But Curly, the youngest, was different. He was even more brilliant intellectually than his brothers; he was better looking, and he had much of his mother's charm. When he was eighteen he won a scholarship at Balliol, a regular blue-ribbon among scholarships, and the minister was a proud man.
Curly did well at Oxford, he lived sparely, and took tutorships in the vacations, and when he came home the Manse was a merry place. Mr. Wycherly was very fond of Curly, for he came and talked about Oxford, and he would ask the older scholar's opinion about many things, and seemed to think it quite worth having. Now his brothers considered Mr. Wycherly a failure, effete, played out, vieux-jeu, and Mr. Wycherly knew it.
Curly took a good degree, and then the blow fell. He became an actor and "went on the stage."
Had he turned forger or robbed a church the minister could hardly have been more upset. Mr. Gloag hated the theatre and everything connected with it. He honestly believed it to be morally degrading and soul-soiling to enter the doors of any such place of amusement. That there could ever, under any circumstances, be found any common ground or bond of union, or even mutual toleration, between the followers of this degraded and degrading calling and professing Christians, he could not conceive. The minister had no belief in toleration. He was fond of saying, "Those that are not for us are against us"; and that "us" might by any possibility include persons he designated as "mountebanks" never for one moment entered his head.
He forbade the mention of Curly's name, declaring that now he had only two sons. Curly's brothers said very little. They thought Curly a fool, but, after all, he knew his own business best.
Mrs. Gloag said nothing at all. She grew frailer and frailer, and her pretty eyes wore always a strained expression as though they were tired with watching for one who never came.
She did not attempt to soften the minister. He was always gentle to her, but she knew him too well not to discern when argument and supplication were alike useless. She laughed less often now, and when no one was watching her gentle face was very sad.
If anything, however, this sore trouble made her kinder and more sympathetic than before, so that when the Misses Moffat took sittings in the church and she, in her capacity of minister's wife, went to see them, she realised at once how anxious and timid and kind and harmless they were; and most of all how they hungered to be admitted to the inner circle of the "select."
She asked Miss Esperance to go and see them, and Miss Esperance went; and she asked Lady Alicia to go and see them, and Lady Alicia went.
That was a great, a never-to-be-forgotten day for the Misses Moffat when Lady Alicia walked over from the "big house" to call. They could have wished she had come in the carriage; it would have looked so fine in the street for all the world to see. But Lady Alicia was energetic and inclined to grow stout, and she liked to walk when she could. There she sat in the Misses Moffat's best room, talking affably in her big voice. Everything about Lady Alicia was big and decided, and every simplest remark she made was treasured by the Misses Moffat as the sayings of a sibyl. She didn't stay long, but she praised the arrangements of Rowan Lodge, from the window curtains to the chocolate-coloured railings in front of the windows.