The rector rose abruptly, walked to the entrance of the arbour, and stood staring out across the garden.  Presently he turned and came back and stood over her.

“Since you ask me,” he said slowly, “I do not wonder at it.”

She raised her eyes swiftly.

“When you speak like that,” she exclaimed with an enthusiasm that stirred him, despite the trouble of his mind, “I cannot think of you as a clergyman,—­but as a man.  Indeed,” she added, in the surprise of her discovery, “I have never thought of you as a clergyman—­even when I first saw you this morning.  I could not account then for a sense of duality about you that puzzled me.  Do you always preach as earnestly as that?”

“Why?”

“I felt as if you were throwing your whole soul into the effort-=oh, I felt it distinctly.  You made some of them, temporarily, a little uncomfortable, but they do not understand you, and you didn’t change them.  It seemed to me you realized this when Gordon Atterbury spoke to you.  I tried to analyze the effect on myself—­if it had been in the slightest degree possible for my reason to accept what you said you might, through sheer personality, have compelled me to reconsider.  As it was, I found myself resisting you.”

With his hands clasped behind him, he paced across the arbour and back again.

“Have you ever definitely and sincerely tried to put what the Church teaches into practice?” he asked.

“Orthodox Christianity? penance, asceticism, self-abnegation—­repression —­falling on my knees and seeking a forgiveness out of all proportion to the trespass, and filled with a sense of total depravity?  If I did that I should lose myself—­the only valuable thing I’ve got.”

Hodder, who had resumed his pacing, glanced at her involuntarily, and fought an inclination to agree with her.

“I see no one upon whom I can rely but myself,” she went on with the extraordinary energy she was able to summon at will, “and I am convinced that self-sacrifice—­at least, indiscriminate, unreasoning self-sacrifice—­is worse than useless, and to teach it is criminal ignorance.  None of the so-called Christian virtues appeals to me:  I hate humility.  You haven’t it.  The only happiness I can see in the world lies in self-expression, and I certainly shouldn’t find that in sewing garments for the poor.

“The last thing that I could wish for would be immortality as orthodox Christianity depicts it!  And suppose I had followed the advice of my Christian friends and remained here, where they insisted my duty was, what would have happened to me?  In a senseless self-denial I should gradually have, withered into a meaningless old maid, with no opinions of my own, and no more definite purpose in life than to write checks for charities.  Your Christianity commands that women shall stay at home, and declares that they are not entitled to seek their own salvation, to have any place in affairs, or to meddle with the realm of the intellect.  Those forbidden gardens are reserved for the lordly sex.  St. Paul, you say, put us in our proper place some twenty centuries ago, and we are to remain there for all time.”