of it, Celia! I have never seen you since that day--that day in
+the woods. I have waited--and waited--with no sign from you, no chance
+of seeing you at all. Think what that meant to me! Everything in the
+world had been altered for me, torn up by the roots. I was a new being,
+plunged into a new existence. The kiss had done that. But until saw you
+again, I could not tell whether this vast change in me and my life was
+for good or for bad--whether the kiss had come to me as a blessing or a
+curse. The suspense was killing me, Celia! That is why, when I learned
+that you were coming here, I threw everything to the winds and followed
+you. You blame me for it, and I bow my head and accept the blame. But
+are you justified in punishing me so terribly--in going on after I have
+confessed my error, and cutting my heart into little strips, putting me
+to death by torture?"
+
+"Sit down," said Celia, with a softened weariness in her voice. She
+seated herself in front of him as he sank into his chair again. "I don't
+want to give you unnecessary pain, but you have insisted on forcing
+yourself into a position where there isn't anything else but pain. I
+warned you to go away, but you wouldn't. No matter how gently I may try
+to explain things to you, you are bound to get nothing but suffering out
+of the explanation. Now shall I still go on?"
+
+He inclined his head in token of assent, and did not lift it again, but
+raised toward her a disconsolate gaze from a pallid, drooping face.
+
+"It is all in a single word, Mr. Ware," she proceeded, in low tones.
+"I speak for others as well as myself, mind you--we find that you are a
+bore."
+
+Theron's stiffened countenance remained immovable. He continued to stare
+unblinkingly up into her eyes.
+
+"We were disposed to like you very much when we first knew you,"
+Celia went on. "You impressed us as an innocent, simple, genuine young
+character, full of mother's milk. It was like the smell of early spring
+in the country to come in contact with you. Your honesty of nature,
+your sincerity in that absurd religion of yours, your general NAIVETE of
+mental and spiritual get-up, all pleased us a great deal. We thought you
+were going to be a real acquisition."
+
+"Just a moment--whom do you mean by 'we'?" He asked the question calmly
+enough, but in a voice with an effect of distance in it.
+
+"It may not be necessary to enter into that," she replied. "Let me go
+on. But then it became apparent, little by little, that we had misjudged
+you. We liked you, as I have said, because you were unsophisticated and
+delightfully fresh and natural. Somehow we took it for granted you would
+stay so. Rut that is just what you didn't do--just what you hadn't the
+sense to try to do. Instead, we found you inflating yourself with
+all sorts of egotisms and vanities. We found you presuming upon the
+friendships which had been mistakenly extended to you. Do you want
+instances? You went to Dr. Ledsmar's house that very day after I had
+been with you to get a piano at Thurston's, and tried to inveigle him
+into talking scandal about me. You came to me with tales about him. You
+went to Father Forbes, and sought to get him to gossip about us both.
+Neither of those men will ever ask you inside his house again. But that
+is only one part of it. Your whole mind became an unpleasant thing
+to contemplate. You thought it would amuse and impress us to hear you
+ridiculing and reviling the people of your church, whose money supports
+you, and making a mock of the things they believe in, and which you for
+your life wouldn't dare let them know you didn't believe in. You talked
+to us slightingly about your wife. What were you thinking of, not
+to comprehend that that would disgust us? You showed me once--do you
+remember?--a life of George Sand that you had just bought,--bought
+because you had just discovered that she had an unclean side to her
+life. You chuckled as you spoke to me about it, and you were for all the
+world like a little nasty boy, giggling over something dirty that older
+people had learned not to notice. These are merely random incidents.
+They are just samples, picked hap-hazard, of the things in you which
+have been opening our eyes, little by little, to our mistake. I
+can understand that all the while you really fancied that you were
+expanding, growing, in all directions. What you took to be improvement
+was degeneration. When you thought that you were impressing us most by
+your smart sayings and doings, you were reminding us most of the fable
+about the donkey trying to play lap-dog. And it wasn't even an honest,
+straightforward donkey at that!"
+
+She uttered these last words sorrowfully, her hands clasped in her lap,
+and her eyes sinking to the floor. A silence ensued. Then Theron reached
+a groping hand out for his hat, and, rising, walked with a lifeless,
+automatic step to the door.
+
+He had it half open, when the impossibility of leaving in this way
+towered suddenly in his path and overwhelmed him. He slammed the door
+to, and turned as if he had been whirled round by some mighty wind.
+He came toward her, with something almost menacing in the vigor of his
+movements, and in the wild look upon his white, set face. Halting
+before her, he covered the tailor-clad figure, the coiled red hair, the
+upturned face with its simulated calm, the big brown eyes, the rings
+upon the clasped fingers, with a sweeping, comprehensive glare of
+passion.
+
+"This is what you have done to me, then!"
+
+His voice was unrecognizable in his own ears--hoarse and broken, but
+with a fright-compelling something in it which stimulated his rage. The
+horrible notion of killing her, there where she sat, spread over the
+chaos of his mind with an effect of unearthly light--red and abnormally
+evil. It was like that first devilish radiance ushering in Creation, of
+which the first-fruit was Cain. Why should he not kill her? In all ages,
+women had been slain for less. Yes--and men had been hanged. Something
+rose and stuck in his dry throat; and as he swallowed it down, the
+sinister flare of murderous fascination died suddenly away into
+darkness. The world was all black again--plunged in the Egyptian night
+which lay upon the face of the deep while the earth was yet without form
+and void. He was alone on it--alone among awful, planetary solitudes
+which crushed him.
