Helen smiled.
"Now I have shocked you," was her comment. "I beg your pardon."
"I can never accustom myself to a familiar way of handling sacred things," he returned. "It is to me too vital a matter."
"I am afraid that that is because you are still so young," she retorted. "It is, if you'll pardon me, the prerogative of youth to find all views but its own intolerable."
The manner in which this was said deprived the words of their sting, but Mrs. Fenton evidently felt that they were getting upon dangerous ground, and she interposed.
"We shall ask you to define youth next, Helen," she threw in.
"Oh, that is easy. Young people are always those of our own age."
In the laugh that followed this the question of the marriage of the clergy was allowed to drop; but to all that had been said Philip had listened with a beating heart. He felt the air about him to be charged with meanings which he could not divine. He had somehow a suspicion that the hostess was more interested in this talk than she was willing to show; and with what in a moment he recognized as consummate and fatuous egotism, he felt in his heart the shadow of a hope that there might be some connection between this and her interest in him. Then a fear followed lest there might be things here hidden which would make him miserable did he understand.
"Mrs. Herman insists that she is a Puritan," Mrs. Fenton said a moment later. "You see how she proves it by the position she takes on all these questions."
"Of course I am a Puritan," was the answer. "I was born so. There is nothing which I believe that wouldn't have seemed to my forefathers good ground for having me whipped at the cart's tail, but I am Puritan to the bone."