infinitely preferable to good looks."

"You agree with me that the two are incompatible. I always say beauty is
only sin deep."

Amabel began to realise that the battle is not always to the
strong-minded. With the immemorial resource of her sex, she abandoned
the frontal attack, and laid stress on her unassisted labours in parish
work, her mental loneliness, her discouragements--and at the right moment
she produced strawberries and cream. Reginald was obviously affected by
the latter, and when his preceptress suggested that he might begin the
strenuous life by helping her to supervise the annual outing of the
bucolic infants who composed the local choir, his eyes shone with the
dangerous enthusiasm of a convert.

Reginald entered on the strenuous life alone, as far as Amabel was
concerned. The most virtuous women are not proof against damp grass, and
Amabel kept her bed with a cold. Reginald called it a dispensation; it
had been the dream of his life to stage-manage a choir outing. With
strategic insight, he led his shy, bullet-headed charges to the nearest
woodland stream and allowed them to bathe; then he seated himself on
their discarded garments and discoursed on their immediate future, which,
he decreed, was to embrace a Bacchanalian procession through the village.
Forethought had provided the occasion with a supply of tin whistles, but
the introduction of a he-goat from a neighbouring orchard was a brilliant
afterthought. Properly, Reginald explained, there should have been an
outfit of panther skins; as it was, those who had spotted handkerchiefs
were allowed to wear them, which they did with thankfulness. Reginald
recognised the impossibility, in the time at his disposal, of teaching
his shivering neophytes a chant in honour of Bacchus, so he started them
off with a more familiar, if less appropriate, temperance hymn. After
all, he said, it is the spirit of the thing that counts. Following the
etiquette of dramatic authors on first nights, he remained discreetly in
the background while the procession, with extreme diffidence and the
goat, wound its way lugubriously towards the village. The singing had
died down long before the main street was reached, but the miserable
wailing of pipes brought the inhabitants to their doors. Reginald said
he had seen something like it in pictures; the villagers had seen nothing
like it in their lives, and remarked as much freely.

Reginald's family never forgave