“Try it,” said Stukely. “It’s the letter they have been making the noise about. It ought to be printed. There’s a hit or two at the middle-class that I should like to see in print. It’s really not bad pulpit; and I suspect that what you object to, colonel, is only the dust of a well-thumped cushion. Shrapnel thumps with his fist. He doesn’t say much that’s new. If the parsons were men they’d be saying it every Sunday. If they did, colonel, I should hear you saying, amen.”
“Wait till they do say it.”
“That’s a long stretch. They’re turn-cocks of one Water-company—to wash the greasy citizens!”
“You’re keeping Nevil on the gape;” said Mr. Romfrey, with a whimsical shrewd cast of the eye at Beauchamp, who stood alert not to be foiled, arrow-like in look and readiness to repeat his home-shot. Mr. Romfrey wanted to hear more of that unintelligible “You!” of Beauchamp’s. But Stukely Culbrett intended that the latter should be foiled, and he continued his diversion from the angry subject.
“We’ll drop the sacerdotals,” he said. “They’re behind a veil for us, and so are we for them. I’m with you, colonel; I wouldn’t have them persecuted; they sting fearfully when whipped. No one listens to them now except the class that goes to sleep under them, to ‘set an example’ to the class that can’t understand them. Shrapnel is like the breeze shaking the turf-grass outside the church-doors; a trifle fresher. He knocks nothing down.”
“He can’t!” ejaculated the colonel.
“He sermonizes to shake, that’s all. I know the kind of man.”
“Thank heaven, it’s not a common species in England!”
“Common enough to be classed.”
Beauchamp struck through the conversation of the pair: “Can I see you alone to-night, sir, or to-morrow morning?”