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tions were down, she had cast her pride to the winds. He seemed to read in her a certain relief. "I am going to tell you something, Mr. Hodder, which you may think strange, but I have a reason for saying it. You are still a young man, and I feel instinctively that you have an unusual career before you. You interested me the first time you stepped into the pulpit of St. John's --and it will do me good to talk to you, this once, frankly. You have reiterated to-day, in no uncertain terms, doctrines which I once believed, which I was brought up to think infallible. But I have lived since then, and life itself has made me doubt them. "I recognize in you a humanity, a sympathy and breadth which you are yourself probably not aware of, all of which is greater than the rule which you so confidently apply to fit all cases. It seems to me that Christ did not intend us to have such rules. He went beyond them, into the spirit. "Under the conditions of society--of civilization to-day, most marriages are merely a matter of chance. Even judgment cannot foresee the development of character brought about by circumstances, by environment. And in many marriages I have known about intimately both the man and the woman have missed the most precious thing that life can give something I cannot but think--God intends us to have. You see,"--she smiled at him sadly--"I am still a little of an idealist. "I missed--the thing I am talking about, and it has been the great sorrow of my life--not only on my account, but on my husband's. And so far as I am concerned, I am telling you the truth when I say I should have been content to have lived in a log cabin if--if the gift had been mine. Not all the money in the world, nor the intellect, nor the philanthropy--the so-called interests of life, will satisfy me for its denial. I am a disappointed woman, I sometimes think a bitter woman. I can't believe that life is meant to be so. Those energies have gone into ambition which should have been absorbed by--by something more worth while. "And I can see so plainly now that my husband would have been far, far happier with another kind of woman. I drew him away from the only work he ever enjoyed--his painting. I do not say he ever could have been a great artist, but he had a little of the divine spark, in his enthusiasm at least--in his assiduity. I shall never forget our first trip abroad, after we were married--he was like a boy in the galleries, in
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