“Dear me,” laughed Mildred; “how droll it all seems now, and what an ignorant little bigot I must have been!
“I tried to follow the speaker and to get some meaning from those quiet, clear-cut sentences as they dropped from his lips, and slowly forced upon my incredulous mind the conviction that here at least was one man who spoke whereof he knew. I had never done so hard thinking in my life. He was taking me into a field of thought of which I had never dreamed, and I was as unable to follow his giant strides as a child to follow the man in seven-league boots. My temples began to throb; in despair I gave up the attempt, and fell to watching my companion as with bated breath he followed the speaker. Only one thing I remember, and that because I jotted it down on the back of an envelope at the time. He said, ‘The standpoint of absolute personality is the one to be attained. On this plane, freedom, immortality, and God are the regulative principles of science as well as of life; and they are not only matters of faith, but matters of indubitable scientific certainty.’
“The lecture was nearly two hours long, and there was to be a discussion following it; but we were both exhausted with the mental strain, and quietly slipped out into the summer sunshine.
“My companion said nothing. He walked with head erect and long strides, and I felt considerably piqued to find that he seemed utterly oblivious of my presence. Presently he turned to me, and in a tone which almost startled me exclaimed, ‘Thank God for that man! More than any other man living or dead has he kept me from making utter shipwreck of my faith.’ I was surprised at his earnestness and touched by the simple frankness with which he had revealed to me, almost an utter stranger, his inmost thoughts.
“Again he seemed to forget me, and we paced on in silence, past the fountain, under gigantic elms, past the ‘town toothpick,’ as the æsthetic scoffers have dubbed the obelisk that commemorates the soldiers of the war, and turned down the road by Hawthorne’s gray old manse and through the avenue of pines, to where, stretching across the sluggish stream, we saw the
... ‘bridge that arched the flood’
where
‘Once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.’
“Here we stopped to rest a while, under the spreading boughs of a pine-tree, beside the graves of the two British soldiers that fell in the famous fight. We shared our sandwiches and bananas, and threw crumbs to the saucy squirrels that darted from limb to limb above our heads; and then, like two children, we trimmed our hats with daisies and buttercups from the fields close by. I watched him closely, with the pleasing consciousness that my pretty dress and new hat were noticed with evident approval on his part. Evidently he was able to enjoy some other things as well as philosophy; and when he shook back the thick blonde hair which rose from his broad forehead in a sort of Rubenstein mane, and tossed over into the fields a great stone that had fallen from the wall, I began to query whether a young man with locks and sinews like a young Norse god might not be a very fascinating type of hero.