"How hardly we should believe in a God who saved every one!" he breathed softly to the remains of his cigar.
"Humph! Such a God would be a mere mush of concession!" retorted Floud, the Baptist.
"And how true," pursued the unruffled Unitarian, "that we cannot worship a 'mere mush of concession' —how true that our God must hate what we hate, and punish what we would punish. We might stomach a God who would save orthodox burglars along with orthodox bishops, but not one who saved unbaptised infants and adults of unsound doctrine. Dear, dear, yes! We must have a God with a little human spite in Him or He seems to be spineless."
"A hopeless cynic," declared the soft voice of the Catholic—"it's the Unitarianism working out of him, mind you!"
"So glad to have met you!" continued the same good man to Bernal. "Your words are conducive to thought—you're an earnest, decent lad at all events."
But Bernal scarcely heard them or identified the speakers. They were to him but so many noisy wheels of the vast machine, each revolving as it must. His whole body seemed to send electric sparks of repulsion out to them to drive them away as quickly as might be. All his energies were centred to one mighty impulse.
At last the door closed and he stood alone with the disordered table and the pushed back chairs, doggedly gathering himself. Then he went to the doors and with a hand to each, pushed them swiftly apart.
She stood at the farther side of the room. She seemed to have fled there, and yet she leaned toward him breathless, again with the under lip caught fast in its quivering—helpless, piteously helpless. It was this that stayed him. Had she utterly shrunk away, even had he found her denying, defiant—the aroused man had prevailed. But seeing her so, he caught at the back of a chair as if to hold himself. Then he gazed long and exultingly into the eyes yielded so abjectly to his. For a moment it filled him to see and know, to be certain that she knew and did not deny. But the man in him was not yet a reasoning man—too lately had he come to life.
He stepped eagerly toward her, to halt only when one weak white hand faltered up with absurd pretension of a power to ward him off. Nor was it her hand that made him stop then. That barrier confessed its frailness in every drooping line. Again it was the involuntary submission of her whole poise—she had actually leaned a little further toward him when he started, even as her hand went up. But the helpless misery in her eyes was still a defense, passive but sufficient.
Then she spoke and his tension relaxed a little, the note of helpless suffering in her voice making him wince and fall back a step.