To begin with, there was our vicar, Mr. Rowlands. A mild man, hampered by shyness and unconscious of the power of local gossip, he had made a grave mistake in marrying his curate. Mrs. Rowlands, who had been ordained a deaconess at the early age of 24, was a woman of strong, masterful character who had come into the parish with the almost expressed intention of “making things hum.” She was of the most violent Relativist school, and rumour said that she always omitted the Creed when she was conducting the service herself, and sat down, sometimes even whistling to herself, when Mr. Rowlands said it. Mr. Rowlands was of the old-fashioned evangelical school, and the village had grown accustomed to his ways: churchgoing was not common, but his slim figure in its plain cassock and penwipery sort of cap, bound for morning or evening service in church, was a familiar sight to all, and he was universally respected. The deaconess, Miss Anderson as she then was, became the subject of a local taboo; and a memorial, signed by twenty-eight communicants, was sent to the Bishop to uphold Mr. Rowlands against the misbehaviour of his impetuous colleague. It was while this document still lay—it is to be feared, unread—on the Bishop’s study table, that the unlooked-for Concordat between vicar and curate suddenly altered the whole situation; Mr. Rowlands, instead of laying a complaint against Miss Anderson, had determined to lead her to the altar. I do not know how they got on after that with the church services, for I was not _pratiquant_ as far as the village was concerned. It will have become obvious by now that my religious convictions at the time were not of the deepest, and my church attendance was confined to an occasional visit to Evensong in King’s Chapel, where the services were at that time adorably rendered. But in the life of our little community Mr. and Mrs. Rowlands counted for a good deal. He was of the eternal type produced by an established Christianity: you could picture him, with a few alterations of outward manner and expression, as a benign Caroline clergyman, happily married, writing love-poems to wholly imaginary young ladies with classical names, or as an old-fashioned High Churchman of the early Tractarian period receiving his “Tracts for the Times” regularly, and not knowing whether he stood on his head or his heels as he read them. He was obsessed with the consciousness that we lived in changeful times, and desperately convinced that “the Church” must have “an attitude” to take up about it all. Often he would deplore the fact that the Bishops did not “give him a lead”: for himself he never got nearer to an attitude than a profound conviction that “while on the one hand ... yet on the other hand...,” a turn of phrase which was so frequent in his sermons that Juliet Savage, who sat under him exasperated whenever she came to stay with me, said he was the only Christian she had ever met whose left-hand never knew what his right hand did.