But to emerge from his
study inevitably at ten o'clock, an hour when the souls of Mary
and Gwendolen and Alice were most reluctant and most hostile to the
thought of prayers, and by sheer worrying to round up the fugitives,
whatever they happened to be doing and wherever they happened to be,
this (though he said it was no pleasure to him) was more agreeable to
Mr. Cartaret than he knew. The very fact that Essy was a Wesleyan
and so far an unwilling conformist gave a peculiar zest to the
performance.
It was always the same. It started with a look through his glasses,
leveled at each member of his household in turn, as if he desired to
satisfy himself as to the expression of their faces while at the same
time he defied them to protest. For the rest, his rule was that of his
father, the schoolmaster, before him. First, a chapter from the Bible,
the Old Testament in the morning, the New Testament in the evening,
working straight through from Genesis to Revelation (omitting
Leviticus as somewhat unsuitable for family reading). Then prayers
proper, beginning with what his daughter Gwendolen, seventeen years
ago, had called "fancy prayers," otherwise prayers not lifted from
the Liturgy, but compiled and composed in accordance with the freer
Evangelical taste in prayers. Then (for both Mr. Cartaret and the
schoolmaster, his father, held that the Church must not be ignored)
there followed last Sunday's Collect, the Collect for Grace, the
Benediction, and the Lord's Prayer.
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