Maxine was standing now with her hands resting on the back of an armchair. She seemed scarcely listening to what her companion was saying. She was listening, but she was thinking as well.
"You cannot do everything yourself," said she, at last. "You must get others to help, and in this I can, perhaps, assist you. Will you go to-morrow and see Monsieur Pugin? I do not know him personally, but I know a friend of his. I will send him a note early to-morrow morning, and the servant can bring back the letter of introduction. You could call upon him to-morrow afternoon."
This question, showing such a boundless ignorance of every-day French life and literature, rather shocked Maxine. She explained that Ary Pugin, the author of "Absolution" and twenty other works equally beautiful, was above all other men fitted to bring home to France the story of this great sin. "Absolution," that masterpiece, had shown France her cruelty in the expulsion of the religious orders. France had read it weeping, drying her tears with one hand and continuing the expulsion of the religious orders with the other.
That, however, was not Pugin's fault; he had done his best. It was not his fault that logic and sentiment are so largely constituent of the French nature, making between them that paradox, the French mind.
"I will go and see him," said Adams, when the girl had explained what Pugin was, what Pugin did, and what Pugin had written. "A man like that could do more with a stroke of his pen, than I with weary years of blundering attempts to write. I can never thank you enough for listening to me. It is strange, but half the weight of the thing seems to have passed from my mind."
"To mine," she replied. Then, with charming _naïveté_, she held out both hands to him.
As he held the door open, and as she passed out, he realized that, during the last few months, his faith in the goodness of God--the old simple faith of his childhood--had been all but stolen by ferocious and fiendish hands from his mind, and that just now, in some miraculous way, it had been returned.
It was as though the gentle hands of Maxine had put it back.
Maxine, when she reached her own apartments, turned on the electric light in her sitting room, and sat down at once to write to the friend who was a friend of Pugin's.