Edwin enjoyed the psalms. There was even something familiar and pleasant in the tunes of the Cathedral Psalter after the exotic harmonies of St. Luke’s. He sang the tenor part (when last he remembered singing them it had been alto) and lost his sense of his surroundings in the beauty of the words. In the middle of them, however, he became conscious of his father singing too. He had never sat next to his father in church before. His mother had always separated them: and for this reason he had never before heard his father sing. The result filled him with horror. Mr. Ingleby had no idea of tune and was apparently unconscious of this disability. Edwin reflected how great an interest music had been in his mother’s life: realised that from this part of her his father must always have been isolated by this natural barrier. It was strange. . . . He began to wonder what they really had in common. He remembered Griffin. No . . . not that. . . . This speculation he did his best to stifle while the rector galloped over the desert wastes of the Litany: but the kneeling posture was rendered uncomfortable by the presence in front of him of an old maiden lady who smelt of caraway seeds, a spice that Edwin detested. A hymn followed. Luckily, this time his father did not sing. Poor creature. . . . Edwin was now so ashamed of his criticism that he almost wished he would. And then they settled down to the sermon. From the first Edwin had decided that he would not listen. The simple austerity of the service at St. Luke’s, where the liturgy was allowed to unfold its sonorous splendours for itself, had bred in him a distaste for the rector’s histrionics. So he did not hear them, contenting himself with a detailed examination of such of the congregation as were within his range. He saw them classified in their social gradations from the pompous distinction of Sir Joseph Hingston, the ironmaster, who, in spite of his baronetcy, wore a frock coat that did not differ greatly from that of Mr. Ingleby, to their late maid, dressed in black, and now conscious of the reflected glory that she had almost sacrificed by leaving. And the thing that impressed him most about this very various gathering was their shabbiness, and the fact that nearly all of those whom he knew seemed so much older than they had been when he last saw them. Thinking of the light and elegance and cleanliness of St. Luke’s, it appeared to him that Halesby was indeed a muddy and obscure backwater and that his own people, sitting in the pew beside him, were in reality as much fitted to inhabit it as all the rest of the shabby congregation. Even the Willises, his mother’s new friends, whom a wave of commercial prosperity had carried forward into one of the front pews of the nave within calculable distance of the glory of Sir Joseph Hingston himself, would have looked very ordinary folk in the chapel at St. Luke’s.