So apparently thought the audience, which resigned itself to a severe mental excursion into the unknown regions of Brother Wright’s imaginative metaphysics. Some of them fell out very soon, finding the road harder to follow than they had foreseen; but Brother Wright kept sturdily on, unheeding the signs of weakness and disaffection as betrayed by movings of feet and stifled yawns.
Olive, not being able to understand what Brother Wright was saying, employed herself in watching Madame, who sat motionless beside her table, resting her head upon her supple white hand. At her feet lay what seemed to be a large brown rug, but was in fact her dog Balthasar, a blood-hound, who always stayed with her and was as gentle as a lamb, notwithstanding his name and breed.
“Brother Green! That’s the second time you’ve snored,” suddenly exclaimed Brother Wright in the midst of his reading. Everybody was wide awake in an instant. Madame hid a smile with her hand, but not before Olive had noticed it.
“Brother Green is perhaps tired. His work is very hard,” said Madame.
“Well, the fact is I had to put a new point to the ploughshare this morning before I went to fetch my load of iron, and I began work before daybreak. I am very tired.”
Brother Green was the blacksmith of Perfection City, an industrious hard-working man who thought life would show him a fairer side on the prairie than it had ever done in the far-away village in Sussex where he was born.
“I think that it might be better to have our gatherings rather shorter now,” said Madame softly. “The workers in our little hive are all tired. I wish I could do more of the labour that is needed. I would gladly——”
Madame was interrupted by a sharp rap on the table, a signal from Brother Huntley that he wanted to speak. He was the deaf and dumb man. She instantly rose and bowed to him with singular graciousness. Madame’s manner towards the deaf brethren was all that was exquisite. Huntley stood up and began in a voice almost inaudible which rose by sudden degrees to the intensity of a steam-whistle.
“I want to know when we’re going to get our corn planted? We’re behindhand; most other folk’s corn is in already.”
“As usual, Brother Huntley has something practical to say,” observed Madame.