“Of course if you have an engagement, we hope you'll feel free to bring any of your friends with you.”
“Well,” admitted Arthur, “you see the fact is I HAVE got a kind of date. Of course if I'd KNOWN--”
“Oh, that's all right,” she cut in with magnificent ease. “I wasn't asking you to go with me. Reverend MacGill just appointed me on a kind of informal committee, you know--I'm asking Raymond Bonner and all the boys of the crowd.”
“You needn't rub it in--I get you. Swell chance of YOU ever wanting to make a date!”
His sulkiness of tone, for some reason, gratified her. Her own became even more gracious as she said again: “We hope you can come. And bring any of your friends you wish.”
She was much pleased with this sustained anonymity she had given Genevieve.
When the opening night of the Methodist revival arrived, most of the “crowd” might have been seen grouped together in one of the rearmost pews of the church. Arthur and Genevieve were there, Genevieve in her white fox furs, of course. She was giggling and making eyes as if she were at a party or a movie show instead of in church. Missy--who had had to do a great deal of arguing in order to be present with her, so to speak, guests--preserved a calm, sweet, religious manner; it was far too relentlessly Christian to take note of waywardness. But the way she hung on the words of the minister, joined in song, bowed her head in prayer, should have been rebuke enough to any light conduct. It did seem to impress Arthur; for, looking at her uplifted face and shining eyes, as in her high, sweet treble, she sang, “Throw Out the Life-Line,” he lost the point of one of Genevieve's impromptu jokes and failed to laugh in the right place. Genevieve noticed his lapse. She also noticed the reason. She herself was not a whit impressed by Missy's devotions, but she was unduly quiet for several minutes. Then she stealthily tore a bit of leaf from her hymnal--the very page on which she and other frail mortals were adjured to throw out life-lines--and began to fashion it into a paper-wad.
The service had now reached the stage of prayer for repentant sinners. Reverend MacGill was doing the praying, but members of the congregation were interjecting, “Glory Hallelujah!” “Praise be His Name!” and the other worshipful ejaculations which make a sort of running accompaniment on such occasions. Missy thought the interruptions, though proper and lending an atmosphere of fervour, rather a pity because they spoiled the effective rise and fall of the minister's voice. There was one recurrent nasal falsetto which especially threw you off the religious track. It belonged to old Mrs. Lemon. Everybody knew she nagged at and overworked and half-starved that ragged little Sims orphan she'd adopted, but here she was making the biggest noise of all!