She said nothing. What can you say when you hear a man blaspheming the very cradle where he was rocked in infancy. Besides, the contempt seemed to include her. She was a part of it, and she loved it. “I saw a handsome plant of some sort blooming in a tin bucket on Mrs. Flitch’s front porch the other day. That’s what I mean,” he went on. “But what do you mean?” she asked, regarding him vaguely. “Well, the bucket was tinware, as I said, and published on it, still in red letters, was the red label of a superior shortening.” He laughed. “She is so fond of flowers,” Helen expounded gravely. His eyes snickered at her. “But the bucket,” he exclaimed, “the tin bucket, the old tin bucket with the red label--with a gardenia blooming in it. Naïve, I’ll admit, but about as appropriate as sticking an ostrich plume over the kitchen sink.” Helen made a hasty mental inventory of the Adams flower pots and thanked heaven they were correct. “The people here do not think; they merely gossip,” he went on. “They have no ideas, no purely mental conceptions. They do not know what is going on in the mind of the world, how men’s views of life are changing and broadening.” She did not follow him, but she felt the wind of the world beneath her wing. “Two years here made no difference. You don’t grow. You don’t develop. But away in a university, where your business is to get what’s going and learn to think, two years change a man. I am a stranger here now. My own father and mother do not know me.” “Oh, George, yes, they do!” she exclaimed consolingly. Then she caught his eye and perceived that he was in no need of consolation. He was boasting, prouder than otherwise of being this stranger. “It’s a fact; they make me feel like a whited sepulcher,” he complained. “But you don’t,” she exclaimed loyally, but really in great trepidation lest he might be this awful thing. “Of course not,” he returned, pleased to have excited her anxiety. “But what would my father think if he knew I am interested in socialism, that my best friends in the university are radicals?” She was not competent to express an opinion. She was not skilled in politics. “And what would my mother think if she knew that I no longer accept the Scriptures literally as she does, as you all do in this town; that I know the Bible to be fragments of history and tradition, much of it mythical, the priestly literature of the Jews, gathered from dreams and hearsay, and interpreted to control the lives and liberties of men.” “Oh, George! you must not say such things. You are a member of the church. I remember the Sunday morning when you were baptized.” “A public bath! And there is no ‘the Church,’ Helen; did you know that--unless it’s the world; that’s the big church,” said this grand young man, delivered from the faith of his fathers.