Needham strongly suspected was[Pg 22] looked upon as innocent and even rather proper by the decadence of that East he was always harping upon. [Pg 22] Louise, artless and unworldly, as she had been trained to be from the cradle, found herself but poorly equipped to combat such allurements as the dreadful Richard exhibited. It was an old tale, but none the less terrible for all that. She believed everything he said to her, fatally misconstrued his abundant enough ardour, fell madly in love, and wanted to throw herself in the river when she realized at length that her beautiful dream was shattered. Naturally, the Rev. Needham was shocked. He was horrified when his daughter wrote of throwing herself in the river. He did not definitely visualize the Potomac, which he had never seen; it was the convulsing generality that gripped him. Mrs. Needham's conduct, at that time, had proved much more practical, if less eloquent, than her husband's. She went straight to her daughter, determined to bring her back home; and she left a distracted minister to make what progress he could with the Sunday sermon—agonized, as he was, by fevered visions of his child's body, gowned in an indefinite but poetically clinging garment, her hair tangled picturesquely with seaweed, floating upon the surface of a composite stream in the moonlight. Necessarily in the moonlight. The effect was more ghastly that way. And certain immortal lines of verse would ripple moaningly through his thoughts: [Pg 23] [Pg 23] The Rev. Needham was not himself a poet, but there was poetry in the family. A brother had written poetry and gone to the devil. The Rev. Needham didn't even read poetry very often any more (for of course he never thought of looking upon King James's Version as a poem). In fact, the Rev. Needham had almost a kind of sentiment against poetry, since brother Will had disgraced them all. But it was curious to observe that at times of intense inner tumult, appropriate metrical interlinings had a way of insinuating themselves out of the vast anthology of his youth. Thus, while Mrs. Needham was away looking after their broken-hearted daughter, the clergyman, struggling to evolve his sermon, had to combat such tragic dirges as: And by the time the poor man got to those inhumanly personal stanzas: [Pg 24] [Pg 24] he
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