public opinion and convention is a check on such men. They keep within
bounds because there's a heavy penalty if they don't. Up here where law
and conventions and so on practically don't exist, men of a certain
stamp aren't long in reverting to pure animalism. It's natural enough, I
dare say. Dad would be the last one to set himself up as a critic of any
one's personal morality. But it isn't very nice, especially for
preachers, who come here posing as the representatives of all that is
good and pure and holy."

"You get terribly sarcastic at times, Miss Carr," Thompson complained.
"A man can preach the Gospel without losing his manhood."

"If he had any clear conception of manhood I don't see how he could
devote himself to preaching as a profession," she said composedly. "Of
course, it's perhaps an excellent means of livelihood, but rather a
parasitic means, don't you think?"

"When Christ came among men He was reviled and despised," Mr. Thompson
declared impressively.

"Do you consider yourself the prototype of Christ?" the girl inquired
mockingly. "Why, if the man of Galilee could be reincarnated the first
thing He would attack would be the official expounders of Christianity,
with their creeds and formalisms, their temples and their self-seeking.
The Nazarene was a radical. The average preacher is an out-and-out
reactionary."

"How do you know?" he challenged boldly. "According to your own account
of your life so far, you have never had opportunity to find the truth or
falsity of such a sweeping statement. You've always lived--" he looked
about the enfolding woods--"how can one know what the world outside of
Lake Athabasca is, if one has never been there?"

She laughed.

"One can't know positively," she said. "Not from personal experience.
But one can read eagerly, and one can think about what one reads, and
one can draw pretty fair conclusions from history, from what wise men,
real thinkers, have written about this big world one has never seen. And
the official exponents of theology show up rather poorly as helpful
social factors, so far as my study of sociology has gone."

"You seem to have a grudge against the cloth," Thompson hazarded a
shrewd guess. "I wonder why?"

"I'll tell you why," the girl said--and she laughed a little
self-consciously. "My reason tells me it's a silly way to feel. I can
never quite consider theology and the preachers from the same
dispassionate plane that dad can. There's a f