ONE:There was no question, however, about the devotion and strenuousness of his life. His congregation, in spite of the secession of such plain men as Mr Keeling, crammed his church to the doors and spilt into the street, and he kindled a religious fervour in the parish, which all the terrors of hell as set forth by his predecessor had been unable to fan into a blaze. In a thoroughly cheap but in a masterly and intelligible manner he preached the gospel, and in his life practised it, by incessant personal exertions, of which others as{109} well as himself were very conscious. It was more his surface than his essential self which was so deplorable a mass of affectation and amorousness, and the horror he inspired in minds of a certain calibre by his skippings and his shepherd��s crook and his little caresses was really too pitiless a condemnation. Indeed, the gravest of his errors was not so much in what he did, as his omission to consider what effect his affectionate dabs and touches and pawings might have on their recipients. He would, in fact, have been both amazed and shocked if he could have been an unseen witness of Alice Keeling��s proceedings when she found herself in the privacy of her own bedroom that night.Keeling went out through his book department, where he nodded to Propert, into the bustle of the square, noticing, with a satisfaction that never failed him, as he walked by the various doors of his block of building, how busy was the traffic in and out of the Stores. It was still an hour to sunset: on the left the municipal offices and town-hall rose pretentious and hideous against the blue of the southern sky, while in front to{82} the west the gray Gothic glories of the Cathedral, separated from the square by a line of canonical houses, aspired high above the house-roofs and leaf-laden elm-towers in the Close. The fact struck him that the front of the town-hall, with its wealth of fussy adornment, its meaningless rows of polished marble pilasters, its foolish little pinnacles and finials, was somehow strangely like the drawing-room in his own house, with its decorations selected by the amazingly futile taste of his wife. There was a very similar confusion of detail about the two, a kindred ostentation of unnecessary objects. There was waste in them both, expense that was not represented on the other side of the ledger by a credit balance of efficiency. No one took pleasure in the little pink granite pilasters between the lights of the windows in the town-hall, and certainly they were entirely useless. The money spent on them was thrown away: whereas money spent ought to yield its dividend, producing either something that was useful or something that gave pleasure. If you liked a thing it was worth paying for it, if it was directly useful it was worth paying for it. But where was the return on the money spent on pink pilasters or on the lilies painted on the huge looking-glass above his wife��s drawing-room chimney-piece? Those lilies certainly were not useful, since they prevented the mirror exercising its proper function of reflecting what stood in front of it. Or did they yield{83} a dividend in pleasure to Emmeline? He did not believe that they did: he felt sure that she had just bought No. 1 drawing-room suite dining-room suite with extras, as set forth in his catalogue. He knew the catalogues well: with extras No. 1 suite came to ��117. It had much in common with the front of the town-hall. So, too, if you came to consider it, had the crocodile with the calling-cards in the abominable hall.

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