But Bartram had good enough reasons for his sudden interest in religion.  He was in love with Eleanor Prency, and, after the manner of his family regarding everything that interested them, he was tremendously in earnest with his wooing.  Like a judicious lawyer, he had endeavored to make his way easier by prepossessing the girl’s parents in his favor; but when he began to pass the lines of pleasing civility, within which he had long known the judge and his wife, he was surprised to find an undercurrent of seriousness, the existence of which in the Prency family he never had suspected.  The judge appeared to estimate everything from the stand-point of religion and righteousness; so did his wife; so, though in less measure, did the daughter.

Such nonsense, as the self-sufficient youth regarded it, was annoying.  To visit a pleasant family with the intention of making a general conquest and find himself confronted by a line of obstacles which he always had regarded as trifling, yet which he was unable to overcome, and to be told that religion was a reality because it had changed Sam Kimper, one of the most insignificant wretches in town, from a lazy, thievish drunkard to an honest, sober, industrious citizen,—­all this was to make war upon Reynolds Bartram’s constitutional opinions as to the fitness of things.

A change of opinion somewhere was necessary:  so it must occur in the Prency family, and as soon as it could be brought about.  This was Bartram’s first conclusion, after an hour of deep thought.  He had started upon a love-making enterprise, and he objected to a complication of interests.  If the Prencys chose to talk theology in the privacy of their family life, they were welcome to do so, but he wished none of it, and, unless his head had lost its cunning, he believed he could devise a method of preventing further inflictions of it.

He convinced himself that his best method would be to discover and expose the weakness, perhaps hypocrisy, of the wretched cobbler’s professions.  Maybe Kimper meant all he said, and thought he believed something which was essential to religion; but had not scores of other common fellows in the town done likewise, during “revivals” and other seasons of special religious effort, only to fall back into their old ways soon afterwards?  It was all a matter of birth and training, argued Bartram to himself:  the feeblest and most excitable intellects, the world over, were the first to be impressed by whatever seemed supernatural, whether it were called religion, spiritualism, mesmerism, or anything else.  It was merely a matter of mental excitement:  the stronger the attack, the sooner the relapse.  Sam Kimper would lose faith in his fancies sooner or later; it might be somewhat cruel to hasten this result, but what was a little more or less of the life of such a fellow, compared with the lifelong happiness of one of the Bartrams,—­the last of the family, and, as the young man fully believed, the best?  Should the cobbler’s fall be hastened, Bartram would make it right; indeed, he would volunteer in his defense the first time he should again be arrested for fighting or stealing.