Page:Elmer Gantry (1927).djvu/81

 "How'd it go?" asked his wife.

"Splendid. Young Gantry seemed to feel an unmistakable divine call. Something struck him that just uplifted him. He's got a lot of power. Only—"

The dean irritably sat down in a cane-seated rocker, jerked off his shoes, grunted, drew on his slippers.

"Only, hang it, I simply can't get myself to like him! Emma, tell me: If I were his age now, do you think I'd go into the ministry, as things are today?"

"Why, Henry! What in the world ever makes you say a thing like that? Of course you would! Why, if that weren't the case— What would our whole lives mean, all we've given up and everything?"

"Oh, I know. I just get to thinking. Sometimes I wonder if we've given up so much. Don't hurt even a preacher to face himself! After all, those two years when I was in the carpet business, before I went to the seminary, I didn't do very well. Maybe I wouldn't have made any more than I do now. But if I could— Suppose I could've been a great chemist? Wouldn't that (mind you, I'm just speculating, as a student of psychology)—wouldn't that conceivably be better than year after year of students with the same confounded problems over and over again—and always so pleased and surprised and important about them!—or year after year again of standing in the pulpit and knowing your congregation don't remember what you've said seven minutes after you've said it?"

"Why, Henry, I don't know what's gotten into you! I think you better do a little praying yourself instead of picking on this poor young Gantry! Neither you nor I could ever have been happy except in a Baptist church or a real cover-to-cover Baptist college."

The dean's wife finished darning the towels and went up to say good-night to her parents.

They had lived with her since her father's retirement, at seventy-five, from his country pastorate. He had been a missionary in Missouri before the Civil War.

Her lips had been moving, her eyebrows working, as she darned the towels; her eyebrows were still creased as she came into their room and shrieked at her father's deafness:

"Time to go to bed, Papa. And you, Mama."