“Do you find it so?” he asked.  “Well, now, I don’t agree with you.  I think this proceeding is a real bore.  My respected aunt is always getting up absurd freaks, and this is one of them, and the worst one, in my opinion, that she has had for some time.  I wanted to go to those meetings to-day—­some of them, at least.  One isn’t obliged to be there every minute.  But it looks badly to run away.”

Eurie eyed him closely.

“Are you the ‘good nephew’ that your aunt said thought these meetings only a step below paradise?” she asked, at last.  “I wonder you would consent to come.”

Mr. Rawson flushed deeply.

“I am not the ‘good nephew’ at all,” he said, trying to laugh.  “The ‘good one’ wouldn’t come.  My aunt tried all her powers of persuasion on him in vain.  But the truth is her eloquence, or her persistence, proved too much for me, though I don’t like the looks of it, and I don’t feel the pleasure of it, and I am afraid I shall make anything but an agreeable addition to the party.  Now that is being frank, isn’t it, when I am walking the deck with a young lady?”

“I don’t see why that circumstance should make it a surprising thing that you are frank.  But I am very sorry for you; perhaps you might prevail on the Captain to put you off now, and let you swim back; you could get there in time for the sermon.  Is there to be a sermon?  What is it you are so anxious to hear?”

“All of it,” he said gloomily.  “I beg your pardon for being in so disagreeable a mood; it is defrauding you out of some of your expected pleasure to have a dismal companion.  But as I have commenced by being frank I may as well continue.  I am dissatisfied with myself.  I ought not to have come on this excursion.  The truth is, I meant to make Chautauqua a help to me.  I need the help badly enough.  I am in the rush and whirl of business all the time at home.  This is the only two weeks in the year that I am free, and I wanted to make it a great spiritual help to me.  I know very well that merely hovering around in such an atmosphere as that at Chautauqua is a help to the Christian, and I came with the full intention of taking in all that I could get of this sort of inspiration, and it chafes me that so early in the meeting I have been led away against my inclinations by a little pressure that I might have resisted, and done no harm to any one.  My cousin had the same sort of influence brought to bear on him, and it had no more effect on him than it would on a stone.”

He stopped, and seemed to give Eurie a chance to answer, but she was not inclined, and he added, as if he had just thought his words an implied reproach:  “I can understand how, to you young ladies of comparative leisure, with plenty of time to cultivate the spiritual side of your natures, it should seem an unnecessary and perhaps a wearisome thing to attend all these meetings; but you can not understand what it is to be in the whirl of business life, never having time to think, hardly having time to pray, and to get away from it all and go to heaven, as it were, for a fortnight, is something to be coveted by us as a great help.”