"Surely there is," replied Clover.
Her guest brightened. "You mean we should judge according to our best education in right and wrong?"
She nodded. "It amounts to that. It seems to me that all that comes to us is important only according to its effect on character."
Page looked at her with admiring approval. Here was a woman, a girl in years, who had thought.
"Are your beliefs simply ethical," he asked, "or are you religious in the usual acceptation of the word?"
"I suppose I understand you," she replied. "I think if I could not say that I am religious I should not be here to say anything. I have stood in places where ethical culture and humanitarianism would not have saved me."
"Such testimony interests me very much," he answered, "especially from a young and beautiful woman."
Clover colored with surprise at this bluntness. She need not have shrunk. Page was as usual making an impersonal statement as nearly accurate as possible.
"I have not a particle of doubt," he continued, "that there is a world of causes, and that ours is a world of effects. Why should not the universe have a soul as well as the human body?"
"Yes; only you do not state it well," returned Clover, entering into his spirit of analysis. "It is not the body that has the soul, but the soul that has the body and will be through with it after a while."