Explore "Father Payne" by A.C. Benson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
We were all at dinner one day, and Father Payne came in, in an excited mood, with a letter in his hand. "Here's a bit of nonsense," he said. "Here's my old friend Davenport giving me what he calls a piece of his mind -- he can't have much left -- about my 'celibate brotherhood,' as he calls it. It's all the other way! I am rather relieved when I hear that any of you people are happily engaged to be married. Celibacy is the danger of my experiment, not the object of it."
"Do you wish us to be married?" said Kaye. "That's new to me. I thought this was a little fortress against the eternal feminine."