of men inwardly ennobled and united in spirit.  He saw history growing reasonable and life visibly noble as mankind realized the divine aim.  All the outward peace and order, the joy of physical existence finely conceived, the mounting power and widening aim were but the expression and verification of the growth of God within.  Then we would bear children for finer ends than the blood and mud of battlefields.  Life would tower up like a great flame.  By faith we reached forward to that.  The vision grew more splendid as it grew more metaphorical.  And the price one paid for that; one gave sham dignities, false honour, a Levitical righteousness, immediate peace, one bartered kings and churches for God....  He looked at the mean, poverty-struck room, he marked the dinginess and tawdriness of its detail and all the sordid evidences of ungracious bargaining and grudging service in its appointments.  For all his life now he would have to live in such rooms.  He who had been one of the lucky ones....  Well, men were living in dug-outs and dying gaily in muddy trenches, they had given limbs and lives, eyes and the joy of movement, prosperity and pride, for a smaller cause and a feebler assurance than this that he had found....

(19)

Presently his thoughts were brought back to his family by the sounds of Eleanor’s return.  He heard her key in the outer door; he heard her move about in the hall and then slip lightly up to bed.  He did not go out to speak to her, and she did not note the light under his door.

He would talk to her later when this discovery of her own emotions no longer dominated her mind.  He recalled her departing figure and how she had walked, touching and looking up to her young mate, and he a little leaning to her....

“God bless them and save them,” he said....

He thought of her sisters.  They had said but little to his clumsy explanations.  He thought of the years and experience that they must needs pass through before they could think the fulness of his present thoughts, and so he tempered his disappointment.  They were a gallant group, he felt.  He had to thank Ella and good fortune that so they were.  There was Clementina with her odd quick combatant sharpness, a harder being than Eleanor, but nevertheless a fine-spirited and even more independent.  There was Miriam, indefatigably kind.  Phoebe too had a real passion of the intellect and Daphne an innate disposition to service.  But it was strange how they had taken his proclamation of a conclusive breach with the church as though it was a command they must, at least outwardly, obey.  He had expected them to be more deeply shocked; he had thought he would have to argue against objections and convert them to his views.  Their acquiescence was strange.  They were content he should think all this great issue out and give his results to them.  And his wife, well as he knew her, had surprised him.  He thought of her words:  “Whither thou goest—­”