"Everybody knows Ernest Havel is, and people say you and he read
that kind of books together."
"Has that got anything to do with our being friends?"
"Yes, it has. I couldn't feel the same confidence in you. I've
worried about it a good deal."
"Well, you just cut it out. For one thing, I'm not worth it," he
said quickly.
"Oh, yes, you are! If worrying would do any good--" she shook her
head at him reproachfully.
Claude took hold of the fence pickets between them with both
hands. "It will do good! Didn't I tell you there was missionary
work to be done right here? Is that why you've been so
stand-offish with me the last few years, because you thought I
was an atheist?"
"I never, you know, liked Ernest Havel," she murmured.
When Claude left the mill and started homeward he felt that he
had found something which would help him through the summer. How
fortunate he had been to come upon Enid alone and talk to her
without interruption,--without once seeing Mrs. Royce's face,
always masked in powder, peering at him from behind a drawn
blind. Mrs. Royce had always looked old, even long ago when she
used to come into church with her little girls,--a tiny woman in
tiny high-heeled shoes and a big hat with nodding plumes, her
black dress covered with bugles and jet that glittered and
rattled and made her seem hard on the outside, like an insect.
Yes, he must see to it that Enid went about and saw more of other
people. She was too much with her mother, and with her own
thoughts. Flowers and foreign missions--her garden and the great
kingdom of China; there was something unusual and touching about
her preoccupations. Something quite charming, too. Women ought to
be religious; faith was the natural fragrance of their minds. The
more incredible the things they believed, the more lovely was the
act of belief. To him the story of "Paradise Lost" was as
mythical as the "Odyssey"; yet when his mother read it aloud to
him, it was not only beautiful but true. A woman who didn't have
holy thoughts about mysterious things far away would be prosaic
and commonplace, like a man.