“Why,” said Hodder, sitting down, “I’ve learned, as you have, by experience.  Only my experience hasn’t been so hopeful as yours—­that is, if you regard yours as hopeful.  It would be hypocritical of me not to acknowledge that the churches are losing ground, and that those who ought to be connected with them are not.  I am ready to admit that the churches are at fault.  But what you tell me of people reading these books gives me more courage than I have had for—­for some time.”

“Is it so!” ejaculated the little man, relapsing into the German idiom of his youth.

“It is,” answered the rector, with an emphasis not to be denied.  “I wish you would give me your theory about this phenomenon, and speak frankly.”

“But I thought—­” the bewildered librarian began.  “I saw you had been reading those books, but I thought—­”

“Naturally you did,” said Holder, smiling.  His personality, his ascendency, his poise, suddenly felt by the other, were still more confusing.  “You thought me a narrow, complacent, fashionable priest who had no concern as to what happened outside the walls of his church, who stuck obstinately to dogmas and would give nothing else a hearing.  Well, you were right.”

“Ah, I didn’t think all that,” Mr. Engel protested, and his parchment skin actually performed the miracle of flushing.  “I am not so stupid.  And once, long ago when I was young, I was going to be a minister myself.”

“What prevented you?” asked Holder, interested.

“You want me to be frank—­yes, well, I couldn’t take the vows.”  The brown eyes of the quiet, humorous, self-contained and dried-up custodian of the city’s reading flamed up.  “I felt the call,” he exclaimed.  “You may not credit it to look at me now, Mr. Hodder.  They said to me, ’here is what you must swear to believe before you can make men and women happier and more hopeful, rescue them from sin and misery!’ You know what it was.”

Hodder nodded.

“It was a crime.  It had nothing to do with religion.  I thought it over for a year—­I couldn’t.  Oh, I have since been thankful.  I can see now what would have happened to me—­I should have had fatty degeneration of the soul.”

The expression was not merely forcible, it was overwhelming.  It brought up before Holder’s mind, with sickening reality, the fate he had himself escaped.  Fatty degeneration of the soul!

The little man, seeing the expression on the rector’s face, curbed his excitement, and feared he had gone too far.

“You will pardon me!” he said penitently, “I forget myself.  I did not mean all clergymen.”

“I have never heard it put so well,” Holder declared.  “That is exactly what occurs in many cases.”