+
+The sight of Celia, sitting motionless only a pace in front of him, was
+plain enough to his eyes. It was an illusion. She was really a star,
+many millions of miles away. These things were hard to understand; but
+they were true, none the less. People seemed to be about him, but in
+fact he was alone. He recalled that even the little child in the car,
+playing with those two buttons on a string, would have nothing to do
+with him. Take his money, yes; take all he would give her--but not smile
+at him, not come within reach of him! Men closed the doors of their
+houses against him. The universe held him at arm's length as a nuisance.
+
+He was standing with one knee upon a sofa. Unconsciously he had moved
+round to the side of Celia; and as he caught the effect of her face now
+in profile, memory-pictures began at once building themselves in his
+brain--pictures of her standing in the darkened room of the cottage of
+death, declaiming the CONFITEOR; of her seated at the piano, under the
+pure, mellowed candle-light; of her leaning her chin on her hands, and
+gazing meditatively at the leafy background of the woods they were in;
+of her lying back, indolently content, in the deck-chair on the yacht of
+his fancy--that yacht which a few hours before had seemed so brilliantly
+and bewitchingly real to him, and now--now--!
+
+He sank in a heap upon the couch, and, burying his face among its
+cushions, wept and groaned aloud. His collapse was absolute. He sobbed
+with the abandonment of one who, in the veritable presence of death,
+lets go all sense of relation to life.
+
+Presently some one was touching him on the shoulder--an incisive,
+pointed touch--and he checked himself, and lifted his face.
+
+"You will have to get up, and present some sort of an appearance, and
+go away at once," Celia said to him in low, rapid tones. "Some gentlemen
+are at the door, whom I have been waiting for."
+
+As he stupidly sat up and tried to collect his faculties, Celia had
+opened the door and admitted two visitors. The foremost was Father
+Forbes; and he, with some whispered, smiling words, presented to her his
+companion, a tall, robust, florid man of middle-age, with a frock-coat
+and a gray mustache, sharply waxed. The three spoke for a moment
+together. Then the priest's wandering eye suddenly lighted upon the
+figure on the sofa. He stared, knitted his brows, and then lifted them
+in inquiry as he turned to Celia.
+
+"Poor man!" she said readily, in tones loud enough to reach Theron. "It
+is our neighbor, Father, the Rev. Mr. Ware. He hit upon my name in
+the register quite unexpectedly, and I had him come up. He is in sore
+distress--a great and sudden bereavement. He is going now. Won't you
+speak to him in the hall--a few words, Father? It would please him. He
+is terribly depressed."
+
+The words had drawn Theron to his feet, as by some mechanical process.
+He took up his hat and moved dumbly to the door. It seemed to him that
+Celia intended offering to shake hands; but he went past her with only
+some confused exchange of glances and a murmured word or two. The tall
+stranger, who drew aside to let him pass, had acted as if he expected to
+be introduced. Theron, emerging into the hall, leaned against the wall
+and looked dreamily at the priest, who had stepped out with him.
+
+"I am very sorry to learn that you are in trouble, Mr. Ware," Father
+Forbes said, gently enough, but in hurried tones. "Miss Madden is also
+in trouble. I mentioned to you that her brother had got into a serious
+scrape. I have brought my old friend, General Brady, to consult with
+her about the matter. He knows all the parties concerned, and he can set
+things right if anybody can."
+
+"It's a mistake about me--I 'm not in any trouble at all," said Theron.
+"I just dropped in to make a friendly call."
+
+The priest glanced sharply at him, noting with a swift, informed
+scrutiny how he sprawled against the wall, and what vacuity his eyes and
+loosened lips expressed.
+
+"Then you have a talent for the inopportune amounting to positive
+genius," said Father Forbes, with a stormy smile.
+
+"Tell me this, Father Forbes," the other demanded, with impulsive
+suddenness, "is it true that you don't want me in your house again? Is
+that the truth or not?"
+
+"The truth is always relative, Mr. Ware," replied the priest, turning
+away, and closing the door of the parlor behind him with a decisive
+sound.
+
+Left alone, Theron started to make his way downstairs. He found his
+legs wavering under him and making zigzag movements of their own in a
+bewildering fashion. He referred this at first, in an outburst of fresh
+despair, to the effects of his great grief. Then, as he held tight to
+the banister and governed his descent step by step, it occurred to him
+that it must be the wine he had had for breakfast. Upon examination, he
+was not so unhappy, after all.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+At the second peal of the door-bell, Brother Soulsby sat up in bed.
+It was still pitch-dark, and the memory of the first ringing fluttered
+musically in his awakening consciousness as a part of some dream he had
+been having.
+
+"Who the deuce can that be?" he mused aloud, in querulous resentment at
+the interruption.
+
+"Put your head out of the window, and ask," suggested his wife,
+drowsily.
+
+The bell-pull scraped violently in its socket, and a third outburst of
+shrill reverberations clamored through the silent house.
+
+"Whatever you do, I'd do it before he yanked the whole thing to pieces,"
+added the wife, with more decision.
+
+Brother Soulsby was wide awake now. He sprang to the floor, and, groping
+about in the obscurity, began drawing on some of his clothes. He rapped
+on the window during the process, to show that the house was astir, and
+a minute afterward made his way out of the room and down the stairs, the
+boards creaking under his stockinged feet as he went.
