lighting of the dining-room
table, however, he grumbled loudly at his inability to see what he was
eating. She retired to her bedroom, and he huffily went out to get a
cigar. At the cigar-counter he repented of all the unkind things he
had ever done or could possibly do, and returned to eat humble
pie--and eat it by candle-light. Inside of two weeks one of the things
which Carl Ericson had always known was that the harmonious
candle-light brought them close together at dinner.

The teaching, in this Period of Adjustments, was not all on Ruth's
part. It was due to Carl's insistence that she tried to discover what
her theological beliefs really were. She admitted that only at
twilight vespers, with a gale of violins in an arched roof, did she
really worship in church. She did not believe that priests and
ministers, who seemed to be ordinary men as regards earthly things,
had any extraordinary knowledge of the mysteries of heaven. Yet she
took it for granted that she was a good Christian. She rarely
disagreed with the Dunleavys, who were Catholics; or her Aunt Emma,
who regarded anything but High Church Episcopalianism as bad form; or
her brother Mason, who was an uneasy Unitarian; or Carl, who was an
unaggressive agnostic.

Of the four it was Carl who seemed to have the greatest interest in
religions. He blurted out such monologues as, "I wonder if it isn't pure
egotism that makes a person believe that the religion he is born to is the
best? _My_ country, _my_ religion, _my_ wife, _my_ business--we think that
whatever is ours is necessarily sacred, or, in other words, that we are
gods--and then we call it faith and patriotism! The Hindu or the Christian
is equally ready to prove to you--and mind you, he may be a wise old man
with a beard--that his national religion is obviously the only one. Find
out what you yourself really do think, and if you turn out a Sun-worshiper
or a Hard-shell Baptist, why, good luck. If you don't think for yourself,
then you're admitting that your theory of happiness is the old dog asleep
in the sun. And maybe he is happier than the student. But I think you like
to experiment with life."

His arguments were neither original nor especially logical; they were
largely given to him by Bone Stillman, Professor Frazer, and chance
paragraphs in stray radical magazines. But to Ruth, politely reared in
a house with three maids, where it was as tactless to discuss God as
to discuss sex, his defiances