Simeon sighed. Ever on Mondays he returned at midday to a house
filled with steam and the dank odour of soap-suds, and to the worst
of the week's meagre meals. A hundred times he had reproached
himself that he did ungratefully to let this affect him, for his wife
(poor soul) had been living in it all day, whereas his morning had
been spent amid books, rare prints, statuettes, soft carpets, all the
delicate luxuries of Master Blanchminster's library. Yet he could
not help feeling the contrast; and the children were always at their
most fractious on Mondays, chafed by a morning in school after two
days of freedom.

"Where are you going this afternoon?" his wife asked.

"To blow the organ for Windeatt."

Dr. Windeatt (Mus. Doc. Oxon.) was the Cathedral organist.

"Has he offered to pay you?"

"Well--it isn't _pay_ exactly. There was an understanding that if I
blew for him this afternoon--old Brewer being laid up with the
shingles--he would take me through that tenor part in the new
_Venite Exultemus_. It's tricky, and yesterday morning I slurred it
horribly."

"Tc'ht! A man of your education blowing an organ, and for nothing!
If there was any money in it one wouldn't mind so much. . . . But you
let yourself be put upon by anybody."

Mr. Simeon was silent. He knew that to defend himself would be to
court a wrangle, reproaches, tears perhaps, all unseemly before the
children; and, moreover, what his wife said was more than half
deserved.

"Daddy, why _don't_ you write a play?" demanded the five-year-old
Agatha. "And then mammy would have a carriage, and I'd go to a real
boarding-school with canaries in the window like they have at Miss
Dickinson's."

The meal over, Mr. Simeon stole away to the Cathedral. He was
unhappy; and as he passed through Friars' Gateway into the Close, the
sight of the minster, majestical above its green garth, for once gave
no lift to his spirit. The great central tower rose against a sky of
clearest blue, strong and foursquare as on the day when its Norman
builders took down their scaffolding. White pigeons hovered or
perched on niche and corbel. But fortitude and aspiration alike had
deserted Mr. Simeon for the while. Life--hard life and poverty--had
subdued him to be one of the petty, nameless crowd this Cathedral had
seen creep to their end in its shadow. . . . "What should such
creatures as I do, crawling between earth and heaven?" A thousand
thousand such as Mr. Si