He had other weaknesses than flowers. The walls of his long living-room were lined with books, many of them "poetry-books," and the rector was reported to have read them all. Passers-by often heard him playing softly on his mother's old piano, and more than once he had been discovered in the kitchen, cooking his own dinner. The one servant he kept was an ancient negress addicted to the use of whisky and cocaine. To those who remonstrated with him for keeping the old woman, he explained that he got her very cheap because of her habits; but the community suspected other reasons, and despised him accordingly. Their scorn of his "softness," however, failed to extend to the man himself. Different, they found him, reserved, a little cold, unless they happened to be in trouble; but never alien. For one thing, he had inherited from his father a gift that made "the French doctor" long remembered in that horse-raising community. It was an understanding of horses, indeed of all brute creatures, that amounted almost to wizardry. There was never a colt so unmanageable that he could not bring it to terms, without the aid of either whip or spur; never an equine ailment too subtle for him to discover and alleviate. At all hours of the day or night owners of sick beasts sent for the young rector as they had sent for his father, confident of willing assistance. He had created his reputation by entering, against all protests, the stall of a crazed stallion which had just mangled its groom. "I want to look at his mouth," he explained. "Just as I thought! It's an ulcerated tooth. Give me my lancet. No wonder the poor beast was vicious!" Philip had made the discovery among animals made by his father among men, that most wickedness may be traced to physical causes. He had also been heard to say, not very originally, that horses needed more care than people, because people had speech and religion to help them and horses had neither; a saying which deeply endeared him to a community that ranks its thoroughbreds with its wives.