rity in that absurd religion of yours, your general NAIVETE of
mental and spiritual get-up, all pleased us a great deal. We thought you
were going to be a real acquisition."

"Just a moment--whom do you mean by 'we'?" He asked the question calmly
enough, but in a voice with an effect of distance in it.

"It may not be necessary to enter into that," she replied. "Let me go
on. But then it became apparent, little by little, that we had misjudged
you. We liked you, as I have said, because you were unsophisticated and
delightfully fresh and natural. Somehow we took it for granted you would
stay so. Rut that is just what you didn't do--just what you hadn't the
sense to try to do. Instead, we found you inflating yourself with
all sorts of egotisms and vanities. We found you presuming upon the
friendships which had been mistakenly extended to you. Do you want
instances? You went to Dr. Ledsmar's house that very day after I had
been with you to get a piano at Thurston's, and tried to inveigle him
into talking scandal about me. You came to me with tales about him. You
went to Father Forbes, and sought to get him to gossip about us both.
Neither of those men will ever ask you inside his house again. But that
is only one part of it. Your whole mind became an unpleasant thing
to contemplate. You thought it would amuse and impress us to hear you
ridiculing and reviling the people of your church, whose money supports
you, and making a mock of the things they believe in, and which you for
your life wouldn't dare let them know you didn't believe in. You talked
to us slightingly about your wife. What were you thinking of, not
to comprehend that that would disgust us? You showed me once--do you
remember?--a life of George Sand that you had just bought,--bought
because you had just discovered that she had an unclean side to her
life. You chuckled as you spoke to me about it, and you were for all the
world like a little nasty boy, giggling over something dirty that older
people had learned not to notice. These are merely random incidents.
They are just samples, picked hap-hazard, of the things in you which
have been opening our eyes, little by little, to our mistake. I
can understand that all the while you really fancied that you were
expanding, growing, in all directions. What you took to be improvement
was degeneration. When you thought that you were impressing us most by
your smart sayings and doings, you were reminding us most of the f