Her eyes lighted up.

“I see what you mean,” she said, “by staying in you can do many things that you could not do, you can help to bring about the change, by being frank.  That is your point of view.  You believe m the future of the Church.”

“I believe in an universal, Christian organization,” he replied.

“But while stronger men are honest,” she objected, “are not your ancient vows and ancient Creeds continually making weaker men casuists?”

“Undoubtedly,” he agreed vigorously, and thought involuntarily of Mr. Engel’s phrased fatty degeneration of the soul.  “Yet I can see the signs, on all sides, of a gradual emancipation, of which I might be deemed an example.”  A smile came into his eyes, like the sun on a grey-green sea.

“Oh, you could never be a casuist!” she exclaimed, with a touch of vehemence.  “You are much too positive.  It is just that note, which is characteristic of so many clergymen, that note of smoothing-over and apology, which you lack.  I could never feel it, even when you were orthodox.  And now—­” words failed her as she inspected his ruggedness.

“And now,” he took her up, to cover his emotion, “now I am not to be classified!”

Still examining him, she reflected on this.

“Classified?” Isn’t it because you’re so much of an individual that one fails to classify you?  You represent something new to my experience, something which seems almost a contradiction—­an emancipated Church.”

“You imagined me out of the Church,—­but where?” he demanded.

“That’s just it,” she wondered intimately, “where?  When I try, I can see no other place for you.  Your place as in the pulpit.”

He uttered a sharp exclamation, which she did not heed.

“I can’t imagine you doing institutional work, as it is called,—­you’re not fitted for it, you’d be wasted in it.  You gain by the historic setting of the Church, and yet it does not absorb you.  Free to preach your convictions, unfettered, you will have a power over people that will be tremendous.  You have a very strong personality.”

She set his heart, his mind, to leaping by this unexpected confirmation on her part of his hopes, and yet the man in him was intent upon the woman.  She had now the air of detached judgment, while he could not refrain from speculating anxiously on the effect of his future course on her and on their intimate relationship.  He forbore from thinking, now, of the looming events which might thrust them apart,—­put a physical distance between them,—­his anxiety was concerned with the possible snapping of the thread of sympathy which had bound them.  In this respect, he dreaded her own future as much as his own.  What might she do?  For he felt, in her, a potential element of desperation; a capacity to commit, at any moment, an irretrievable act.

“Once you have made your ideas your own,” she mused, “you will have the power of convincing people.”