enty centuries ago, and we are to
remain there for all time."

He felt sweeping through him the reverse current of hostility.

"And what I preach," he asked, "has tended to confirm you in such a mean
conception of Christianity?"

Her eye travelled over the six feet of him--the kindling, reflecting
eye of the artist; it rested for a moment on the protesting locks of his
hair, which apparently could not be cut short enough to conform; on the
hands, which were strong and sinewy; on the wide, tolerant mouth, with
its rugged furrows, on the breadth and height of the forehead. She lay
for a moment, inert, considering.

"What you preach--yes," she answered, bravely meeting his look. "What
you are--no. You and your religion are as far apart as the poles. Oh,
this old argument, the belief that has been handed down to the man, the
authority with which he is clothed, and not the man himself! How can one
be a factor in life unless one represents something which is the fruit
of actual, personal experience? Your authority is for the weak, the
timid, the credulous,--for those who do not care to trust themselves,
who run for shelter from the storms of life to a 'papier-mache'
fortress, made to look like rock. In order to preach that logically you
should be a white ascetic, with a well-oiled manner, a downcast look
lest you stumble in your pride; lest by chance you might do something
original that sprang out of your own soul instead of being an imitation
of the saints. And if your congregation took your doctrine literally,
I can see a whole army of white, meek Christians. But you are not like
that. Can't you see it for yourself?" she exclaimed.

"Can't you feel that you are an individual, a personality, a force that
might be put to great uses? That will be because you are open-minded,
because there is room in you for growth and change?"

He strove with all his might to quell the inner conflagration which she
had fanned into leaping flames. Though he had listened before to doubt
and criticism, this woman, with her strange shifting moods of calm and
passion, with her bewildering faculty of changing from passive to active
resistance, her beauty (once manifest, never to be forgotten), her
unique individuality that now attracted, now repelled, seemed for
the moment the very incarnation of the forces opposed to him and his
religion. Holder, as he looked at her, had a flash of fierce resentment
that now, of all times, she should suddenly