pressed by her felicitous
discovery of the adjective.

Alison laughed.

"It's pagan because I'm pagan, I suppose."

"It's very beautiful--you have managed to get an extraordinary
atmosphere," he continued, bent on doing himself an exact justice. But
I should say, if you pressed me, that it represents to me the deification
of beauty to the exclusion of all else. You have made beauty the Alpha
and Omega."

"There is nothing else for me," she said.

The coffee-tray arrived and was deposited on a wicker table beside her.
She raised herself on an elbow, filled his cup and handed it to him.

"And yet," he persisted, "from the manner in which you spoke at the
table--"

"Oh, don't imagine I haven't thought? But thinking isn't--believing."

"No," he admitted, with a touch of sadness, "you are right. There were
certain comments you made on the Christian religion--"

She interrupted him again.

"As to the political side of it, which is Socialism, so far as I can
see. If there is any other side, I have never been able to discover it.
It seems to me that if Christians were logical, they should be
Socialists. The brotherhood of man, cooperation--all that is Socialism,
isn't it? It's opposed to the principle of the survival of the fittest,
which so many of these so-called Christians practise. I used to think,
when I came back from Paris, that I was a Socialist, and I went to a lot
of their meetings in New York, and to lectures. But after a while I saw
there was something in Socialism that didn't appeal to me, something
smothering,--a forced cooperation that did not leave one free. I wanted
to be free, I've been striving all my life to be free," she exclaimed
passionately, and was silent an instant, inspecting him. "Perhaps I owe
you an apology for speaking as I did before a clergyman--especially
before an honest one."

He passed over the qualification with a characteristic smile.

"Oh, if we are going to shut our ears to criticism we'd better give up
being clergymen," he answered. "I'm afraid there is a great deal of
truth in what you said."

"That's generous of you!" she exclaimed, and thrilled him with the
tribute. Nor was the tribute wholly in the words: there had come
spontaneously into her voice an exquisite, modulated note that haunted
him long after it had died away . . . .

"I had to say what I thought," she continued earnestly; "I stood it as
long as I could. Perhaps you didn't realize it, but my father was