etically honest than the way her neck comes
up out of the collar and says: "Search me!"

All this is most noticeable when the circuit rider has brought her up
from his country circuit to the town parsonage and the town church,
where there is such a thing as "style" in sleeves and headgear. I
should say in this connection that William did at last "rise" that much
in the church: he occasionally became the pastor in a village with a
salary of at most five hundred dollars. The wife at this time always
looks like a poor little lady Rip Van Winkle in the congregation. And
her husband invariably makes the better impression, because all those
years while she was wearying and fading he was consciously or
unconsciously cultivating his powers of personality, his black-coated
ministerial presence, and even the full, rich tones of his preaching
voice.

But I will say for William that he was as innocent as a lamb of any
carnal intentions in these improvements. He was wedded to his white
cravats as the angels are to their wings, and he was by nature so
fastidiously neat that if he had been a cat instead of a man he would
have spent much of his time licking his paws and washing his face.
Besides, like all preachers' wives, I was anxious that he should look
well in the pulpit, and therefore ready to sacrifice my own needs that
he might buy new clothes, because he must appear so publicly every
Sunday; especially as by this time I had the feeling of not appearing
even when I was present. One of the peculiar experiences of a
preacher's wife is to stand in the background at the end of every
Sunday morning service and see her husband lionized by the congregation.

Another thing happened as we went on, far more important than the
casting of me out of the fashion of the times. This was the change in
the quality of spirituality with which William had to deal in his more
cultivated congregations.

I cannot tell exactly where we made the transit, but somewhere in the
latter years of his ministry he stepped out of one generation into
another where the ideals of the Christian life were more intelligent,
but less Heavenly. The things that preachers had told about God to
scare the people forty years before had come up and flowered into
heresies and unbelief in their children. William actually had to quit
preaching about Jonah and the whale. He had an excellent sermon on the
crucial moment of Jonah's repentance, with which in the early pa