"At me?"
"Well, at you, mebby, this Sunday, because this is the first time they are seeing you. But it's Danny they look at mostly, such a way-up lawyer as he is, coming into their church. And every year he gives them a contribution yet."
There actually was a stir in the congregation as the party of four was ushered to the pew reserved for them, and Margaret noted curiously the look of satisfaction it brought to the faces of her husband and his sisters.
The village volunteer choir was singing a "selection" as they entered:
"We're going home to glory
In the good old-fashioned way."
In Hiram's prayer, which followed, he informed God, whom he addressed in epistolary style as "Dear God," that "the good old-fashioned way" was plenty good enough for the members of the Millerstown United Brethren Church.
Margaret, unable to keep her mind on the rambling discourse intended to be a prayer, noted that the speaker's accent and diction, while not illiterate, were very crude, that he took a manifest pleasure in the hackneyed religious phrases which rolled stentoriously from his lips, and that he wore an expression, as he prayed, of smug self-satisfaction. She also observed that, like Daniel, he was small, slight, and insignificant looking; and she suddenly realized, with a sinking of her heart, that in this uncouth village preacher she really saw her husband as he would assuredly appear if stripped of the veneer which an earlier training and a college education had given him.
As they sat down after the prayer, Sadie whispered to her: "That's Hiram's Lizzie over there with three of the children." And glancing across the aisle, Margaret saw in the opposite front pew a buxom, matronly young woman, dressed somewhat elaborately in clothes of village cut and with a rather heavy but honest and wholesome countenance; her three children, shining from soap and water, and dressed also elaborately in village style, were gathered with her in the pew.
In the sermon that Hiram preached Margaret couldn't help suspecting that he was, this morning, doing some "special stunts" to impress her, so often did his complacent glance wander down to meet her upward, attentive gaze. For indeed she couldn't help listening to him, so astonishing did his so-called sermon seem to her, so colossal his self-approval.
His theme was Lot's unfortunate career in Sodom, and in his extraordinary paraphrasing of the scriptural story he gave it as his opinion that probably one of the causes leading to Lot's downfall was the ambition of Mrs. Lot and her daughter to get into Sodom's Four Hundred. From the Lot family as social climbers in Sodom, the preacher launched forth into a denunciation of the idle, dissipated lives of fashionable women (with which he assumed a first-hand intimacy), a denunciation that seemed rather irrelevant as spiritual food for his simple village hearers. He hauled into his discourse, without regard to sequence of ideas, time, space, or logic, Martha and Mary of the New Testament, saying that some one had once asked him which of the two he'd have preferred to marry. "Martha before dinner and Mary after dinner," had been his response, and his congregation rippled with amusement and almost applauded. A few moments later he was moving them to tears by his deep-toned, solemn references to death and the grave and "the hollow sounds of clods of earth falling upon the coffin lid."