It was quite true that the chief interest in common between Miss Pride and Philip McAllister was Hopestill, proof of which required only the most casual eavesdropping. But it was also true that Miss Pride had known the young man’s family for many years and had moved in the same feminine circles as his mother, who had gone that summer to London, and his grandmother. Dr. McAllister’s father, a retired Unitarian minister, used sometimes to come to see his son and always made a point of lunching at the Hotel. I took pains to stay as near them as possible so that I might not miss any of their talk. The Reverend McAllister was withered and singed and clad from head to toe in decent black. All that relieved his funereal attire was a gold watch chain across his convex middle from which hung a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a dabbler in oddities. He knew, for instance, that the armadillo always bore identical quadruplets; he offered this news with a brief, factual account of the duck-billed platypus, but he went no further, although Mrs. McKenzie, who overheard him, was enchanted and pressed him for details. Or he would trace at length the development of spiritism, but far from discussing it in the light of his religious tenets, he merely presented the case as though it had no bearing on anything else. Gravely he would imitate the Fox sisters, “Ho, Mr. Slipfoot, are you there?” Or, if he were invited to express his opinion of Christian Science, he would repeat an anecdote he had heard about Mrs. Eddy which was perhaps illustrative of his feeling but which suggested, to his discredit, that that was all he knew about Christian Science. He was, as his son remarked of him once, the kind of man who came out ahead in pen and pencil games.

Miss Pride did not particularly like “the Reverend” though she respected him, for she had been taught that it was improper not to respect the cloth. She said in a low voice to a friend who had come to dine with her, “He is a very good Christian, I grant you, but he’s a frightful bore.”

The friend, a woman with a broad, innocent face, said, “I can’t believe he’s a bore, Lucy, though I’ve only met him once or twice. Why, I was dumfounded, when I dined at his house once, at the size of his theological library. And the books were so worn, so obviously studied. No, indeed, a man who has read that much can’t be a bore.”