“I’m told you’re working very hard—­stirring up McCrae.  He needs it.”

“I’m only trying to study the situation,” Hodder replied.  “I don’t think you quite do justice to McCrae,” he added; “he’s very faithful, and seems to understand those people thoroughly.”

Mr. Parr smiled.

“And what conclusions have you come to?  If you think the system should be enlarged and reorganized I am willing at any time to go over it with you, with a view to making an additional contribution.  Personally, while I have sympathy for the unfortunate, I’m not at all sure that much of the energy and money put into the institutional work of churches isn’t wasted.”

“I haven’t come to any conclusions—­yet,” said the rector, with a touch of sadness.  “Perhaps I demand too much—­expect too much.”

The financier, deep in his leather chair under the shaded light, the tips of his fingers pressed together, regarded the younger man thoughtfully, but the smile lingered in his eyes.

“I told you you would meet problems,” he said.

II

Hodder’s cosmos might have been compared, indeed, to that set forth in the Ptolemaic theory of the ancients.  Like a cleverly carved Chinese object of ivory in the banker s collection, it was a system of spheres, touching, concentric, yet separate.  In an outer space swung Mr. Parr; then came the scarcely less rarefied atmosphere of the Constables and Atterburys, Fergusons, Plimptons, Langmaids, Prestons, Larrabbees, Greys, and Gores, and then a smaller sphere which claims but a passing mention.  There were, in the congregation of St. John’s, a few people of moderate means whose houses or apartments the rector visited; people to whom modern life was increasingly perplexing.

In these ranks were certain maiden ladies and widows who found in church work an outlet to an otherwise circumscribed existence.  Hodder met them continually in his daily rounds.  There were people like the Bradleys, who rented half a pew and never missed a Sunday; Mr. Bradley, an elderly man whose children had scattered, was an upper clerk in one of Mr. Parr’s trust companies:  there were bachelors and young women, married or single, who taught in the Sunday school or helped with the night classes.  For the most part, all of these mentioned above belonged to an element that once had had a comfortable and well-recognized place in the community, yet had somehow been displaced.  Many of them were connected by blood with more fortunate parishioners, but economic pressure had scattered them throughout new neighbourhoods and suburbs.  Tradition still bound them to St. John’s.

With no fixed orbit, the rector cut at random through all of these strata, and into a fourth.  Not very far into it, for this apparently went down to limitless depths, the very contemplation of which made him dizzy.  The parish house seemed to float precariously on its surface.