created
a figure whose faith would be an eternal and joyful contemplation. She
had never invented for herself a marriage with some one merely
good-looking or rich or endowed with any of the romantic attributes that
young girls were supposed to award their ideals, as her cousins would
say, of men. When Guy entered her life, the only gift he brought her for
which she was at all prepared was the conviction of his faith. This
indeed was his spiritual and mental reality for her; the rest of him
was a figment, a dream that might pass suddenly away. The visit of his
father had given her a more clearly defined assurance of his existence
on earth, but his faith had been the heart of the immortal substance of
her love for Guy. The endlessness of their union was always present in
her thoughts, the ultimate consolation of whatever delays they might be
called upon to endure. Very often, even at the beginning of the
engagement, Guy had frightened her sometimes by his indifference to
immortality--sometimes by his harping upon the swift flight of youth,
sometimes by his manifest indulgence of her creed. All these doubts,
however, of his sympathy were allayed by his apparently deliberate
pleasure in worship. She was angry with herself then for her mistrust of
him, and her contentment had been perfect when in church he knelt beside
her on that birthday of his, that day of their avowed betrothal, and on
all those other occasions when he had given an outward proof of his
faith. Now as she looked back on his absence from church lately, she
could not but wonder whether all his attendance had not been a kind of
fair-weather spoiling of her that could not withstand the least stress
of worldly circumstance. She began to torment herself over every light
remark that might have been a sneer and to look forward dreadfully to
Guy's abrupt declaration of a profound disbelief in everything she held
most sacred. His cleverness, as he hated her to call it, intervened and
seemed to wrench them asunder; and the more she pondered his behavior,
the more she became convinced that all the time Guy's religion had
merely been Guy's kindness. This discovery was not to make her love him
less; but it did throw upon her the responsibility of the knowledge that
he had nothing within himself to fortify his soul, should mishap destroy
his worldly confidence.

For a long time Pauline lay awake in the darkness, fretting herself on
account of Guy's resourcelessness of sp