+
+Nearly a quarter of an hour passed before he returned. Sister Soulsby,
+lying in sleepy quiescence, heard vague sounds of voices at the front
+door, and did not feel interested enough to lift her head and listen.
+A noise of footsteps on the sidewalk followed, first receding from the
+door, then turning toward it, this second time marking the presence of
+more than one person. There seemed in this the implication of a guest,
+and she shook off the dozing impulses which enveloped her faculties,
+and waited to hear more. There came up, after further muttering of male
+voices, the undeniable chink of coins striking against one another. Then
+more footsteps, the resonant slam of a carriage door out in the street,
+the grinding of wheels turning on the frosty road, and the racket of a
+vehicle and horses going off at a smart pace into the night. Somebody
+had come, then. She yawned at the thought, but remained well awake,
+tracing idly in her mind, as various slight sounds rose from the lower
+floor, the different things Soulsby was probably doing. Their spare room
+was down there, directly underneath, but curiously enough no one seemed
+to enter it. The faint murmur of conversation which from time to
+time reached her came from the parlor instead. At last she heard her
+husband's soft tread coming up the staircase, and still there had been
+no hint of employing the guest-chamber. What could he be about? she
+wondered.
+
+Brother Soulsby came in, bearing a small lamp in his hand, the reddish
+light of which, flaring upward, revealed an unlooked-for display of
+amusement on his thin, beardless face. He advanced to the bedside,
+shading the glare from her blinking eyes with his palm, and grinned.
+
+"A thousand guesses, old lady," he said, with a dry chuckle, "and you
+wouldn't have a ghost of a chance. You might guess till Hades froze over
+seven feet thick, and still you wouldn't hit it."
+
+She sat up in turn. "Good gracious, man," she began, "you don't mean--"
+Here the cheerful gleam in his small eyes reassured her, and she sighed
+relief, then smiled confusedly. "I half thought, just for the minute,"
+she explained, "it might be some bounder who'd come East to try and
+blackmail me. But no, who is it--and what on earth have you done with
+him?"
+
+Brother Soulsby cackled in merriment. "It's Brother Ware of Octavius,
+out on a little bat, all by himself. He says he's been on the loose only
+two days; but it looks more like a fortnight."
+
+"OUR Brother Ware?" she regarded him with open-eyed surprise.
+
+"Well, yes, I suppose he's OUR Brother Ware--some," returned Soulsby,
+genially. "He seems to think so, anyway."
+
+"But tell me about it!" she urged eagerly. "What's the matter with him?
+How does he explain it?"
+
+"Well, he explains it pretty badly, if you ask me," said Soulsby, with
+a droll, joking eye and a mock-serious voice. He seated himself on the
+side of the bed, facing her, and still considerately shielding her
+from the light of the lamp he held. "But don't think I suggested any
+explanations. I've been a mother myself. He's merely filled himself up
+to the neck with rum, in the simple, ordinary, good old-fashioned way.
+That's all. What is there to explain about that?"
+
+She looked meditatively at him for a time, shaking her head. "No,
+Soulsby," she said gravely, at last. "This isn't any laughing matter.
+You may be sure something bad has happened, to set him off like that.
+I'm going to get up and dress right now. What time is it?"
+
+"Now don't you do anything of the sort," he urged persuasively. "It
+isn't five o'clock; it'll be dark for nearly an hour yet. Just you turn
+over, and have another nap. He's all right. I put him on the sofa, with
+the buffalo robe round him. You'll find him there, safe and sound, when
+it's time for white folks to get up. You know how it breaks you up all
+day, not to get your full sleep."
+
+"I don't care if it makes me look as old as the everlasting hills," she
+said. "Can't you understand, Soulsby? The thing worries me--gets on my
+nerves. I couldn't close an eye, if I tried. I took a great fancy to
+that young man. I told you so at the time."
+
+Soulsby nodded, and turned down the wick of his lamp a trifle. "Yes, I
+know you did," he remarked in placidly non-contentious tones. "I
+can't say I saw much in him myself, but I daresay you're right." There
+followed a moment's silence, during which he experimented in turning the
+wick up again. "But, anyway," he went on, "there isn't anything you can
+do. He'll sleep it off, and the longer he's left alone the better. It
+isn't as if we had a hired girl, who'd come down and find him there, and
+give the whole thing away. He's fixed up there perfectly comfortable;
+and when he's had his sleep out, and wakes up on his own account, he'll
+be feeling a heap better."
+
+The argument might have carried conviction, but on the instant the sound
+of footsteps came to them from the room below. The subdued noise rose
+regularly, as of one pacing to and fro.
+
+"No, Soulsby, YOU come back to bed, and get YOUR sleep out. I'm going
+downstairs. It's no good talking; I'm going."
+
+Brother Soulsby offered no further opposition, either by talk or
+demeanor, but returned contentedly to bed, pulling the comforter over
+his ears, and falling into the slow, measured respiration of tranquil
+slumber before his wife was ready to leave the room.
+
+The dim, cold gray of twilight was sifting furtively through the lace
+curtains of the front windows when Mrs. Soulsby, lamp in hand, entered
+the parlor. She confronted a figure she would have hardly recognized.
+The man seemed to have been submerged in a bath of disgrace. From the
+crown of his head to the soles of his feet, everything about him was
+altered, distorted, smeared with an intangible effect of shame. In the
+vague gloom of the middle distance, between lamp and window, she noticed
+that his shoulders were crouched, like those of some shambling tramp.
