`Oh yes. How was that made?'

`I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate brochures, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr. - - - but never mind his name, poor boy - said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable.'

`H'm!' said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege.

`And what a literary enormity this is,' she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. `I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff.'

Jude looked pained. `You are quite Voltairean!' he murmured.

`Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I hate such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!' Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. `I wish I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!'

`But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!' he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument.

`Yes you are, yes you are!' she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. `You are on the side of the people in the training-school - at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: `Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: `The church professeth her faith,' is supremely ridiculous!'

`Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am - only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know you are fairest among women to me, come to that!'

`But you are not to say it now!' Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible.

`I won't disturb your convictions - I really won't!' she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. `But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I - shall I confess it? - thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say.'

`Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity.'

`Well, perhaps you might take something worse.'

`Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!' He thought of Arabella.

`I won't ask what, because we are going to be very nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?' She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast.

`I shall always care for you!' said Jude.