Читать книгу The Ball of Fire онлайн

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“And the gratification of the billionaire vestry,” she added, still annoyed with the Reverend Smith Boyd, though she did not know why.

He turned to her almost savagely.

“Have you no sense of reverence?” he demanded.

“For the church, or the creed, or the ministry? Not a particle!” she heartily assured him. “The church, as an instrument for good, has practically ceased to exist. Even charity, the greatest of the three principles upon which the church was originally founded, has been taken away from it, because the secular organisations dispense charity better and more sanely, and while the object is still alive.”

Again the Reverend Smith Boyd drew her out of the road, almost ungently, and unnecessarily in advance of need, to permit a thick man to glide leisurely by, on his stomach on a hand sled. He grinned up at them from under a stubby moustache, and waved a hand at them with a vigour which nearly ran him into a ditch; but a sharp scrape of his toe in the snow, made with a stab the expertness of which had come back to him through forty years, brought him into the path again, and he slid majestically onward, with happy forgetfulness of the dignity belonging to the president of the Towando Valley Railroad and a vestryman of Market Square Church.