Gerald was very kind in his home, playing with the children and helping to prepare the decorations for Christmas.
On the second Sunday of the holidays, Christmas day being the Monday after it, a little incident occurred which disturbed Mr. Eversley’s mind, perhaps unnecessarily. The distinction between Sunday books and weekday books—one of the most mysterious of human distinctions—was fundamental in Kestercham Vicarage. No one ever questioned it, or imagined that it could be questioned. Mrs. Eversley in particular prided herself upon possessing an infallible faculty of discriminating between the two species of literature. It did not appear that her faculty required for its proper exercise any perusal or study of the books which she approved, or, at least, which she condemned. On this Sunday it happened that Mrs. Eversley, looking in the afternoon into Gerald’s bedroom where he had been reading between morning service and mid-day dinner, caught sight of a novel lying open on the table. She did not communicate her discovery to Mr. Eversley, but brought her guns to bear upon Gerald at tea in the presence of the family, attacking him not in the front, but, as it were, upon the flank.
‘I hope, Gerald,’ she said, when she had served all the party with tea, ‘I hope you always read Sunday books on Sundays at school.’
Gerald parried the interrogation by another: ‘What is a Sunday book?’
There are questions which by their extreme simplicity are calculated to silence a whole battery of argument or invective. They excite in the minds of the initiated a feeling not so much of anger as of pity. If a person disputes the validity of one of Euclid’s axioms, what is to be said to him? It does not follow that these questions are always easy to answer.
Mrs. Eversley gave a short dry cough, and replied, ‘I did not expect to hear you ask such a question as that, Gerald. A Sunday book—I should suppose a Sunday book is a book that a Christian may read on a Sunday.’
‘I don’t see how it differs from any other book,’ said Gerald.
‘All I can say then is, Gerald, that I am sorry you don’t,’ retorted Mrs. Eversley, satisfied in her own mind that she had solved the difficulty beyond the possibility of appeal.
But at this point Mr. Eversley interposed, saying, ‘I think, Gerald, a Christian will naturally wish to spend Sunday in reading books of a serious kind, not light secular literature which perishes in the using, but his Bible and such other books as are profitable to his soul’s health.’
‘At all events,’ added Mrs. Eversley, ‘I hope you won’t leave novels and such-like books about the house on a Sunday to put temptation in the way of your sisters.’