a form of
coercion which it seemed he could apply quite successfully to his
womenkind, those creatures of his flesh and blood, yet so alien and
intractable. Family prayers gave him a keener spiritual satisfaction
than the church services in which, outwardly, he cut a far more
imposing figure. In a countryside peopled mainly by abominable
Wesleyans and impure Baptists (Mr. Cartaret spoke and thought of
Wesleyans and Baptists as if they were abominable and impure pure) he
had some difficulty in procuring a congregation. The few who came
to the parish church came because it was respectable and therefore
profitable, or because they had got into the habit and couldn't well
get out of it, or because they liked it, not at all because his
will and his authority compelled them. But to emerge from his
study inevitably at ten o'clock, an hour when the souls of Mary
and Gwendolen and Alice were most reluctant and most hostile to the
thought of prayers, and by sheer worrying to round up the fugitives,
whatever they happened to be doing and wherever they happened to be,
this (though he said it was no pleasure to him) was more agreeable to
Mr. Cartaret than he knew. The very fact that Essy was a Wesleyan
and so far an unwilling conformist gave a peculiar zest to the
performance.

It was always the same. It started with a look through his glasses,
leveled at each member of his household in turn, as if he desired to
satisfy himself as to the expression of their faces while at the same
time he defied them to protest. For the rest, his rule was that of his
father, the schoolmaster, before him. First, a chapter from the Bible,
the Old Testament in the morning, the New Testament in the evening,
working straight through from Genesis to Revelation (omitting
Leviticus as somewhat unsuitable for family reading). Then prayers
proper, beginning with what his daughter Gwendolen, seventeen years
ago, had called "fancy prayers," otherwise prayers not lifted from
the Liturgy, but compiled and composed in accordance with the freer
Evangelical taste in prayers. Then (for both Mr. Cartaret and the
schoolmaster, his father, held that the Church must not be ignored)
there followed last Sunday's Collect, the Collect for Grace, the
Benediction, and the Lord's Prayer.

Now, as his rule would have it, that evening of the fifth of December
brought him to the Eighth chapter of St. John, in the one concerning
the woman taken in adultery, which was the very la