daughter, married a second late in life. This lady had somewhat
unexpectedly brought him three sons, so that between Angel, the
youngest, and his father the Vicar there seemed to be almost a
missing generation. Of these boys the aforesaid Angel, the child of
his old age, was the only son who had not taken a University degree,
though he was the single one of them whose early promise might have
done full justice to an academical training.
Some two or three years before Angel's appearance at the Marlott
dance, on a day when he had left school and was pursuing his studies
at home, a parcel came to the Vicarage from the local bookseller's,
directed to the Reverend James Clare. The Vicar having opened it and
found it to contain a book, read a few pages; whereupon he jumped up
from his seat and went straight to the shop with the book under his
arm.
'Why has this been sent to my house?' he asked peremptorily, holding
up the volume.
'It was ordered, sir.'
'Not by me, or any one belonging to me, I am happy to say.'
The shopkeeper looked into his order-book.
'Oh, it has been misdirected, sir,' he said. 'It was ordered by Mr
Angel Clare, and should have been sent to him.'
Mr Clare winced as if he had been struck. He went home pale and
dejected, and called Angel into his study.
'Look into this book, my boy,' he said. 'What do you know about it?'
'I ordered it,' said Angel simply.
'What for?'
'To read.'
'How can you think of reading it?'
'How can I? Why--it is a system of philosophy. There is no more
moral, or even religious, work published.'
'Yes--moral enough; I don't deny that. But religious!--and for YOU,
who intend to be a minister of the Gospel!'
'Since you have alluded to the matter, father,' said the son, with
anxious thought upon his face, 'I should like to say, once for
all, that I should prefer not to take Orders. I fear I could not
conscientiously do so. I love the Church as one loves a parent.
I shall always have the warmest affection for her. There is no
institution for whose history I have a deeper admiration; but I
cannot honestly be ordained her minister, as my brothers are, while
she refuses to liberate her mind from an untenable redemptive
theolatry.'
It had never occurred to the straightforward and simple-minded Vicar
that one of his own flesh and blood could come to this! He was
stultified, shocked, paralysed. And if Angel were not going to
enter the Church, what was the use of sending him to Cambridge? The
University as a step to anything but ordination seemed, to this man
of fixed ideas, a preface without a volume. He was a man not merely
religious, but devout; a firm believer--not as the phrase is now
elusively construed by theological thimble-riggers in the Church and
