“What is the subject?” Flossy asked, with a sudden glow of interest.

“It is what a Christian can learn from a heathen.  I’m the heathen, and I presume Dr Calkins is the Christian.  So he is to see what he can learn from me, I take it, and naturally I am anxious to know.  Flossy isn’t interested in that; I can see it from her face.  She knows she isn’t a heathen—­she is a good proper little Christian.  But it is your duty, my dear, to find what you can learn from me.”

“What can he possibly make of such a subject as that?” Ruth asked, curiously.  “I don’t believe I want to hear him.  Is he so very talented, Marion?”

“I don’t know.  Haven’t the least idea whether he is what you call talented or not.  He says things exactly as though he knew they were so, and for the time being he makes you feel as though you were a perfect simpleton for not knowing it, too.”

“And you like to be made to feel like a ‘perfect simpleton?’ Is that the reason you resolved to hear him again?”

“I like to meet a man once in a while who knows how to do it, and for the matter of that I wouldn’t mind being made to feel the truth of the things that he says, if one could only stay made.  It isn’t the fault of the preaching that it all feels like a pretty story and nothing else; it is the fault of the wretched practicing that the sheep go home and do.  It makes one feel like being an out-and-out goat, and done with it, instead of being such a perfect idiot of a sheep.”

At this point the talk suddenly ceased, for the leaders began to assemble, and the service commenced.  Ruth and Marion exchanged comic glances when they discovered the “heathen” of the afternoon to be Socrates.  And Marion presently whispered that she was evidently to play the character of the old fellow’s wife, and Eurie whispered to them both: 

“Now I want to know if that horrid Zantippe was Socrates’ wife!  Upon my word I never knew it before.  She wasn’t to blame, after all, for being such a wretch.”

“What do you mean?” Marion whispered back, with scornful eyes.  “Socrates was the grandest old man that ever lived.”

“Pooh!  He wasn’t.  He didn’t know any more than little mites of Sunday-school children do nowdays.  I never could understand why his philosophy was so remarkable, only that he lived in a heathen country and got ahead of all the rest, but if he were living now he would be a pigmy.”

“I wish he were,” Marion said, with her eyes still flashing.  “I would like to see such a life as he lived.”

This girl was a hero worshiper.  Her cheeks could burn and her eyes glow over the grand stories of old heathen characters, and she could melt to tears over their trials and wrongs.  And yet she passed by in haughty silence the sublime life that of all others is the only perfect one on record, and she had no tears to shed over the shameful and pitiful story of the cross.  What a strange girl she was!  I wonder if it be possible that there are any others like her?