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“Don’t you think food for the soul comes in other ways, too? I know I find it in music—in beauty everywhere—”
    Her father’s grave face grew a little more grave. He compressed his lips into patience before he answered with certainty, “These things do not lead to the knowledge of God. There is but one Saviour, and He is the Crucified.”
    Now Rose lifted her secret heavy-lidded eyes and flashed them at her father and dropped them again, musing. Beyond Rose’s blond young head Joan looked into the garden and there she saw the glowing newly opened roses and the summer lilies in the border. The lemon lily was wide open. She forgot what her father said. After breakfast she would go out and dip her face delicately into the lily, as the hummingbird did when he discovered it. She remembered from summer to summer the fragrance of the lemon lily; among a hundred scents and perfumes she knew that clear single sweetness. But such knowledge, her father said, was not the knowledge of God. She turned to her mother impatiently.
    “Mother—” she cried.
    But her mother was not ready to hear her. She was listening to her son and her face was troubled.
    “I don’t see why I can’t, Moms,” he was arguing. His dark beautiful face grew darker and somehow still more beautiful. Red rushed into his dark cheeks and he bit his lip to crimson. “All the fellows are going. Why, even Ned Parsons is going and you’re always holding him up to me—Gee, I’ve already asked my girl.”
    “I don’t like your going off to that dance hall,” she answered stubbornly. “Your father is the minister.” She paused and pressed her full lips together. They were shaped exactly as her son’s were. Then she asked with constraint and in a different voice, “What girl have you asked?”
    Now he was determined to punish her. “Why should I tell you if I can’t take her?” he muttered. He really had not asked a girl. But he wanted to hurt her.
    “Oh, Frank,” she breathed, beseeching him, “don’t be so—You know I want you to have good wholesome fun. But I can’t think this is good for you.”
    “That’s not the reason,” he retorted. “It’s because Dad is the sacred minister. Gosh, I’ve been hampered all my life because Dad is the sacred minister!”
    But now his mother’s mobile face changed. She could be angry even with her son.
    “If you’re half as good a man as your father, Francis—”
    “I hope I’ll die before that,” he said between his teeth.
    “Where do you want to go, son?” his father inquired. He had heard nothing, but now he looked up suddenly, aware of some discord.
    “What’s the use of asking anything?” the boy broke out against his mother, ignoring his father. “I ought to do like the other fellows and not tell—I’m a fool for telling!”
    Now he had the victory over his mother. Above all else she wanted him to tell her everything. She dreaded the hour when there would be silence between them, the silence of trivial surface speech. She clung to him as he still was. When he was stormy, and rebellious at least she knew what he was, and as long as she knew him he was still hers. But she perceived that she was holding him now only from day to day, even from hour to hour. She gave way before him, frightened lest this was the last hour.
    “I’ll see about it,” she said.
    He understood her and he grew amiable at once and turned to his father. “There’s a new place to eat and swim about three miles down the south road and a bunch of us thought we’d go down tonight for supper and stay a while afterwards.”
    “I see,” his father said vaguely. It occurred to him nowadays that he should take an interest in his son’s life, now that he was sixteen—or was it seventeen? At any rate he was ceasing to be a child. When they were children it was natural that their mother should care for them. But Francis was no longer a child.
    “Your—ah—studies are over?” he asked politely.
    The mother