His knowledge of her powers of discrimination was not at fault. Phyllis never for a moment thought of him as posturing. She did him more than justice. She regarded him as terribly in earnest; no man unless one who was terribly in earnest could have written that book--a book which she felt was bound to alienate from him all the people who had previously honored him and delighted to listen to his preaching. Someone had said in her hearing that the preaching of George Holland was, compared to the preaching of the average clergyman, as the electric light is to the gas--the gas of a street lamp. She had flushed with pleasure,--that had been six months ago,--when it first occurred to her that to be the wife of a distinguished clergyman, who was also a scholar, was the highest vocation to which a woman could aspire. She had told her father of this testimony to the ability of the rector of St. Chad’s--pride had been in her voice and eyes. “The man who said that was a true critic,” her father had remarked. “Electric light? Quite so. In the absence of sunlight the electric light does extremely well for the requirements of the average man and woman. Your critic said nothing about volts?” That was how her father became irritating to her occasionally--leading up to some phrase which he had in his collection of bric-a-brac. “Volts!” Yes, she felt that the sincerity of George Holland would alienate from him all the people who had previously held him in high esteem. Although she was a daughter of Philistia, it had never occurred to her that there is such a thing as a _succes scandale_, and that the effect of such an incident in connection with the rector of a fashionable church rarely leads to his isolation.