After a few visits she professes a very real "growth" spiritually, but--she hesitates, lowers her gentle head and, finally, confesses that she is troubled with "temptations." She shows her angelic confidence in him by telling them, and he is deeply moved at the almost childish innocency of what she calls her temptations. No honest woman could possibly regard them as such, if he only knew it. But he doesn't know it. He sees her reduced to tears over her would-be transgressions, and before he considers what he is about he has kissed the "dear child." That is the way it happens nine times out of ten, a good man damned and lost by some frail angel of his church. A minister is always justified in suspecting the worst of a pretty woman who wants to consult him privately about her soul, whether she has sense enough to suspect herself or not. After observing William very carefully for thirty years I reached the conclusion that the wisest preacher knows nothing about the purely feminine soul, and the less he has to do with it the better. The thing, whatever it is, is so intimately connected with her nervous system that only her Heavenly Father can locate it from day to day. And I have observed that the really good women are never guilty of the sacrilege of showing their immortality to preachers. I lived with William for thirty years, and had more than my share of spiritual difficulties. But I would have as soon asked him how to cut out my dress as what to do with my soul. No man's preaching benefited me more, but in so far as my soul was feminine and peculiar to me I took it as an indication that Providence meant it to remain so, and I never betrayed it, not even to him. But I could not keep other women from doing so. There was a beautiful lady in the church at Orionville who gave "Bible readings" as if they were soprano solos. She was always beautifully gowned for the occasion, and had an expression of pretty, pink piety that was irresistible. She was "not happy at home" and candidly confessed it. The lack of congeniality grew out of the fact that her husband was a straightforward business man who took no interest in her Bible readings. But he was about the only man in the church who did not. And it is only a question of time when she would have betrayed William in the Second Book of Samuel if I had not intervened. She had been coming to the parsonage regularly for a month, consulting him about her "interpretation" of these Scriptures. She asked for him at the door as simply as if I had been his office-boy. And William was always cheered and invigorated by her visits. He would come out of his study to tea after her departure, rubbing his hands and praising the beautiful, spiritual clearness of her mind, which he considered very remarkable in a woman.