In the Vestry he found Canon Dobell and Canon Rogers. Dobell, the Minor
Canon who was singing the service, was a short, round, chubby clergyman,
thirty-eight years of age, whose great aim in life was to have an easy
time and agree with every one. He lived with a sister in a little house in
the Precincts and gave excellent dinners. Very different was Canon Rogers,
a thin esthetic man with black bushy eyebrows, a slight stoop and thin
brown hair. He took life with grim seriousness. He was a stupid man but
obstinate, dogmatic, and given to the condemnation of his fellow-men. He
hated innovations as strongly as the Archdeacon himself, but with his
clinging to old forms and rituals there went no self-exaltation. He was a
cold-blooded man, although his obstinacy seemed sometimes to point to a
fiery fanaticism. But he was not a fanatic any more than a mule is one
when he plants his feet four-square and refuses to go forward. No
compliments nor threats could move him; he would have lived, had he had a
spark of asceticism, a hermit far from the haunts of men, but even that
withdrawal would have implied devotion. He was devoted to no one, to no
cause, to no religion, to no ambition. He spent his days in maintaining
things as they were, not because he loved them, simply because he was
obstinate. Brandon quite frankly hated him.

In the farther room the choir-boys were standing in their surplices,
whispering and giggling. The sound of the bell was suddenly emphatic.
Canon Rogers stood, his hands folded motionless, gazing in front of him.
Dobell, smiling so that a dimple appeared in each cheek, said in his
chuckling whisper to Brandon:

"Render comes to-day, doesn't he?"

"Ronder?" Brandon repeated, coming abruptly out of his secret exultation.