“I’ll tell you why,” the girl said—­and she laughed a little self-consciously.  “My reason tells me it’s a silly way to feel.  I can never quite consider theology and the preachers from the same dispassionate plane that dad can.  There’s a foolish sense of personal grievance.  Dad had it once, too, but he got over it long ago.  I never have.  Perhaps you’ll understand if I tell you.  My mother was a vain, silly, emotional sort of person, it seems, with some wonderful capacity for attracting men.  Dad was passionately fond of her.  When I was about three years old my foolish mother ran away with a young minister.  After living with him about six months, wandering about from place to place, she drowned herself.”

Thompson listened to this recital of human frailty in wonder at the calm way in which Sophie Carr could speak to him, a stranger, of a tragedy so intimate.  She stopped a second.

“Dad was all broken up about it,” she continued.  “He loved my mother with all her weaknesses—­and he’s a man with a profound knowledge of and tolerance for human weaknesses.  I daresay he would have been quite willing to consider the past a blank if she had found out she cared most for him, and had come back.  But, as I said, she drowned herself.  We lived in the eastern States.  It simply unrooted dad.  He took me and came away up here and buried himself.  Incidentally he buried me too.  And I don’t want to be buried.  I resent being buried.  I hope I shall not always be a prisoner in these woods.  And I grow more and more resentful against that preacher for giving my father a jolt that made a recluse of him.  Don’t you see?  That one thing has colored my personal attitude toward preachers as a class.  I can never meet a minister without thinking of that episode which has kept me here where I never see another white woman, and very seldom a man.  It’s really a weak spot in me, holding a grudge like that.  One wouldn’t condemn carpenters as a body because one carpenter botched a house.  And still—­”

She made the queer little gesture with her hands that he had noticed before.  And she smiled quite pleasantly at Mr. Thompson in womanly inconsistency with the attitude she had just been explaining she held toward ministers.

“One gets such silly notions,” she remarked.  “Just like your idea that you can come here and do good.  You can’t, you know—­not for others—­not by your method.  It’s absurd.  One can help others most, I really believe, by helping oneself.  I’ve noticed in reading of the phenomena of human relations that the most pronounced idealists are frequently a sad burden to others.”

Mr. Thompson found himself at a loss for instant reply.  It was a trifle less direct, more subtle than he liked.  It opened hazily paths of speculation he had never explored because generalizations of that sort had never been propounded to him—­certainly never by a young woman whose very physical presence disturbed him sadly.