Everyone agreed that it was to be the most beautiful church in the
country, consistent with the money, and no one doubted that it would be,
especially as everyone except Mrs. Taylor felt that in confiding the
matter to the leading architect in Benham the committee would be
exercising a wise and intelligent discretion. Mr. Pierce, the individual
suggested, had never, until recently, employed the word architect in
speaking of himself, and he pronounced it, as did some of the committee,
"arshitect," shying a little at the word, as though it were caviare and
anything but American. He was a builder, practised by a brief but
rushing career in erecting houses, banks, schools, and warehouses
speedily and boldly. He had been on the spot when the new growth of
Benham began, and his handiwork was writ large all over the city. The
city was proud of him, and had, as it were, sniffed when Joel Flagg went
elsewhere for a man to build his new house. Surely, if it were necessary
to pay extra for that sort of thing, was not home talent good enough?
Yet it must be confessed that the ugly splendor of the Flagg mediæval
castle had so far dazed the eye of Benham that its "arshitect" had felt
constrained, in order to keep up with the times, to try fancy flights of
his own. He had silenced any doubting Thomases by his latest effort, a
new school-house, rich in rampant angles and scrolls, on the brown-stone
front of which the name _Flagg School_ appeared in ambitious, distorted
hieroglyphics.

Think what a wealth of imagery in the tossing of the second O on top of
the L. If artistic novelty and genius were sought for the new church,
here it was ready to be invoked. Besides, Mr. Pierce was a
brother-in-law of one of the members of the committee, and, though the
committee had the fear of God in their hearts in the erection of his
sanctuary, it was not easy to protest against the near relative of a
fellow member, especially one so competent.