"All right--glad you understand me. Now, listen! Is it great to pull a long face? Is it right to get melancholy about religion, when the head of it always preached happiness? Is it sensible to try and make every one do your way, when you're told the nearer like little children we are, the better we are off? Don't you think you're acting as if you knew better than Christ Himself? You don't imagine that those kids, as they were ten minutes ago, was what He meant when He said, 'Suffer little children to come unto Me'? Seems to me you've altered the text to read: 'Suffer, little children, to come unto Me.' They sure were suffering in them starched white shirts, but I'm betting the words weren't meant to read like that." "Will," she said earnestly, "I think I've made the common mistake of supposing that I alone cared. Even now, while I feel you have more the real spirit than I, your way of speaking jars on me." She sat down as if she had suddenly grown weak. "I have simply worshiped a certain way of doing things and forgotten the results and the reason for doing anything. Your straight way of putting it makes my life seem ridiculous." She stopped with a miserable face. I hadn't, in the least, thought to convince her. Most people will hang on to a mistake of that kind harder than they will to a life-preserver. It was like turning a Republican into a Democrat by simply showing him he was wrong--who'd go into politics with that idea? I stared at her, not believing. "Why, Mary," I said, hedging, as a person will in such circumstances, "it ain't a cinch that I'm right. I'm only a boy, and of course things appear to me boy fashion." She cut me short. "To be honest, doubts have troubled me before this. Your history proves what can be done by extreme--" Up to this she had spoken quite quietly. Now she put her head in her hands and burst out crying; fortunately we were in a little summer-house where no one could see us. "Oh, Will!" she sobbed out, "the struggle for nothing at all! All fight, fight, and no peace! I want to be a good woman, I _do_; but what is there for me?" "Listen to me again," says I, so sorry that I had another attack of reason. "There's this for you--to be a man's wife, and make him twice a man because you are his wife; to raise boys and girls that prove what's right--there's a job for you." She dried her tears and smiled at me, ashamed of showing so much feeling. "Is this an offer?" she said. I had to laugh. "You don't squirm out that way, young lady--you were in earnest and you know it. I'll take you, if necessary--by the Prophet Moses, I _will_, if some other feller doesn't show up soon--but I want to speak of a more suitable man." She looked at me. It was a try at being stern, but, as a result, it was a good deal more scared. "You can do a great deal with me, Will," she said, "but I'll not hear a word of Arthur Saxton."