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The Puritans
By
Arlo Bates
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. All's Well That Ends Well, iv. 3.
"Abandoning my heart, and rapt in ecstasy, I ran after her till I cameto a place in which religion and reason forsook me." _Persian Religious Hymn.
AFTER SUCH A PAGAN CUT
Henry VIII., i. 3.
"We are all the children of the Puritans," Mrs. Herman said smiling.
"Of course there is an ethical strain in all of us."
Her cousin, Philip Ashe, who wore the dress of a novice from the Clergy
House of St. Mark, regarded her with a serious and doubtful glance.
"But there is so much difference between you and me," he began. Then hehesitated as if not knowing exactly how to finish his sentence.
"The difference," she responded, "is chiefly a matter of the differencebetween action and reaction. You and I come of much the same stockethically. My childhood was oppressed by the weight of the Puritancreed, and the reaction from it has made me what you feel obliged tocall heretic; while you, with a saint for a mother, found evenPuritanism hardly strict enough for you, and have taken tosemi-monasticism. We are both pushed on by the same original impulse:the stress of Puritanism."
She had been putting on her gloves as she spoke, and now rose and stoodready to go out. Philip looked at her with a troubled glance, risingalso.
"I hardly know," said he slowly, "if it's right for me to go with you.
It would have been more in keeping if I adhered to the rules of the
Clergy House while I am away from it."
Mrs. Herman smiled with what see