Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/247

only just begun to grow weary of recalling the night she found Perry kissing me in the dining-room, and now I’m in another ridiculous scrape.

“I will be honest. It was not dropping my umbrella which was responsible for it, neither was it the fact that I let the kitchen mirror at New Moon fall last Saturday and crack. It was just my own carelessness.

“St. John’s Presbyterian church here in Shrewsbury became vacant at New Year’s and has been hearing candidates. Mr. Towers of the Times asked me to report the sermons for his paper on such Sundays as I was not in Blair Water. The first sermon was good and I reported it with pleasure. The second one was harmless, very harmless, and I reported it without pain. But the third, which I heard last Sunday, was ridiculous. I said so to Aunt Ruth on the way home from church and Aunt Ruth said, ‘Do you think you are competent to criticise a sermon?’

“Well, yes, I do!

“That sermon was a most inconsistent thing. Mr. Wickham contradicted himself half a dozen times. He mixed his metaphors—he attributed something to St. Paul that belonged to Shakespeare—he committed almost every conceivable literary sin, including the unpardonable one of being deadly dull. However, it was my business to report the sermon, so report it I did. Then I had to do something to get it out of my system, so I wrote, for my own satisfaction, an analysis of it. It was a crazy but delightful deed. I showed up all the inconsistencies, the misquotations, the weaknesses and the wobblings. I enjoyed writing it—I made it as pointed and satirical and satanical as I could—oh, I admit it was a very vitriolic document.

“Then I handed it into the Times by mistake!

“Mr. Towers passed it over to the typesetter without reading it. He had a touching confidence in my work, which he will never have again. It came out the next day.