"Well?"
"I turn to the Church, and I find a great bishop addressing such questions as these to his clergy: 'What ecclesiastical dress do you wear when celebrating the Holy Communion? Do you ever use any ceremony such as the Lavabo, or swinging of the incense immediately before or after the service? Do you have cards on the holy table? If so what do they contain? Do you ever read the first of the three longer exhortations? Do you ever have celebrations without communicants?' with a dozen other questions—to me—equally trivial and unimportant."
"To the bishop such questions would not be trivial at all, but vastly important."
He smiled a little sadly. "Isn't that the pity of it," he said, "that trifles are treated as though they were matters of life and death? I notice that a neighbouring vicar has even closed the church because women go into it with their heads uncovered."
"I admit that that seems straining at a gnat."
"But he does not think so. He is evidently righteously indignant, complains of the house of God being desecrated, because people go into it without some piece of millinery on their heads. One wonders whether it is a woman's hair or her head that is the offence."
“THEN SUDDENLY FROM OUT THE SHADOW GERVASE APPEARED AND STOOD BEFORE THEM.”
"I think it is rather insulting to women, of course," she answered, with a laugh. "But he is only one, and nobody need mind very much."
"But how do these things help me? Think of the men who are wrestling with the great problems of life, who are fighting temptation and bad habits, who are groping in the darkness, and crying for the light, and the Church meets them with petty discussions about Lavabos and stoles and chasubles and incense, and hats off or on in church?"