+The frowsy shadows of a stubble beard lay on his jaw and throat. His
+clothes were crumpled and hung awry; his boots were stained with mud.
+The silk hat on the piano told its battered story with dumb eloquence.
+
+Lifting the lamp, she moved forward a step, and threw its light upon his
+face. A little groan sounded involuntarily upon her lips. Out of a mask
+of unpleasant features, swollen with drink and weighted by the physical
+craving for rest and sleep, there stared at her two bloodshot eyes,
+shining with the wild light of hysteria. The effect of dishevelled hair,
+relaxed muscles, and rough, half-bearded lower face lent to these eyes,
+as she caught their first glance, an unnatural glare. The lamp shook
+in her hand for an instant. Then, ashamed of herself, she held out her
+other hand fearlessly to him.
+
+"Tell me all about it, Theron," she said calmly, and with a soothing,
+motherly intonation in her voice.
+
+He did not take the hand she offered, but suddenly, with a wailing moan,
+cast himself on his knees at her feet. He was so tall a man that the
+movement could have no grace. He abased his head awkwardly, to bury
+it among the folds of the skirts at her ankles. She stood still for a
+moment, looking down upon him. Then, blowing out the light, she reached
+over and set the smoking lamp on the piano near by. The daylight made
+things distinguishable in a wan, uncertain way, throughout the room.
+
+"I have come out of hell, for the sake of hearing some human being speak
+to me like that!"
+
+The thick utterance proceeded in a muffled fashion from where his face
+grovelled against her dress. Its despairing accents appealed to her, but
+even more was she touched by the ungainly figure he made, sprawling on
+the carpet.
+
+"Well, since you are out, stay out," she answered, as reassuringly as
+she could. "But get up and take a seat here beside me, like a sensible
+man, and tell me all about it. Come! I insist!"
+
+In obedience to her tone, and the sharp tug at his shoulder with which
+she emphasized it, he got slowly to his feet, and listlessly seated
+himself on the sofa to which she pointed. He hung his head, and began
+catching his breath with a periodical gasp, half hiccough, half sob.
+
+"First of all," she said, in her brisk, matter-of-fact manner, "don't
+you want to lie down there again, and have me tuck you up snug with the
+buffalo robe, and go to sleep? That would be the best thing you could
+do."
+
+He shook his head disconsolately, from side to side. "I can't!" he
+groaned, with a swifter recurrence of the sob-like convulsions. "I'm
+dying for sleep, but I'm too--too frightened!"
+
+"Come, I'll sit beside you till you drop off," she said, with masterful
+decision. He suffered himself to be pushed into recumbency on the couch,
+and put his head with docility on the pillow she brought from the spare
+room. When she had spread the fur over him, and pushed her chair close
+to the sofa, she stood by it for a little, looking down in meditation at
+his demoralized face. Under the painful surface-blur of wretchedness
+and fatigued debauchery, she traced reflectively the lineaments of the
+younger and cleanlier countenance she had seen a few months before.
+Nothing essential had been taken away. There was only this pestiferous
+overlaying of shame and cowardice to be removed. The face underneath was
+still all right.
+
+With a soft, maternal touch, she smoothed the hair from his forehead
+into order. Then she seated herself, and, when he got his hand out from
+under the robe and thrust it forth timidly, she took it in hers and
+held it in a warm, sympathetic grasp. He closed his eyes at this, and
+gradually the paroxysmal catch in his breathing lapsed. The daylight
+strengthened, until at last tiny flecks of sunshine twinkled in the
+meshes of the further curtains at the window. She fancied him asleep,
+and gently sought to disengage her hand, but his fingers clutched at it
+with vehemence, and his eyes were wide open.
+
+"I can't sleep at all," he murmured. "I want to talk."
+
+"There 's nothing in the world to hinder you," she commented smilingly.
+
+"I tell you the solemn truth," he said, lifting his voice in dogged
+assertion: "the best sermon I ever preached in my life, I preached only
+three weeks ago, at the camp-meeting. It was admitted by everybody to be
+far and away my finest effort! They will tell you the same!"
+
+"It's quite likely," assented Sister Soulsby. "I quite believe it."
+
+"Then how can anybody say that I've degenerated, that I've become a
+fool?" he demanded.
+
+"I haven't heard anybody hint at such a thing," she answered quietly.
+
+"No, of course, YOU haven't heard them!" he cried. "I heard them,
+though!" Then, forcing himself to a sitting posture, against the
+restraint of her hand, he flung back the covering. "I'm burning hot
+already! Yes, those were the identical words: I haven't improved; I've
+degenerated. People hate me; they won't have me in their houses. They
+say I'm a nuisance and a bore. I'm like a little nasty boy. That's what
+they say. Even a young man who was dying--lying right on the edge of his
+open grave--told me solemnly that I reminded him of a saint once, but I
+was only fit for a barkeeper now. They say I really don't know anything
+at all. And I'm not only a fool, they say, I'm a dishonest fool into the
+bargain!"
+
+"But who says such twaddle as that?" she returned consolingly. The
+violence of his emotion disturbed her. "You mustn't imagine such things.
+You are among friends here. Other people are your friends, too. They
+have the very highest opinion of you."
