“You were in the churchyard,” stated Mr. Queed.  “I was there just ahead of you.  I was struck with that motto or text on the headstone, and shall look it up when I get home.  I have been making a more careful study of your Bible this autumn and have found it exceptionally interesting.  You, I suppose, subscribe to all the tenets of the Christian faith?”

Sharlee hesitated.  “I’m not sure that I can answer that with a direct yes, and I will not answer it with any sort of no.  So I’ll say that I believe in them all, modified a little in places to satisfy my reason.”

“Ah, they are subject to modification, then?”

“Certainly.  Aren’t you?  Am not I?  Whatever is alive is subject to modification.  These doctrines,” said she, “are evolving because they have the principle of life in them.”

“So you are an evolutionist?”

“The expert in evolutionary sociology will hardly quarrel with me for that.”

“The expert in evolutionary sociology deals with social organisms, nations, the human race.  Your Bible deals with Smith, Brown, and Jones.”

“Well, what are your organisms and nations but collections of my Smiths, Browns, and Joneses?  My Bible deals with individuals because there is nothing else to deal with.  The individual conscience is the beginning of everything.”

“Ah!  So you would found your evolution of humanity upon the increasing operation of what you call conscience?”

“Probably I would not give all the credit to what I call conscience.  Probably I’d give some of it to what I call intellect.”

“In that case you would almost certainly fall into a fatal error.”

“Why, don’t you consider that the higher the intellectual development the higher the type?”

“Suppose we go more slowly,” said Mr. Queed, intently plucking a dead bough from an overhanging young oak.

“How do you go about measuring a type?  When you speak of a high type, exactly what do you mean?”

“When I speak of a high type,” said Sharlee, who really did not know exactly what she meant, “I will merely say that I mean a type that is high—­lofty, you know—­towering over other types.”

She flaunted a gloved hand to suggest infinite altitude.

“You ought to mean,” he said patiently, “a type which most successfully sketches the civilization of the future, a type best fitted to dominate and survive.  Now you have only to glance at history to see that intellectual supremacy is no guarantee whatever of such a type.”

“Oh, Mr. Queed, I don’t know about that.”