lipping, under your palms,
between your fingers, crumbling and running away!"

He shook himself like a big, loose-skinned bear, and long breaths were
drawn all around the table.

"One night my wife asked me if I thought the rector liked his new
rectory.

"'Why, I suppose so,' I said. 'I've had no complaints--why?'

"'He doesn't stay in it very much,' she said, rather slowly, for her,
and when a woman measures her words, I always listen very carefully.

"'What do you mean?' I asked.

"'He practically lives in the study at the church,' said she, 'working
there on parish business all day, and a good many evenings, too. That
leaves her all alone, and that's not good for any woman.'

"' What on earth do you mean?' I said. 'Are those long-nosed old
tabbies gossiping already? Shame on 'em!'

"'Oh, John,' she broke down and cried. 'They're talking horribly! It
doesn't seem possible! But why isn't she more careful?'

"Well, there's no good going into that much further. It was a very
unpleasant business. He was a pig-headed parson who wouldn't look
after his own, and she, I thought, till my wife finally persuaded her
to call me in, was simply one of those women who have mistaken their
natural vocation. They hadn't been in the town long and they didn't
stay long, for as soon as I really understood her I put her into a
sanitarium--the sanitarium boom had just begun, then--and he went into
the Salvation Army. He'd got his eyes opened, I fancy, and he made a
great success in Chicago; he told me he never wanted to see another
fashionable congregation in his life--said they were sinks of iniquity.
But I don't think there was ever anything actually iniquitous in that
business--it hadn't got that far. Only for a clergyman's family, of
course ...

"You see, I got her out in time. Ugh! It makes me sick to think of
it! She was a nervous wreck.

"That was the first time that Miss Jessop ever went back on me. She
was a trained nurse not long out of the training school, and nurses
were scarcer, then. A handsome, plucky creature--we worked together
for years, and I got to depend a good deal on her. But after a week of
the parson's wife she flounced in on me with that regular bronze-mule
look of hers and informed me she was leaving the next day--she had to
go back East, home, she said.

"I reasoned a bit with her--she had a great influence on women, Jessop,
but it was no use.

"'There are two good nurses for to