"Church hasn't left a very salubrious effect on us. It's made me feel as desolate as a haunted house, and the only impression I brought away is that a man must spit on his hands to pump an organ. Funny sort of a stunt, wasn't it—having him come up out of the audience that way?"
"It didn't seem strange to me, Brent. You're probably too literal."
"There isn't such a tremendous scope for the poetic, when a rube wiggles out of his clothes right in the pulpit, you might say!"
"Audience and pulpit," she gaily cried. "What a born churchman you are! But, Brent," her voice grew wondrously sincere, "there was something more to it: the simplicity with which that farmer, whose boots have been in the soil for six days, could merge so actually into those things which make for ideality! How few of us who cannot play an organ would deign to offer ourselves as pumpers for its prosy bellows! Think of the music we are denying ourselves, and others about us, merely because we lack the kind of spirit to take off our coats and," she looked whimsically up at him, "spit on our hands before the world!"
She knew that he was listening, but little suspected how much her words had moved him until he spoke. There was a depth of passion in his voice which she had never heard except upon that one day when he called her as she was going toward the house.
"What eyes have you? To what white heights do you dare climb? You seem literally to push away the clouds and gaze straight through that dome which marks the farthest limit of my imaginings! You seem to tear it with your hands, and look through!—you put your lips to the rift and whisper with the angels!—and you always bring a little something back which does men good! Oh, Jane, Jane! How honestly I wish—"
But he did not finish the wish, and in another few minutes they were at Flat Rock, with Bob welcoming them and helping her to alight.