e eyes of the beautiful woman--she was twenty-eight--swept the
apartment and, finally, resting upon a delightful _vis-a-vis_, she
laughed merrily, as she said:

"Fancy finding a _vis-a-vis_, and of this luxurious type, too, in a
library. I always think it is a mistake to have the library of the house
so stiff, sometimes the library is positively forbidding."

She laughed lightly again, as she said. "I'm going off into a
disquisition on interiors, so--shall we sit here?"

She dropped into one of the curves of the _vis-a-vis_, and he took the
other.

For half-an-hour their talk on their pet subject was more or less
general, then he startled her by asking:

"Do you know the Christian New Testament, at all?"

"The Gospels, I have read," she replied, "and am fairly well familiar
with them. I have read, too, the final book, "The Revelation," which
though a sealed book to me, as far as knowledge of its meaning goes, yet
has, I confess, a perennial attraction for me."

She lifted her great eyes to his, a little quizzical expression in them,
as she added:

"You are surprised that I, a Jewess, should speak thus of the Gentile
scriptures!"

Then, without giving him time to reply, she went on:

"But why did you ask whether I knew anything of the New Testament?"

"Because, apropos of what I said a moment ago, anent the repetition of
History, the Christ of the New Testament declared that "as the days of
Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be."

She nodded her beautiful head, as though she would assent to the
correctness of his quotation.

"Now I make no profession of being ultra-Christian," he went on, "but I
know the _letter_ of the Bible quite as well as most Teachers of
Christianity, and without intending any egotism I am sure I dare to say
that I know it infinitely better than the average Christian. And if I
was a teacher or preacher of the Christian faith I would raise my voice
most vehemently against the wilful, sinful ignorance of the Bible on the
part of the professed Christians. Members of the various so-called
'churches,' seem to know _every_thing _except_ their Bibles. Mention a
passage in Spenser, William Wordsworth, Whittier, Longfellow, Tennyson,
Browning, or even Swinburne, William Watson, Charles Fox, Carleton, or
Lowell, and they can pick the volume off the shelf in an instant, and the
next instant, they have the book open at your quotation. But quote Jude
or Enoch, or Job on