Helen hesitated. She had never seen him near before. He looked a little singular, not quite like other people, a little weary and very white-faced, a little impenetrable. She remembered all he had said to her through Saint Mary's organ, things sensitive and intimate. The process of putting together two groups of impressions to make one personality is difficult, and one ought to have time. But he insisted on knowing where the tower was. "I don't know how to be an ogre without it," so that she said, hastily, "You must have one in the organ-loft," and was not at all sure that it meant anything, if it were not an entire mistake, and was glad when they sat down without calling for more explanations. She slid down to her old place by Mrs. Mavering and half listened to them, and half studied a problem, to see what was honestly true about it, or whether it had any middle. When Helen was little, she used to compose parables and sermons, and sometimes wept to think how beautiful they were, and declaimed them to her mother, who had only one comment to make. It was, "Why, Helen!" Such was the parable of the Perfect Cat, who lived a life of absolute sinlessness. There was a sermon on David and Absalom--"Oh, Absalom, my son!" It was tearful at that point. But the moral was that Absalom was hung by his hair--a sorrowful incident. People should not make their children have long hair. "And I have asked you three times to-day, 'Mother, please, may I cut it off?' and you just said, 'Why, Helen!' and I'm not going to ask again. I'm going to put you in the closing prayer." So that now she put her conclusion into a sermon, to the effect that every one had a tower in which part of himself or herself was a proud ogre, and another part was a valiant knight who ought to eventually thrust a lance into the middle of the ogre to make him humble and social, or else dead, so that both together might become a perfect character before the benediction. Because a proper sermon was like a story, inasmuch as in the first part you made things look as badly as possible and talked about wickedness, so that everybody might become interested; and in the last part you talked about goodness and made goodness succeed after difficulty, so that everybody might become calm; and in the benediction you told everybody to be happy ever after. "Do you read Emerson," Gard was saying to Mrs. Mavering--"the Massachusetts lecturer? He says, 'The Eden of God is bare and grand'; but I don't see anything more than a personal fancy in that. Anyway, the poets would be wrong in putting music in such an Eden. An organ is full of sin and sorrow. The pipes always seem to me to hold so many human emotions compressed and stowed away, like the genius in Solomon's bottle. Say one of them is a pure aspiration and one of them a snarling desire. You set the snarling desire chasing the pure aspiration, and you have one of the simple formulæ for expressing humanity. It isn't Eden."