He passed over the qualification with a characteristic smile.

"Oh, if we are going to shut our ears to criticism we'd better give up
being clergymen," he answered. "I'm afraid there is a great deal of
truth in what you said."

"That's generous of you!" she exclaimed, and thrilled him with the
tribute. Nor was the tribute wholly in the words: there had come
spontaneously into her voice an exquisite, modulated note that haunted
him long after it had died away . . . .

"I had to say what I thought," she continued earnestly; "I stood it as
long as I could. Perhaps you didn't realize it, but my father was
striking at me when he referred to your sermon, and spiritual control
--and in other things he said when you were talking about the
settlement-house. He reserves for himself the right to do as he pleases,
but insists that those who surround him shall adopt the subserviency
which he thinks proper for the rest of the world. If he were a Christian
himself, I shouldn't mind it so much."

Hodder was silent. The thought struck him with the force of a great
wind.

"He's a Pharisee," Alison went on, following the train of her thought.
"I remember the first time I discovered that--it was when I was reading
the New Testament carefully, in the hope of finding something in
Christianity I might take hold of. And I was impressed particularly by
the scorn with which Christ treated the Pharisees. My father, too, if he
had lived in those days, would have thought Christ a seditious person, an