She was younger than himself, yet she suggested a serene maturity, a gracious pride. She was slender, but her bosom was full, and some day she might be portly. Her face was lovely, her forehead wide, her brown eyes trusting, and smooth her chestnut hair. She had taken off her rose-trimmed straw hat and was swinging it in her large and graceful hands. . . . Virginal, stately, kind, most generous.
She came placidly down the aisle, a hand out, crying, “It’s Reverend Gantry, isn’t it? I’m so proud to be the first to welcome you here in the church! I’m Cleo Benham—I lead the choir. Perhaps you’ve seen Papa—he’s a trustee—he has the store.”
“You sure are the first to welcome me, Sister Benham, and it’s a mighty great pleasure to meet you! Yes, your father was so nice as to invite me for supper tonight.”
They shook hands with ceremony and sat beaming at each other in a front pew. He informed her that he was certain there was “going to be a great spiritual awakening here,” and she told him what lovely people there were in the congregation, in the village, in the entire surrounding country. And her panting breast told him that she, the daughter of the village magnate, had instantly fallen in love with him.
III
Cleo Benham had spent three years in the Sparta Women’s College, specializing in piano, organ, French, English literature, strictly expurgated, and study of the Bible. Returned to Banjo Crossing, she was a fervent church-worker. She played the organ and rehearsed the choir: she was the superintendent of the juvenile department in the Sunday School; she decorated the church for Easter, for funerals, for the Halloween Supper.
She was twenty-seven, five years younger than Elmer.
Though she was not very lively in summer-evening front porch chatter, though on the few occasions when she sinned against the Discipline and danced she seemed a little heavy on her feet, though she had a corseted purity which was dismaying to the earthy young men of Banjo Crossing, yet she was handsome, she was kind, and her father was reputed to be worth not a cent less than seventy-five thousand dollars. So almost every eligible male in the vicinity had hinted at proposing to her.
Gently and compassionately she had rejected them one by one. Marriage must, she felt, be a sacrament; she must be the helpmate of some one who was “doing a tremendous amount of good in the world.” This good she identified with medicine or preaching.
Her friends assured her, “My! With your Bible training and your music and all, you’d make a perfect pastor’s wife. Just dandy! You’d be such a help to him.”