PAIN
I
"How much more bitter, dearly beloved, are the anguishes of the soul than any mere bodily distress! When the heart under conviction of sin for the violation of one of God's laws writhes and cries aloud in repentance and remorse, then, ah, then, is true suffering. What are the fleeting torments of this tenement of clay, mere bone and flesh, to the soul's despair? Nothing! Noth—"
The clergyman's emphatic fist did not thump the Scriptures the second time. He checked it in air; for a woman stood up straight and stared at him straight. Her thin mouth seemed to twist with a sneer. He thought he read on her lips words not quite uttered. He read:
"You fool! You fool!"
Then Miss Straley sidled from the family pew to the aisle and marched up it and out of the church.
Doctor Crosson was shocked doubly. The woman's action was an outrage upon the holy composure of the Sabbath, and it would remind everybody that he was an old lover of Irene Straley's.
The neatly arranged congregational skulls were disordered now, some still tilted forward in sleep, some tilted back to see what the pastor would do, some craned round to observe the departer, some turned inward in whispering couples.
Such a thing had never happened before in all the parsoning of Doctor Crosson—the D.D. had been conferred on him by the small theological institute where he had imbibed enough dogmas in two years to last him a lifetime.
Some of his dogmas were so out of fashion that he felt them a trifle shabby even for village wear. He had laid aside the old red hell-fire dogma for a new one of hell-as-a-state-of-mind. He was expounding that doctrine this morning again. He had never heard any complaint of it. But his mind was so far from his memory that he hardly knew what he had just uttered. He wondered what he could have said to offend Miss Straley.