“I think I’ll drive you out of the house, Tod,” Mrs. Boyd decided, in the same tones she had used to employ when she had sent him to bed. “I think I’ll send you over to Sargent’s to-night, to sing with Gail.”
The rector of the richest church in the world flushed a trifle, and looked at the barley in the bottom of his soup. His mother regarded him quietly, and the twinkles went out of her eyes. She had been bound to get at the bottom of his irritability, and now she had arrived at it.
“I would prefer not to go,” he told her stiffly, and the eyes which he lifted to her were coldly green.
Again that slight twitch of impatience in his brows, then he suppressed a sigh. The catechism was on the way, and he might just as well answer up promptly.
For just one second the rector’s mother felt an impulse to shake Tod Boyd. Gail Sargent was a young lady of whom any young man might approve—and what was the matter with Tod? She was beginning to be humiliated by the fact that, at thirty-two, he had not lost his head and made a fool of himself, to the point of tight shoes and poetry, over a girl.
“Why?” and the voice of Mrs. Boyd was not cold as she had meant it to be. She had suddenly felt some tug of sympathy for Tod.
“Well, for one thing, she has a most disagreeable lack of reverence,” he stated.
“Reverence?” and Mrs. Boyd knitted her brows. “I don’t believe you quite understand her. She has the most beautifully simple religious faith that I have ever seen, Tod.”
The Reverend Smith Boyd watched his soup disappearing, as if it were some curious moving object to which his attention had just been called.
“Miss Sargent claims to have a new religion,” he observed. “She has said most unkind things about the Church as an institution, and about Market Square Church in particular. She says that it is a strictly commercial institution, and that its motive in desiring to build the new cathedral is vanity.”
He omitted to mention Gail’s further charge that his own motive in desiring the new cathedral was personal ambition. Candour did not compel that admission. It did not become him to act from piqued personal pride.
Mrs. Boyd studied him as he gazed sombrely at his fish, and the twinkles once more returned to her eyes, as she made up her mind to cure Tod’s irritability.