ce and seek independently to
spread the true doctrine. He is only one of many. I know several Army
chaplains who have been troubled with serious doubts for years. They
will rally to Paul as the Crusaders rallied to Peter the Hermit."

"I read his book," said Flamby, still staring unseeingly before her,
"and something inside myself told me that every word of it was true. I
know that I have lived before, everybody knows it, but everybody isn't
able to realise it. Dad told me that re-incarnation was the secret of
life once when I asked him who his father was. He said, 'Never mind
about that. Damn your ancestors!...' Oh! I didn't mean to say it! But,
really he said that. 'It is your _spiritual_ ancestry that counts,' he
told me. 'There are plenty of noble blackguards, and it wasn't his
parents who made a poet of Keats.' Dad convinced me in a wonderful way.
He pointed out that a child born of a fine cultured family and one whose
father was a thief and his mother something worse didn't start level at
all. One was handicapped before he had the sense to think for himself;
'before he weighed in,' was how dad put it. 'If there is a just God,' he
said--'and every man finds out sooner or later that there is, to his joy
or to his sorrow--there are no unfair handicaps. It wouldn't be racing.
Why should an innocent baby be born with the diseases and deformities of
it's parents? Why should some be born blind?' What he called 'the
hell-fire and brimstone' theory used to make him sick. He considered
that most missionaries ought to be publicly executed, and said that in
the Far East where he had lived you could see their work 'like the trail
of a tin tabernacle across a blasted heath.' That sounds like swearing,
but it's Shakespeare."

"I don't see," said Don, as Flamby became silent, "what this has to so
with Paul's misjudgment of you, or your misjudgment of Paul. It simply
means that you agree with him. You are such an extraordinarily clever
girl, and have had so extraordinary a training, that I cannot pass
lightly by anything you say seriously. What has led you to believe that
Paul thinks ill of you, and why does it worry you that I think him
incapable of such a thing?"

Flamby absently flicked cigarette ash upon the carpet. "According to
_The Gates_," she said, speaking very slowly and evidently seeking for
words wherewith to express her meaning, "everybody's sorrows and joys
and understanding or lack of understanding are exactly in