Her appearance was a libel on any variety of independence and a joke on hope, but I waited for the rest of the story.

She said that the Order to which she belonged was not large.  She was one of a small band of women bound by a solemn oath to go where they could and seek to help and uplift fallen humanity by living the life of the native poor.  She had chosen Japan because it was “so pretty and poetical.”  She had worked her way across the Pacific as stewardess on a large steamer, and had landed in Hijiyama a few months before with enough cash to keep a canary bird in delicate health for a month.  Her enthusiasm was high, her zeal blazed.  If only her faith were strong enough to stand the test, her need for food and clothing would be supplied from somewhere.  “Now,” she moaned, “something has happened.  Maybe my want of absolute trust brought me to it.  I’m sick and hungry and I’ve failed.  Oh!  I wanted to help these sweet people; I wanted to save their dear souls.”

I was skeptical as to this special brand of philanthropy, but I was touched by the grief of her disappointed hopes.  I knew the particular sting.  At the same time my hand twitched to shake her for going into this thing in so impractical a way.  Teaching and preaching in a foreign land may include romance, but I’ve yet to hear where the most enthusiastic or fanatical found nourishment or inspiration on a diet of visions pure and simple.  While there must be something worth while in a woman who could starve for her belief, yet in the eyes of the one before me was the look of a trusting child who would never know the practical side of life any more than she would believe in its ugliness.  It was not faith she needed.  It was a guardian.

“Maybe I had better die,” she wailed.  “Dead missionaries are far too few to prove the glory of the cause.”

I suggested that live ones could glorify far more than dead ones, and told her that I was going to take her home with me and put strength into her body and a little judgment into her head, if I could.

She broke out again.  “Oh, I cannot go!  I must stay here!  If work is denied me, maybe it is my part to starve and prove my faith by selling my soul for the highest price.”

Although I was to learn that this was a favorite expression of Miss Gray’s, the meaning of which she never made quite clear to me, that day it sounded like the melancholy mutterings of hunger.  For scattering vapors of pessimism, and stirring up symptoms of hope, I’d pin my faith to a bowl of thick hot soup before I would a book full of sermons.

Without further argument I called to some coolies to come with a “kago,” a kind of lie-down-sit-up basket swung from a pole, and in it we laid the weak, protesting woman.

The men lifted it to their shoulders and the little procession, guarded fore and aft by a policeman, moved through the sinister shadows of Flying Sparrow street to the clearer heights of “The House of the Misty Star.”