Brady started and moved away a trifle, but made no effort at denial till after a minute, when he said rather weakly, "What makes you think so?" "_Think_ so! Why, man, I must be deaf, dumb, and blind not to _know_ it. Do you suppose I believed that a man at your time of life, brought up as you have been, had suddenly gone daft on this Salvation Army business?" "It's a 'business', as you call it, that does more good than all the churches put together," answered Brady, hotly. "Hear him!" echoed Flint, mockingly. "Hear this son of New England actually declaring that there may be a way to heaven which does not lie between church-pews or start from a pulpit!" "Flint, you are a scoffer." "What do I scoff at?" "Religion." "Pardon me, but I do not." "Well, theology, anyway." "Ah, that is a different matter." "You call yourself an agnostic." "No, I don't. 'Agnostic' is too long and too pretentious a word. I prefer to translate it and call myself a know-nothing." "Don't you believe in God and a future life--and--and all that sort of thing?" Brady ended rather disjointedly. "Don't you believe Mars is inhabited? and that the lines on its surface are canals for irrigation?" "I don't know," answered Brady, whose mental processes were simple. "Neither do I," said Flint; "and what is more, neither does any man, any more than he knows about God and a future life; and so why should we go to making up creeds and breaking the heads of people who don't agree with us when we are all just guessers, and probably all of us wrong?" "Then you would take away faith out of the world?" "Not I,--at least not unless I could see something to take its place, which at present I don't; and as for these poor devils who are consoling themselves for their hard lot in this world by the expectation of a soft thing in the next, I would not be such a brute as to shake their confidence if I could, and I don't blame them much if in addition to their heaven they set up a hell where, in imagination at least, they can put the folks who have been having a too good time here while they were grunting and sweating under their weary load." "Then I wonder you have not more sympathy with an organization like the Salvation Army, which is doing its best to lighten the burden of the grunters and sweaters." "Ah," answered Flint, "I had forgotten the Salvation Army,--it seems so small a branch of a big subject. I am glad you brought me back. But let us go a little further back still, for you know it was not the Army at all that we started to discuss, but only one of its officers, with a slender little figure and a pale face and a big pair of rather mournful dark eyes." "Oh!" said Brady, taken somewhat off his guard, "but you should see her when she is pleased! They light up just as if a torch had been kindled in them." "Oh, they do, do they?" said Flint, with genial raillery; "well, you see I never saw her so pleased as that."