He went into the vestry room, saying to himself, "What is the matter?" It was very common for the vestrymen to come around and say, "That was fine, Ingraham. Just what ought to be said," but to-day the only person that waited on him at the door as he came out was Miss Sarah Kenton, a lady of sixty or so, whom he and Ralph were accustomed to call, "Our Intellectual." Miss Sarah had had a literary experience, she had written books. There was no subject which ever came up on which she did not have a pronounced opinion. It must be confessed that she held most of Sabinsport in awe. With Dick, she had always been as nearly humble as was possible for her, for Dick was a man who had seen most of the world which Miss Sarah had not. Besides, his reading and thinking, even she admitted, was much broader and mellower than hers. Almost invariably Miss Sarah approved of Dick, but this morning when he came out she was waiting for him very rigid and very stern, and what she said was to the point. "You have made a great mistake, Mr. Ingraham, in your sermon this morning. You have outraged us and you have injured yourself. No matter what we would _do_ if we were given the direct alternative of sparing Germany or injuring her--an alternative which can only be hypothetical, and therefore should not be discussed now even as a 'mere dream'--no matter, I say, what we would _do_ if face to face with such an alternative, we don't want people to talk to us now about sparing the smiling fields and cheerful little happy homes of Germany! It isn't that we are bloodthirsty, but we are nauseated, Richard Ingraham, at talking about the blessed state of Germany compared with the desolation she has made in other countries. We don't want to hear about it." And Miss Sarah turned on her heel and walked down the street, indignation and disgust in every tap of her shoe on the pavement. What Miss Sarah had so pointedly put straight to Dick himself, his retiring congregation was saying in more or less abbreviated and moderated form to one another. "I can't see it," said one; "it's looking too far ahead to talk like that. Besides, it sounds like peace propaganda to me, and I won't stand for that, even from the Domine, much as I have always believed in him." "It's pacifist talk," said another. "Makes me feel as if we'd been harboring a serpent in our bosom through all these years. It might be all very well to talk about a peaceful walk to Berlin if the Germans were not Germans, but they are Germans, the people who have stood for all these atrocities, who have been militarized out of all semblance to human beings, they must have their lesson. It's a church for a church, a cottage for a cottage, I think." "He's all wrong," said another. "Get them with their backs to the wall and they would fight like hell, for they've got it into their heads that our men would do every fearful thing to their women and children that they have done to ours."