At least Seagrave would have thought so. What right had a man to be as good as that? Self-righteous, that was what it was, to set up a standard and go around making other people feel uncomfortable because they didn’t believe in the same things! There was no sense to it. Why would she persist in thinking about that man any longer? She had nothing to do with him, would very likely never see him again. He would probably be sent off to some other city by the time she got back. People did that in business, got sent to a Western office or something. Well, she hoped she never would see him again. Prig! Going around and nosing into strangers’ business. Scraping acquaintance with a girl in church when she was uniting with a perfectly respectable church and then daring to give her flowers and leave his handkerchief—! Goodness! She had never returned that handkerchief! Where was it? Had she stuffed it into her suitcase at the last minute thinking it was something of her own, or had she left it lying on her bureau or floor for her brother to discover and send on with appropriate inscriptions of poetry or something? He was perfectly capable, of course, of doing that.

Well, she wouldn’t return the handkerchief anyway. He would just think she wanted him to correspond if she did. She would forget it, and he could, too, or else think he had put it in his pocket and lost it. Anyway it didn’t matter what he thought. She must snap out of this. She was getting perfectly maudlin on the subject.

She sat up with a jerk and opened her magazine, absorbing herself as well as she could in a thrilling murder and detective story, but ever in between the paragraphs would come some sentence that Seagrave had spoken that morning. Some arresting phrase that kept her wondering. Born again. That was the thing he had talked about so much. She tried to think it out. What had he said was the way to get born again? Was it just that you had to believe something? That was absurd, of course. You couldn’t believe a thing that you couldn’t believe.

Of course he had used the illustration of riding in an airplane, but then that wasn’t quite a parallel case. One rode in planes as a matter of course. Now if some special plane had been condemned, if it had a doubt cast upon its workmanship or mechanism, she wouldn’t go in it. And that was what had happened to her spiritually. She had been to college and found out that these things he talked about were myths, fables, legends, traditions. How could one believe any more in a fable after one had been enlightened? How could he? He had been to college, too, and seemed more than commonly intelligent.

And yet he did believe with all his soul. There was no denying that. He was utterly sincere in everything he said.

During the whole of that five-hour journey, Constance debated with herself. She didn’t even finish the detective story. It didn’t somehow seem worthwhile. She finally laid down the magazine and closed her eyes. Too many times had a pair of brown eyes come across the page and interrupted the trend of the story.