eel the futility, the crass,
absurd presumption of what he had come back to undertake. From the lucid
quiet of his mountain haunts he had descended into a vale where
antiquated cymbals clashed in wild discordance above the confusing
clatter of an intricate machinery--machinery too complicated to be
readjusted by a passing dreamer. In his years of solitude he had grown
to believe that the teachers of the world were no longer dominated by
that ancient superstition of a superhumanly malignant God. He had been
prepared to find that the world-ideal had grown more lofty in his
absence, been purified by many eliminations into a God who, as he had
once said to Nance, could no more spare the soul of a Hottentot than the
soul of a pope. Yet here was a high type of the priest of the Mother
Church, gentle, Godly, learned, who gravely and as one having authority
told how God would blight forever the soul of a child unbaptised, thus
imputing to Deity a regard for mechanical rites that would constitute
even a poor human father an incredible monster.

Yet the marvel of it seemed to him to lie in this: that the priest
himself lived actually a life of loving devotion and sacrifice in marked
opposition to this doctrine of formal cruelty; that his church, more
successfully than any other in Christendom, had met the needs of
humanity, coming closer to men in their sin and sickness, ministering to
them with a deeper knowledge, a more affectionate intimacy, than any
other. That all these men of God should hold formally to dogmas belying
the humaneness of their actual practise--here was the puzzling anomaly
that might well give pause to any casual message-bringer. Struggle as he
might, it was like a tangling mesh cast over him--this growing sense of
his own futility.

Along with this conviction of his powerlessness there came to him a new
sense of reliance upon Nancy. Unconsciously at first he turned to her
for sunlight, big views and quiet power, for the very stimulus he had
been wont to draw from the wide, high reaches of his far-off valley.
Later, came a conscious turning, an open-eyed bringing of all his needs,
to lay them in her waiting lap. Then it was he saw that on that first
night at Edom her confidence and enthusiasm had been things he leaned
upon quite naturally, though unwittingly. The knowledge brought him a
vague unrest. Furtive, elusive impulses, borne to him on the wings of
certain old memories--memories once resolutely put aw