“Mr. Pentland seems a very educated sort of man,” said Mrs. Simpson, having nothing else to say.
“Yes. We went to see him when we were hunting for a house,” Genevieve added. “He was very nice to us. He told us he had once been in the ministry.”
“Yes,” said Eugene. “He was a Man of God for more than twenty years—one of the most eloquent, passionate, and gifted soul-savers that ever struck fear into the hearts of the innumerable sinners of the American nation. In fact, I know of no one with whom to compare him, unless I turn back three centuries to Jonathan Edwards, the Puritan divine, who evoked, in a quiet voice like the monotonous dripping of water, a picture of hell-fire so near that the skins of the more imaginative fanatics on the front rows visibly blistered. However, Edwards spoke for two and a half hours: Uncle Bascom, with his mad and beautiful tongue, has been known to drive people insane with terror in twenty-seven minutes by the clock. There are still people in the asylums that he put there,” he said piously. “I hope,” he added quickly, “you didn’t ask him why he had left the Church.”
“Oh, no!” said Genevieve. “We never did that.”
“Why did he?” asked Mrs. Simpson bluntly, who felt that now she had only to ask and it would be given. She was not disappointed.
“It was the centuries-old conflict between organized authority and the individual,” said Eugene. “No doubt you have felt it in your own lives. Uncle Bascom was a poet, a philosopher, a mystic—he had the soul of an artist which must express divine love and ideal beauty in corporeal form. Such a man as this is not going to be shackled by the petty tyrannies of ecclesiastical convention. An artist must love and be loved. He must be swept by the Flow of Things, he must be a constantly expanding atom in the rhythmic surges of the Life Force. Who knew this better than Uncle Bascom when he first met the choir contralto?”
“Contralto!” gasped Genevieve.
“Perhaps she was a soprano,” said Eugene. “It skills not. Suffice it to say they lived, they loved, they had their little hour of happiness. Of course, when the child came—”
“The child!” screamed Mrs. Simpson.
“A bouncing boy. He weighed thirteen pounds at birth and is at the present a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy.”
“What became of—her?” said Genevieve.
“Of whom?”