+
+"I haven't a friend on earth but you!" he declared solemnly. His eyes
+glowed fiercely, and his voice sank into a grave intensity of tone. "I
+was going to kill myself. I went on to the big bridge to throw myself
+off, and a policeman saw me trying to climb over the railing, and he
+grabbed me and marched me away. Then he threw me out at the entrance,
+and said he would club my head off if I came there again. And then I
+went and stood and let the cable-cars pass close by me, and twenty times
+I thought I had the nerve to throw myself under the next one, and then
+I waited for the next--and I was afraid! And then I was in a crowd
+somewhere, and the warning came to me that I was going to die. The fool
+needn't go kill himself: God would take care of that. It was my heart,
+you know. I've had that terrible fluttering once before. It seized me
+this time, and I fell down in the crowd, and some people walked over
+me, but some one else helped me up, and let me sit down in a big lighted
+hallway, the entrance to some theatre, and some one brought me some
+brandy, but somebody else said I was drunk, and they took it away again,
+and put me out. They could see I was a fool, that I hadn't a friend
+on earth. And when I went out, there was a big picture of a woman in
+tights, and the word 'Amazons' overhead--and then I remembered you. I
+knew you were my friend--the only one I have on earth."
+
+"It is very flattering--to be remembered like that," said Sister
+Soulsby, gently. The disposition to laugh was smothered by a pained
+perception of the suffering he was undergoing. His face had grown drawn
+and haggard under the burden of his memories as he rambled on.
+
+"So I came straight to you," he began again. "I had just money enough
+left to pay my fare. The rest is in my valise at the hotel--the Murray
+Hill Hotel. It belongs to the church. I stole it from the church. When I
+am dead they can get it back again!"
+
+Sister Soulsby forced a smile to her lips. "What nonsense you
+talk--about dying!" she exclaimed. "Why, man alive, you'll sleep this
+all off like a top, if you'll only lie down and give yourself a chance.
+Come, now, you must do as you're told."
+
+With a resolute hand, she made him lie down again, and once more covered
+him with the fur. He submitted, and did not even offer to put out his
+arm this time, but looked in piteous dumbness at her for a long time.
+While she sat thus in silence, the sound of Brother Soulsby moving about
+upstairs became audible.
+
+Theron heard it, and the importance of hurrying on some further
+disclosure seemed to suggest itself. "I can see you think I'm just
+drunk," he said, in low, sombre tones. "Of course that's what HE
+thought. The hackman thought so, and so did the conductor, and
+everybody. But I hoped you would know better. I was sure you would see
+that it was something worse than that. See here, I'll tell you. Then
+you'll understand. I've been drinking for two days and one whole night,
+on my feet all the while, wandering alone in that big strange New York,
+going through places where they murdered men for ten cents, mixing
+myself up with the worst people in low bar-rooms and dance-houses, and
+they saw I had money in my pocket, too, and yet nobody touched me, or
+offered to lay a finger on me. Do you know why? They understood that I
+wanted to get drunk, and couldn't. The Indians won't harm an idiot, or
+lunatic, you know. Well, it was the same with these vilest of the vile.
+They saw that I was a fool whom God had taken hold of, to break his
+heart first, and then to craze his brain, and then to fling him on a
+dunghill to die like a dog. They believe in God, those people. They're
+the only ones who do, it seems to me. And they wouldn't interfere when
+they saw what He was doing to me. But I tell you I wasn't drunk. I
+haven't been drunk. I'm only heart-broken, and crushed out of shape
+and life--that's all. And I've crawled here just to have a friend by me
+when--when I come to the end."
+
+"You're not talking very sensibly, or very bravely either, Theron Ware,"
+remarked his companion. "It's cowardly to give way to notions like
+that."
+
+"Oh, I 'm not afraid to die; don't think that," he remonstrated wearily.
+"If there is a Judgment, it has hit me as hard as it can already. There
+can't be any hell worse than that I've gone through. Here I am talking
+about hell," he continued, with a pained contraction of the muscles
+about his mouth--a stillborn, malformed smile--"as if I believed in one!
+I've got way through all my beliefs, you know. I tell you that frankly."
+
+"It's none of my business," she reassured him. "I'm not your Bishop, or
+your confessor. I'm just your friend, your pal, that's all."
+
+"Look here!" he broke in, with some animation and a new intensity of
+glance and voice. "If I was going to live, I'd have some funny things to
+tell. Six months ago I was a good man. I not only seemed to be good, to
+others and to myself, but I was good. I had a soul; I had a conscience.
+I was going along doing my duty, and I was happy in it. We were poor,
+Alice and I, and people behaved rather hard toward us, and sometimes we
+were a little down in the mouth about it; but that was all. We really
+were happy; and I--I really was a good man. Here's the kind of joke God
+plays! You see me here six months after. Look at me! I haven't got an
+honest hair in my head. I'm a bad man through and through, that's what
+I am. I look all around at myself, and there isn't an atom left anywhere
+of the good man I used to be. And, mind you, I never lifted a finger
+to prevent the change. I didn't resist once; I didn't make any fight.
+I just walked deliberately down-hill, with my eyes wide open. I told
+myself all the while that I was climbing uphill instead, but I knew in
+my heart that it was a lie. Everything about me was a lie. I wouldn't be
+telling the truth, even now, if--if I hadn't come to the end of my rope.
