demonstration did not mean to the world quite all that oratory would have
them think; if they themselves were but the poorest, humblest, least
learned women in the land--for all that, it seemed to me that in those
tattered, wistful figures, so still, so trustful, I was looking on such
beauty as I had never beheld. All the elaborated glory of things made,
the perfected dreams of aesthetes, the embroideries of romance, seemed as
nothing beside this sudden vision of the wild goodness native in humble
hearts.
1910.




A CHRISTIAN

One day that summer, I came away from a luncheon in company of an old
College chum. Always exciting to meet those one hasn't seen for years;
and as we walked across the Park together I kept looking at him askance.
He had altered a good deal. Lean he always was, but now very lean, and
so upright that his parson's coat was overhung by the back of his long
and narrow head, with its dark grizzled hair, which thought had not yet
loosened on his forehead. His clean-shorn face, so thin and oblong, was
remarkable only for the eyes: dark-browed and lashed, and coloured like
bright steel, they had a fixity in them, a sort of absence, on one
couldn't tell what business. They made me think of torture. And his
mouth always gently smiling, as if its pinched curly sweetness had been
commanded, was the mouth of a man crucified--yes, crucified!

Tramping silently over the parched grass, I felt that if we talked, we
must infallibly disagree; his straight-up, narrow forehead so suggested a