Two more series of meetings Sharon Falconer held that summer, and at each of them the power in the machinery world appeared and chronicled his conversion by the Gideon Bible and the eloquence of Sister Falconer.
Sometimes he seemed very near her; the next time she would regard him with bleak china eyes. Once she turned on him with: "You smoke, don't you?"
"Why, yes."
"I smelled it. I hate it. Will you stop it? Entirely? And drinking?"
"Yes. I will."
And he did. It was an agony of restlessness and craving, but he never touched alcohol or tobacco again, and he really regretted that in evenings thus made vacuous he could not keep from an interest in waitresses.
It was late in August, in a small Colorado city, after the second of his appearances as a saved financial Titan, that he implored Sharon as they entered the hotel together, "Oh, let me come up to your room. Please! I never have a chance to just sit and talk to you."
"Very well. Come in half an hour. Don't 'phone. Just come right up to Suite B."
It was a half-hour of palpitating, of almost timorous, expectancy.
In every city where she held meetings Sharon was invited to stay at the home of one of the elect, but she always refused. She had a long standard explanation that "she could devote herself more fully to the prayer life if she had her own place, and day by day filled it more richly with the aura of spirituality." Elmer wondered whether it wasn't the aura of Cecil Aylston for which she had her suite, but he tried to keep his aching imagination away from that.
