ed because you enjoy it! The
reward of labour is life: to enjoy our work is the secret. If you could
persuade people that the spring of life lies there, you would do more for
the happiness of man than by attending fifty thousand committees. But I
won't talk any more. I want to consider the lilies of the field, how they
grow. They don't do it every day!"

LXIV

OF POSE

Someone said rashly, after dinner to-night, that the one detestable and
unpardonable thing in a man was pose. A generalisation of this kind acted
on Father Payne very often like a ferret on a rabbit. He had been
mournfully abstracted during dinner, shaking his head slowly, and turning
his eyes to heaven when he was asked leading questions. But now he said: "I
don't think that is reasonable--you might as well say that you always
disliked length in a book. A book has got to be some length--it is as short
as it's long. Of course, the moment you begin to say, 'How long this book
is!' you mean that it is too long, and excess is a fault. Do you remember
the subject proposed in a school debating society, 'That too much athletics
is worthy of our admiration'? Pose is like that--when you become conscious
of pose it is generally disagreeable--that is, if it is meant to deceive:
but it is often amusing too, like the pose of the unjust judge in the
parable, who prefaces his remarks by saying, 'Though I fear not God,
neither regard man.'"

"Oh, but you know what I mean, Father," said the speaker, "the pose of
knowing when you don't know, and being well-bred when you are snobbish, and
being kind when you are mean, and so on."

"I think you mean humbug rather than pose," said Father Payne; "but even
so, I don't agree with you. I have a friend who would be intolerable, but
for his pose of being agreeable. He isn't agreeable, and he doesn't feel
agreeable; but he behaves as if he was, and it is the only thing that makes
him bearable. What you really mean is the pose of superiority--the man
whose motives are always just ahead of your own, and whose taste is always
slightly finer, and who knows the world a little better. But there is a lot
of pose that isn't that. What _is_ pose, after all? Can anyone define
it?"

"It's an artist's phrase, I think," said Barthrop; "it means a position in
which you look your best."

"Like the Archbishop who was always painted in a gibbous attitude--first
quarter, you know--with his back turned to you, and his face just visible