+Now, how do you explain that? How can it be explained? Was I really
+rotten to the core all the time, years ago, when I seemed to everybody,
+myself and the rest, to be good and straight and sincere? Was it all a
+sham, or does God take a good man and turn him into an out-and-out bad
+one, in just a few months--in the time that it takes an ear of corn to
+form and ripen and go off with the mildew? Or isn't there any God at
+all--but only men who live and die like animals? And that would explain
+my case, wouldn't it? I got bitten and went vicious and crazy, and
+they've had to chase me out and hunt me to my death like a mad dog! Yes,
+that makes it all very simple. It isn't worth while to discuss me at
+all as if I had a soul, is it? I'm just one more mongrel cur that's gone
+mad, and must be put out of the way. That's all."
+
+"See here," said Sister Soulsby, alertly, "I half believe that a good
+cuffing is what you really stand in need of. Now you stop all this
+nonsense, and lie quiet and keep still! Do you hear me?"
+
+The jocose sternness which she assumed, in words and manner, seemed to
+soothe him. He almost smiled up at her in a melancholy way, and sighed
+profoundly.
+
+"I've told you MY religion before," she went on with gentleness. "The
+sheep and the goats are to be separated on Judgment Day, but not a
+minute sooner. In other words, as long as human life lasts, good, bad,
+and indifferent are all braided up together in every man's nature, and
+every woman's too. You weren't altogether good a year ago, any more than
+you're altogether bad now. You were some of both then; you're some
+of both now. If you've been making an extra sort of fool of yourself
+lately, why, now that you recognize it, the only thing to do is to slow
+steam, pull up, and back engine in the other direction. In that way
+you'll find things will even themselves up. It's a see-saw with all
+of us, Theron Ware--sometimes up; sometimes down. But nobody is rotten
+clear to the core."
+
+He closed his eyes, and lay in silence for a time.
+
+"This is what day of the week?" he asked, at last.
+
+"Friday, the nineteenth."
+
+"Wednesday--that would be the seventeenth. That was the day ordained for
+my slaughter. On that morning, I was the happiest man in the world.
+No king could have been so proud and confident as I was. A wonderful
+romance had come to me. The most beautiful young woman in the world, the
+most talented too, was waiting for me. An express train was carrying me
+to her, and it couldn't go fast enough to keep up with my eagerness. She
+was very rich, and she loved me, and we were to live in eternal summer,
+wherever we liked, on a big, beautiful yacht. No one else had such a
+life before him as that. It seemed almost too good for me, but I thought
+I had grown and developed so much that perhaps I would be worthy of it.
+Oh, how happy I was! I tell you this because--because YOU are not like
+the others. You will understand."
+
+"Yes, I understand," she said patiently. "Well--you were being so
+happy."
+
+"That was in the morning--Wednesday the seventeenth--early in the
+morning. There was a little girl in the car, playing with some buttons,
+and when I tried to make friends with her, she looked at me, and she
+saw, right at a glance, that I was a fool. 'Out of the mouths of babes
+and sucklings,' you know. She was the first to find it out. It began
+like that, early in the morning. But then after that everybody knew it.
+They had only to look at me and they said: 'Why, this is a fool--like a
+little nasty boy; we won't let him into our houses; we find him a bore.'
+That is what they said."
+
+"Did SHE say it?" Sister Soulsby permitted herself to ask.
+
+For answer Theron bit his lips, and drew his chin under the fur, and
+pushed his scowling face into the pillow. The spasmodic, sob-like gasps
+began to shake him again. She laid a compassionate hand upon his hot
+brow.
+
+"That is why I made my way here to you," he groaned piteously. "I knew
+you would sympathize; I could tell it all to you. And it was so awful,
+to die there alone in the strange city--I couldn't do it--with nobody
+near me who liked me, or thought well of me. Alice would hate me. There
+was no one but you. I wanted to be with you--at the last."
+
+His quavering voice broke off in a gust of weeping, and his face frankly
+surrendered itself to the distortions of a crying child's countenance,
+wide-mouthed and tragically grotesque in its abandonment of control.
+
+Sister Soulsby, as her husband's boots were heard descending the stairs,
+rose, and drew the robe up to half cover his agonized visage. She patted
+the sufferer softly on the head, and then went to the stair-door.
+
+"I think he'll go to sleep now," she said, lifting her voice to the
+new-comer, and with a backward nod toward the couch. "Come out into the
+kitchen while I get breakfast, or into the sitting-room, or somewhere,
+so as not to disturb him. He's promised me to lie perfectly quiet, and
+try to sleep."
+
+When they had passed together out of the room, she turned. "Soulsby,"
+she said with half-playful asperity, "I'm disappointed in you. For a man
+who's knocked about as much as you have, I must say you've picked up an
+astonishingly small outfit of gumption. That poor creature in there is
+no more drunk than I am. He's been drinking--yes, drinking like a
+fish; but it wasn't able to make him drunk. He's past being drunk; he's
+grief-crazy. It's a case of 'woman.' Some girl has made a fool of him,
+and decoyed him up in a balloon, and let him drop. He's been hurt bad,
+too."
+
+"We have all been hurt in our day and generation," responded Brother
+Soulsby, genially. "Don't you worry; he'll sleep that off too. It takes
+longer than drink, and it doesn't begin to be so pleasant, but it can be
+slept off. Take my word for it, he'll be a different man by noon."
+
+When noon came, however, Brother Soulsby was on his way to summon one
+of the village doctors. Toward nightfall, he went out again to telegraph
+for Alice.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+Spring fell early upon the pleasant southern slopes of the Susquehanna
+country. The snow went off as by magic. The trees budded and leaved
+before their time. The birds came and set up their chorus in the elms,
+while winter seemed still a thing of yesterday.
