Miss Morel, being a teacher going home after three years of steady, close work in a Manila high school, was ready to talk of anything but school work.  She found herself immensely interested in J.W.’s experiences.  He had told her of the double life, so to say, which he had led; preaching the good news of better tools, and studying the work of other men and women, as truly salesmen as himself, who preached a more arresting and insistent gospel.

“I’m glad to meet some one who knows about missions at first hand,” Miss Morel began one morning, as they stepped out on the promenade deck for their constitutional.  “You know, I think people at home don’t understand at all.  They are so absorbed with their little parish affairs that they can’t appreciate this wonderful work that is being done so far from home.”

J.W. agreed, though not without mental reservations.  He knew how true it was that many of the home folks did not rightly value mission work, but he was not so sure about their “little parish affairs.”  He watched to see if Miss Morel meant to expand that idea.

But she evidently had thought at once of something else.  Said she, “Sometimes I think that if the gossip about missionaries and missions which is so general in the Orient gets back home, as it surely does in one way or another, it must have a certain influence on what people think about the work.”

“Oh, that,” said J.W., with no little scorn.  “That stuff is always ignorant or malicious, and I doubt if it gets very far with church people.  Of course it may with outsiders.  I’ve heard it, any amount of it; you can’t miss it if you travel in the East And there’s just enough excuse for it to make it a particularly vicious sort of slander.  You could say as much about the churches at home, and a case here and there would not be lacking to furnish proof.”

“Certainly,” said the teacher.  “And yet missions are so wonderful; so much more worth while than anything that is being done at home, don’t you think?”

There it was again.  “I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Miss Morel,” J.W. said, with a puzzled air.  “Do you mean that the churches at home are not onto their job, if you’ll excuse the phrase?”

His companion laughed as she answered, “Maybe not quite as strong as that.  But they are doing the same old thing in the same old way.  Going to church and home again, to Sunday school and home again, to young people’s meeting and home again.  But out here,” and her hand swung in a half circle as though she meant to include the whole Pacific basin, “out here men and women are doing such splendid pioneer work, in all sorts of fascinating ways.”

“True enough,” J.W. assented.  “I’ve seen that, all right.  But the home church isn’t so dead as you might think.  Just before I left Delafield to go to Saint Louis, for instance, a new work for the foreign-speaking people of our town was being started, with the Board of Home Missions and Church Extension backing up the local workers.  They were planning to make a great church center for all these people, and I hear that it is getting a good start.”