For some time, too, I could find no entrance at all into the mind of
Lena Houghton. Try as I would, I could not distract her attention
or gain the slightest hold upon her, and I really believe I should
have been altogether baffled, had not the rector unconsciously come
to my aid.

All through the prayers and psalms I had fought a desperate fight
without gaining a single inch. Then the rector walked over to the
lectern, and the moment he opened his mouth I knew that my time had
come, and that there was a very fair chance of victory before me.
Whether this clergyman had a toothache, or a headache, or a heavy
load on his mind, I cannot say, but his reading was more lugubrious
than the wind in an equinoctial gale. I have since observed that he
was only a degree worse than many other clerical readers, and that a
strange and delightfully mistaken notion seems prevalent that the
Bible must be read in a dreary and unnatural tone of voice, or with
a sort of mournful monotony; it is intended as a sort of reverence,
but I suspect that it often plays into the hands of my progenitor,
as it most assuredly did in the present instance.

Hardly had the rector announced, "Here beginneth the forty-fourth
verse of the sixteenth chapter of the book of the prophet Ezekiel,"
than a sort of relaxation took place in the mind I was attacking.
Lena Houghton's attention could only have been given to the drearily
read lesson by a very great effort; she was a little lazy and did
not make the effort, she thought how nice it was to sit down again,
and then the melancholy voice lulled her into a vague interval of
thoughtless inactivity. I promptly seized my opportunity, and in a
moment her whole mind was full of me. She was an excitable,