+
+Alice, clad gravely in black, stood again upon a kitchen-stoop, and
+looked across an intervening space of back-yards and fences to where the
+tall boughs, fresh in their new verdure, were silhouetted against the
+pure blue sky. The prospect recalled to her irresistibly another sunlit
+morning, a year ago, when she had stood in the doorway of her own
+kitchen, and surveyed a scene not unlike this; it might have been with
+the same carolling robins, the same trees, the same azure segment of
+the tranquil, speckless dome. Then she was looking out upon surroundings
+novel and strange to her, among which she must make herself at home as
+best she could. But at least the ground was secure under her feet; at
+least she had a home, and a word from her lips could summon her husband
+out, to stand beside her with his arm about her, and share her buoyant,
+hopeful joy in the promises of spring.
+
+To think that that was only one little year ago--the mere revolution of
+four brief seasons! And now--!
+
+Sister Soulsby, wiping her hands on her apron, came briskly out upon
+the stoop. Some cheerful commonplace was on her tongue, but a glance at
+Alice's wistful face kept it back. She passed an arm around her waist
+instead, and stood in silence, looking at the elms.
+
+"It brings back memories to me--all this," said Alice, nodding her head,
+and not seeking to dissemble the tears which sprang to her eyes.
+
+"The men will be down in a minute, dear," the other reminded her.
+"They'd nearly finished packing before I put the biscuits in the oven.
+We mustn't wear long faces before folks, you know."
+
+"Yes, I know," murmured Alice. Then, with a sudden impulse, she turned
+to her companion. "Candace," she said fervently, "we're alone here for
+the moment; I must tell you that if I don't talk gratitude to you, it's
+simply and solely because I don't know where to begin, or what to say.
+I'm just dumfounded at your goodness. It takes my speech away. I only
+know this, Candace: God will be very good to you."
+
+"Tut! tut!" replied Sister Soulsby, "that's all right, you dear thing. I
+know just how you feel. Don't dream of being under obligation to explain
+it to me, or to thank us at all. We've had all sorts of comfort out of
+the thing--Soulsby and I. We used to get downright lonesome, here all
+by ourselves, and we've simply had a winter of pleasant company instead,
+that s all. Besides, there's solid satisfaction in knowing that at
+last, for once in our lives we've had a chance to be of some real use to
+somebody who truly needed it. You can't imagine how stuck up that makes
+us in our own conceit. We feel as if we were George Peabody and Lady
+Burdett-Coutts, and several other philanthropists thrown in. No,
+seriously, don't think of it again. We're glad to have been able to do
+it all; and if you only go ahead now, and prosper and be happy, why,
+that will be the only reward we want."
+
+"I hope we shall do well," said Alice. "Only tell me this, Candace. You
+do think I was right, don't you, in insisting on Theron's leaving the
+ministry altogether? He seems convinced enough now that it was the right
+thing to do; but I grow nervous sometimes lest he should find it harder
+than he thought to get along in business, and regret the change--and
+blame me."
+
+"I think you may rest easy in your mind about that," the other
+responded. "Whatever else he does, he will never want to come within
+gunshot of a pulpit again. It came too near murdering him for that."
+
+Alice looked at her doubtfully. "Something came near murdering him, I
+know. But it doesn't seem to me that I would say it was the ministry.
+And I guess you know pretty well yourself what it was. Of course, I've
+never asked any questions, and I've hushed up everybody at Octavius
+who tried to quiz me about it--his disappearance and my packing up
+and leaving, and all that--and I've never discussed the question with
+you--but--"
+
+"No, and there's no good going into it now," put in Sister Soulsby,
+with amiable decisiveness. "It's all past and gone. In fact, I hardly
+remember much about it now myself. He simply got into deep water, poor
+soul, and we've floated him out again, safe and sound. That's all.
+But all the same, I was right in what I said. He was a mistake in the
+ministry."
+
+"But if you'd known him in previous years," urged Alice, plaintively,
+"before we were sent to that awful Octavius. He was the very ideal of
+all a young minister should be. People used to simply worship him,
+he was such a perfect preacher, and so pure-minded and friendly
+with everybody, and threw himself into his work so. It was all that
+miserable, contemptible Octavius that did the mischief."
+
+Sister Soulsby slowly shook her head. "If there hadn't been a screw
+loose somewhere," she said gently, "Octavius wouldn't have hurt him. No,
+take my word for it, he never was the right man for the place. He seemed
+to be, no doubt, but he wasn't. When pressure was put on him, it found
+out his weak spot like a shot, and pushed on it, and--well, it came near
+smashing him, that's all."
+
+"And do you think he'll always be a--a back-slider," mourned Alice.
+
+"For mercy's sake, don't ever try to have him pretend to be anything
+else!" exclaimed the other. "The last state of that man would be worse
+than the first. You must make up your mind to that. And you mustn't show
+that you're nervous about it. You mustn't get nervous! You mustn't be
+afraid of things. Just you keep a stiff upper lip, and say you WILL get
+along, you WILL be happy. That's your only chance, Alice. He isn't going
+to be an angel of light, or a saint, or anything of that sort, and it's
+no good expecting it. But he'll be just an average kind of man--a little
+sore about some things, a little wiser than he was about some others.
+You can get along perfectly with him, if you only keep your courage up,
+and don't show the white feather."
