“Quite so,” rejoined the sister, patiently.  “If you saw the way a hotel dinner was cooked, you wouldn’t be able to stomach it.  Did you ever see a play?  In a theatre, I mean.  I supposed not.  But you’ll understand when I say that the performance looks one way from where the audience sit, and quite a different way when you are behind the scenes.  There you see that the trees and houses are cloth, and the moon is tissue paper, and the flying fairy is a middle-aged woman strung up on a rope.  That doesn’t prove that the play, out in front, isn’t beautiful and affecting, and all that.  It only shows that everything in this world is produced by machinery—­by organization.  The trouble is that you’ve been let in on the stage, behind the scenes, so to speak, and you’re so green—­if you’ll pardon me—­that you want to sit down and cry because the trees are cloth, and the moon is a lantern.  And I say, don’t be such a goose!”

“I see what you mean,” Theron said, with an answering smile.  He added, more gravely, “All the same, the Winch business seems to me—­”

“Now the Winch business is my own affair,” Sister Soulsby broke in abruptly.  “I take all the responsibility for that.  You need know nothing about it.  You simply voted as you did on the merits of the case as he presented them—­that’s all.”

“But—­” Theron began, and then paused.  Something had occurred to him, and he knitted his brows to follow its course of expansion in his mind.  Suddenly he raised his head.  “Then you arranged with Winch to make those bogus offers—­just to lead others on?” he demanded.

Sister Soulsby’s large eyes beamed down upon him in reply, at first in open merriment, then more soberly, till their regard was almost pensive.

“Let us talk of something else,” she said.  “All that is past and gone.  It has nothing to do with you, anyway.  I’ve got some advice to give you about keeping up this grip you’ve got on your people.”

The young minister had risen to his feet while she spoke.  He put his hands in his pockets, and with rounded shoulders began slowly pacing the room.  After a turn or two he came to the desk, and leaned against it.

“I doubt if it’s worth while going into that,” he said, in the solemn tone of one who feels that an irrevocable thing is being uttered.  She waited to hear more, apparently.  “I think I shall go away—­give up the ministry,” he added.

Sister Soulsby’s eyes revealed no such shock of consternation as he, unconsciously, had looked for.  They remained quite calm; and when she spoke, they deepened, to fit her speech, with what he read to be a gaze of affectionate melancholy—­one might say pity.  She shook her head slowly.

“No—­don’t let any one else hear you say that,” she replied.  “My poor young friend, it’s no good to even think it.  The real wisdom is to school yourself to move along smoothly, and not fret, and get the best of what’s going.  I’ve known others who felt as you do—­of course there are times when every young man of brains and high notions feels that way—­but there’s no help for it.  Those who tried to get out only broke themselves.  Those who stayed in, and made the best of it—­well, one of them will be a bishop in another ten years.”