“Yes, I am!”
“Listen, dear. You think of me as so awfully grown-up, and of course I have to impress all these folks when I’m in the pulpit, but you can see through it and— I’m really just a big bashful kid, and I need your help so. Do you know, dear, you remind me of my mother—”
V
Frank Shallard turned on Elmer in their bedroom, while they were washing for supper—their first moment alone since Lulu and Miss Baldwin had driven them to the Bains farm to spend the night before the Thanksgiving service.
“Look here, Gantry—Elmer. I don’t think it looked well, the way you took Miss Bains in the back room at the church and kept her there—must have been half an hour—and when I came in you two jumped and looked guilty.”
“Uh-huh, so our little friend Franky is a real rubber-necking old woman!”
It was a spacious dusky cavern under the eaves, the room where they were to stay the night. The pitcher on the black walnut washstand was stippled in gold, riotous with nameless buds. Elmer stood glaring, his big forearms bare and dripping, shaking his fingers over the carpet before he reached for the towel.
“I am not a ‘rubber-neck,’ and you know it, Gantry. But you’re the preacher here, and it’s our duty, for the effect on others, to avoid even the appearance of evil.”
“Evil to him that evil thinks. Maybe you’ve heard that, too!”
“Oh, yes, Elmer, I think perhaps I have!”