“As a rule, men are such fools about the women they wish to marry,” she continued.  “She would have led him a dance for a year or two, and then calmly and inexorably left him.  And there was her father, with all his ability and genius, couldn’t see it either, but fondly imagined that Alison as Gordon Atterbury’s wife, would magically become an Atterbury and a bourgeoise, see that the corners were dusted in the big house, sew underwear for the poor, and fast in Lent.”

“And she is happy—­where she is?” he inquired somewhat naively.

“She is self-sufficient,” said Mrs. Larrabbee, with unusual feeling, “and that is just what most women are not, in these days.  Oh, why has life become such a problem?  Sometimes I think, with all that I have, I’m not, so well off as one of those salesgirls in Ferguson’s, at home.  I’m always searching for things to do—­nothing is thrust on me.  There are the charities—­Galt House, and all that, but I never seem to get at anything, at the people I’d like to help.  It’s like sending money to China.  There is no direct touch any more.  It’s like seeing one’s opportunities through an iron grating.”

Hodder started at the phrase, so exactly had she expressed his own case.

“Ah,” he said, “the iron grating bars the path of the Church, too.”

And just what was the iron grating?

They had many moments of intimacy during that fort night, though none in which the plumb of their conversation descended to such a depth.  For he was, as she had said, always “putting her off.”  Was it because he couldn’t satisfy her craving? give her the solution for which—­he began to see—­she thirsted?  Why didn’t that religion that she seemed outwardly to profess and accept without qualification—­the religion he taught set her at rest? show her the path?

Down in his heart he knew that he feared to ask.

That Mrs. Larrabbee was still another revelation, that she was not at rest, was gradually revealed to him as the days passed.  Her spirit, too, like his own, like ’Mrs Constable’s, like Eldon Parr’s, like Eleanor Goodrich’s, was divided against itself; and this phenomenon in Mrs. Larrabbee was perhaps a greater shock to him, since he had always regarded her as essentially in equilibrium.  One of his reasons, indeed, —­in addition to the friendship that had grown up between them,—­for coming to visit her had been to gain the effect of her poise on his own.  Poise in a modern woman, leading a modern life.  It was thus she attracted him.  It was not that he ignored her frivolous side; it was nicely balanced by the other, and that other seemed growing.  The social, she accepted at what appeared to be its own worth.  Unlike Mrs. Plimpton, for instance, she was so innately a lady that she had met with no resistance in the Eastern watering places, and her sense of values had remained the truer for it.