“Not ready?” he asked, after the usual salutations.

“I am not going.”

“Really?  You are not ill, I hope?”

“Oh, no!  I never was better,” confessed Winifred.

“You should go above all things to-night,” he said.  “Mr. Mercer is going to give us parts of the Redemption.”

The music was certainly alluring.

“I have left the choir,” said Winifred faintly.

Mr. Frothingham never lost his easy self-poise over anything which this jestingly tolerated world offered him, but he allowed himself to be surprised now.

“You are surely not in earnest?” he said.  “You of all persons!  I thought you were devoted to the choir.  You are not going to desert us for some other field of conquest?”

“Oh, no!” said Winifred.

“Have you quarreled with Mercer?” he persisted.  “He is cranky sometimes.  Shall I fight him?”

Winifred had to laugh at the thought of the handsome, immaculate young man before her in a pugilistic encounter with Mr. Mercer.

“No, you needn’t do that,” she said; and added, “you would get the worst of it, I think.”

“Oh, really!  Thanks very much!  Perhaps you do not know my prowess in those lines?  But on the whole I should prefer a smaller man than Mercer.  He shall be spared if you say so.”

“You relieve me,” said Winifred, laughing.

But how was she to explain the truth to Frothingham?  It was easier to jest with him than to speak earnestly, and Winifred had an instinctive feeling, not definitely acknowledged, that to make him understand a spiritual idea would be impossible.

“But really, Winifred,” he went on, “if it is not rude to ask, I should like to know what great reason makes you desert us now in the very height of your success, and, I should think, enjoyment?”

Smiles left her face, and a flush of embarrassment deepened in her cheeks.  It was very hard to speak to him of these things—­harder than it had been to any other.

“That is just it,” she said slowly.  “It has been a success for me, artistically, and a great enjoyment.  But there has been nothing in it for—­for—­Christ.”  She hesitated before the sacred name.  Why was it so hard to speak it before him?

He was silent.  They were already by the simple mention of that name in deeper water, conversationally, than he was accustomed to.  She had to go on.

“I have been convinced,” she said, “that it has all been very wrong.  I have been offering to God a pretended worship, when it has really been the worship of our Art.  That must be idolatry, I think.  I can’t go on with it.”

Winifred stopped decisively, and Frothingham found words to reply with just a tinge of irony: 

“I am afraid you are a bit too metaphysical for me, Winifred.  I don’t quite understand you.  Do you mean to say singing in the choir is wrong?  If it is, it is a pretty common sin and quite generally approved of.”