is
represented the pathetic ideal of one who toiled and saved and bought
after the fashion of his type.

Raven's eyes strayed to the faces about him: these were the younger set,
boys and girls from sixteen to twenty. The first two or three had, by
chance perhaps, dropped into this room and the rest gravitated shyly to
it. There was always a line of cleavage at prayer-meeting, as at teas
and "socials," between old and young. Raven was glad he had chosen the
room at random. He liked the atmosphere of half-awed, half-tittering
youth. They were always on the verge, always ready to find hilarity in
untoward circumstance, and yet trained to a respect for meeting, doing
their conventional best. What hard red cheeks there were, what great
brown hands of boys, awkwardly holding hats, and yet, taken into the
open, how unerringly they gripped the tasks that fell to them. All of
them, boys and girls alike, were staring at him and Nan: at Nan with a
frank admiration, the girls perhaps with envy. At the corner of the room
corresponding to his own, two chairs had been left vacant, and when his
eyes came to them he saw a blue scarf depending from the back of one; it
had been dropped when the occupant of the chair had left it. It was
Tira's chair, and Tira herself appeared from the door opposite, leading
from the kitchen, crossed the room, took the scarf and wrapped it about
her shoulders and sat down. She had been called out, perhaps in response
to a cry from the child who seemed to be the center of commotion in this
house, though so mysteriously inactive. Raven felt the blood mounting to
his face, she was so movingly beautiful in this scene of honest but
unlovely mediocrity. Even her walk across the room, unconscious of
herself, yet with the rhythmic step of high processionals--how strange a
part she was of this New England picture! He could not see her now,
without turning, and tried to summon his mind home from her, to fix it
on Tenney, who, having finished his prayer, was calling on one and
another, with an unction that seemed merely a rejoicing tyranny, for
testimony. It was a scene of tension. Church members were timid before
the ordeal of experience or pleading, and the unconverted were strained
to the verge of hysteria over a prospect of being haled into the open
and prayed for. Neither Raven nor Nan knew how unpopular Tenney had
become, because he could not enter the conventional limits of a
prayer-meeting without turning it i