That she should criticize the Evangelicals and pronounce them unscriptural was disintegrating to all his ideas of the subjection, of children.  His sun-burned face grew darker.

“Mebbe you don’t twist that there Book!  Gawd he wouldn’t of created wine to be made if it would be wrong fur to look at it!  You can’t come over that, can you?  Them Scripture you spoke, just mean not to drink to drunkenness, nor eat to gluttonness.  But,” he sternly added, “it ain’t fur you to answer up to your pop!  I ain’t leavin’ you dress plain—­and that’s all that’s to say!”

“I got to do it, pop,” Tillie’s low voice answered, “I must obey to Christ.”

“What you sayin’ to me?  That you got to do somepin I tole you you haven’t the dare to do?  Are you sayin’ that to me, Tillie?  Heh?”

“I got to obey to Christ,” she repeated, her face paling.

“You think!  Well, we’ll see about that oncet!  You leave me see you obeyin’ to any one before your pop, and you’ll soon get learnt better!  How do you bring it out that the Scripture says, ’Childern, obey your parents’?”

“‘Obey your parents in the Lord,’” Tillie amended.

“Well, you’ll be obeyin’ to the Scripture and your parent by joinin’ the Evangelicals.  D’ you understand?”

“The Evangelicals don’t hold to Scripture, pop.  They enlist.  And we don’t read of Christ takin’ any interest in war.”

“Yes, but in the Old Dispensation them old kings did it, and certainly they was good men!  They’re in the Bible!”

“But we’re livin’ under the New Dispensation.  And a many things is changed to what they were under the Old.  Pop, I can’t dress fashionable any more.”

“Now, look here, Tillie, I oughtn’t argy no words with you, fur you’re my child and you’re got the right to mind me just because I say it.  But can’t you see the inconsistentness of the plain people?  Now a New Mennonite he says his conscience won’t leave him wear grand [wear worldly dress] but he’ll make his livin’ in Lancaster city by keepin’ a jew’lry-store.  And yet them Mennonites won’t leave a sister keep a millinery-shop!”

“But,” Tillie tried to hold her ground, “there’s watches, pop, and clocks that jew’lers sells.  They’re useful.  We got to have watches and clocks.  Millinery is only pleasing to the eye.”

“Well, the women couldn’t go bare-headed neither, could they?  And is ear-rings and such things like them useful?  And all them fancy things they keep in their dry-goods stores?  Och, they’re awful inconsistent that way!  I ain’t got no use fur New Mennonites!  Why, here one day, when your mom was livin’ yet, I owed a New Mennonite six cents, and I handed him a dime and he couldn’t change it out, but he sayed he’d send me the four cents.  Well, I waited and waited, and he never sent it.  Then I bought such a postal-card and wrote it in town to him yet.  And that didn’t fetch the four cents neither.  I wrote to him backward and forward till I had wrote three cards a’ready, and then I seen I wouldn’t gain nothin’ by writin’ one more if he did pay me, and if he didn’t pay I’d lose that other cent yet.  So I let it.  Now that’s a New Mennonite fur you!  Do you call that consistentness?”