"I could see," said Mela, as she and Christine drove home together,
"that she was as jealous as she could be, all the time you was talkun'
to Mr. Beaton. She pretended to be talkun' to Conrad, but she kep' her
eye on you pretty close, I can tell you. I bet she just got us there to
see how him and you would act together. And I reckon she was satisfied.
He's dead gone on you, Chris."

Christine listened with a dreamy pleasure to the flatteries with which
Mela plied her in the hope of some return in kind, and not at all
because she felt spitefully toward Miss Vance, or in anywise wished her
ill. "Who was that fellow with you so long?" asked Christine. "I suppose
you turned yourself inside out to him, like you always do."

Mela was transported by the cruel ingratitude. "It's a lie! I didn't
tell him a single thing."

Conrad walked home, choosing to do so because he did not wish to hear
his sisters' talk of the evening, and because there was a tumult in his
spirit which he wished to let have its way. In his life with its single
purpose, defeated by stronger wills than his own, and now struggling
partially to fulfil itself in acts of devotion to others, the thought of
women had entered scarcely more than in that of a child. His ideals were
of a virginal vagueness; faces, voices, gestures had filled his fancy at
times, but almost passionately; and the sensation that he now indulged
was a kind of worship, ardent, but reverent and exalted. The brutal
experiences of the world make us forget that there are such natures in
it, and that they seem to come up out of the lowly earth as well as down
from the high heaven. In the heart of this man well on toward thirty
there had never been left the stain of a base thought; not that
suggestion and conjecture had not visited him, but that he had not
entertained them, or in any-wise made them his. In a Catholic age and
country, he would have been one of those monks who are sainted after
death for the angelic purity of their lives, and whose names are invoked
by believers in moments of trial, like San Luigi Gonzaga. As he now
walked along thinking, with a lover's beatified smile on his face, of
how Margaret Vance had spoken and looked, he dramatized scenes in which
he approved himself to her by acts of goodness and unselfishness, and
died to please her for the sake of others. He made her praise him for
them, to his face, when he disclaimed their merit, and after his death,
when he could