Pitt opened his book and turned over a few leaves.
'To begin with,' he said, 'you admit that whatever this book commands we are bound to obey?'
'Provided we understand it,' his opponent put in.
'Provided we understand it, of course. A command not understood is hardly a command. Now here is a word which has struck me, and I would like to know how it strikes you.'
He turned to the familiar twenty-fifth of Matthew and read the central portion, the parable of the talents. He read like an interested man, and perhaps it was owing to a slight unconscious intonation here and there that Pitt's two hearers listened as if the words were strangely new to them. They had never heard them sound just so. Yet the reading was not dramatic at all; it was only a perfectly natural and feeling deliverance. But feeling reaches feeling, as we all know. The reading ceased, nobody spoke for several minutes.
'What does it mean?' asked Pitt.
'My dear,' said his mother, 'can there be a question what it means? The words are perfectly simple, it seems to me.'
'Mamma, I am not talking to you. You may sit as judge and arbiter; but it is Miss Frere and I who are disputing. She will have the goodness to answer.'
'I do not know what to answer,' said the young lady. 'Are not the words, as Mrs. Dallas says, perfectly plain?'
'Then surely it cannot be difficult to say what the teaching of them is?'