The Way of a Maid with a Man

Between the queer mixture of emotions which beset him and the discomfort
of his bruised face and over-strained body Thompson turned and twisted,
and sleep withheld its restful oblivion until far in the night. As a
consequence he slept late. Dawn had grown old before he wakened.

When he opened his cabin door he was confronted by the dourest aspect of
the north that he had yet seen. The sky was banked full of slate-gray
clouds scudding low before a northeast wind that droned its melancholy
song in the swaying spruce tops, a song older than the sorrows of men,
the essence of all things forlorn in its minor cadences. A gray, clammy
day, tinged with the chill breath of coming snow. Thompson missed the
sun that had cheered and warmed those hushed solitudes. Just to look at
that dull sky and to hear the wind that was fast stripping the last sere
leaves from willow and maple and birch, and to feel that indefinable
touch of harshness, the first frigid fingerings of the frost-gods in the
air, gave him a swift touch of depression. He shivered a little. Turning
to his wood box he hastened to build a fire in the stove.

He stoked that rusty firebox until by the time he had cooked and eaten
breakfast it was glowing red. When he sat with his feet cocked up on the
stove front and gave himself up to the sober business of thought, it
seemed to him that he was passing a portentous milestone. To his
unsophisticated mind the simple fact that Sophie Carr had permitted him
to kiss her, that for a moment her head with its fluffy aureole of
yellow hair had rested willingly upon his shoulder, created a bond
between them, an understanding, a tentative promise, a cleaving together
that could have but one conclusion. He found himself reflecting upon
that--to him--most natural conclusion with a peculiar mixture of
gladness and doubt. For even in his exaltation he could not visualize
Sophie Carr as an ideal minister's helpmate. He simply could not. He
could hear too plainly the scorn of her tone as she spoke of
"parasitical parsons", of "unthinking acceptance of priestly myths", of
the Church, his Church, as "an organization essentially materialistic in
its aims and activities", and many more such phrases which were new and
startling to Thompson, even if they had been current among radical
thinkers long enough to become incorporated in a great deal that has
been written upon philosophy and theology.