Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/152

 a little from his long and wandering atonement. But even then God saw fit to give him only a little peace, for wherever he went, he was driven on again in a little time. People disliked him and they distrusted the queer Annie and her silent, mysterious ways. Uriah's hatred of women grew with advancing age and as women were the best defenders of priests he failed in his mission, for his female parishioners came to look upon him as a poor thing who was a feeble preacher with a harsh, weak voice in which there was only the monotonous grey and bitter scale of denunciation. The women of a parish were the natural antagonists of a preacher's wife and she of them, and Annie Spragg was worse than the most helpless clergyman's wife. The women she ignored. She did not call upon them or go to the Ladies' Aid or make mother hubbards for the missionary society. She merely sat at home, mysterious and silent, surrounded by the outlandish wild things she had made her pets.

And so at last when Uriah Spragg had passed his fiftieth birthday, they came to the church at Winnebago Falls, a miserable and dying parish worthy only of one whose life had been a failure. The building itself was a primitive affair of unpainted wood, long in need of repair, which stood in a poor part of the town between the railroad yards and the river, and his flock was made up of the remnants of a migration of poor whites who, abandoned by their strength in the course of a western migration, had