alize it, but my father
was striking at me when he referred to your sermon, and spiritual
control--and in other things he said when you were talking about the
settlement-house. He reserves for himself the right to do as he pleases,
but insists that those who surround him shall adopt the subserviency
which he thinks proper for the rest of the world. If he were a Christian
himself, I shouldn't mind it so much."

Hodder was silent. The thought struck him with the force of a great
wind.

"He's a Pharisee," Alison went on, following the train of her thought.
"I remember the first time I discovered that--it was when I was reading
the New Testament carefully, in the hope of finding something in
Christianity I might take hold of. And I was impressed particularly by
the scorn with which Christ treated the Pharisees. My father, too, if he
had lived in those days, would have thought Christ a seditious person,
an impractical, fanatical idealist, and would have tried to trip him
up with literal questions concerning the law. His real and primary
interest--is in a social system that benefits himself and his kind,
and because this is so, he, and men like him, would have it appear that
Christianity is on the side of what they term law and order. I do not
say that they are hypocritical, that they reason this out. They are
elemental; and they feel intuitively that Christianity contains a vital
spark which, if allowed to fly, would start a conflagration beyond their
control. The theologians have helped them to cover the spark with ashes,
and naturally they won't allow the ashes to be touched, if they can help
it."

She lay very still.

The rector had listened to her, at first with amazement, then with
more complicated sensations as she thus dispassionately discussed the
foremost member of his congregation and the first layman of the diocese,
who was incidentally her own father. In her masterly analysis of Eldon
Parr, she had brought Hodder face to face with the naked truth, and
compelled him to recognize it. How could he attempt to refute it, with
honesty?

He remembered Mr. Parr's criticism of Alison. There had been hardness in
that, though it were the cry of a lacerated paternal affection. In that,
too, a lack of comprehension, an impotent anger at a visitation not
understood, a punishment apparently unmerited. Hodder had pitied him
then--he still pitied him. In the daughter's voice was no trace of
resentment. No one, seemingly, c