"I am sorry, Miss Torrington, that you should have asked me such a question," he replied with a kind of gentle severity which might have led almost any hearer to think him in the right. "I had hoped that my ministry at Wrexhill, short as it has been, could not have left it a matter of doubt whether, in speaking of singing or prayer, I was in jest?"
"Nevertheless, sir," rejoined Rosalind, "it does to me appear like a jest, and a very indecent one too, thus to imagine that an air long familiar to all as the vehicle of words as full of levity as of poetry can be on the sudden converted into an accompaniment to a solemn invocation to prayer—uttered, too, in the form of a vile parody."
"I think that a very few words may be able to prove to you the sophistry of such an argument," returned the vicar. "You will allow, I believe, that this air is very generally known to all classes.—Is it not so?"
Rosalind bowed her assent.
"Well, then, let me go a step farther, and ask whether the words originally set to this air are not likely to be recalled by hearing it?"
"Beyond all doubt."
"Now observe, Miss Torrington, that what you have been pleased to call levity and poetry, I, in my clerical capacity, denounce as indecent and obscene."
"Is that your reason for setting me to play it?" said Rosalind in a tone of anger.
"That question again, does not, I fear, argue an amiable and pious state of mind," replied Mr. Cartwright, appealing meekly with his eyes to the right and left. "It is to substitute other thoughts for those which the air has hitherto suggested that I conceive the singing this song, as it now stands, desirable."
"Might it not be as well to leave the air alone altogether?" said Rosalind.