Carpendike listened with a bent head, upraised eyes, and brows wrinkling far on to his poll:  a picture of a mind entrenched beyond the potentialities of mortal assault.  He signified that he had spoken.  Indeed Beauchamp’s reply was vain to one whose argument was that he considered the people nearer to holiness in the:  indulging of an evil propensity than in satisfying a harmless curiosity and getting a recreation.  The Sabbath claimed them; if they were disobedient, Sin ultimately might scourge them back to the fold, but never if they were permitted to regard themselves as innocent in their backsliding and rebelliousness.

Such language was quite new to Beauchamp.  The parsons he had spoken to were of one voice in objecting to the pothouse.  He appealed to Carpendike’s humanity.  Carpendike smote him with a text from Scripture.

‘Devilish cold in this shop,’ muttered Palmet.

Two not flourishing little children of the emaciated Puritan burst into the shop, followed by their mother, carrying a child in her arms.  She had a sad look, upon traces of a past fairness, vaguely like a snow landscape in the thaw.  Palmet stooped to toss shillings with her young ones, that he might avoid the woman’s face.  It cramped his heart.

‘Don’t you see, Mr. Carpendike,’ said fat Mr. Oggler, ’it’s the happiness of the people we want; that’s what Captain Beauchamp works for—­their happiness; that’s the aim of life for all of us.  Look at me!  I’m as happy as the day.  I pray every night, and I go to church every Sunday, and I never know what it is to be unhappy.  The Lord has blessed me with a good digestion, healthy pious children, and a prosperous shop that’s a competency—­a modest one, but I make it satisfy me, because I know it’s the Lord’s gift.  Well, now, and I hate Sabbath-breakers; I would punish them; and I’m against the public-houses on a Sunday; but aboard my little yacht, say on a Sunday morning in the Channel, I don’t forget I owe it to the Lord that he has been good enough to put me in the way of keeping a yacht; no; I read prayers to my crew, and a chapter in the Bible-Genesis, Deuteronomy, Kings, Acts, Paul, just as it comes.  All’s good that’s there.  Then we’re free for the day! man, boy, and me; we cook our victuals, and we must look to the yacht, do you see.  But we’ve made our peace with the Almighty.  We know that.  He don’t mind the working of the vessel so long as we’ve remembered him.  He put us in that situation, exactly there, latitude and longitude, do you see, and work the vessel we must.  And a glass of grog and a pipe after dinner, can’t be any offence.  And I tell you, honestly and sincerely, I’m sure my conscience is good, and I really and truly don’t know what it is not to know happiness.’

‘Then you don’t know God,’ said Carpendike, like a voice from a cave.

‘Or nature:  or the state of the world,’ said Beauchamp, singularly impressed to find himself between two men, of whom—­each perforce of his tenuity and the evident leaning of his appetites—­one was for the barren black view of existence, the other for the fantastically bright.  As to the men personally, he chose Carpendike, for all his obstinacy and sourness.  Oggler’s genial piety made him shrink with nausea.