professor who smokes to show what a manly fellow he is. McGarry wandered about the room. He had a way of pointing arguments by shaking objects of furniture—pokers, vases, books, lamps—which was as dangerous as it looked.
"Oh, I was rotten at prayer-meeting tonight," Frank grumbled. "Darn it, I can't seem to go on being interested in the fact that old Mrs. Besom finds God such a comfort in her trials. Mrs. Besom's daughter-in-law doesn't find Mrs. Besom any comfort in her trials, let me tell you! And yet I don't see how I can say to her, after she's been fluttering around among the angels and advertising how dead certain she is that Jesus loves her—I haven't quite the nerve to say, 'Sister, you tight-fisted, poison-tongued, old hellcat—'"
"Why, Frank!" from Bess, in placid piety.
"'—you go home and forget your popularity in Heaven and ask your son and his wife to forgive you for trying to make them your kind of saint, with acidity of the spiritual stomach!'"
"Why, Frank!"
"Let him rave, Bess," said McGarry. "If a preacher didn't cuss his congregation out once in a while, nobody but St. John would ever've lasted—and I'll bet he wasn't very good at weekly services and parish visiting!"
"And," went on Frank, "tomorrow I've got a funeral. That Henry Semp. Weighed two hundred and eighty pounds from the neck down and three ounces from the neck up. Perfectly good Christian citizen who believed that Warren G. Harding was the greatest man since George Washington. I'm sure he never beat his wife. Worthy communicant. But when his wife came to hire me, she wept like the dickens when she talked about Henry's death, but I noticed from the window that when she went off down the street she looked particularly cheerful. Yes, Henry was a bulwark of the nation; not to be sneered at by highbrows. And I'm dead certain, from something she said, that every year they've jipped the Government out of every cent they could on their income tax. And tomorrow I'm supposed to stand up there and tell his friends what a moral example and intellectual Titan he was, and how the poor little woman is simply broken by sorrow. Well, cheer up! From what I know of her, she'll be married again within six months, and if I do a good job of priesting tomorrow, maybe I'll get
