The resolute dumbness of one of the small natives must have been a parti-pris, for it suddenly disappeared during his sister's absence,
and he gave a narrative of a family dissension, not necessarily recent. He appears proud of his own share in it, which Sally nevertheless felt she could not appear to sanction by silence.
"You bad little boy," she said. "You smacked your sister Elizabeth in t' oy, and your foarther smacked you. I hope he hurt." The bad little boy assented with a nod, and supplied some further details. Then he asked for a penny before his sister Elizabeth came back. He wanted it to buy almond-rock, but he wouldn't give any of it to Jacob, nor to his sister Elizabeth, nor to Reuben, nor to many others, whom he seemed to exclude from almond-rock with rapture. Asked to whom he would give some, then, he replied: "Not you—eat it moyself!" and laughed heartlessly. Sally, we regret to say, gave this selfish little boy a penny for not being hypocritical. And then his sister Elizabeth reappeared with the key, which was out of scale with her, like St. Peter's.
The inward splendours of this church had been inferred by Sally from a tiptoe view through the window, which commanded its only archaic object of interest—the monument of a woolstapler who, three hundred and odd years ago, had the effrontery to have two wives and sixteen children. He ought to have had one or two more wives, thought Dr. Conrad. However, the family was an impressive one now, decorated as it was with roses cut out of turnips, and groups of apples and carrots and cereals. And no family could have kneeled down more symmetrically, even in 1580.
But there was plenty to see in that church, too. Indeed, it was for all the world like the advertisement sheets of Architectonic Ecclesiology (ask for this paper at your club), and every window was brim full of new stained glass, and every inch of floor-space was new encaustic tiles. And, what was more, there was a new mosaic over the chancel-arch—a modest and wobbly little arch in itself, that seemed afflicted with its position, and to want to get away into a quiet corner and meditate. Sally said so, and added so should she, if she were it.
"I wonder if the woolstapler was married here to one or other of the little square women," said she.
"I wonder why the angels up there look so sulky," said Dr. Conrad. And then Sally, who seemed absent-minded, found something
else to wonder about—a certain musical whistling noise that filled the little church. But it was only a big bunch of moonwort on a stained-glass-window sill, and the wind was blowing through a vacancy that should have been a date, and making Æolian music. The little maid with the key found her voice over this suddenly. Her bruvver had done that, she said with pride. He had oymed a stoo-an when it was putten up, and brokken t' glass. So that stained glass was very new indeed, evidently.
"I wonder why they call that stuff 'honesty,' Miss Sally?" said the doctor. Sally, feeling that the interest of either in the church was really perfunctory, said vaguely—did they? And then, recoiling from further wonderment, and, indeed, feeling some terror of becoming idiotic if this sort of thing went on much longer, she exclaimed, with reality in her voice: "Because it's not pretending to take an interest when it doesn't, like us. But I wish you wouldn't, Dr. Conrad; I do hate it so."
"Hate what? Taking an interest or calling it honesty? I didn't call it honesty. They did, whoever they are!"