“And now I want to talk seriously to you, as a friend,” she began.  “You mustn’t breathe to any living soul the shadow of a hint of this nonsense about leaving the ministry.  I could see how you were feeling—­I saw the book you were reading the first time I entered this room—­and that made me like you; only I expected to find you mixing up more worldly gumption with your Renan.  Well, perhaps I like you all the better for not having it—­for being so delightfully fresh.  At any rate, that made me sail in and straighten your affairs for you.  And now, for God’s sake, keep them straight.  Just put all notions of anything else out of your head.  Watch your chief men and women, and be friends with them.  Keep your eye open for what they think you ought to do, and do it.  Have your own ideas as much as you like, read what you like, say ‘Damn’ under your breath as much as you like, but don’t let go of your job.  I’ve knocked about too much, and I’ve seen too many promising young fellows cut their own throats for pure moonshine, not to have a right to say that.”

Theron could not be insensible to the friendly hand on his shoulder, or to the strenuous sincerity of the voice which thus adjured him.

“Well,” he said vaguely, smiling up into her earnest eyes, “if we agree that it is moonshine.”

“See here!” she exclaimed, with renewed animation, patting his shoulder in a brisk, automatic way, to point the beginnings of her confidences:  “I’ll tell you something.  It’s about myself.  I’ve got a religion of my own, and it’s got just one plank in it, and that is that the time to separate the sheep from the goats is on Judgment Day, and that it can’t be done a minute before.”

The young minister took in the thought, and turned it about in his mind, and smiled upon it.

“And that brings me to what I’m going to tell you,” Sister Soulsby continued.  She leaned back in her chair, and crossed her knees so that one well-shaped and artistically shod foot poised itself close to Theron’s hand.  Her eyes dwelt upon his face with an engaging candor.

“I began life,” she said, “as a girl by running away from a stupid home with a man that I knew was married already.  After that, I supported myself for a good many years—­generally, at first, on the stage.  I’ve been a front-ranker in Amazon ballets, and I’ve been leading lady in comic opera companies out West.  I’ve told fortunes in one room of a mining-camp hotel where the biggest game of faro in the Territory went on in another.  I’ve been a professional clairvoyant, and I’ve been a professional medium, and I’ve been within one vote of being indicted by a grand jury, and the money that bought that vote was put up by the smartest and most famous train-gambler between Omaha and ’Frisco, a gentleman who died in his boots and took three sheriff’s deputies along with him to Kingdom-Come.  Now, that’s my record.”

Theron looked earnestly at her, and said nothing.