+
+"Yes, I know; but I've had it pretty well taken out of me," commented
+Alice. "It used to come easy to me to be cheerful and resolute and all
+that; but it's different now."
+
+Sister Soulsby stole a swift glance at the unsuspecting face of her
+companion which was not all admiration, but her voice remained patiently
+affectionate. "Oh, that'll all come back to you, right enough. You'll
+have your hands full, you know, finding a house, and unpacking all your
+old furniture, and buying new things, and getting your home settled.
+It'll keep you so busy you won't have time to feel strange or lonesome,
+one bit. You'll see how it'll tone you up. In a year's time you won't
+know yourself in the looking-glass."
+
+"Oh, my health is good enough," said Alice; "but I can't help thinking,
+suppose Theron should be taken sick again, away out there among
+strangers. You know he's never appeared to me to have quite got his
+strength back. These long illnesses, you know, they always leave a mark
+on a man."
+
+"Nonsense! He's strong as an ox," insisted Sister Soulsby. "You mark my
+word, he'll thrive in Seattle like a green bay-tree."
+
+"Seattle!" echoed Alice, meditatively. "It sounds like the other end of
+the world, doesn't it?"
+
+The noise of feet in the house broke upon the colloquy, and the women
+went indoors, to join the breakfast party. During the meal, it was
+Brother Soulsby who bore the burden of the conversation. He was full of
+the future of Seattle and the magnificent impending development of that
+Pacific section. He had been out there, years ago, when it was next door
+to uninhabited. He had visited the district twice since, and the changes
+discoverable each new time were more wonderful than anything Aladdin's
+lamp ever wrought. He had secured for Theron, through some of his
+friends in Portland, the superintendency of a land and real estate
+company, which had its headquarters in Seattle, but ambitiously linked
+its affairs with the future of all Washington Territory. In an hour's
+time the hack would come to take the Wares and their baggage to the
+depot, the first stage in their long journey across the continent
+to their new home. Brother Soulsby amiably filled the interval with
+reminiscences of the Oregon of twenty years back, with instructive
+dissertations upon the soil, climate, and seasons of Puget Sound and the
+Columbia valley, and, above all, with helpful characterizations of the
+social life which had begun to take form in this remotest West. He had
+nothing but confidence, to all appearances, in the success of his young
+friend, now embarking on this new career. He seemed so sanguine about
+it that the whole atmosphere of the breakfast room lightened up, and the
+parting meal, surrounded by so many temptations to distraught broodings
+and silences as it was, became almost jovial in its spirit.
+
+At last, it was time to look for the carriage. The trunks and hand-bags
+were ready in the hall, and Sister Soulsby was tying up a package of
+sandwiches for Alice to keep by her in the train.
+
+Theron, with hat in hand, and overcoat on arm, loitered restlessly into
+the kitchen, and watched this proceeding for a moment. Then he sauntered
+out upon the stoop, and, lifting his head and drawing as long a breath
+as he could, looked over at the elms.
+
+Perhaps the face was older and graver; it was hard to tell. The long
+winter's illness, with its recurring crises and sustained confinement,
+had bleached his skin and reduced his figure to gauntness, but there was
+none the less an air of restored and secure good health about him. Only
+in the eyes themselves, as they rested briefly upon the prospect, did
+a substantial change suggest itself. They did not dwell fondly upon the
+picture of the lofty, spreading boughs, with their waves of sap-green
+leafage stirring against the blue. They did not soften and glow this
+time, at the thought of how wholly one felt sure of God's goodness in
+these wonderful new mornings of spring.
+
+They looked instead straight through the fairest and most moving
+spectacle in nature's processional, and saw afar off, in conjectural
+vision, a formless sort of place which was Seattle. They surveyed its
+impalpable outlines, its undefined dimensions, with a certain cool
+glitter of hard-and-fast resolve. There rose before his fancy, out of
+the chaos of these shapeless imaginings, some faces of men, then more
+behind them, then a great concourse of uplifted countenances, crowded
+close together as far as the eye could reach. They were attentive faces
+all, rapt, eager, credulous to a degree. Their eyes were admiringly bent
+upon a common object of excited interest. They were looking at HIM; they
+strained their ears to miss no cadence of his voice. Involuntarily
+he straightened himself, stretched forth his hand with the pale, thin
+fingers gracefully disposed, and passed it slowly before him from side
+to side, in a comprehensive, stately gesture. The audience rose at him,
+as he dropped his hand, and filled his day-dream with a mighty roar of
+applause, in volume like an ocean tempest, yet pitched for his hearing
+alone.
+
+He smiled, shook himself with a little delighted tremor, and turned on
+the stoop to the open door.
+
+"What Soulsby said about politics out there interested me enormously,"
+he remarked to the two women. "I shouldn't be surprised if I found
+myself doing something in that line. I can speak, you know, if I can't
+do anything else. Talk is what tells, these days. Who knows? I may turn
+up in Washington a full-blown senator before I'm forty. Stranger things
+have happened than that, out West!"
+
+"We'll come down and visit you then, Soulsby and I," said Sister
+Soulsby, cheerfully. "You shall take us to the White House, Alice, and
+introduce us."
+
+"Oh, it isn't likely I would come East," said Alice, pensively. "Most
+probably I'd be left to amuse myself in Seattle. But there--I think
+that's the carriage driving up to the door."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Damnation of Theron Ware, by Harold Frederic
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