oolish sense of personal
grievance. Dad had it once, too, but he got over it long ago. I never
have. Perhaps you'll understand if I tell you. My mother was a vain,
silly, emotional sort of person, it seems, with some wonderful capacity
for attracting men. Dad was passionately fond of her. When I was about
three years old my foolish mother ran away with a young minister. After
living with him about six months, wandering about from place to place,
she drowned herself."

Thompson listened to this recital of human frailty in wonder at the calm
way in which Sophie Carr could speak to him, a stranger, of a tragedy so
intimate. She stopped a second.

"Dad was all broken up about it," she continued. "He loved my mother
with all her weaknesses--and he's a man with a profound knowledge of and
tolerance for human weaknesses. I daresay he would have been quite
willing to consider the past a blank if she had found out she cared most
for him, and had come back. But, as I said, she drowned herself. We
lived in the eastern States. It simply unrooted dad. He took me and came
away up here and buried himself. Incidentally he buried me too. And I
don't want to be buried. I resent being buried. I hope I shall not
always be a prisoner in these woods. And I grow more and more resentful
against that preacher for giving my father a jolt that made a recluse of
him. Don't you see? That one thing has colored my personal attitude
toward preachers as a class. I can never meet a minister without
thinking of that episode which has kept me here where I never see
another white woman, and very seldom a man. It's really a weak spot in
me, holding a grudge like that. One wouldn't condemn carpenters as a
body because one carpenter botched a house. And still--"

She made the queer little gesture with her hands that he had noticed
before. And she smiled quite pleasantly at Mr. Thompson in womanly
inconsistency with the attitude she had just been explaining she held
toward ministers.

"One gets such silly notions," she remarked. "Just like your idea that
you can come here and do good. You can't, you know--not for others--not
by your method. It's absurd. One can help others most, I really believe,
by helping oneself. I've noticed in reading of the phenomena of human
relations that the most pronounced idealists are frequently a sad burden
to others."

Mr. Thompson found himself at a loss for instant reply. It was a trifle
less direct, more subtle than he l