“Wasn’t good enough, eh?” growled Red Pepper, suddenly and characteristically striking fire. “Did he think we wanted a ‘good one’—a saint? I don’t, for one. My principal objection to him, without having heard him, is that he looks as if his mother parted his hair for him before he came, and put a clean handkerchief in his pocket. Jolly—I like ’em to look less like poets and more like red-blooded men! Not that I want ’em beefy, either. Speaking of beef—I’ll have another slice. This going to church takes it out of a fellow.”
Jim Macauley howled. “Going to church! Coming away, you mean. Just a look-in, for yours. As to the way you like your preachers, my private opinion is you don’t like ’em at all.”
“Mr. Black doesn’t look like a poet, Red.” It was Martha Macauley again. She and her brother-in-law seldom agreed upon any topic. “He has the jolliest twinkle in those black eyes—and his hair is so crisp with trying to curl that it doesn’t stay parted well at all—it was all rumpled up before the end of his sermon. And he has a fine, healthy colour—and the nicest smile——”
Burns sighed. “Jim, suppose there was a man up for the governorship in our state, and we went around talking about his eyes and his hair and his smile! Oh, Christopher! Don’t you women ever think about a man’s brains?—what he has in his head—not on it?”
“It was you who began to talk about his looks!” Mrs. Macauley pointed out triumphantly.
“Check!” called James, her husband. “She scores, Red! You did begin a lot of pretty mean personal observations about his mother parting his hair, and so forth. Shame!—it wasn’t sporting of you. The preacher has brains, brother—brains, I tell you. I saw ’em myself, through his skull. And he’s got a pretty little muscle, too. When he gripped my hand I felt the bones crack—and me a golf player. I don’t know where he got his—but he’s got it. These athletic parsons—look out for ’em. They’re liable to turn the other cheek, according to instructions in the Scriptures, and then hit you a crack with a good right arm. It struck me this chap hadn’t been sitting on cushions all his life. You’ll outweigh him by about fifty pounds, but I’ll bet he could down you in a wrestling match.”
“Yes, and I’ll bet you’d like to see him do it,” murmured Red Pepper, becoming genial again under the influence of his second cup of very strong coffee, which was banishing his weariness like magic, as usual. “Well, you won’t right away, because we’re not likely to get to that stage of intimacy for some time. Ministers and doctors meet mostly in places where each has a good chance to criticize the other’s job. When I come to die I’d rather have my old friend, Max Buller, M.D., to say a prayer for me—if he knows how—than any preacher who ever came down the pike—except one, and that was a corking old bishop who was the best sport I ever met in my life. Oh, it isn’t that I don’t respect the profession—I do. But I want a minister to be a man as well, and I——”
“But it isn’t quite fair to take it for granted that he isn’t one, is it, Red?” inquired the charming woman at the other side of the table who was his wife.
James Macauley laughed. “Innocent of not being a man till he’s proved guilty, eh, Red?” he suggested. “You know I really have quite a strong suspicion that this particular minister is a regular fellow. The way he looked me in the eye—well—I may be no judge of men——”
“You’re not,” declared his opponent, frankly. “Any chap with a cheerful grin and a plausible line of talk can put it all over you. You’re too good-natured to live. Now me—I’m a natural born cynic—I see too many faces with the mask off not to be. I——”