"My dear," returned the stranger, with exceeding gentleness, while she studied Helen's set features with compassionate eyes, "that is a question which cannot be elucidated in a moment; but let me say, as I read your thought just now, love is not emotion, sentiment, mere personal attachment; it is the abiding desire to do good to our neighbor—to all men—for the love of doing good. 'Hate' is criticism, condemnation, resentment. Are you in haste?" she added, with a winning smile. "Could you stop for a little talk with me?"
"I could not this morning," said Helen, with unsteady lips and voice, and just on the verge of a nervous burst of tears.
"Then, will you come again some time? I am always in this pew on Sunday morning, and will be glad to see you. Good-by, dear." She slipped a card into Helen's hand, and turned to greet another, for she saw that her recent companion needed to be left to herself for the present.
Helen quickly made her way from the church, anxious to get away from the crowd, and, crossing the street, entered Central Park. She was nearly spent with the inward conflict she had been undergoing during the last hour, and she was eager to get out into the open, under the blue sky and green trees, to be alone, to think, to analyze the new and startling phase of her own character that had been so strangely revealed to her.
She glanced at the card in her hand. "Mrs. Raymond B. Everleigh," she read, and somehow the euphonious name soothed and appealed to her even as the beautiful face and winning voice of the woman had done.
She strolled slowly about for a while, thinking deeply along the new lines suggested by what she had just heard within the church. Love, she had learned, was not a mere emotion or sentiment, to be put on or off according to the attraction to or repulsion for the personality of those with whom one lives or mingles. No, she had just been awakened to see it possessed a far deeper, higher significance than that.
Love—to be love—must be a motive power, an indwelling principle, an all-absorbing desire always impelling one to do good. To do good to whom? To all men, she had been told.
And hate? "Hate is criticism, condemnation, resentment," she repeated, a shiver sweeping swiftly through her frame.
"Oh, I have never really loved!" she breathed, with an inward sense of aversion for herself. "But—I have hated all my life! I have simply been clinging to selfish, pleasurable emotions and sentiment, which have been aroused by the personal attractions and pleasing qualities of my friends, my child, and other dear ones, and which I have called love; but I begin to see something which I have never dreamed of before."
She dropped upon a near-by seat, to try to think out the problem more clearly; but the subject seemed infinite, and a sense of depression began to fall upon her as she became more and more involved in its intricacies.