feeling,
the levity, on the unbelief of the age. Isn't it because the control has
been taken off?"

He saw an opportunity to slip into smoother waters.

"The engine has lost its governor?"

"Exactly!" cried Mrs. Larrabbee. "What a clever simile!"

"It is Mr. Pares," said Hodder. "Only he was speaking of other symptoms,
Socialism, and its opposite, individualism,--not carnivalism."

"Poor man," said Mrs. Larrabbee, accepting the new ground as safer, yet
with a baffled feeling that Hodder had evaded her once more, "he has had
his share of individualism and carnivalism. His son Preston was here
last month, and was taken out to the yacht every night in an unspeakable
state. And Alison hasn't been what might be called a blessing."

"She must be unusual," said the rector, musingly.

"Oh, Alison is a Person. She has become quite the fashion, and has more
work than she can possibly attend to. Very few women with her good looks
could have done what she has without severe criticism, and something
worse, perhaps. The most extraordinary thing about her is her contempt
for what her father has gained, and for conventionalities. It always
amuses me when I think that she might have been the wife of Gordon
Atterbury. The Goddess of Liberty linked to--what?"

Hodder thought instinctively of the Church. But he remained silent.

"As a rule, men are such fools about the women they wish to marry," she
continued. "She would have led him a dance for a year or two, and then
calmly and inexorably left him. And there was her father, with all his
ability and genius, couldn't see it either, but fondly imagined that
Alison as Gordon Atterbury's wife, would magically become an Atterbury
and a bourgeoise, see that the corners were dusted in the big house, sew
underwear for the poor, and fast in Lent."

"And she is happy--where she is?" he inquired somewhat naively.

"She is self-sufficient," said Mrs. Larrabbee, with unusual feeling,
"and that is just what most women are not, in these days. Oh, why has
life become such a problem? Sometimes I think, with all that I have,
I'm not, so well off as one of those salesgirls in Ferguson's, at home.
I'm always searching for things to do--nothing is thrust on me. There
are the charities--Galt House, and all that, but I never seem to get at
anything, at the people I'd like to help. It's like sending money to
China. There is no direct touch any more. It's like seeing one's
opportunities through an ir