“You think it pagan,” she told him.

“Perhaps I do,” he answered simply, as though impressed by her felicitous discovery of the adjective.

Alison laughed.

“It’s pagan because I’m pagan, I suppose.”

“It’s very beautiful—­you have managed to get an extraordinary atmosphere,” he continued, bent on doing himself an exact justice.  But I should say, if you pressed me, that it represents to me the deification of beauty to the exclusion of all else.  You have made beauty the Alpha and Omega.”

“There is nothing else for me,” she said.

The coffee-tray arrived and was deposited on a wicker table beside her.  She raised herself on an elbow, filled his cup and handed it to him.

“And yet,” he persisted, “from the manner in which you spoke at the table—­”

“Oh, don’t imagine I haven’t thought?  But thinking isn’t—­believing.”

“No,” he admitted, with a touch of sadness, “you are right.  There were certain comments you made on the Christian religion—­”

She interrupted him again.

“As to the political side of it, which is Socialism, so far as I can see.  If there is any other side, I have never been able to discover it.  It seems to me that if Christians were logical, they should be Socialists.  The brotherhood of man, cooperation—­all that is Socialism, isn’t it?  It’s opposed to the principle of the survival of the fittest, which so many of these so-called Christians practise.  I used to think, when I came back from Paris, that I was a Socialist, and I went to a lot of their meetings in New York, and to lectures.  But after a while I saw there was something in Socialism that didn’t appeal to me, something smothering,—­a forced cooperation that did not leave one free.  I wanted to be free, I’ve been striving all my life to be free,” she exclaimed passionately, and was silent an instant, inspecting him.  “Perhaps I owe you an apology for speaking as I did before a clergyman—­especially before an honest one.”

He passed over the qualification with a characteristic smile.

“Oh, if we are going to shut our ears to criticism we’d better give up being clergymen,” he answered.  “I’m afraid there is a great deal of truth in what you said.”

“That’s generous of you!” she exclaimed, and thrilled him with the tribute.  Nor was the tribute wholly in the words:  there had come spontaneously into her voice an exquisite, modulated note that haunted him long after it had died away . . . .

“I had to say what I thought,” she continued earnestly; “I stood it as long as I could.  Perhaps you didn’t realize it, but my father was striking at me when he referred to your sermon, and spiritual control —­and in other things he said when you were talking about the settlement-house.  He reserves for himself the right to do as he pleases, but insists that those who surround him shall adopt the subserviency which he thinks proper for the rest of the world.  If he were a Christian himself, I shouldn’t mind it so much.”