he had not worn
clerical clothes.

Mr. Plimpton became very thoughtful when he had left the office. He
visited Nelson Langmaid in the Parr Building. And the result of the
conference was to cause Mr. Langmaid to recall, with a twinge of
uneasiness, a certain autumn morning in a room beside Bremerton Lake
when he had been faintly yet distinctly conscious of the admonitory
whisperings of that sixth sense which had saved him on other occasions.

"Dash it!" he said to himself, after Mr. Plimpton had departed, and
he stood in the window and gazed across at the flag on the roof of
'Ferguson's.' "It would serve me right for meddling in this parson
business. Why did I take him away from Jerry Whitely, anyhow?"

It added to Nelson Langmaid's discomfort that he had a genuine
affection, even an admiration for the parson in question. He might have
known by looking at the man that he would wake up some day,--such was
the burden of his lament. And there came to him, ironically out of
the past, the very words of Mr. Parr's speech to the vestry after Dr.
Gilman's death, that succinct list of qualifications for a new rector
which he himself, Nelson Langmaid, had humorously and even more
succinctly epitomized. Their "responsibility to the parish, to the city,
and to God" had been to find a rector "neither too old nor too young,
who would preach the faith as we received it, who was not sensational,
and who did not mistake Socialism for Christianity." At the "Socialism"
a certain sickly feeling possessed the lawyer, and he wiped beads of
perspiration from his dome-like forehead.

He didn't pretend to be versed in theology--so he had declared--and at
the memory of these words of his the epithet "ass," self applied, passed
his lips. "You want a parson who will stick to his last, not too high or
too low or too broad or too narrow, who has intellect without too
much initiative... and will not get the church uncomfortably full
of strangers and run you out of your pews." Thus he had capped the
financier. Well, if they had caught a tartar, it served him, Nelson
Langmaid, right. He recalled his talk with Gerald Whitely, and how his
brother-in-law had lost his temper when they had got on the subject of
personality....

Perhaps Wallis Plimpton could do something. Langmaid's hopes of this
were not high. It may have been that he had suspicions of what Mr.
Plimpton would have called Hodder's "reasonableness." One thing was
clear--that Mr. Plimpton