Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/20

 because he was engaged upon a colossal work which already had taken up the greater part of his life. It was called "Miracles and Other Natural Phenomena." In speaking of this work he always placed a profound emphasis on the word natural lest you should think that he was taken in by such nonsense as miracles. He was a small, bald man of fifty-two and a quarter of a century earlier he had written parodies and light verse which had appeared now and then in the Yellow Book. But a kind of blight had fallen early on his literary career and for years now he had been devoting his none too great energies to demolishing the idea of miracles in general and the legends clustered about the saints in particular.

His work kept him in Brinoë. It had kept him there for twenty-nine previous and consecutive summers, and it was not yet completed. (Indeed, only Mr. Winnery knew that it was still in a chaotic stage, consisting almost entirely of huge accumulations of notes and copyings from various little-known books on the saints.) Still, it served its purpose, and year after year it continued to give him a faint echo of that fleeting glory which he had known as a young literary radical. Old Mrs. Whitehead and those Anglo-Saxon Marchesas and Contessas who had not become more Catholic than the Blackest Black still spoke of Mr. Winnery's work with a kind of awe. Mr. Binnop, the curate, who prided himself on being broadminded, did not mention the work at all, but he did not, on the other hand, allow it to interfere with his friendship with Mr. Winnery. 