Page:Dorothy Canfield--The Real Motive.djvu/17



" trouble with all that kind of talk," remarked Mr. Walker, judicially, as he listened to the reverberations of the revivalist's impassioned periods, "is that it's out of date. That's the way folks used to go on about religion when I was a boy back in West Endbury, but it's as much gone by now as putting beargrease on your hair." After emitting this dictum, he put his pipe back in his mouth, cocked his feet up on the railing of his porch, and contemplated with great satisfaction the new concrete walk from the street to the house. "Concrete costs like the devil," he admitted to his wife; "but there's some class to it, once you got it."

There was a pause. The sweet, hot June night was vibrant with the stirring of the year's new life, with the whir of the Walker lawn-sprinkler revolving briskly, with the soft spatter of the water on the grass, and with the bellowings of the revivalist preacher in the little church next door. It was an old joke of Walker's that he and his family never needed to go to church. "All we gotta do any time," he explained, "is to sit on the porch and soak up righteousness without bothering to put on a coat and vest."