Miss Mole by E.H. Young — Read

If Hannah had chosen to look for them, she could have found as many reasons and excuses for Robert Corder's peculiarities as for those of Ethel and Ruth. Robert Corder himself did not seek excuses; he saw his troubles as the faults of other people and it did not occur to him that the chief of his difficulties was that he had been born too late. Thirty or forty years earlier, he would have been a happier man. It would not have been necessary, then, to make the mental compromises he found so bewildering; he would have been set firmly on the infallibility of his creed and his authority as its exponent would have been unquestioned. Life would have been simpler to direct and consequently simpler to live. It was the knowledge that infallibility of book, of man and of creed was increasingly denied, and with a strength under which one must bend or break, that took the full sweetness out of his position, and being a man of great energy but no intellect, he felt bound to give the appearance of keeping abreast of modern thought, while his mind resented, and did not really make, the effort. In the days when to doubt or to question was bad manners, if it was not sin, his work would have offered him everything he wanted, adulation, security of mind and station and the loyal following of that army of men and boys it had always been his ambition to lead. Self-confidence, physical strength, a manly exterior were his, but the army was merely a handful of old soldiers, suspicious of changes, and raw recruits, and of this disappointment, with its implication of failure in himself or his teaching, his encounter with Samuel Blenkinsop had reminded him. Those people in his chapel who kept the old simplicity and to whom he was God's vice-regent, were his inferiors, as he knew too well: most of his flock were his inferiors and this contributed to his comfort, but a few were his equals in ability, if not in state, and these accepted new ideas rather too quickly for the Reverend Robert, who liked to point the way himself, or else they took the Gospel with a literalness which was not practical. If Mrs. Spenser-Smith had not been a levelheaded woman, her husband would have given all he had to the poor, without considering their deserts. Fortunately, Mrs. Spenser-Smith and the Reverend Robert were of one mind about deserts, of which agreement a luxurious armchair in his study and a son at Oxford were proofs. There is no union, however, which does not involve chafing at times, and the pride he took in casually mentioning the son at Oxford was offset by his annoyance that Howard should have a privilege his father had missed and could have put to better use. Undeniably, a part of Howard's life was an unknown world to Robert Corder, and while this did not prevent him from criticism and informatory observations, it put him at a disadvantage for which he blamed his benefactress and subtly punished Howard.

And now Mrs. Spenser-Smith's anxiety for the general welfare of the family had brought Miss Mole into the house.