"I don't know. At least, I didn't know at the beginning."
"Was it because you wanted to work among th people in the Flats?"
"No . . . no . . . I'm through with meddling in other people's lives."
There was a bitterness in his tone which Mary must have guessed had some relation to the woman she had left a little while before; only Philip had always adored his mother. Emma Downes boasted of it.
"I think I went into the Mills," he was saying, "because I had to find something solid to get hold of . . . and that was the solidest thing I could find. It's awfully solid, Mary. And it's beginning to do the trick. At first I hadn't faith in anything, least of all myself, and now I've got something new to take its place. It's a kind of faith in man—a faith in yourself. I couldn't go on always putting everything into the hands of God. It's like cheating—and people don't do it really. They only pretend they do. If they left it all to God, I suppose things would work out somehow; but they don't. They insist on meddling, too, and when a thing succeeds then God is good and he's answered their prayers, and if it fails, then it is God's Will. But all the while they're meddling themselves and making a mess of things."
"And you don't mean ever to go back to the church?"
For a moment he didn't answer. Then he said in a low voice, "No . . . I don't believe any longer—at least, not in the way of the church. And the church—well, the church is dead so far as the world is concerned. It's full of meddling old women. It might
