By morning they felt sure that they had persuaded God to attend to Elmer, and though it is true that Elmer himself had slept quite soundly all night, unaware of the prayer-meeting or of divine influences, it was but an example of the patience of the heavenly powers. And immediately after those powers began to move. To Elmer’s misery and Jim’s stilled fury, their sacred room was invaded by hordes of men with uncombed locks on their foreheads, ecstasy in their eyes, and Bibles under their arms. Elmer was safe nowhere. No sooner had he disposed of one disciple, by the use of spirited and blasphemous arguments patiently taught to him by Jim, than another would pop out from behind a tree and fall on him. At his boarding-house—Mother Metzger’s, over on Beech Street—a Y. M. C. A. dervish crowed as he passed the bread to Elmer, “Jever study a kernel of wheat? Swonnerful! Think a wonnerful intricate thing like that created _itself_? Somebody must have created it. Who? God! Anybody that don’t reconize God in Nature—and acknowledge him in repentance—is _dumm_. That’s what he is!” Instructors who had watched Elmer’s entrance to classrooms with nervous fury now smirked on him and with tenderness heard the statement that he wasn’t quite prepared to recite. The president himself stopped Elmer on the street and called him My Boy, and shook his hand with an affection which, Elmer anxiously assured himself, he certainly had done nothing to merit. He kept assuring Jim that he was in no danger, but Jim was alarmed, and Elmer himself more alarmed with each hour, each new greeting of: “We need you with us, old boy—the world needs you!” Jim did well to dread. Elmer had always been in danger of giving up his favorite diversions—not exactly giving them up, perhaps, but of sweating in agony after enjoying them. But for Jim and his remarks about co-eds who prayed in public and drew their hair back rebukingly from egg-like foreheads, one of these sirens of morality might have snared the easy-going pangynistic Elmer by proximity. A dreadful young woman from Mexico, Missouri, used to coax Jim to “tell his funny ideas about religion,” and go off in neighs of pious laughter, while she choked, “Oh, you’re just too cute! You don’t mean a word you say. You simply want to show off!” She had a deceptive sidelong look which actually promised nothing whatever this side of the altar, and she might, but for Jim’s struggles, have led Elmer into an engagement.