The Reverend Osney Possnett, who had never had a chance in his life of reaching a point of declamation beyond what was necessary for the adequate reproof of a ploughman for neglecting to attend Divine service, and who had never been addressed except with respect bordering upon awe since the days of his curacy, found himself in a mental condition for which the word flabbergasted was invented by a philologist in the lumber trade. When he had told Priscilla that she was forgetting herself he forgot himself. He forgot his part. He had come to the Manor House, on the invitation of his churchwarden, Farmer Wadhurst, to administer a severe rebuke to Farmer Wadhurst’s self-willed daughter, whose early religious instruction he had superintended, and who, he saw no reason to doubt, would be at once amenable to his ministration; but he found himself forced not only to enter into something of an argument with her--a course of action which was very distasteful to him--but also to be reproved by her for a sensualist, looking at the fleshly side of marriage instead of the spiritual--to be told by her that his opinion was of no greater value than that of an ordinary man who had never been granted the distinction of holy orders, which the whole world recognizes as a proof of the possession of the highest culture, pagan as well as Christian, the most virile human intellect, and an intuitive knowledge of mankind, such as ordinary people can only gain by experience! He had come to be letter-perfect in the part which he had meant to play in her presence, and with a good working knowledge of the “business” of the part; but she had failed to act up to him. She had disregarded the cues which he waited for from her, and the result was naturally the confusion that now confronted him--that now overwhelmed him. He had in his mind actually, if unconsciously, the feeling that it was her failure in regard to her cues which had put him out, when he cried: “Priscilla, you forget yourself.”