“But how can he? He cannot keep religion apart from life and right and wrong. What good would religion be if it did not go ahead of us in life and show us the way?”
“But what’s the use?” the boy said grudgingly. “What good does it do? You wouldn’t have thought of any of this only for that last part of his letter. Why does that have to come into everything? It’s the Catholic Church all over again, always pushing in everywhere.”
“Isn’t that funny,” the girl said, brightening; “I have cried myself sick thinking just that same 123 thing. I have gone almost frantic thinking that if I once gave in to the Church it would crush me and make me do everything that I didn’t want to do. And now I never think of it. Life goes along really just as though being a Catholic didn’t make any difference at all.”
“That’s because you’ve given in to it altogether. You don’t even know that you want to resist. You’re swallowed up in it.”
The girl flushed angrily, but bit her lips before she answered.
“It’s the queerest thing, isn’t it, Jeff,” she said finally in a thoughtful, friendly way, “how two people can fight about religion? Now you don’t care a particle about it one way or the other. And I––I’d rather not talk about it. And yet, we were just now within an inch of quarrelling bitterly about it. Why is it?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry, Ruth,” the boy apologised slowly. “It’s none of my business, anyway.”
They were just coming over the long hill above Ruth’s home. Below them stretched the long sweep of the road down past her house and up the other slope until it lost itself around the shoulder of Lansing Mountain.
Half a mile below them a rider was pushing his big roan horse up the hill towards them at a heart-breaking pace.