"I'd rather go in the
street cars."

She sat very still in the empty room, her face burning.

Characteristically, her father had not once mentioned the rector of
St. John's, yet had contrived to imply that her interest in Hodder was
greater than her interest in religion. And she was forced to admit, with
her customary honesty, that the implication was true.

The numbers who knew Alison Parr casually thought her cold. They admired
a certain quality in her work, but they did not suspect that that
quality was the incomplete expression of an innate idealism capable
of being fanned into flame,--for she was subject to rare but ardent
enthusiasms which kindled and transformed her incredibly in the eyes of
the few to whom the process had been revealed. She had had even a longer
list of suitors than any one guessed; men who--usually by accident--had
touched the hidden spring, and suddenly beholding an unimagined woman,
had consequently lost their heads. The mistake most of them had made
(for subtlety in such affairs is not a masculine trait) was the failure
to recognize and continue to present the quality in them which had
awakened her. She had invariably discovered the feet of clay.

Thus disillusion had been her misfortune--perhaps it would be more
accurate to say her fortune. She had built up, after each invasion,
her defences more carefully and solidly than before, only to be again
astonished and dismayed by the next onslaught, until at length the
question had become insistent--the question of an alliance for purposes
of greater security. She had returned to her childhood home to consider
it, frankly recognizing it as a compromise, a fall....

And here, in this sanctuary of her reflection, and out of a quarter on
which she had set no watch, out of a wilderness which she had believed
to hold nothing save the ruined splendours of the past, had come one
who, like the traditional figures of the wilderness, had attracted her
by his very uncouthness and latent power. And the anomaly he presented
in what might be called the vehemence of his advocacy of an outworn
orthodoxy, in his occupation of the pulpit of St. John's, had quickened
at once her curiosity and antagonism. It had been her sudden discovery,
or rather her instinctive suspicion of the inner conflict in him which
had set her standard fluttering in response. Once more (for the last
time--something whispered--now) she had become the lady of the lists;
she sat on her