His mind was calmer as he sat that evening talking with his mother. Mrs. Ashe was a plain, sweet-faced woman, with gray hair brushed smoothly under her cap of black lace. There was in her pale, faded face little beauty of feature or coloring; yet the light of her kindly and delicate spirit shone through. Maurice Wynne had once said that she was like a sweet-pea,—born with wings, but tethered so that she might not fly away. Philip, with his exquisite sensitiveness, found an unspeakable comfort in her presence; a soothing sense of rest and peace so blissful that it seemed almost wrong. There are even in this worldly age many women who hide under the covering of uneventful, commonplace lives existences full of spiritual richness,—women who find in religion not the mechanical acceptance of form, not a mere superstition which encrusts an outworn creed, but a vital, uplifting force; a power which fills their souls with imaginative warmth and fervor. The worth of an experience is to be estimated by the emotional fire which it kindles; and to the lives of such women the dull, colorless round of their daily existence gives no real clue. Theirs is the life of the spirit, and for them the inner is the only true life. It is when the sunken eye shines with a glow from deep within; when the thin cheeks faintly warm with the ghost of a flush and the blue veins swell from the throbbing of a heart stirred by a spiritual vision, that the observer gets a hint of the realities of such a life.
Mrs. Ashe was a type of the saintly woman that the spirit of Puritanism bred in rural New England. Such women are the living embodiment of the power which has inspired whatever is best in the nation; the power which has been a living force amid the worldliness, the materialism, the crudity that have threatened to overwhelm the people of this yet young land, so prematurely old. In her face was a look of high unworldliness that marks the mystic, the inheritance from ancestors bred in a faith impossible without mysticism in the very fibres of the race. The heroic self-denial, the persistent belief, the noble fidelity to the ideal which is the salvation of a nation, shine in such a countenance, and make real the high deeds of a past generation the narrowness of whose creeds too often blinds us to-day to the greatness of their character.
She smiled a little on hearing the object of her son's visit.
"I am glad to see you on any terms," she observed, "but I cannot say that I think your coming very wise."
"But, mother," he urged, "don't you see that it is a matter of so much importance that we ought not to neglect any chance?"
"My dear boy," questioned she, "do you really think that it is of so much importance who is bishop?"
"It is of the greatest possible importance," he returned earnestly. "Of course you don't agree with me as to the importance of forms of worship, but suppose that it were your own church, and the question were of having a man put into a place so influential. Wouldn't you be troubled if one were likely to be chosen who taught what you regarded as heresy?"
She smiled on him still, but he saw the seriousness in her eyes.
"Yes," she said, "I suppose I should; but doesn't it ever occur to you, Philip, that we are all too much inclined to feel that everything is going wrong if Providence doesn't work in our way? We can't help, I suppose, the habit of regarding our plans as somehow essential to the proper management of the universe."
He laughed and shook his head.