“Oh!” said Ardea, catching her breath.  Her religion was very much a matter of fact to her, and the thought of Tom—­Martha Gordon’s son—­stumbling in the plain path of belief was dismaying.  “Why would you have to be a hypocrite?  Do you mean that you are not sure you ought to be a minister?”

“I mean that I don’t know any more what I believe and what I don’t believe.  I feel as if I’d just like to let myself alone on that side for a while, and make everybody else let me alone.  It seems—­but you don’t know; a girl can’t know.”

She smiled up at him, and the smile effaced some of the trouble furrows between his eyes.

“Last night you were telling me that I seemed ages older than you; what is it that I can’t know?”

“Stumpings like mine,—­a man’s stumpings,” he said, with a touch of the old self-assurance.  “You’ve swallowed your religion whole; it’s the best thing for a girl to do, I reckon.  But I’ve got to have whys and wherefores; I’ve always had to have them.  And there are no wherefores in religion; just none whatever.”

She was plainly shocked.  “O Tom!” she urged; “think of your mother!”

“Thinking of her isn’t going to change the value of pi any,” he rejoined soberly.  “I suppose I’ve thought of her, and of what she wants me to be, ever since the first day I went to Beersheba.  The first two years I tried, honestly tried.  But it’s no use.  It appears like we’ve got so far away from taw that we can’t even see what-all we’re aiming at.  I’ve been grinding theology till I’m fairly sick of the word, and I’ve learned just one thing, Ardea, and that is that you can’t prove a single theorem in it.”

“But there are some things that don’t appear to need any proof; one seems to have been born knowing them.  Don’t you feel that way?”

He shook his head slowly.

“I used to think I did; but now I’m afraid I don’t.  I can’t remember the time when I wasn’t asking why.  Don’t they teach you to ask why at Carroll?”

“Not in matters of—­of conscience.”

“Well, they don’t at Beersheba, when you come right down to it.  And when you do ask, they put you off with a text out of the Bible that, just as like as not, doesn’t come within a row of apple-trees of hitting the mark.  I remember one time I said something about the ‘why’ to Doctor Tollivar.  He sniffled—­he does sniffle, Ardea—­and said:  ’Mr. Gordon, I recommend that you read what Paul says to the Romans, fourteen and twenty-three:  “He that doubteth is damned.”  And you will note the verb in the original—­is damned, present tense.’  Do you happen to remember the verse?”

Ardea confessed ignorance, and he went on, with a lip-curl of contempt.