They had met less than half-a-dozen times; and he, driven by his mental pugnacity to test so unreasonable an apparition, had spared neither himself nor her. The sincerity of her faith had angered him, though anything else, had he detected it, would have destroyed his dream; and when he had scoffed she had not troubled to rebuke him, had only glanced at him amused, not with pity or condescension or kind Christian charity, but with a very friendly understanding and often with what seemed agreement. He was astonished to find that a rippling sense of humor could go hand in hand with a blind gift of faith, and to hear sayings as bold as his own uttered as though they were the merest common-sense. "Why yes, of course," she admitted, in answer to one of his tirades, "if you want envy, hatred, and uncharitableness in a concentrated form you will find them in the Church; that stands to reason." And when he inquired why, she answered, quite simply, "Because a bad Christian is Satan's best material."
Nor had she any illusions about that particular branch of the Church militant for which she labored; she regarded it rather as a half-baked body of territorials than a regular army equipped for the field. Still it served a purpose, gave useful occupation to many, and stood for the time being against unreasoning panic or callous desertion of duty; nor would she surrender its few poor healing virtues for any of the nostrums he sought to set in their place. "It does more than you with all your talking," she said quietly, and, as they passed by, took him into a mission church where he might see--a small corrugated iron hut, set down in the midst of slums. Under the scent of incense the smell of disinfectants was strong; near a stove sat a lay reader, and about her a dozen poor weary women plying needle and thread. Two or three of them held children at the breast; in a pen near by lay half-a-dozen others asleep. Over the stove was a large boiler supplying hot water to poor parishioners; away by a small side altar knelt a single figure in prayer. Brightly colored "stations of the Cross," and something upon the altar that looked like a large tea-cozy, before which burned a light, told how here the law was systematically broken, and that the "nonsense" inveighed against by the old Queen Regent had not yet been put down.