“I thought you would think I was going to do it because I hoped to get something. I thought one of your strong points was that people must come in a state of need and expecting to be satisfied. I don't expect anything. I am only doing it for the sake of honesty and thoroughness. I don't expect any good at all.”
“Is it likely that you can expect when you know so little what is there? What can you bring better than an hones mind to the search? Erica, if I hadn't known that you were absolutely sincere, I should not have dared to give you the pain I gave you yesterday. It was my trust in your perfect sincerity which brought you that strong accusation. Even then it was a sore piece of work.”
“Did you mind it a little,” exclaimed Erica. But directly she had spoken, she felt that the question was absurd, for she saw a look in Charles Osmond's eyes that made the word “little” a mockery.
“What makes that man so loving?” she thought to herself. “He reminded me almost of father, yet I am no child of his. I am opposed to all that he teaches. I have spoken my mind out to him in a way which must sometimes have pained him. Yet he cares for me so much that it pained him exceedingly to give me pain yesterday.”
His character puzzled her. The loving breath, the stern condemnation of whatever was not absolutely true, the disregard of what the world said, the hatred of shams, and most puzzling of all, the often apparent struggle with himself, the unceasing effort to conquer his chief fault. Yet this noble, honest, intellectual man was laboring under a great delusion, a delusion which somehow gave him an extraordinary power of loving! Ah, no! It could not be his Christianity, though, which made him loving, for were not most Christians hard and bitter and narrow-minded?
“I wish,” she said, abruptly, “you would tell me what makes you willing to be friends with us. I know well enough that the 'Church Chronicle' has been punishing you for your defense of my father, and that there must be a thousand disagreeables to encounter in your own set just because you visit us. Why do you come?”
“Because I care for you very much.”
“But you care, too, perhaps, for other people who will probably cut you for flying in the face of society and visiting social outcasts.”
“I don't think I can explain it to you yet,” he replied. “You would only tell me, as you told me once before, that I was talking riddles to you. When you have read your Greek Testament and really studied the life of Christ, I think you will understand. In the meantime, St. Paul, I think, answers your question better than I could, but you wouldn't understand even his words, I fancy. There they are in the Greek,” he opened a Testament and showed her a passage. “I believe you would think the English almost as great gibberish as this looks to you in its unknown characters.”
“Do you advise every one to learn Greek?”