“You sure are the first to welcome me, Sister Benham, and it’s a mighty great pleasure to meet you! Yes, your father was so nice as to invite me for supper tonight.”
They shook hands with ceremony and sat beaming at each other in a front pew. He informed her that he was certain there was “going to be a great spiritual awakening here,” and she told him what lovely people there were in the congregation, in the village, in the entire surrounding country. And her panting breast told him that she, the daughter of the village magnate, had instantly fallen in love with him.
III
Cleo Benham had spent three years in the Sparta Women’s College, specializing in piano, organ, French, English literature, strictly expurgated, and study of the Bible. Returned to Banjo Crossing, she was a fervent church-worker. She played the organ and rehearsed the choir; she was the superintendent of the juvenile department in the Sunday School; she decorated the church for Easter, for funerals, for the Halloween Supper.
She was twenty-seven, five years younger than Elmer.
Though she was not very lively in summer-evening front-porch chatter, though on the few occasions when she sinned against the Discipline and danced she seemed a little heavy on her feet, though she had a corseted purity which was dismaying to the earthy young men of Banjo Crossing, yet she was handsome, she was kind, and her father was reputed to be worth not a cent less than seventy-five thousand dollars. So almost every eligible male in the vicinity had hinted at proposing to her.
Gently and compassionately she had rejected them one by one. Marriage must, she felt, be a sacrament; she must be the helpmate of someone who was “doing a tremendous amount of good in the world.” This good she identified with medicine or preaching.
Her friends assured her, “My! With your Bible training and your music and all, you’d make a perfect pastor’s wife. Just dandy! You’d be such a help to him.”
But no detached preacher or doctor had happened along, and she had remained insulated, a little puzzled, hungry over the children of her friends, each year more passionately given to hymnody and agonized solitary prayer.
Now, with innocent boldness, she was exclaiming to Elmer: “We were so afraid the bishop would send us some pastor that was old and worn-out. The people here are lovely, but they’re kind of slow-going; they need somebody to wake them up. I’m so glad he sent somebody that was young and attractive—Oh, my, I shouldn’t have said that! I was just thinking of the church, you understand.”
Her eyes said that she had not been just thinking of the church.
She looked at her wristwatch (the first in Banjo Crossing) and chanted, “Why, my gracious, it’s six o’clock! Would you like to walk home with me instead of going to Mrs. Clark’s—you could wash up at Papa’s.”
“You can’t lose me!” exulted Elmer, hastily amending, “—as the slangy youngers say! Yes, indeed, I should be very pleased to have the pleasure of walking home with you.”
Under the elms, past the rosebushes, through dust emblazoned by the declining sun, he walked with his stately abbess.
He knew that she was the sort of wife who would help him to capture a bishopric. He persuaded himself that, with all her virtue, she would eventually be interesting to kiss. He noted that they “made a fine couple.” He told himself that she was the first woman he had ever found who was worthy of him. … Then he remembered Sharon. … But the pang lasted only a moment, in the secure village peace, in the gentle flow of Cleo’s voice.
IV
Once he was out of the sacred briskness of his store, Mr. Nathaniel Benham forgot discounts and became an affable host. He said, “Well, well, Brother,” ever so many times, and shook hands profusely. Mrs. Benham—she was a large woman, rather handsome; she wore figured foulard, with an apron over it, as she had been helping in the kitchen—Mrs. Benham was equally cordial. “I’ll just bet you’re hungry, Brother!” cried she.
He was, after a lunch of ham sandwich and coffee at a station lunchroom on the way down.
The Benham house was the proudest mansion in town. It was of yellow clapboards with white trim; it had a huge screened porch and a little turret; a staircase window with a border of colored glass; and there was a real fireplace, though it was never used. In front of the house, to Elmer’s admiration, was one of the three automobiles which were all that were to be found in 1913 in Banjo Crossing. It was a bright red Buick with brass trimmings.
The Benham supper was as replete with fried chicken and theological questions as Elmer’s first supper with Deacon Bains in Schoenheim. But here was wealth, for which Elmer had a touching reverence, and here was Cleo.
Lulu Bains had been a tempting mouthful; Cleo Benham was of the race of queens. To possess her, Elmer gloated, would in itself be an empire, worth any battling. … And yet he did not itch to get her in a corner and buss her, as he had Lulu; the slope of her proud shoulders did not make his fingers taut.
After supper, on the screened porch pleasant by dusk, Mr. Benham demanded, “What charges have you been holding, Brother Gantry?”
Elmer modestly let him know how important he had been in the work of Sister Falconer; he admitted his scholarly research at Mizpah Seminary; he made quite enough of his success at Schoenheim; he let it be known that he had been practically assistant sales-manager of the Pequot Farm Implement Company.
Mr. Benham grunted with surprised admiration. Mrs. Benham gurgled, “My, we’re lucky to have a real high-class preacher for once!” And Cleo—she leaned toward Elmer, in a deep willow chair,
