He felt sweeping through him the reverse current of hostility.

“And what I preach,” he asked, “has tended to confirm you in such a mean conception of Christianity?”

Her eye travelled over the six feet of him—­the kindling, reflecting eye of the artist; it rested for a moment on the protesting locks of his hair, which apparently could not be cut short enough to conform; on the hands, which were strong and sinewy; on the wide, tolerant mouth, with its rugged furrows, on the breadth and height of the forehead.  She lay for a moment, inert, considering.

“What you preach—­yes,” she answered, bravely meeting his look.  “What you are—­no.  You and your religion are as far apart as the poles.  Oh, this old argument, the belief that has been handed down to the man, the authority with which he is clothed, and not the man himself!  How can one be a factor in life unless one represents something which is the fruit of actual, personal experience?  Your authority is for the weak, the timid, the credulous,—­for those who do not care to trust themselves, who run for shelter from the storms of life to a ‘papier-mache’ fortress, made to look like rock.  In order to preach that logically you should be a white ascetic, with a well-oiled manner, a downcast look lest you stumble in your pride; lest by chance you might do something original that sprang out of your own soul instead of being an imitation of the saints.  And if your congregation took your doctrine literally, I can see a whole army of white, meek Christians.  But you are not like that.  Can’t you see it for yourself?” she exclaimed.

“Can’t you feel that you are an individual, a personality, a force that might be put to great uses?  That will be because you are open-minded, because there is room in you for growth and change?”

He strove with all his might to quell the inner conflagration which she had fanned into leaping flames.  Though he had listened before to doubt and criticism, this woman, with her strange shifting moods of calm and passion, with her bewildering faculty of changing from passive to active resistance, her beauty (once manifest, never to be forgotten), her unique individuality that now attracted, now repelled, seemed for the moment the very incarnation of the forces opposed to him and his religion.  Holder, as he looked at her, had a flash of fierce resentment that now, of all times, she should suddenly have flung herself across his path.  For she was to be reckoned with.  Why did he not tell her she was an egoist?  Why didn’t he speak out, defend his faith, denounce her views as prejudiced and false?

“Have I made you angry?” he heard her say.  “I am sorry.”

It was the hint of reproach in her tone to which the man in him instantly responded.  And what he saw now was his portrait she had painted.  The thought came to him:  was he indeed greater, more vital than the religion he professed?  God forbid!  Did he ring true, and it false?