Page:Minnie's Bishop and Other Stories (1915).djvu/99

 men by urging them, unnecessarily and insultingly as they thought, to take baths. People became shy of calling at the rectory after she insisted on teaching a bank clerk to breathe, laying him flat on his back on the drawing-room floor for the purpose. This misguided boy believed that he could breathe well enough for all practical purposes before the lesson.

Mrs. Crossley was still a comparatively young woman when she read a book about the way the poor live in York. She was fascinated by the bud- gets of weekly expenditure, the statistics about the number of people who slept in one bedroom, and the dirt and disease consequent on insufficient water supply. She ransacked library catalogues for more books of the same kind, and for weeks feasted her soul on detailed descriptions of common lodging-houses, casual labour-homes, and institutions called "shelters." She acquired quite easily a taste for sordidness, and began to yearn to extend her knowledge by experimental investigation. She came to the conclusion that she was studying a science called sociology, and was, above all things, anxious that her knowledge of it should be fundamental. The word had always been a favourite one with her. She had flung it at the heads of people who would not sign pledges, and her devotion to it was responsible for the insult to the bank clerk. Combined with a really splendid noun like sociology it afforded her intense satisfaction. "Physical culture"