Orthodox though he were, there had been times when his humour had borne him upward toward higher truths, and he had once remarked that promising to love forever was like promising to become President of the United States.

One might achieve it, but it was independent of the will.  Hodder’s ideals—­if he had only known—­transcended the rubric.  His feeling for Rachel Ogden had not been lacking in tenderness, and yet he had recoiled from marriage merely for the sake of getting a wife, albeit one with easy qualification.  He shrank instinctively from the humdrum, and sought the heights, stormy though these might prove.  As yet he had not analyzed this craving.

This he did know—­for he had long ago torn from his demon the draperies of disguise—­that women were his great temptation.  Ordination had not destroyed it, and even during those peaceful years at Bremerton he had been forced to maintain a watchful guard.  He had a power over women, and they over him, that threatened to lead him constantly into wayside paths, and often he wondered what those who listened to him from the pulpit would think if they guessed that at times, he struggled with suggestion even now.  Yet, with his hatred of compromises, he had scorned marriage.

The yoke of Augustine!  The caldron of unholy loves!  Even now, as he sat in the train, his mind took its own flight backward into that remoter past that was still a part of him:  to secret acts of his college days the thought of which made him shudder; yes, and to riots and revels.  In youth, his had been one of those boiling, contagious spirits that carry with them, irresistibly, tamer companions.  He had been a leader in intermittent raids into forbidden spheres; a leader also in certain more decorous pursuits—­if athletics may be so accounted; yet he had capable of long periods of self-control, for a cause.  Through it all a spark had miraculously been kept alive. . . .

Popularity followed him from the small New England college to the Harvard Law School.  He had been soberer there, marked as a pleader, and at last the day arrived when he was summoned by a great New York lawyer to discuss his future.  Sunday intervened.  Obeying a wayward impulse, he had gone to one of the metropolitan churches to hear a preacher renowned for his influence over men.  There is, indeed, much that is stirring to the imagination in the spectacle of a mass of human beings thronging into a great church, pouring up the aisles, crowding the galleries, joining with full voices in the hymns.  What drew them?  He himself was singing words familiar since childhood, and suddenly they were fraught with a startling meaning!

          “Fill me, radiancy divine,
          Scatter all my unbelief!”

Visions of the Crusades rose before him, of a friar arousing France, of a Maid of Orleans; of masses of soiled, war-worn, sin-worn humanity groping towards the light.  Even after all these ages, the belief, the hope would not down.