“That is the reason so much is left undone, then,” retorted Eurie, with unfailing good humor, and turned back to the speaker in time to hear his description of the superintendent that was so long in finding the place to sing that the boys before him went around the world while he was giving the number.

“Slow people,” said she, going down the hill afterward.  “I never could endure them, and I shall have less patience with them in future than ever.  Wasn’t he splendid?  Ruth, you liked the part about Dickens, of course.”

“A valuable help the lecture will be to your after-life if all you have got is an added feeling of impatience toward slow people.  Unfortunately for you they are in the world, and will be very likely to stay in it, and a very good sort of people they are, too.”

It was Marion who said this, and her tone was dry and unsympathetic.

Eurie turned to her curiously.

“You didn’t like him,” she said, “did you?  I am so surprised; I thought you would think him splendid.  On your favorite hobby, too.  I said to myself this will be just in Marion’s line.  She has so much to say about teaching children by rote in a dull and uninteresting way.  You couldn’t forgive him for reciting that horrid old hymn in such a funny way.  Flossy, do you suppose you can ever hear that hymn read again without laughing?  What was the matter, Marion?  Who imagined you had any sentimental drawings toward Watts’ hymns?”

“I didn’t even know it was Watts’ hymn,” Marion said, indifferently.  “But I hate to hear any one go back on his own belief.  If he honestly believes in the sentiments of that verse, and they certainly are Bible sentiments, he shouldn’t make fun of it.  But I’m sure it is of no consequence to me.  He may make fun of the whole Bible if he chooses, verse by verse, and preach a melting sermon from it the very next Sabbath; it will be all the same to me.  Let us go in search of some dinner, and not talk any more about him.”

“But that isn’t fair.  You are unjust, isn’t she, Ruth?  I say he didn’t make fun of religion, as Marion persists in saying that he did.”

“Of course not,” Ruth said.  “A minister would hardly be guilty of doing that.  He was simply comparing the advanced methods of the present with the stupidity of the past.”

And obstinate Marion said then he ought to get a new Bible, for the very same notions were in it that were when she was a child and learned verses.  And that was all that this discussion amounted to.  Nobody had appealed to Flossy.  She had stood looking with an indifferent air around her, until Marion turned suddenly and said: 

“What did the lecture say to you, Flossy?  Eurie seems very anxious to get out of it something for our ‘special needs,’ as they say in church.  What was yours?”

Flossy hesitated like a timid child, flushed and then paled, and finally said, simply: 

“I have been thinking ever since he spoke it of that one sentence, ‘Rock-firm, God-trust, has died out of the world.’  I was wondering if it were true, and I was wishing that it wasn’t.”