"Well, they haven't dropped in on me. The only one I ever saw that measured up to something like that was you, and now you've chucked it."
Had he, as she expressed the matter, "chucked it"? Her remark brought him reluctantly, fearfully, remorselessly—agitated and unprepared as he was—face to face with his future.
"You were too good for the job," she declared. "What is there in it? There ain't nobody converted these days that I can see, and what's the use of gettin' up and preach into a lot of sapheads that don't know what religion is? Sure they don't."
"Do you?" he asked.
"You've called my bluff." She laughed. "Say, do YOU?" If there was anything in it you'd have kept on preachin' to that bunch and made some of 'em believe they was headed for hell; you'd have made one of 'em that owns the flat house I live in, who gets fancy rents out of us poor girls, give it up. That's a nice kind of business for a church member, ain't it?"
"Owns the house in which you live!"
"Sure." She smiled at him compassionately, pitying his innocence and ignorance. "Now I come to think of it, I guess he don't go to your church,—it's the big Baptist church on the boulevard. But what's the difference?"
"None," said Hodder, despondently.
She regarded him curiously.
"You remember when you dropped in that night, when the kid was sick?"