Here Harry took a short rest from the sermon, to contemplate
the amazing moral phenomenon: how robust can be a wife's faith
in a commonplace husband!

"Now, this man," reflected Harry, growing interested in his own fancies,
"this man never can have LIVED! He doesn't know what it is
to suffer, he has only vegetated! Doubtless, in a prosaic way,
he loves his wife and children; but can a fellow who talks
like him have any delicate sympathies or any romance about him?
He looks honest; I think he is a right good fellow and works
like a soldier; but to be so stupid as he is, ought to HURT!"

Harry felt a whimsical moving of sympathy towards the preacher.
He wondered why he continually made gestures with the left arm,
never with his right.

"It gives a one-sided effect to his eloquence," said he.
But he thought that he understood when an unguarded movement
revealed a rent which had been a mended place in the surplice.

"Poor fellow," said Harry. He recalled how, as a boy, he had
gone to a fancy-dress ball in Continental smallclothes, so small
that he had been strictly cautioned by his mother and sisters not
to bow except with the greatest care, lest he rend his magnificence
and reveal that it was too tight to allow an inch of underclothing.
The stockings, in particular, had been short, and his sister
had providently sewed them on to the knee-breeches, and to guard
against accidents still further, had pinned as well as sewed,
the pins causing Harry much anguish.