She stopped to laugh at her folly; then said, apologetically, "I am giving you the whole crude story, but it is for a purpose. I can laugh at that silly girl, now, but there have been times in my life when I cried over her. She knew so little in any direction, and there were such possibilities of danger, such imminent fear of a wrecked life. She needed a friend, as every girl does; and I can never cease to be thankful that she found one.
"Mrs. Burnham, I presume you have never understood what you did for me by calling on me and inviting me to your home, and opening to me a new world. We were very plain people with limited opportunities in every way, and my father's sudden financial success but a short time before had almost turned our heads; mine, at least, so that I was ready to be injured in many ways. Do you remember me sufficiently to realize the possibilities?"
"I remember you perfectly, my dear," said her puzzled and charmed hostess. "But I do not understand in the least why you think, or how you can think, that I--"
"Mrs. Burnham, you were a revelation to me. I had never before come into close contact with a perfect lady. At first, I was afraid of you, which was a new feeling to me, and in itself good for me; and then, for a while, I hated you; I thought that you came between me and some of my ambitions, I called them; now I know that they were utter follies." There was a heightened color on the fair face, and for a moment her eyes drooped. Then she laughed softly at her girlish follies.
"I recovered from them," she said briskly, "and enshrined you in my heart; made you my idol, and, better than that, my ideal. I had discovered from you what woman was meant to be.
"And, dear friend, I learned another lesson also, deeper and more far-reaching than any other. Up to that time I had always thought of religion as a very serious but somewhat tiresome experience that came to the old, or the sick, after they had got all they could out of life. It was Mr. Erskine Burnham who first showed me my utter misunderstanding of the whole matter. I do not know that he understood at the time what he was doing for me, but he gave me a hint of what Jesus Christ was, not only to you, but to himself, a young man in the first flush of youthful successes. I could not understand it at first, and it half vexed me by its strangeness; but there came a time in my life, afterward, when I was disappointed in all my plans, and unhappy. Then I thought of what had been said to me about Christ, and, almost as an experiment, I tried it. Mrs. Burnham, He stooped even to that low plane and revealed Himself to me, and I have counted it all joy to love and serve Him ever since And for this, too, I have to thank you and yours."