mount interest. But then I don't suppose they
were exactly civilized."

"Were the Pilgrims and the Puritans?" asked Mrs. Fletcher, who now joined
the talk, in which she had been a most animated and stimulating listener,
her deep gray eyes dancing with intellectual pleasure.

"I should not like to answer 'no' to a descendant of the Mayflower. Yes,
they were highly civilized. And if we had adhered to their methods, we
should have avoided a good deal of confusion. The meeting-house, you
remember, had a committee for seating people according to their quality.
They were very shrewd, but it had not occurred to them to give the best
pews to the sitters able to pay the most money for them. They escaped the
perplexity of reconciling the mercantile and the religious ideas."

"At any rate," said Mrs. Fletcher, "they got all sorts of people inside
the same meeting-house."

"Yes, and made them feel they were all sorts; but in those, days they
were not much disturbed by that feeling."

"Do you mean to say," asked Mr. Lyon, "that in this country you have
churches for the rich and other churches for the poor?"

"Not at all. We have in the cities rich churches and poor churches, with
prices of pews according to the means of each sort, and the rich are
always glad to have the poor come, and if they do not give them the best
seats, they equalize it by taking up a collection for them."

"Mr. Lyon," Mrs. Morgan interrupted, "you are getting a travesty of the
whole thing. I don't believe there is elsewhere in the world such a
spirit of Christian charity as in our churches of all sects."

"There is no doubt about the charity; but that doesn't seem to make the
social machine run any more smoothly in the church associations. I'm not
sure but we shall have to go back to the old idea of considering the
churches places of worship, and not opportunities for sewing-societies,
and the cultivation of social equality."

"I found the idea in Rome," said Mr. Lyon, "that the United States is now
the most promising field for the spread and permanence of the Roman
Catholic faith."

"How is that?" Mr. Fletcher asked, with a smile of Puritan incredulity.

"A high functionary at the Propaganda gave as a reason that the United
States is the most democratic country and the Roman Catholic is the most
democratic religion, having this one notion that all men, high or low,
are equally sinners and equally in need of one thing only. And I must say
that in