"I didn't need to be told that," he answered. "What I want to know is, whether or not she ever teaches them by word of mouth,—an ordinary and inferior mode, if you will."
"If you had ever heard her, you would not call hers an ordinary or inferior mode," I returned. "Her teaching is the outcome of her life, the blossom of her being, and therefore has the whole force of her living truth to back it."
"Have I offended you, Ethel?" he asked.
Then I saw, that, in my eagerness to glorify my friend, I had made myself unpleasant to Roger,—a fault of which I had been dimly conscious before now. Marion would never have fallen into that error. She always made her friends feel that she was with them, side by side with them, and turning her face in the same direction, before she attempted to lead them farther.
I assured him that he had not offended me, but that I had been foolishly backing him from the front, as I once heard an Irishman say,—some of whose bulls were very good milch cows.
"She teaches them every Sunday evening," I added.
"Have you ever heard her?"
"More than once. And I never heard any thing like it."
"Could you take me with you some time?" he asked, in an assumed tone of ordinary interest, out of which, however, he could not keep a slight tremble.
"I don't know. I don't quite see why I shouldn't. And yet"—