She had a great respect for religion, and for any sincere person.

"How old is the oldest part ?" she asked him.

He told her as best he could, but he was not versed in the latest scholarship and had a genuine horror of "the higher criticism." But I supplied a little information on the side, when we were alone, telling her of the patchwork group of ancient legends which made up the first part; of the very human councils of men who had finally decided which of the ancient writings were inspired and which were not; of how the Book of Job, the oldest of all, had only scraped in by one vote, and then, with rather a malicious relish, of that most colossal joke of all history—how the Song of Songs—that amorous, not to say salacious ancient love-lyric, had been embraced with the others and interpreted as a mystical lofty outburst of devotion with that "black but comely" light-o'-love figuring as The Church.

Ellador was quite shocked.

"But Van!—he ought to know that. You ought to tell him. Is it generally known?"

"It is known to scholars, not to the public as a whole."

"But they still have it bound in with the others—and think it is holy—when it isn't."

"Yes," I grinned, "the joke is still going on."

"What have the scholars done about it?" she asked.

"Oh, they have worked out their proof, shown up the thing—and let it go at that."

"Wasn't there any demand from the people who knew to have it taken out of the Bible?"

"There is one edition of the Bible now printed in all the separate books—a whole shelf full of little ones, instead of one big one."

"I should think that would be much better," she said, "but the other one is still printed—and sold?"

"Printed and sold and given away by hundreds of thousands—with The Joke going right on."

She was puzzled. It was not so much the real outside things we did which she found it hard to understand, but the different way our minds worked. In Herland, if a thing like that had been discovered, the first effort of all their wisest students would have been to establish the facts. When they were sure about it, they would then have taken the rather shameful old thing out of its proud position among the "sacred" books at once. They would have publicly acknowledged their mistake, rectified it, and gone on.

"You'll have to be very patient with me, Van dearest. It is going to take me a long time to get hold of your psychology. But I'll do my best."

Her best was something amazing. And she would have come to her final conclusions far earlier but for certain firm preconceptions that we were somehow better, nobler, than we were.

The Reverend Murdock kept at her pretty steadily. He started in at the beginning, giving her the full circumstantial account of The Temptation, The Fall, and The Curse.

She listened quietly, with no hint in her calm face of what she might be thinking. But when he came to the punishment of the serpent: "Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life," she asked a question.

"Will you tell me please—how did the serpent 'go' before?"

Mr. Murdock looked at her. He was reading in a deep sorrowful voice, his mind full of the solemn purport of the Great Tragedy.

"What was his method of locomotion before he was cursed?" asked Ellador.

He laid down the book in some annoyance. "It is believed that the serpent walked erect, that he stood like a man, that he was Satan himself," he replied.

"But it says: "Now the serpent was more subtile than any of the beasts of the field," doesnt it? And the picture you showed me is of a snake, in the tree."

"The picture is, as it were, allegorical," he replied. "It is not reverent to question the divine account like this."

She did not mind this note of censure, but asked further: "As a matter of fact, do snakes eat dust?  Or is that allegorical too? How do you know which is allegorical and which is fact? Who decides?"

They had a rather stormy discussion on that point; at least the missionary was stormy. He was unable to reconcile Ellador's gentle courtesy with her singular lack of reverence for mere statements.

But our theological discussions were summarily ended, and Ellador reduced to clinging to her berth, by a severe storm. It was not a phenomenal hurricane by any means; but a steady lashing gale which drove us far out of our course, and so damaged the vessel that we could do little but drive before the wind.

"There's a steamer !" said Terry on the third day of heavy weather. And as we watched the drift of smoke on the horizon we found it was nearing us. And none too soon! By the time they were within hailing distance our small vessel ran up signals of distress, for we were leaking heavily, and we were thankful to be taken off, even though the steamer, a Swedish one, was bound for Europe instead of America.

They gave us better accommodations than we had had on the other, and eagerly took on board our big motor-boat and biplane—too eagerly, I thought.

Ellador was greatly interested in the larger ship, the big blond men, and in their talk. I prepared her as well as I could. They had good maps of Europe, and I filled in her outlines of history as far as I was able, and told her of the war. Her horror at this was natural enough.

"We have always had war," Terry explained. "Ever since the world began— at least as far as history goes, we have have had war. It is human nature."

"Human?" asked Ellador.

"Yes," he said, "human. Bad as it is, it is evidently human nature to do it. Nations advance, the race is improved by fighting. It is the law of nature."

Since our departure from Herland, Terry had rebounded like a rubber ball from all its influences. Even his love for Alima he was evidently striving to forget, with some success. As for the rest, he had never studied the country and its history as I had, nor accepted it like Jeff; and now he was treating it all as if it really was, what he had often called it to me, a bad dream. He would keep his word in regard to telling nothing about it; that virtue was his at any rate.