They paused for a moment on the low rise overlooking the church, to survey it. Judith was very fond of its weathered grey stones, almost buried in the luxuriant ivy. She had been christened and confirmed in it, and the stained glass windows at opposite ends of the transept—masterpieces they were, too—were gifts of hers, in memory of her long-dead father and mother. It was an exquisite little edifice, a genuine bit of Tudor, without a particle of "adaptation," looking as if it had been transplanted bodily from some English vale, together with the soil upon which it stood, and the well trimmed trees which surrounded it. She felt a little catch in her throat, as the memories clustered before her.
"Pretty, isn't it?"
"Yes," said Good slowly. "It's pretty...."
She did not like the hesitant qualification implied in his tone.
"Is there a reservation?"
"Well,"—he cocked his head on one side, and knitted his brows. "Yes. It's too beautiful. It's beauty in the wrong place. The people out here have beauty enough without it. I'd like it better if it was in the city—in the heart of the city—with its trees and its vines and its grass. It's needed more there." Then he laughed. "Oh, Miss Wynrod, you must be careful what you ask me. I'm a queer fellow. Most of the things you think are all right, I think are all wrong. You'd have to have lived my life to see things the way I see them."
She was vaguely disappointed and hurt, and she made no attempt to reply. Every now and then he did bewilder her by flights of thought which she found herself incapable of following. Usually she tried to argue, but the little church was too intimate a thing for that. She said nothing, and silently they went on into it.
She had timed their arrival carefully so as to get there just before the sermon, and unobtrusively they slipped into one of the side pews in the rear. But the building was so small that they had a very good view of the Reverend Arnold Imrie, sometime stroke of the Yale crew, Fellow of Oxford, and one of the strongest heads that ever succumbed to a Heidelberg kneipe.
He was a well-built, good-looking young man, with close cropped curly blonde hair, and a clear skin and eyes. His complexion was ruddy, but bronzed, as if he were still not unused to out-of-doors. Yet there were two lines between his eyes, and a stoop to his shoulders that seemed to betoken an equal familiarity with the study. Indeed his whole manner and appearance gave the same paradoxical impression. It seemed to Good, as he studied him, that Doctor Imrie was the product of a victory of the mind over the body. He was the conscious ascetic, triumphing over the instinctive sensualist. It was not hard to imagine that the clergyman was very fond of the good things of the world, however much he might neglect them in favour of the things of the spirit.
And in that estimate he was substantially correct. Imrie had gone into the ministry, not really from choice, but from a painfully acute sense of duty inherited from his Knoxian forbears. Contradicting an abounding vitality was an overwhelming consciousness of sin, based, it must be confessed, on a fair modicum of actuality, impelling him, irresistibly, toward a fear and a hatred of the flesh. Some men enter the Church positively, out of love for their God and their fellow men: but Imrie had entered it negatively, from a fear and a distrust of the devil in himself. Of his fellow men, in the mass, at least, he never thought at all.