“Then if all that is not religion, pray what is it? You are not like Miss Charlotte, who uses phrases without analyzing them. What do you mean by religion?” “I mean knowing and loving God,” she said, after a moment’s pause. Her tone was very gentle, and not in the least didactic. “I have believed in a God always—more or less,” said Frithiof slowly. “But how do you get to know Him?” “I think it is something in the same way that people get to know each other,” said Cecil. “Cousin James Horner, for instance, sees my father every day; he has often stayed in the same house with him, and has in a sense known him all his life. But he doesn’t really know him at all. He never takes the trouble really to know any one. He sees the outside of my father—that is all. They have hardly anything in common.” “Mr. Horner is so full of himself and his own opinions that he never could appreciate such a man as your father,” said Frithiof. Then, perceiving that his own mouth had condemned him, he relapsed into silence. “What is your receipt, now, for getting to know a person?” he said presently, with a smile. “First,” she said thoughtfully, “a desire to know and a willingness to be known. Then I think one must forget one’s self as much as possible, and try to understand the feelings, and words, and acts of the one you wish to know in the light of the whole life, or as much as you can learn of it, not merely of the present. Then, too, I am quite sure that you must be alone together, for it is only alone that people will talk of the most real things.” He was silent, trying in his own mind to fit her words to his own need. “Then you don’t think, as some do, that when once we set out with a real desire all the rest is quite easy and to be drifted into without any special effort.” “No,” she said, “I do not believe in drifting. And if we were not so lazy I believe we should all of us know more of God. It is somehow difficult to take quite so much pains about that as about other things.” “It can’t surely be difficult to you; it always seems to be easy to women, but to us men all is so different.” “Are you so sure of that?” she said quietly. “I have always fancied so,” he replied. “Why, the very idea of shutting one’s self in alone to think—to pray—it is so utterly unnatural to a man.” “I suppose the harder it is the more it is necessary,” said Cecil. “But our Lord was not always praying on mountains; he was living a quite ordinary shop life, and must have been as busy as you are.”