"Well, I don't know." He resumed his shaving in a troubled, fidgety way.
"Alf," she said solemnly, standing in the centre of the room with her hands on her hips, where they paused in the act of adjusting the band of her skirt, "Alf, you—you don't think she isn't a Christian any more?"
The Rev. Needham nervously cut himself a little. He laid down the razor with a startled sigh.
"Anna," said he, "how do I know? If it is true, then it's one of the things I've always dreaded so—having atheism break out right in the family!"
"Oh, Marjory can't be one of those people!" her sister cried earnestly. "Alf, we ought not to judge her so harshly. She's lived in foreign countries so long that I suppose she's kind of gotten into new ways of speaking. She talked so sensibly yesterday, Alf—I kept wishing you could have been there to have heard."
"Well, Anna," he said quietly, "Marjory's your sister, and, whatever the facts, naturally I've nothing to say."
"You try and have a good talk with her, Alf. I never felt you two understood each other very well. She don't talk so flippantly when there aren't other people around. I'll fix it so you two can be alone together. Oh, Alf," she concluded, almost piteously, "Marjie may have gone into another church, but I can't believe she's drifted any farther!"
"I hope not, Anna." He tried to speak with an air of charitable calm; but the impression conveyed seemed rather that a disturbance of his own convictions was troubling his heart than that he was primarily moved with concern over his sister-in-law's spiritual well-being.
All persons with whom he came in contact influenced the Rev. Needham. They influenced him one way or another, however transiently. In fact, when it came to that, there was seldom what one would call any really permanent influence exerted. Contacts with life merely kept him hopping back and forth or up and down. They augmented, were perhaps more largely than anything else responsible for, the poor man's perpetual inner unrest. He could not seem to settle down to cool, steady views; could not feel his soul impregnably at peace. But then, in this regard he seemed, though perhaps in a rather acutely pointed fashion, logical fruit of his time.
To be, for the moment, quite ruthless in one's musing upon him, what would the world say if it could really pry into the tumultuous inner consciousness of the Rev. Needham? Might the world call him melodramatic, stagy? Could it actually be brought against this minister that he was, in a sense, theatrical? What a blow—and at the same time what a terrific coup of irony; for the Rev. Needham would be the very first himself to cry out against any such trait as staginess! Staginess, he would say, must certainly have something to do with the so-called "culture." But the world could never bring this charge against the Rev. Needham, because the world, one realizes with an instinctively grateful sigh, was denied the license of prying inside. No, to the world this minister appeared a being not essentially removed from the usual run of beings. The world by no means thought of him as a Chinese or Dark Age delinquent strung up for punishment in such a manner that his heels were perpetually off the floor. He might not, perhaps, strike people as a man of intense and dynamic, of unfailingly clean-cut personal persuasions about religion—or, for that matter, perhaps, about anything else in life. Nevertheless, he scarcely stood out as vivid or eccentric; scarcely like a sore thumb; because nobody realized what he was really like inside.