“Not very well, aunt.  He wants to see you.  Come home with us and help us to amuse him.”

So talking, all three walked along the avenue to 42d Street, and turning down it, at length entered one of the houses about half way between the avenues.  Up-stairs in a sunny room fitted up as a library and large enough to be handsome, they found the owner, William Dudley, a man of sixty or thereabouts, sitting in an arm-chair before the fire, trying to read a foreign review in which he took no interest.  He moved with an appearance of effort, as though he were an invalid, but his voice was strong and his manner cheerful.

“I hoped you would all come.  This is an awful moment.  Tell me instantly, Sarah; is St. Stephen a success?”

“Immense!  St. Stephen and St. Wharton too.  The loveliest clergyman, the sweetest church, the highest-toned sermon and the lowest-toned walls,” said she.  “Even George owns that he has no criticisms to make.”

“Aunt Sarah tells the loftiest truth, Uncle William,” said the professor; “every Christian emblem about the church is superlatively correct, but paleontologically it is a fraud.  Wharton and Hazard did the emblems, and I supplied them with antediluvian beasts which were all right when I drew them, but Wharton has played the devil with them, and I don’t believe he knows the difference between a saurian and a crab.  I could not recognize one of my own offspring.”

“And how did it suit you, Esther?”

“I am charmed,” replied his daughter.  “Only it certainly does come just a little near being an opera-house.  Mr. Hazard looks horribly like Meyerbeer’s Prophet.  He ordered us about in a fine tenor voice, with his eyes, and told us that we belonged to him, and if we did not behave ourselves he would blow up the church and us in it.  I thought every moment we should see his mother come out of the front pews, and have a scene with him.  If the organ had played the march, the effect would have been complete, but I felt there was something wanting.”

“It was the sexton,” said the professor; “he ought to have had a medieval costume.  I must tell Wharton to-night to invent one for him.  Hazard has asked me to come round to his rooms, because he thinks I am an unprejudiced observer and will tell him the exact truth.  Now what am I to say?”

“Tell him,” said the aunt, “that he looked like a Christian martyr defying the beasts in the amphitheater, and George, you are one of them.  Between you and your Uncle William I wonder how Esther and I keep any religion at all.”

“It is not enough to save you, Aunt Sarah,” replied the professor.  “You might just as well go with us, for if the Church is half right, you haven’t a chance.”

“Just now I must go with my husband, who is not much better than you,” she replied.  “He must have his luncheon, church or no church.  Good-by.”

So she departed, notifying Esther that the next day there was to be at her house a meeting of the executive committee of the children’s hospital, which Esther must be careful to attend.