been with me. I took particular delight in that especial visit,
remembering the time when the "Companion" gave my first pious little
sentence to print, and paid me with the paper for a year.

"The Gates Ajar" was attacked by the press. In fact it was virulently
bitten. The reviews of the book, some of them, reached the point of
hydrophobia. Others were found to be in a milder pathological condition.
Still others were gentle or even friendly enough. Religious papers waged
war across that girl's notions of the life to come as if she had been an
evil spirit let loose upon accepted theology for the destruction of the
world. The secular press was scarcely less disturbed about the matter,
which it treated, however, with the more amused good-humor of a man of
the world puzzled by a religious disagreement.

In the days of the Most Holy Inquisition there was an old phrase whose
poignancy has always seemed to me to be but half appreciated. One did
not say: He was racked. She was burned. They were flayed alive, or
pulled apart with little pincers, or clasped in the arms of the red-hot
Virgin. One was too well-bred for so bald a use of language. One
politely and simply said: He was put to the question.

The young author of "The Gates Ajar" was only put to the question.
Heresy was her crime, and atrocity her name. She had outraged the
church; she had blasphemed its sanctities; she had taken live coals from
the altar in her impious hand. The sacrilege was too serious to be
dismissed with cold contempt.

Opinion battled about that poor little tale as if it had held the power
to overthrow church and state and family.