Gavan, amused by the idea that Eppie lacked religious faith, inquired whether the settlement were religious in intention, and Miss Allen sighed a little in answering no,--Miss Grey, indeed, was a Positivist. “But we Anglicans are very broad, you know,” she said. “I can work in perfectly with them all--better with Miss Grey and Miss Gifford than with Miss Henderson, who is very, very Low. Miss Gifford goes in more for social conditions and organization--trades-unions, all that sort of thing; that’s where she finds Mr. Grainger so much of a help, I think.” And he gathered from Miss Allen’s further conversation, from its very manner of vague though admiring protest, a clearer conception of Eppie’s importance down here. To Miss Allen, she evidently embodied a splendid, pagan force, ambiguous in its splendor. He saw her slightly shrinking vision of an intent combatant; no loving sister of charity, but a young Bellona, the latest weapons of sociological warfare in her hands, its latest battle-cry on her lips. And all for what? thought Gavan, while, with a sense of contrasting approval, he looked at Miss Allen’s tidy little head against the sunlit crocuses and watched the harmless occupation of her hands. All for life, more life; the rousing of desire; the struggling to higher forms of consciousness. She was in it, the strife, the struggle. He had seen on her face to-day, with all its surprise, perhaps its gladness, that alien look of grave preoccupation that passed from him to the destinies she touched. In thinking of it all he felt particularly at peace, though there was the irony of his assurance that Eppie’s efforts among this suffering life where he found her only resulted in a fiercer hold on suffering. Physical degradation and its resultant moral apathy were by no means the most unendurable of human calamities. Miss Allen’s anodynes--the mere practical petting, soothing, telling of pretty tales--were, in their very short-sightedness, more fitted to the case. Miss Allen little thought to what a context her harmless prattle was being adjusted. She would have been paralyzed with horror could she have known that to the gentle young man, sitting there so unalarmingly, she herself was only a rather simple symptom of life that he was quietly studying. In so far from suspecting, her shyness went from her; he was so unalarming--differing in this from so many people--that she found it easy to talk to him. And she still had a happy little hope of a closer community of interest than he had owned to. He looked, she thought, very High Church. Perhaps he was in the last stages of conversion.