"I have been at choir-practising. I promised to take the solo in Sunday's anthem, and have been trying it over. The booming of the organ through the empty church rouses, one, I think. I generally feel brighter after it, and that may account for my looking so cheerful as you say."
"And who is the gentleman who carried home your music?"
"That is Mr. Selby, our organist. A splendid player. If you had not been such an invalid, you would have known both his playing and himself ere now."
"It would seem that you know him very well; and to see you walking together one would have said that he knows you very well too. You appear quite intimate, and yet I have never seen him here."
"No. Susan will not let him be invited to the house. She says his is not a recognized profession. As if a successful musician were not better than a bungling doctor or notary! It has something to do with the line which she says must be drawn--between wholesale and retail, for instance--if Montreal is to have a Society. A ridiculous line, it seems to me, which excludes many wealthy and accomplished people as traders, while it lets in poor Stephen and his wife, with her superfluous h's, because his little business in needles and pins is wholesale, seeing that he never sells less than a thousand at a time."
"Mrs. Stephen is my sister-in-law, and may do with her h's what she pleases. It is not her fault if she was born in the British metropolis, and if Stephen is not in opulent circumstances, it is just because it has so happened. I have known many high-toned families who were but in a small way pecooniarily speaking. I am surprised to hear you run Stephen and his family down, though I confess I have been disappointed myself in his son Ralph."
"I don't run them down; but why should they be so particular about others? It was Mrs. Stephen who said to Susan that an organist wasn't 'genteel,'--Mrs. Stephen, who doesn't know one tune from another--and so Mr. Selby has never been asked to the house. And then Judith chimed in with her 'higher grounds.' She says that good music is a snare and device of the High Church party, and that you got on very well without it long ago in the old church at Stoke-upon-Severn. A funny church it must have been."
"So it was, and I reckon you would not have liked it. The village joiner and the bellows mender played the clarionet and the bassoon in a little loft over the squire's pew, while the blacksmith's daughter sang the hymns, and the schoolmaster as clerk said the responses out loud before the people. But the world has changed since then. Yes! I daresay an organist might do as well to invite as anybody else. But what does it matter? What do you want with an organist? You have no organ."
"I like to be able to invite my friends just as other people do. If you knew him, Gerald, you would like him."
"I dare say. There are many people one would like if one knew them. Yet if one does not, it seems of little consequence, there are so many others. If you lived in Natchez, now, you would not see much of your Canadian friends. You would make friends down there, and very high-toned and elegant you would find them."