Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/682



ARIA DORRS had married Samuel Flathers when she was a chatty girl of eighteen, and when her father, senior warden at St. Stephen's Church, had just been elected the President of the L. S. & V. Railroad.

In the arrangements, formal and informal, subsequent to the brief courtship between Miss Dorrs and the somewhat gay young Flathers, the latter promised his fiancée that he would prove his devotion by becoming at once a vestryman at St. Stephen's, and, moreover, once a vestryman, he promised to remain so as long as he was loyal to his marriage vow,—thus fulfilling with pride the churchly duty as an outward expression of his renunciation of the gay world.

As the years came and went after the death of Mr. Dorrs not only were the family fortunes so increased through wise investments that Mrs. Flathers became the richest woman in Sudbury, but to Samuel fell his father-in-law's obligations as senior warden.

As for Maria Dorrs-Flathers, from a certain point of view she was the most influential woman in her city. She had grown, through financial responsibilities and through the lack of domestic idealism, into a restless woman at home and a great worker in society. She was an honest lover of innovation, a female promote even a follower of fads. College settlements, kitchen-gardens, boys' clubs, as well as the latest orchids for a dinner-party, one and all interested her, and to each she had given time, money, and her very self. The guild-house at St. Stephen's was built at her expense. The working-girls' lunch-rooms had been equipped through her interest. It was her gift that established the Episcopal free bed at the General Hospital, and at the new Woman's College she had built and endowed the Dorrs Dormitory in memory of her father. Her husband's partners at "bridge" had suggested to Sam that upon his death there would follow a Flathers Flat for Failures. But the senior warden assumed his "offertory air " and won the game in spite of insinuations.

Mrs. Flathers was a thin, wiry, homely woman of fifty, with an indefinite vocabulary and an aspirated voice. Her friends called her "wonderful"; the public, "a benefactor"; but the architects, plumbers, decorators, and her husband knew her best. She possessed a masculine determination to carry out her plans; but her plans were changed according to whims, and her whims were feminine.

One interest had never varied in fifteen years, although here, too, she had whimsical notions in regard to it. It was the development of the career of the rector of St. Stephen's. For fifteen years the Rev. Charles Archibald had enjoyed the living of that fashionable parish. Perhaps no Episcopal clergyman in Michigan was better fitted to grace this one Episcopal church of Sudbury. Charles Archibald looked the Episcopalian. His big frame, clean-shaven face, and genial smile lent themselves to his type. A commanding presence, an authoritative preacher, he was indeed admirably appointed to wear the cloth. For years the Rev. Archibald had had the one all-absorbing ambition to become a bishop. Indeed, so long had he trimmed his sails for the largest of the diocesan harbors that his clerical brothers sometimes called him a "time-server" to the office.

From the outset, when the young rector of thirty brought his still younger wife to St. Stephen's, until the birth of their second child, the rectory had not been invaded by Maria Dorrs-Flathers, although her influence was felt from the first. But with an increasing and grievous invalidism which fell, after the birth of little Charles junior, upon Mrs. Archibald, she turned constantly for ad-