"I guess the trouble with you, Arnold, is that you're too much of a clergyman—not enough of an ordinary sinful man."
He wavered no longer. His suspicion crystallised into certainty. His words came through his teeth as if shot from a cannon. The Reverend Arnold Imrie, for the first time in years, lost his temper, and lost it with a completeness and animation that was magnificent. He turned suddenly and glared at Judith, his face pale. Then he shot a trembling finger at her.
"So," he snapped. "Six weeks of this—this—anarchist—can shatter the faith of a lifetime. Such a faith. A Wynrod, too.... It is—I dare not say what it is."
But he did dare. He launched into a passionate diatribe, which to Judith, listening patiently, sounded very much like a funeral oration over the body of a notorious scoundrel, so compounded it was of scorn and pity and utter certainty of ultimate damnation and complacent self-satisfaction that he was not as such. It was accompanied by familiar pulpit gesticulations, used so long that they had become unconscious. As he talked he paced back and forth, pausing now and again to emphasise a point with a resounding thump on his hand. It was excellent—oratory. But all through she had the feeling that it was only a sermon, that the recital of her iniquities, so vividly phrased, was only academic. And as he made his peroration, more from a lack of breath than a lack of ideas, she laughed—mirthfully, unrestrainedly.
He stopped as if shot. He stared at her as if he could not believe his ears.
"Very wonderful, Arnold," said Judith lazily, "but very absurd."
Flouted to the depths of his soul, Imrie gathered up his papers anew. It was as if a priest, praying passionately to his idols, had suddenly raised his eyes to find them with their thumbs to their noses. It was a ghastly dream. He was like a ship that has dragged its anchor. He was drifting in uncharted waters. The most dependable of his flock, the dearest of his friends, the star of the best that was in him, had deliberately, thoroughly, and without any effort at concealment, held up all that he held sacred, to ridicule. His chagrin showed in his face, and Judith was a little appalled by what she had done. But she would not have recalled a word or a glance. She was sorry to see his pain, but for all its harshness, she felt that he would emerge better for the treatment. The mind needs an occasional physic, no less than the body. She had rocked the ponderous bulk of the Reverend Arnold Imrie on its foundations. If it settled back into its original place, none the worse for the rocking, so much the better for the foundations. If it did not, ... well, the new position could not be less satisfying than the old. And there was a possibility that it might be better.
She smiled back at his frigid bow with the feeling of a mother who has spanked an obstreperous child.
"For the good of your soul, Arnold," she whispered under her breath, "and the greater honour and glory of God."
For a long time after Imrie had left, she pondered, trying to put in a phrase the exact idea she had meant to give him. Finally it came to her, in a single word—honesty. And then, as an inevitable corollary, came the thought of the man who exemplified honesty as did no one else she knew. She thought of that deprecating little lift of his hands—so characteristic, so significant. With a smile that was not without tears, she picked up a book and made an effort to read.