pent in her own room before breakfast, writing;
and the "Daily Review" owed some very lively articles to the Greyshot
visit. Beyond a sort of clan feeling for her aunt, and a real liking for
Rose who, in spite of her follies, was good-humored and very lovable
she had not yet found one point of union with her new relations. Even
possible topics of conversation were hard to find. They cared nothing
for politics, they cared nothing for science, they were none of them
book lovers, and it was against their sense of etiquette to speak of
anything but the externals of religion. Worst of all, any allusion to
home matters, any mention of her father had to be avoided. Little was
left but the mere gossip of the neighborhood, which, except as a social
study, could not interest Erica.

Greyshot was an idle place; the church seemed asleep, a drowsy
indifference hung about the richer inhabitants, while the honest
workers not unnaturally banded themself together against the sleepily
respectable church-goers, and secularism and one or two other "isms"
made rapid advances. Then sleepy orthodoxy lifted its drowsy head for a
minute, noted the evil, and abused Mr. Raeburn and his fellow workers,
lamenting in many-syllable words the depravity of the working classes
and the rapid spread of infidelity. But nothing came of the lament; it
never seemed to strike them that they must act as well as talk, that
they must renounce their useless, wasteful, un-Christian lives before
they had even a right to lift up their voices against secularism, which
certainly did in some measure meet the needs of the people. It never
seemed to strike them that THEY were the real promoters of infidelity
that they not only dishonored the name of Christ, but by their
inconsistent lives disgusted people with Christianity, and then refused
to have anything more to do with them. Luke Raeburn, if he pulled down
with the one hand, at any rate, tried hard to build up with the other;
but the people of Greyshot caused in a great degree the ruin and down
fall, and then exclaimed, "How shocking!" and turned their backs,
thinking to shift their blame on to the secularist leaders.

As far as society goes, they succeeded in thus shifting the blame; the
world laid it all on Luke Raeburn, he was a most convenient scapegoat,
and so widely does conventional Christianity differ from the religion
founded by Christ it soon became among a certain set almost equivalent
to a religious act t