abit, like tobacco, or biting
your fingernails, or anything else. Either you were all to come to smash
here, or the people had to be shaken up, stood on their heads, broken
of their habit. It's my business--mine and Soulsby's--to do that sort
of thing. We came here and we did it--did it up brown, too. We not
only raised all the money the church needs, and to spare, but I took a
personal shine to you, and went out of my way to fix up things for
you. It isn't only the extra hundred dollars, but the whole tone of
the congregation is changed toward you now. You'll see that they'll be
asking to have you back here, next spring. And you're solid with your
Presiding Elder, too. Well, now, tell me straight--is that worth while,
or not?"

"I've told you that I am very grateful," answered the minister, "and I
say it again, and I shall never be tired of repeating it. But--but it
was the means I had in mind."

"Quite so," rejoined the sister, patiently. "If you saw the way a hotel
dinner was cooked, you wouldn't be able to stomach it. Did you ever see
a play? In a theatre, I mean. I supposed not. But you'll understand when
I say that the performance looks one way from where the audience sit,
and quite a different way when you are behind the scenes. THERE you see
that the trees and houses are cloth, and the moon is tissue paper,
and the flying fairy is a middle-aged woman strung up on a rope.
That doesn't prove that the play, out in front, isn't beautiful and
affecting, and all that. It only shows that everything in this world is
produced by machinery--by organization. The trouble is that you've
been let in on the stage, behind the scenes, so to speak, and you're so
green--if you'll pardon me--that you want to sit down and cry because
the trees ARE cloth, and the moon IS a lantern. And I say, don't be such
a goose!"

"I see what you mean," Theron said, with an answering smile. He added,
more gravely, "All the same, the Winch business seems to me--"

"Now the Winch business is my own affair," Sister Soulsby broke in
abruptly. "I take all the responsibility for that. You need know nothing
about it. You simply voted as you did on the merits of the case as he
presented them--that's all."

"But--" Theron began, and then paused. Something had occurred to him,
and he knitted his brows to follow its course of expansion in his mind.
Suddenly he raised his head. "Then you arranged with Winch to make those
bogus offers--just to lead other