About this time there was a great flow of tea-table hospitality in the village, and my friends and their friends used to be asked out, by respective parents and by more than one amiable spinster, to faint little entertainments where those sang who were ambitious to sing, and where all played post and forfeits after a rich tea.  My Father was constantly exercised in mind as to whether I should or should not accept these glittering invitations.  There hovered before him a painful sense of danger in resigning the soul to pleasures which savoured of ‘the world’.  These, though apparently innocent in themselves, might give an appetite for yet more subversive dissipations.  I remember, on one occasion,—­when the Browns, a family of Baptists who kept a large haberdashery shop in the neighbouring town, asked for the pleasure of my company ‘to tea and games’, and carried complacency so far as to offer to send that local vehicle, ’the midge’, to fetch me and bring me back,—­my Father’s conscience was so painfully perplexed, that he desired me to come up with him to the now-deserted ‘boudoir’ of the departed Marks, that we might ‘lay the matter before the Lord’.  We did so, kneeling side by side, with our backs to the window and our foreheads pressed upon the horsehair cover of the small, coffin-like sofa.  My Father prayed aloud, with great fervour, that it might be revealed to me, by the voice of God, whether it was or was not the Lord’s will that I should attend the Browns’ party.  My Father’s attitude seemed to me to be hardly fair, since he did not scruple to remind the Deity of various objections to a life of pleasure and of the snakes that lie hidden in the grass of evening parties.  It would have been more scrupulous, I thought, to give no sort of hint of the kind of answer he desired and expected.

It will be justly said that my life was made up of very trifling things, since I have to confess that this incident of the Browns’ invitation was one of its landmarks.  As I knelt, feeling very small, by the immense bulk of my Father, there gushed though my veins like a wine the determination to rebel.  Never before, in all these years of my vocation, had I felt my resistance take precisely this definite form.  We rose presently from the sofa, my forehead and the backs of my hands still chafed by the texture of the horsehair, and we faced one another in the dreary light.  My Father, perfectly confident in the success of what had really been a sort of incantation, asked me in a loud wheedling voice, ‘Well, and what is the answer which our Lord vouchsafes?’ I said nothing, and so my Father, more sharply, continued, ’We have asked Him to direct you to a true knowledge of His will.  We have desired Him to let you know whether it is, or is not, in accordance with His wishes that you should accept this invitation from the Browns.’  He positively beamed down at me; he had no doubt of the reply.  He was already, I believe, planning some little treat to make up to me for the material deprivation.  But my answer came, in the high-piping accents of despair:  ’The Lord says I may go to the Browns.’  My Father gazed at me in speechless horror.  He was caught in his own trap, and though he was certain that the Lord had said nothing of the kind, there was no road open for him but just sheer retreat.  Yet surely it was an error in tactics to slam the door.