once, or easily. Their position in the
social structure, too, was all against clear-sightedness in material
matters. A general, for example, uniformed and in the saddle, advancing
through the streets with his staff in the proud wake of his division's
massed walls of bayonets, cannot be imagined as quailing at the glance
thrown at him by his tailor on the sidewalk. Similarly, a man invested
with sacerdotal authority, who baptizes, marries, and buries, who
delivers judgments from the pulpit which may not be questioned in his
hearing, and who receives from all his fellow-men a special deference of
manner and speech, is in the nature of things prone to see the grocer's
book and the butcher's bill through the little end of the telescope.

The Wares at the outset had thought it right to trade as exclusively as
possible with members of their own church society. This loyalty became
a principal element of martyrdom. Theron had his creditors seated in
serried rows before him, Sunday after Sunday. Alice had her critics
consolidated among those whom it was her chief duty to visit and profess
friendship for. These situations now began, by regular gradations, to
unfold their terrors. At the first intimation of discontent, the Wares
made what seemed to them a sweeping reduction in expenditure. When
they heard that Brother Potter had spoken of them as "poor pay," they
dismissed their hired girl. A little later, Theron brought himself
to drop a laboriously casual suggestion as to a possible increase of
salary, and saw with sinking spirits the faces of the stewards freeze
with dumb disapprobation. Then Alice paid a visit to her parents, only
to find her brothers doggedly hostile to the notion of her being helped,
and her father so much under their influence that the paltry sum he
dared offer barely covered the expenses of her journey. With another
turn of the screw, they sold the piano she had brought with her from
home, and cut themselves down to the bare necessities of life, neither
receiving company nor going out. They never laughed now, and even smiles
grew rare.

By this time Theron's sermons, preached under that stony glare of
people to whom he owed money, had degenerated to a pitiful level of
commonplace. As a consequence, the attendance became once more
confined to the insufficient membership of the church, and the trustees
complained of grievously diminished receipts. When the Wares, grown
desperate, ventured upon the experimen