The Slanderers by Warwick Deeping

MRS. MINCE was in possession of her husband's study, a melancholy room whose single window looked forth upon a red-brick wall and a corner of Mr. Mince's vegetable garden. The room was carpeted with red drugget and curtained with dingy green plush. A forcible aroma of stale tobacco-smoke pervaded the air. Ranged along one wall were a number of dilapidated leather chairs like needy pensioners, the seats of the uninitiated who came on certain occasions to receive wisdom from Mr. Mince's lips. A deal bookcase stood with warped shelves beneath a ponderous infliction of theological literature. The very books appeared dreary monuments of a dogmatism that had outlived its age. As for the room, it seemed to smell of Calvin and to echo the barbaric incongruities of the Athanasian Creed. It suggested a geological museum in its atmosphere, save that geology stands in peril of being dubbed heretical, and Mr. Mince's sacerdotal fossils were orthodox to the last letter.

Mrs. Mince was in possession of her husband's desk-chair, that solemn pedestal whence the sage gave to Saltire those luminous moments of spiritual exaltation begot of brandy and tobacco. Opposite the vicaress, on one of the sedilia bankrupt of horse-hair, sat that estimable person Mrs. Primmer, who had dwelt as cook for seven years under the parsonic roof and had earned a reputation for sober saintliness and extreme economy. Mrs. Primmer was garbed in her best for the occasion, a lavish outlay of crape and jet beads testifying to the woe that had once made of her a widow. She was one of Mrs. Mince's "props of honesty," an estimable errant angel in cloth boots and crape.