row of John Stuart Mill's
essays, while Hume and Hobbes looked out above and below. It amused
Flint, as he sat there alone, to fancy these polemical gentlemen
issuing from their bindings and sitting down together around his
evening lamp, to talk things over. "Probably," he mused, with that
idle pensiveness which is the lazy man's apology to himself for not
thinking, "the thing which would surprise them most would be to see
how much they held in common. If they could get rid of the cant of
theology and the jargon of metaphysics, they would find that they were
not so far apart after all. But I don't know that that would gratify
them so much,--certainly not the old parson, for he belonged to the
Church Militant if ever any one did, and dearly loved to belabor his
enemies with the spiritual weapons too heavy for any but him to
handle. Well, it _was_ a temptation to let something fly, be it Bible
or brickbat, at the head of the average dullard. How was it that some
people did not find the average man dull? There was Winifred Anstice,
for instance,--she seemed to find something interesting in every one
she met. Perhaps because she did not try to approach them on the
intellectual side at all, but took them into her sympathies and
soothed their troubles, as he remembered that mother across the way
from his uncle's house soothing the little son and wiping away his
tears."

_Perhaps, after all, she was right and he was wrong._ It was almost
the first time in Flint's life that he had ever definitely formulated
a confession that his attitude towards life in general was not what it
might be. Once formulated, it began to grow upon him curiously. He
found himself reviewing whole courses of conduct, and testing them by
new rules and standards.

At first these rules and standards were cold and rigid abstractions;
but gradually they took on a faint echo of personality, and he found
himself speculating on what Winifred Anstice would have done or said,
on occasions when he felt himself to have been harsh and hard. This
haunting influence was intensified by the presence of the portrait
which he had brought away from Nepaug; the picture of the gray-robed
Quakeress, with the soft dark eyes, and the white lace, and the point
of flame at her breast.

He had lost all appreciation of its artistic qualities. The mottled
softness of the curtained background against the folds of the woollen
stuff gave him no pleasure now,--at least, he never tho