He was himself the son of the Reverend Harold Spear, the eloquent and popular divine who for years had packed Saint Ambrose's with New York's most distinguished congregation. Dr. Spear, as popular out of the pulpit as in it, had married a distant cousin of the Van der Luydens, thus paving the way for his son's more brilliant alliance; but still it required a certain courage on the part of the heiress of Eaglewood to accept a suitor whom her friends alluded to as "merely clever." Sometimes Héloïse, thinking over the phrase (which her mother had once quoted to her in derision), smiled to note how exact it was. After all, those dull old Lorburns and their clan must have had a nice sense of nuances: her father, whom she loved and laughed at, was exactly that—he was merely clever. It was perhaps because his wife belonged to the same category (though, being a Lorburn, she had never been placed in it, since a Lorburn woman might be beautiful, or masterful, or distinguished, but never anything so ambiguous as "clever") that she had had been attracted by young Spear, and had married him in spite of the family opposition. Emily Lorburn, brought up in an atmosphere of rigid social conformity, had become passionately nonconforming; her husband, educated after the strict rule of Episcopalian orthodoxy, had read Strauss and Renan in secret before going over openly to Darwin and Haeckel. The young people, dazzled by each other's audacities, had perhaps expected, by pooling them, to form a nucleus of intellectual revolt; but the world had revolted without waiting for them. Their heresies were too mild to cause any excitement outside of their own circle, and their house, instead of being the centre of incendiarism they had imagined, was merely regarded as one where one was likely to meet agreeable people.