It is just that note, which is
characteristic of so many clergymen, that note of smoothing-over and
apology, which you lack. I could never feel it, even when you were
orthodox. And now--" words failed her as she inspected his ruggedness.

"And now," he took her up, to cover his emotion, "now I am not to be
classified!"

Still examining him, she reflected on this.

"Classified? Isn't it because you're so much of an individual that one
fails to classify you? You represent something new to my experience,
something which seems almost a contradiction--an emancipated Church."

"You imagined me out of the Church,--but where?" he demanded.

"That's just it," she wondered intimately, "where? When I try, I can see
no other place for you. Your place as in the pulpit."

He uttered a sharp exclamation, which she did not heed.

"I can't imagine you doing institutional work, as it is called,--you're
not fitted for it, you'd be wasted in it. You gain by the historic
setting of the Church, and yet it does not absorb you. Free to preach
your convictions, unfettered, you will have a power over people that
will be tremendous. You have a very strong personality."

She set his heart, his mind, to leaping by this unexpected confirmation
on her part of his hopes, and yet the man in him was intent upon the
woman. She had now the air of detached judgment, while he could not
refrain from speculating anxiously on the effect of his future course on
her and on their intimate relationship. He forbore from thinking, now,
of the looming events which might thrust them apart,--put a physical
distance between them,--his anxiety was concerned with the possible
snapping of the thread of sympathy which had bound them. In this
respect, he dreaded her own future as much as his own. What might she
do? For he felt, in her, a potential element of desperation; a capacity
to commit, at any moment, an irretrievable act.

"Once you have made your ideas your own," she mused, "you will have the
power of convincing people."

"And yet--"

"And yet"--she seized his unfinished sentence, "you are not at all
positive of convincing me. I'll give you the credit of forbearing to
make proselytes." She smiled at him.

Thus she read him again.

"If you call making proselytes a desire to communicate a view of life
which gives satisfaction--" he began, in his serious way.

"Oh, I want to be convinced!" she exclaimed, penitently, "I'd give
anything to feel as you fee