“There is no doubt about the charity; but that doesn’t seem to make the social machine run any more smoothly in the church associations.  I’m not sure but we shall have to go back to the old idea of considering the churches places of worship, and not opportunities for sewing-societies, and the cultivation of social equality.”

“I found the idea in Rome,” said Mr. Lyon, “that the United States is now the most promising field for the spread and permanence of the Roman Catholic faith.”

“How is that?” Mr. Fletcher asked, with a smile of Puritan incredulity.

“A high functionary at the Propaganda gave as a reason that the United States is the most democratic country and the Roman Catholic is the most democratic religion, having this one notion that all men, high or low, are equally sinners and equally in need of one thing only.  And I must say that in this country I don’t find the question of social equality interfering much with the work in their churches.”

“That is because they are not trying to make this world any better, but only to prepare for another,” said Mrs. Fletcher.

“Now, we think that the nearer we approach the kingdom-of-heaven idea on earth, the better off we shall be hereafter.  Is that a modern idea?”

“It is an idea that is giving us a great deal of trouble.  We’ve got into such a sophisticated state that it seems easier to take care of the future than of the present.”

“And it isn’t a very bad doctrine that if you take care of the present, the future will take care of itself,” rejoined Mrs. Fletcher.

“Yes, I know,” insisted Mr. Morgan; “it’s the modern notion of accumulation and compensation—­take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves—­the gospel of Benjamin Franklin.”

“Ah,” I said, looking up at the entrance of a newcomer, “you are just in time, Margaret, to give the coup de grace, for it is evident by Mr. Morgan’s reference, in his Bunker Hill position, to Franklin, that he is getting out of powder.”

The girl stood a moment, her slight figure framed in the doorway, while the company rose to greet her, with a half-hesitating, half-inquiring look in her bright face which I had seen in it a thousand times.

II

I remember that it came upon me with a sort of surprise at the moment that we had never thought or spoken much of Margaret Debree as beautiful.  We were so accustomed to her; we had known her so long, we had known her always.  We had never analyzed our admiration of her.  She had so many qualities that are better than beauty that we had not credited her with the more obvious attraction.  And perhaps she had just become visibly beautiful.  It may be that there is an instant in a girl’s life corresponding to what the Puritans called conversion in the soul, when the physical qualities, long maturing, suddenly glow in an effect which we call beauty.  It cannot be that women do not have a consciousness of it, perhaps of the instant of its advent.  I remember when I was a child that I used to think that a stick of peppermint candy must burn with a consciousness of its own deliciousness.