The solemn, earnest, tender closing to this address did not lessen her sense of discomfort.  Then just beside her was carried on a conversation that added to her annoyance.

“They are big men,” a man said.  He was dressed in a common business suit; his linen had not the exquisite freshness about it that her fastidious eyes delighted in; his hands looked as though they might have been used to work that was rough and hard; his straggling hair was sprinkled with gray, and there was not a striking feature about him.

“They are big men,” he said, “and I’ve no doubt it is a big thing to know them, and talk with them, and have a friendly feeling for each, as if they belonged to him, but he knows a bigger one than them, and the best of it is, so do we.  The Lord Jesus Christ, our Elder Brother, is not to be compared to common men like these.”

And now Ruth’s lips curled utterly.  She was an aristocrat without knowing it.  She believed in Christianity, and in its power to save the poor and the commonest, but this insufferable assumption of dignity and superiority over the rest of the world, as she called it, was hateful to her in the extreme.  It would have startled her exceedingly to have been told that she was angry with the man for presuming to place his Friend higher in the list of great ones than any of those given that day; and yet such was actually her feeling.  She swept her skirts angrily away from contact with the man, and spoke so crustily to the little lady who had come in her wake that she moved timidly away.

Just at her left were two gentlemen shaking hands.  Both had been on the stand together, she knew the faces of both, and one ranked just a trifle higher in her estimation than any one at Chautauqua.  She edged a little nearer.  She lived in the hope of making the acquaintance of some of these lights, just enough acquaintance to receive a bow and a clasp of the hand, though how one could accomplish it who was determined that her interest in them should neither be seen nor suspected, it would be hard to say; but they were talking in eager, hearty tones, not at all as if their words were confidential—­at least she might have the benefit of them.

“That was a capital lecture,” the elder of the two was saying.  “Cuyler has had great advantages in his life in meeting on a familiar footing so many of our great men.  When you get thinking of these things, and of the many men whom you would like to know intimately, what is the thought that strikes you most forcibly?”

“That I am glad I belong to the ‘royal family,’ and have the opportunity of knowing intimately and holding close personal relations with Him who ‘spake as never man spake.’”

The other answered in a rare, rich tone of suppressed jubilance of feeling.

“Exactly!” his friend said; “and when you can leave the fullness of that thought long enough to take another, there is the looking forward to actual fellowship and communion not only with him, but with all these glorious men who are living here, and who have gone up yonder.”