Perhaps few women know how much of an ordeal general society is to many men. Women are naturally social and gregarious, and have very little experience of the kind of shyness that is the outer bark of many manly natures, in which they fortify all the more sensitive part of their being against the rude shocks of the world.
As we said, Mr. St. John's life had been that of a recluse and scholar, up to the time of his ordination as a priest. He was, by birth and education, a New England Puritan, with all those habits of reticence and self-control which a New England education enforces. His religious experiences, being those of reaction from a sterile and severe system of intellectual dogmatism, still carried with them a tinge of the precision and narrowness of his early life. His was a nature like some of the streams of his native mountains, inclining to cut for itself straight, deep, narrow currents; and all his religious reading and thinking had run in one channel. As to social life, he first began to find it among his inferiors; among those to whom he came, not as a brother man, but as an authoritative teacher—a master, divinely appointed, set apart from the ordinary ways of men. In his rôle of priest he felt strong. In the belief of his divine and sacred calling, he moved among the poor and ignorant with a conscious superiority, as a being of a higher sphere. There was something in this which was a protection to his natural diffidence; he seemed among his parishioners to feel surrounded by a certain sacred atmosphere that shielded him from criticism. But to mingle in society as man with man, to lay aside the priest and be only the gentleman, appeared on near approach a severe undertaking. As a priest at the altar he was a privileged being, protected by a kind of divine aureole, like that around a saint. In general society he was but a man, to make his way only as other men; and, as a man, St. John distrusted and undervalued himself. As he thought it over, he inly assented to the truth of what Eva had so artfully stated—that this ordeal of society was indeed, for him, the true test of self-sacrifice. Like many other men of refined natures, he was nervously sensitive to personal influences. The social sphere of those around him affected him, through sympathy, almost as immediately as the rays of the sun impress the daguerreotype plate; but he felt it his duty to subject himself to the ordeal the more because he dreaded it. "After all," he said to himself, "what is my faith worth, if I cannot carry it among men? Do I hold a lamp with so little oil in it that the first wind will blow it out?"
It was with such thoughts as these that he started out on his usual afternoon tour of visiting and ministration in one of the poorest alleys of his neighborhood.
As he was making his way along, a little piping voice was heard at his elbow:
"Mr. St. Don; Mr. St. Don."
He looked hastily down and around, to meet the gaze of a pair of dark childish eyes looking forth from a thin, sharp little face. Gradually, he recognized in the thin, barefoot child, the little girl whom he had seen in Angie's class, leaning on her.
"What do you want, my child?"
"Mother's took bad, and Poll's gone to wash for her. They told me to watch till you came round, and call you. Mother wants to see you."
"Well, show me the way," said Mr. St. John, affably, taking the thin, skinny little hand.
The child took him under an alley-way, into a dark, back passage, up one or two rickety staircases, into an attic, where lay a woman on a poor bed in the corner.