“I am sure you are wrong,” he objected, rather feebly.
Delight eyed him with the scorn of nineteen for fifty.
“I wonder what you would do,” she observed, “if mother just lay around all day, and had her hair done, and got new clothes, and never thought a thought of her own, and just used you as a sort of walking bank-account?”
“My dear, I really can not—”
“I'll tell you what you'd do,” she persisted. “You'd fall in love with somebody else, probably. Or else you'd just naturally dry up and be made a bishop.”
He was extremely shocked at that, and a little hurt. It took her some time to establish cheerful relations again, and a very humble apology. But her words stuck in the rector's mind. He made a note for a sermon, with the text: “Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.”
He went quietly into the great stone building and sat down. The organist was practicing the Introit anthem, and half way up the church a woman was sitting quietly.
The rector leaned back, and listened to the music. He often did that when he had a sermon in his mind. It was peaceful and quiet. Hard to believe, in that peace of great arches and swelling music, that across the sea at that moment men were violating that fundamental law of the church, “Thou shalt not kill.”
The woman turned her head, and he saw that it was Audrey Valentine. He watched her with kindly, speculative eyes. Self-reliant, frivolous Audrey, sitting alone in the church she had so casually attended—surely that was one of the gains of war. People all came to it ultimately. They held on with both hands as long as they could, and then they found their grasp growing feeble and futile, and they turned to the Great Strength.
The organist had ceased. Audrey was kneeling now. The rector, eyes on the gleaming cross above the altar, repeated softly: