“I know it! Since he began to come, I can't keep my eyes off him. I do deliver my sermons at him. I believe I write them at him! He has an eye of terrible and exacting truth. I feel myself on trial before him. He holds me up to a standard of sincerity that is killing me. Mrs. Sewell was bad enough; I was reasonably bad myself; but this! Couldn't you keep him away? Do you think it's exactly decorous to let your man-servant occupy a seat in your family pew? How do you suppose it looks to the Supreme Being?”
Miss Vane was convulsed. “I had precisely those misgivings! But Lemuel hadn't. He asked me what the number of our pew was, and I hadn't the heart—or else I hadn't the face—to tell him he mustn't sit in it. How could I? Do you think it's so very scandalous?”
“I don't know,” said Sewell. “It may lead to great abuses. If we tacitly confess ourselves equal in the sight of God, how much better are we than the Roman Catholics?”
Miss Vane could not suffer these ironies to go on.
“He approves of your preaching. He has talked your sermons over with me. You oughtn't to complain.”
“Oh, I don't! Do you think he's really softening a little toward me?”
“Not personally, that I know,” said Miss Vane. “But he seems to regard you as a channel of the truth.”
“I ought to be glad of so much,” said Sewell. “I confess that I hadn't supposed he was at all of our way of thinking. They preached a very appreciable orthodoxy at Willoughby Pastures.”
“I don't know about that,” said Miss Vane. “I only know that he approves your theology, or your ethics.”
“Ethics, I hope. I'm sure they're right.” After a thoughtful moment the minister asked, “Have you observed that they have softened him socially at all—broken up that terrible rigidity of attitude, that dismaying retentiveness of speech?”