It was a sight worth seeing to watch these Breezys ambling up Queen’s Road, proudly, with their little girl. And it was because Lola knew that she was conferring a great treat upon her parents that she submitted herself to an hour and a half of something worse to her than boredom. Only a little while ago she had looked forward to the evening service on Sundays and had been gently moved by the hymns, by the reading from the Scripture and even by the illiterate impromptus of the minister; and she had found, in moments that were dull, the usual feminine pleasure in casting surreptitious glances about the small, plain unbeautiful building to see what Mrs. This wore or Mrs. That. But now she found herself going through it all like a fish out of water. As Ellingham had outgrown Lady Feo, so had she outgrown that flat, uninspired, and rather cruel service, in which the name of God was always mentioned as a monster of vengeance, without love and without forgiveness, and with a suspicious eye to the keyhole of every house. With a sort of shame she found herself finding fault with the rhymes of the hymns, which every now and then were dreadful, and were, oh, so badly sung; and when a smug-faced, uneducated man came forward, shut his eyes, placed himself in an attitude of elaborate piety and let himself go with terrible unction, treating God and death and life and joy and humanity as though they were butter, or worse still, margarine, goose flesh broke out upon her and a curious self-consciousness as though she were intruding upon a scene at which she had no right to be present. Away and away back, church had not been like this to her. Out of a dream she seemed to hear the deep reverberation of a great organ, the high sweet voices of unseen boys and the soft murmur of an old scholar retelling the simple story of Christ’s pathetic struggle, and of God’s mercy.—Oh, the commonplace, the misinterpretation, the hypocrisy, the ignorance. No wonder the busses were filled, she thought, the commons crowded on the outskirts of the city. To her there was more religion in one shaft of evening sun than in all those chapels put together.
It was with thankfulness and relief that Lola went back with her parents to the street and turned into Queen’s Road again, which wore a Sunday expression. Gone for a brief time were the itinerant musicians, the innumerable perambulators, the ogling flappers with their cheap silk stockings and misshapen legs, the retired colonels eking out a grumbling living on infinitesimal pensions.