by her husband, whose orthodoxy was a whip. Perhaps she died thinking
her tremulous little departures were sure attractions of hell and
heresy. Bedient liked to think of her as vastly bigger than her mate,
bigger than she dreamed--but alone and afraid.



SEVENTH CHAPTER


_ANDANTE CON MOTO_--FIFTH

For the first time in his life, Bedient learned what America liked to
read.... All the finer expressions of the human mind and hand gave him
deep joy. His love and divination for the good and the true were the
same that characterized the rarest minds of our ancestors, who had
access only to a few noble books in their formative years. And
Bedient's was the expanded and fortified intelligence of one who has
grown up with the Bible.

Each ship brought the latest papers, periodicals and certain pickings
from the publishers' lists. India had not prepared Bedient for this.
With glad welcome he discovered David Cairns here and there among
short-story contributors, but the love of man and woman which the
stories in general exploited, struck him of Indian ideals as shifty and
pestilential. The woman of fiction was equipped with everything to make
her as common as man. She was glib, pert, mundane, her mind a
chatter-mill; a creature of fur, paint, hair, and absurdly young. The
clink of coins was her most favorable accompaniment; and her giving of
self was a sort of disrobing formality. The men who pursued her were