The rector’s office in the parish house was a businesslike room on the first floor, fitted up with a desk, a table, straight-backed chairs, and a revolving bookcase.  And to it, one windy morning in March, came Eleanor Goodrich.  Hodder rose to greet her with an eagerness which, from his kindly yet penetrating glance, she did not suspect.

“Am I interrupting you, Mr. Hodder?” she asked, a little breathlessly.

“Not at all,” he said, drawing up a chair.  “Won’t you sit down?”

She obeyed.  There was an awkward pause during which the colour slowly rose to her face.

“I wanted to ask you one or two things,” she began, not very steadily.  “As perhaps you may know, I was brought up in this church, baptized and confirmed in it.  I’ve come to fear that, when I was confirmed, I wasn’t old enough to know what I was doing.”

She took a deep breath, amazed at her boldness, for this wasn’t in the least how she had meant to begin.  And she gazed at the rector anxiously.  To her surprise, he did not appear to be inordinately shocked.

“Do you know any better now?” he asked.

“Perhaps not,” she admitted.  “But the things of which I was sure at that time I am not sure of now.  My faith is—­is not as complete.”

“Faith may be likened to an egg, Mrs. Goodrich,” he said.  “It must be kept whole.  If the shell is chipped, it is spoiled.”

Eleanor plucked up her courage.  Eggs, she declared, had been used as illustrations by conservatives before now.

Hodder relieved her by smiling in ready appreciation.

“Columbus had reference to this world,” he said.  “I was thinking of a more perfect cue.”

“Oh!” she cried, “I dare say there is a more perfect one.  I should hate to think there wasn’t—­but I can’t imagine it.  There’s nothing in the Bible in the way of description of it to make me really wish to go there.  The New Jerusalem is too insipid, too material.  I’m sure I’m shocking you, but I must be honest, and say what I feel.”

“If some others were as honest,” said the rector, “the problems of clergymen would be much easier.  And it is precisely because people will not tell us what they feel that we are left in the dark and cannot help them.  Of course, the language of St. John about the future is figurative.”

“Figurative,—­yes,” she consented, “but not figurative in a way that helps me, a modern American woman.  The figures, to be of any use, ought to appeal to my imagination—­oughtn’t they?  But they don’t.  I can’t see any utility in such a heaven—­it seems powerless to enter as a factor into my life.”

“It is probable that we are not meant to know anything about the future.”

“Then I wish it hadn’t been made so explicit.  Its very definiteness is somehow—­stultifying.  And, Mr. Hodder, if we were not meant to know its details, it seems to me that if the hereafter is to have any real value and influence over our lives here, we should know something of its conditions, because it must be in some sense a continuation of this.  I’m not sure that I make myself clear.”