Theron's stiffened countenance remained immovable. He continued to stare
unblinkingly up into her eyes.

"We were disposed to like you very much when we first knew you,"
Celia went on. "You impressed us as an innocent, simple, genuine young
character, full of mother's milk. It was like the smell of early spring
in the country to come in contact with you. Your honesty of nature,
your sincerity in that absurd religion of yours, your general NAIVETE of
mental and spiritual get-up, all pleased us a great deal. We thought you
were going to be a real acquisition."

"Just a moment--whom do you mean by 'we'?" He asked the question calmly
enough, but in a voice with an effect of distance in it.

"It may not be necessary to enter into that," she replied. "Let me go
on. But then it became apparent, little by little, that we had misjudged
you. We liked you, as I have said, because you were unsophisticated and
delightfully fresh and natural. Somehow we took it for granted you would
stay so. Rut that is just what you didn't do--just what you hadn't the
sense to try to do. Instead, we found you inflating yourself with
all sorts of egotisms and vanities. We found you presuming upon the
friendships which had been mistakenly extended to you. Do you want
instances? You went to Dr. Ledsmar's house that very day after I had
been with you to get a piano at Thurston's, and tried to inveigle him
into talking scandal about me. You came to me with tales about him. You
went to Father Forbes, and sought to get him to gossip about us both.
Neither of those men will ever ask you inside his house again. But that
is only one part of it. Your whole mind became an unpleasant thing
to contemplate. You thought it would amuse and impress us to hear you
ridiculing and reviling the people of your church, whose money supports