“Now, you see what you let me in for, Cloudy, when you made me go to that little old dull Christian Endeavor! But I won’t do it! That’s all there is to it. You needn’t think I’m going to. The idea! Why, what did we come here to college for? To run an asylum for sick Sunday schools, I’d like to know? As if I had time to monkey with their little old society! It’s rank nonsense, anyhow! What good do they think they can do, a couple of sissies, and two or three kid vamps, setting up to lisp religion? It’s ridiculous!”
He was working himself up into a fine frenzy. Julia Cloud stood and watched him, an amused smile growing on her sweet lips. He caught the amusement, and fired up at it.
“What are you looking like that at me for, Cloudy? You know it is. You know it’s all foolishness. And you know I couldn’t help them, anyhow. Come, now, don’t you? What are you looking like that for, Cloudy? I believe you’re laughing at me! You think I’ll go and get into this thing, but I’ll show you. I won’t! And that’s an end of it. Cloudy, I insist on knowing what you find to laugh at in this situation.”
“Why, I was just thinking how much you reminded me of Moses,” said Julia Cloud sweetly.
“Of Moses!” screamed Allison half angrily. “Why, he was a meek man, and I’m not meek. I’m mad! Out and out mad, Cloudy. What do you mean?”
“Oh, no, he wasn’t always meek,” said his aunt thoughtfully; “and he talked just as you are doing when God called on him first to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt. He said he couldn’t and he wouldn’t and he shouldn’t, and made every excuse in the calendar; and finally God had to send along Aaron 189 to help him, although God had said He would be with him and make him perfectly able alone to do what He wanted done.”
“I suppose I’m Aaron,” sighed Leslie, settling into a big chair by the fire. “But I don’t like those girls one bit! And I don’t care if they stay in seven Egypts.”
“Now, look here, Cloudy Jewel,” pleaded Allison. “You’re not going to get me into any such corner as that. The idea that God would call me to do any of His work when I never had anything at all to do with the church in my life, and I don’t want to. How should I know what to do? Why should He ever call me, I’d like to know, when I don’t know the first thing about churches? You’re all off, Cloudy. Think again. Why, I’m not even what you’d call a Christian. He surely wouldn’t call people that haven’t––well, what you’d call enlisted with Him, would He?”
“He might,” answered Julia Cloud reflectively. She was sitting on the end of the big blue couch, and the firelight played over her white hair with silvery lights, and cast a lovely rose tint over her sweet face. “There were several instances where He called people who had never known Him at all, who, in fact, were worshipping idols and strange gods, and told them to go and do something for Him. There was Paul; he was actually against Him. And there was Abraham; he lived among regular idol-worshippers, and God called him to go into a strange land and founded a new family for him, the beginning of the peculiar people through whose line was to come Jesus, the Saviour of the world. And Abraham went.”