"If your statement is true, Marion, how is it that so many professed Christians indulge in these very things?"
"Precisely the question that I just asked myself while I was talking. By what means they become destitute of that keen insight into consistencies and inconsistencies, the moment they enter the lists as Christian people, is more than I can understand, unless it is because they decide to succumb to the necessity of doing as other people do, and let any special thinking alone as inconvenient and unprofitable. I don't know how it is; only you watch this question and think about it, and you will discover that just so surely as you come in contact with any who are active and alert in Christian work, whose religion you respect as amounting to something, you are almost sure to see them avoiding all these amusements. Who ever heard of a minister being asked to spend an evening in social card-playing! I presume that even Col. Baker himself knows that that would be improper, and he would be the first to sneer."
"Of course," Ruth said, "ministers were expected to be examples for other people to follow."
"Well, then," Flossy said, her perplexity in no way lessened, "ought we not to follow?"
Whereupon Marion clapped her hands.
"Little Flossy among the logicians!" she said. "That is the point, Ruth Erskine. If the example is for us to follow, why don't we follow? Now, what do you honestly think about this question yourself?"
"Why," said Ruth, hesitatingly, "I have always played cards, in select circles, being careful, of course, with whom I played; just as I am careful with whom I associate, and, contrary to your supposition, I have always supposed those people who frowned on such amusements to be a set of narrow-minded fanatics. And I didn't know that Christian people did frown on such amusements; though, to be sure, now that I think of it, there are certain ones who never come to card-parties nor dancing-parties. I guess the difficulty is that I have never thought anything about it."
Marion was looking sober.
"The fact is," she said, gravely, "that with all my loneliness and poverty and general forlornness, I have had a different bringing up from any of you. My father did not believe in any of these things."
"And he was a Christian man," Flossy said, quickly. "Then he must have had a reason for his belief. That is what I want to get at. What was it?"