“No, Wallis Plimpton.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, with disdain in her voice.

“Mr. Parr only got back yesterday, and Wallis told me that Hodder had refused to go on a yachting trip with him.  Not only foolishness, but high treason.”  Phil smiled.  “Plimpton’s the weather-vane, the barometer of that crowd—­he feels a disturbance long before it turns up—­he’s as sensitive as the stock market.”

“He is the stock market,” said Eleanor.

“It’s been my opinion,” Phil went on reflectively, “that they’ve all had just a trace of uneasiness about Hodder all along, an idea that Nelson Langmaid slipped up for the first time in his life when he got him to come.  Oh, the feeling’s been dormant, but it existed.  And they’ve been just a little afraid that they couldn’t handle him if the time ever came.  He’s not their type.  When I saw Plimpton at the Country Club the other day he wondered, in that genial, off-hand manner of his, whether Hodder would continue to be satisfied with St. John’s.  Plimpton said he might be offered a missionary diocese.  Oh we’ll have a fine old row.”

“I believe,” said Eleanor, “that that’s the only thing that interests you.”

“Well, it does please me,” he admitted, when I think of Gordon Atterbury and Everett Constable and a few others,—­Eldon Parr,—­who believe that religion ought to be kept archaic and innocuous, served in a form that won’t bother anybody.  By the way, Nell, do you remember the verse the Professor quoted about the Pharisees, and cleansing the outside of the cup and platter?”

“Yes,” she answered, “why?”

“Well—­Hodder didn’t give you any intimation as to what he intended to do about that sort of thing, did he?”

“What sort of thing?”

“About the inside of Eldon Parr’s cup,—­so to speak.  And the inside of Wallis Plimpton’s cup, and Everett Constable’s cup, and Ferguson’s cup, and Langmaid’s.  Did it ever strike you that, in St. John’s, we have the sublime spectacle of Eldon Parr, the Pharisee in chief, conducting the Church of Christ, who, uttered that denunciation?  That’s what George Bridges meant.  There’s something rather ironical in such a situation, to say the least.”

“I see,” said Eleanor, thoughtfully.

“And what’s more, it’s typical,” continued Phil, energetically, “the big Baptist church on the Boulevard is run by old Sedges, as canny a rascal as you could find in the state.  The inside of has cup has never been touched, though he was once immersed in the Mississippi, they say, and swallowed a lot of water.”

“Oh, Phil!”

“Hodder’s been pretty intimate with Eldon Parr—­that always puzzled me,” Phil went on.  “And yet I’m like you, I never doubted Hodder’s honesty.  I’ve always been curious to know what would happen when he found out the kind of thing Eldon Parr is doing every day in his life, making people stand and deliver in the interest of what he would call National Prosperity.  Why, that fellow, Funk, they sent to the penitentiary the other day for breaking into the Addicks’ house isn’t a circumstance to Eldon Parr.  He’s robbed his tens of thousands, and goes on robbing them right along.  By the way, Mr. Parr took most of Addicks’ money before Funk got his silver.”