When in the cupboard there is a real and very bony skeleton, carefully kept from the sight of a single member of the family, the position of that member is liable to become lonely.  But Pierson, who had been lonely fifteen years, did not feel it so much, perhaps, as most men would have.  In his dreamy nature there was a curious self-sufficiency, which only violent shocks disturbed, and he went on with his routine of duty, which had become for him as set as the pavements he trod on his way to and from it.  It was not exactly true, as the painter had said, that this routine did not bring him into touch with life.  After all he saw people when they were born, when they married, when they died.  He helped them when they wanted money, and when they were ill; he told their children Bible stories on Sunday afternoons; he served those who were in need with soup and bread from his soup kitchen.  He never spared himself in any way, and his ears were always at the service of their woes.  And yet he did not understand them, and they knew that.  It was as though he, or they, were colour-blind.  The values were all different.  He was seeing one set of objects, they another.

One street of his parish touched a main line of thoroughfare, and formed a little part of the new hunting-grounds of women, who, chased forth from their usual haunts by the Authorities under pressure of the country’s danger, now pursued their calling in the dark.  This particular evil had always been a sort of nightmare to Pierson.  The starvation which ruled his own existence inclined him to a particularly severe view and severity was not his strong point.  In consequence there was ever within him a sort of very personal and poignant struggle going on beneath that seeming attitude of rigid disapproval.  He joined the hunters, as it were, because he was afraid-not, of course, of his own instincts, for he was fastidious, a gentleman, and a priest, but of being lenient to a sin, to something which God abhorred:  He was, as it were, bound to take a professional view of this particular offence.  When in his walks abroad he passed one of these women, he would unconsciously purse his lips, and frown.  The darkness of the streets seemed to lend them such power, such unholy sovereignty over the night.  They were such a danger to the soldiers, too; and in turn, the soldiers were such a danger to the lambs of his flock.  Domestic disasters in his parish came to his ears from time to time; cases of young girls whose heads were turned by soldiers, so that they were about to become mothers.  They seemed to him pitiful indeed; but he could not forgive them for their giddiness, for putting temptation in the way of brave young men, fighting, or about to fight.  The glamour which surrounded soldiers was not excuse enough.  When the babies were born, and came to his notice, he consulted a Committee he had formed, of three married and two maiden ladies, who visited the mothers, and if necessary took the babies into a creche; for those babies had a new value to the country, and were not—­poor little things!—­to be held responsible for their mothers’ faults.  He himself saw little of the young mothers; shy of them, secretly afraid, perhaps, of not being censorious enough.  But once in a way Life set him face to face with one.