hy relict of the late James Hawley-Crowles, on Riverside Drive.

CHAPTER 7

As has been said, Carmen's six months in the Elwin school had been a
period of slow adjustment to the changed order. She had brought into
this new world a charm of unsophistication, an ingenuous _naivete_,
such as only an untrammeled spirit nourished in an elemental
civilization like that of primitive Simiti could develop. Added to
this was the zest and eagerness stimulated by the thought that she had
come as a message-bearer to a people with a great need. Her first
emotion had been that of astonishment that the dwellers in the great
States were not so different, after all, from those of her own
unprogressive country. Her next was one of sad disillusionment, as the
fact slowly dawned upon her trusting thought that the busy denizens of
her new environment took no interest whatsoever in her message. And
then her joy and brilliant hopefulness had chilled, and she awoke to
find her strange views a barrier between herself and her associates.
She had brought to the America of the North a spirit so deeply
religious as to know naught else than her God and His ceaseless
manifestation. She had come utterly free of dogma or creed, and
happily ignorant of decaying formularies and religious caste. Her
Christianity was her demonstrable interpretation of the Master's
words; and her fresh, ebulliant spirit soared unhampered in the warm
atmosphere of love for mankind. Her concept of the Christ stirred no
thought within her of intolerance toward those who might hold
differing views; nor did it raise interposing barriers within her own
mind, nor evoke those baser sentiments which have so sadly warped the
souls of men into instruments of deadly hatred and crushing tyranny.
Her spiritual vision, undimmed and world-embracing, saw the advent of
that day when all mankind would obey the commands of Jesus, and do the
works which he did, even to the complete spiritualization and
dematerializing of all human thought. And her burning desire was to
hasten the coming of that glad hour.

The conviction that, despite its tremendous needs, humanity was
steadily rejecting, even in this great land of opportunity and
progress, the remedy for its consuming ills, came to her slowly. And
with it a damping of her ardor, and a dulling of the fine edge of her
enthusiasm. She grew quiet as the days passed, and drew away from her
companions into her thought. With her increasing