"Come," she said, rising, and turning on the electric light again. "It is time for Grant to be at home, and for me to be dressing. We are to dine at the Bodewin Rangers to-night."
He put up his hand to arrest her, and said in a tone that wrung her heart:--
"But, Cousin Helen, I cannot speak of love to a woman until I am ready to give up for her my priestly calling."
"Until you are willing to give up your unwholesome idea of celibacy and asceticism, you mean."
"It would be sacrificing a principle to a passion."
"I could reason with you," she returned, half-humorously, "but how shall I get on with all the Puritan ancestors who prevail in you and me! The thing that I say isn't that you are to give up your notions about the celibacy of the priesthood in order to marry, but because they are unwholesome and abnormal. The thing that most closely links you to humanity is the thing that best fits you to be of use in the world."
He regarded her with a glance of painful intensity.
"But suppose," he suggested, "that the woman I loved could not love me? Then I should come back to the church, and lay on the altar only a discarded and worthless sacrifice."
"Come back to the church!" she echoed. "You don't leave it. If marriage takes you out of the church, then the sooner such a church is left the better! Do you realize what you are doing, Philip? Do you remember that you insult the good name of your mother by the view you take of marriage? I am sick of all this infamous condemnation of what to me is holy! If the church cannot rise to a noble and pure conception of it, the sooner the church is done away with, the better for mankind!"
"But you wrong the church," he interrupted eagerly. "The church makes marriage a sacrament; it recognizes its purity; it"--
"Then what are you doing," she burst in, "with your exceptions to the theory of the church? It is you who degrade it--Pardon me, cousin," she added in a calmer voice, coming to him and laying her fingers lightly on his shoulder. "I am speaking out of my heart. I have the shame of knowing that I once failed to realize how high and how noble a thing marriage is. I am older than you, and I have suffered as I hope you may never have to suffer; the end of it all is that I have learned that there is nothing else on earth so blessed as the real love of husband and wife. Of course," she concluded, as he would have interrupted, "I talk as a woman, and I cannot decide what you are to do. Only I would like you to believe that I would help you if I could, and that what I say of marriage is the thing which seems to me the truest thing on earth."