Mr. Plimpton became very thoughtful when he had left the office.  He visited Nelson Langmaid in the Parr Building.  And the result of the conference was to cause Mr. Langmaid to recall, with a twinge of uneasiness, a certain autumn morning in a room beside Bremerton Lake when he had been faintly yet distinctly conscious of the, admonitory whisperings of that sixth sense which had saved him on other occasions.

“Dash it!” he said to himself, after Mr. Plimpton had departed, and he stood in the window and gazed across at the flag on the roof of ‘Ferguson’s.’  “It would serve me right for meddling in this parson business.  Why did I take him away from Jerry Whitely, anyhow?”

It added to Nelson Langmaid’s discomfort that he had a genuine affection, even an admiration for the parson in question.  He might have known by looking at the man that he would wake up some day,—­such was the burden of his lament.  And there came to him, ironically out of the past, the very words of Mr. Parr’s speech to the vestry after Dr. Gilman’s death, that succinct list of qualifications for a new rector which he himself, Nelson Langmaid, had humorously and even more succinctly epitomized.  Their “responsibility to the parish, to the city, and to God” had been to find a rector “neither too old nor too young, who would preach the faith as we received it, who was not sensational, and who did not mistake Socialism for Christianity.”  At the “Socialism” a certain sickly feeling possessed the lawyer, and he wiped beads of perspiration from his dome-like forehead.

He didn’t pretend to be versed in theology—­so he had declared—­and at the memory of these words of his the epithet “ass,” self applied, passed his lips.  “You want a parson who will stick to his last, not too high or too low or too broad or too narrow, who has intellect without too much initiative . . . and will not get the church uncomfortably full of strangers and run you out of your pews.”  Thus he had capped the financier.  Well, if they had caught a tartar, it served him, Nelson Langmaid, right.  He recalled his talk with Gerald Whitely, and how his brother-in-law had lost his temper when they had got on the subject of personality . . . .

Perhaps Wallis Plimpton could do something.  Langmaid’s hopes of this were not high.  It may have been that he had suspicions of what Mr. Plimpton would have called Hodder’s “reasonableness.”  One thing was clear—­that Mr. Plimpton was frightened.  In the sanctuaries, the private confessionals of high finance (and Nelson Langmaid’s office may be called so), the more primitive emotions are sometimes exhibited.

“I don’t see what business it is of a clergyman, or of any one else, whether I own property in Dalton Street,” Mr. Plimpton had said, as he sat on the edge of the lawyer’s polished mahogany desk.  “What does he expect us to do,—­allow our real estate to remain unproductive merely for sentimental reasons?  That’s like a parson, most of ’em haven’t got any more common sense than that.  What right has he got to go nosing around Dalton Street?  Why doesn’t he stick to his church?”