“I don’t know what there is to explain,” said Mr. Dean, taking, nothing loth, the chair his wife had vacated: he too preferred the mistress to the master of the house. “Our services—but then Mrs. Rowland will understand them better when she has seen them.”
“Oh, I was very tired after my long journey—and I had a headache.”
“She was not out of her bed,” replied Rowland, as if his wife were being blamed.
“I am sure,” said Mr. Dean, “that if I was Mrs. Rowland, I should not go through the tedious drawl of the old-fashioned Scotch church on any account, or listen to a sermon an hour long, which is what some of our neighbouring clergymen still indulge in. But it is modified in Rosmore church, and I promise you you shall not have more of me than twenty minutes. We have very decent music, thanks to my wife. In short, for a country service in an out-of-the-way place like this, I’m glad to think that we are making it much more attractive.”
“Attractive?” Evelyn said, more bewildered than ever. “To whom were they intended to be attractive? To the persons to whom they were addressed?”
“It is in no way necessary,” said the minister, “that music and everything that is pleasant should be appropriated by one body. We can take up our inheritance in that way just as fitly as the Episcopalians. I am not a bigoted Presbyterian,” he said, “even in the way of Church government, which is really the only peculiar part of our economy. I think it is just as good as the other. I don’t think that either of them is divinely appointed. I am used to presbytery, you are used to bishops—very well. We need not go to loggerheads about that. I know a bishop or two, and I’ve always found them very friendly, without being inclined to bow down to kiss the pastoral ring any more than the papal toe.”
“You are not so peaceably inclined when you come home from a Presbytery meeting, Alexander,” said the wife of his bosom. “For my part I am rather fond of the lawn sleeves. I think equality of ministers is just as great nonsense as equality generally. Don’t you think so, Mr. Rowland? When young Lord Rosmore says to me we are all born equal, I just say to him, Bah! As if anybody in his senses would put my husband and Johnny Shanks at the head of the loch upon the same level! You will remember Johnny Shanks? just a nobody; whereas Alexander——”
“My wife,” said Mr. Dean, while this was going on, “likes the decorative side. Lawn sleeves and gaitered legs take her fancy. But if there is one thing convenient in our simplicity, it is that we are saved all the millinery questions. And that, I think, goes for a great deal.”
Evelyn had never been ecclesiastically minded, and was but vaguely aware what the millinery question meant. As for the rest, though she was an intelligent woman, these two people might as well have talked Hebrew to her: there was no understanding in her mind.