le is going to be. At some weddings,
he goes on, hardly nobody ain't allowed in, but then again, sometimes
they don't scarcely look at the tickets at all. The two flappers retire
abashed, and as the sexton finishes his sweeping, there enters the
organist.

The organist is a tall, thin man of melancholy, uraemic aspect, wearing a
black slouch hat with a wide brim and a yellow overcoat that barely
reaches to his knees. A pupil, in his youth, of a man who had once
studied (irregularly and briefly) with Charles-Marie Widor, he acquired
thereby the artistic temperament, and with it a vast fondness for malt
liquor. His mood this morning is acidulous and depressed, for he spent
yesterday evening in a Pilsner ausschank with two former members of the
Boston Symphony Orchestra, and it was 3 A. M. before they finally agreed
that Johann Sebastian Bach, all things considered, was a greater man
than Beethoven, and so parted amicably. Sourness is the precise
sensation that wells within him. He feels vinegary; his blood runs cold;
he wishes he could immerse himself in bicarbonate of soda. But the call
of his art is more potent than the protest of his poisoned and quaking
liver, and so he manfully climbs the spiral stairway to his organ-loft.

Once there, he takes off his hat and overcoat, stoops down to blow the
dust off the organ keys, throws the electrical switch which sets the
bellows going, and then proceeds to take off his shoes. This done, he
takes his seat, reaches for the pedals with his stockinged feet, tries
an experimental 32-foot CCC, and then wanders gently into a Bach
toccata. It is his limbering-up piece: he always plays it as a prelude
to a wedding job. It thus goes very smoothly and even brilliantly, but
when he comes to the end of it and tackles the ensuing fugue he is
quickly in difficulties, and after four or five stumbling repetitions of
the subject he hurriedly improvises a crude coda and has done. Peering
down into the church to see if his flounderings have had an audience, he
sees two old maids enter, the one very tall and thin and the other
somewhat brisk and bunchy.

They constitute the vanguard of the nuptial throng, and as they proceed
hesitatingly up the center aisle, eager for good seats but afraid to go
too far, the organist wipes his palms upon his trousers legs, squares
his shoulders, and plunges into the program that he has played at all
weddings for fifteen years past. It begins with Mendelssohn's S