“Here’s Granny Jones’s,” interrupted Gail, with a smile for the compliment. “Don’t come in, for she’s my worst specimen. She’s a duty,” and taking some carnations and a package of tea, she hurried away.
Flowers and tea for the old ladies, tobacco and flowers for the old men, and the bottle of whiskey for old Ben Jackson, to whom his little nip every morning and night was a genuine charity, though one severe worker left the guild because Gail persisted in taking it to him.
At the house they found silver-haired old Doctor Mooreman, the rector of the quaintly beautiful little chapel up the avenue, and he greeted Gail with a smile which was a strange commingling of spiritual virtue and earthly shrewdness.
“Well, how’s my little pagan?” he asked her, in the few minutes they had alone.
“Worse than ever, I’m afraid,” she confessed. “I suppose you’re asking about the state of my mind and the degree of my wickedness.”
“That’s it exactly,” agreed the Reverend Doctor, smiling on her fondly. “Are you still quarrelling with the Church, because it prefers to be respectable rather than merely good?”
“I’m afraid so,” she laughed. “I still don’t understand why Hell is preached when nobody believes it; nor why we are told the material details of a spiritual Heaven, when no one has proved its existence except by ancient literature; nor why an absolutely holy man whose works are all good, from end to end of his life, can’t go to Heaven if he doubts the divinity of the Saviour; nor why so much immorality is encouraged in the world by teaching that marriage itself is sinful; nor why a hundred other things, which are necessarily the formulas of man, are made a condition of the worship of the heart. You see, I’m as bad as ever.”
The smile of Doctor Mooreman was a pleasant sight to behold.
“You’re in no spiritual difficulties,” he told her. “You’re only having fun with your mind, and laying tragic stress on the few little innocent fictions which were once well-meant and useful.”
Gail looked at him in astonishment.