Mrs. Ewbert fretted under the nickname, with an impatience perhaps the greater because she had merely married into the Rixonite church, and had accepted its doctrine because she loved her husband rather than because she had been convinced of its truth. From the first she complained that the Rixonites were cold; and if there was anything Emily Ewbert had always detested, it was coldness. No one, she once testified, need talk to her of their passive waiting for a sign, as a religious life; if there were not some strong, central belief, some rigorously formulated creed, some-- "Good old herb and root theology," her husband interrupted. "Yes!" she heedlessly acquiesced. "Unless there is something like _that_, all the waiting in the world won't"--she cast about for some powerful image--"won't keep the cold chills from running down _my_ back when I think of my duty as a Christian." "Then don't think of your duty as a Christian, my dear," he pleaded, with the caressing languor which sometimes made her say, in reprobation of her own pleasure in it, that _he_ was a Rixonite, if there ever _was_ one. "Think of your duty as a woman, or even as a mortal." "I believe you're thinking of making a sermon on that," she retorted; and he gave a sad, consenting laugh, as if it were quite true, though in fact he never really preached a sermon on mere femininity or mere mortality. His sermons were all very good, however; and that was another thing that put her out of patience with his Rixonite parishioners--that they should sit there Sunday after Sunday, year in and year out, and listen to his beautiful sermons, which ought to melt their hearts and bring tears into their eyes, and not seem influenced by them any more than if they were so many dry chips. "But think how long they've had the gospel," he suggested, in a pensive self-derision which she would not share. "Well, one thing, Clarence," she summed up, "I'm not going to let you throw yourself away on them; and unless you see some of the university people in the congregation, I want you to use your old sermons from this out. They'll never know the difference; and I'm going to make you take one of the old sermons along every Sunday, so as to be prepared." II.