Clinton Scollard.
Pride of Race
By P. S. Carlson
AT luncheon Bishop Chalmers, ensconced snugly between his hostess, the handsome widow, Mrs. Patricia Danvers, and her equally charming daughter, Miss Isabel, sublimated from the seclusion of boarding school to society two seasons before, listened quietly to the many laudatory comments on his sermon of the previous evening.
The sermon had been delivered in the large and fashionable city church of St. Barnabas. Ostensibly it had been on “Charity”; principally it was a plea for aid for the bishop’s struggling diocese in the South. The bishop had received the invitation to preach from the rector of the rich congregation, a classmate at the theological seminary, who occupied a seat at the left of the hostess.
The rector was wifeless, as was the bishop, and after Mrs. Danvers had satisfied herself that she had paid due deference to the bishop she left him to the tender mercies of the daughter.
Mrs. Danvers, Patricia Hardesty that was, had begun life with a devotion to the church, especially its representatives in this mundane sphere. Her impoverished family, painfully aware that dollars were far scarcer than devotion, insisted on her giving up her maidenly intention of wedding a clergyman and urged on her the necessity of marrying Horace Danvers, by no means religious, many years her senior and “interested in cotton.” Now that the cotton had been shelved for all time by the death of the husband, leaving a magnificent golden fleece in its stead, her devotion to “the cloth” had reasserted itself. Witness the bishop as a guest, the presence of the rector.