Betty had met Joe Hurley but once—to Hunt’s knowledge. It was an occasion when she had stopped at the college town on her way home from boarding school. Hunt had met her at the station, and Joe had shown up, too. The three of them had sought a restaurant where they ate, and Betty had chattered like—well, just as a girl of her age and fresh from the excitement of boarding school would chatter. When her first fear of the big Westerner had worn off she had usurped the conversation almost completely. Hunt had often thought since that Joe Hurley was quite attracted by his lively sister.
But how did Joe know that Betty had changed so?
That his sister was not the same cheerful, brisk, chatterbox of a girl she had been when Joe met her, Hunt quite well knew. And the change puzzled him.
He visualized their Aunt Prudence Mason, who had lived all her long life in the rut of New England spinsterhood, molding more or less the characters of the orphaned brother and sister left at an early age to her sole care. Was Betty, here in the straitened environment of Ditson Corners, doomed to jog along the well-beaten track Aunt Prudence had followed? The brother shuddered as he thought of it.
He glanced at Joe’s letter once more. A golden-haired, blue-eyed girl who really sang—not shrieked as did Miss Pelter whose top notes in the church choir rasped Hunt’s nerves like a cross-cut saw dragged through a pine knot.
There was always a quarrel of some kind in that choir—the bickerings and heart-burnings of his volunteer church choir were perennial.
Then, there was the feud over the Ditson pew—which branch of the influential Ditson family should hold the chief seats in the church. Hunt could not satisfy everybody. There was still a clique, even after his two years’ pastorate, who let it be frankly known that they had desired to call Bardell, instead of him, to the pulpit of the First Church.
These continued faultfindings and disputes were getting on Hunt’s nerves. And they must be affecting Betty—influencing her more than he had heretofore considered.
This letter from Joe Hurley had come at a moment when Hunt was desperately and completely out of tune with his environment. He had brought to his first pastorate a modicum of enthusiasm which, during the first year, had expanded into an earnest and purposeful determination to do his duty as he saw it and to carry his congregation in spirit to the heights he would achieve.
He—and they—had risen to a certain apex of spiritual experience through the first months of his earnest endeavor, and then the cogs had begun to slip. Suddenly Willett Ford Hunt’s castles toppled and collapsed about him. He found himself, half stunned, wholly mazed, wallowing in the débris of his first church row, the renewed war over the Ditson pew.