“Why,” he said, “we want the best there is.  That building was a barn, I’ll admit, but it is strongly built, and we expect to fix it pretty thoroughly.  We have a gift from the Board of Home Missions and Church Extension, and we match that with as much again of our own money, enough in all to swing the building around off the alley, put it on a new foundation next to the church, and remodel it for our needs.”

“That’s news to me,” said J.W., “though of course I’m glad to hear it.  But I didn’t know that the Board put money into such work as this.  Somehow I supposed you were under the Board of Education for Negroes.”

“No, not for this sort of church work,” the colored pastor answered.  “I was ‘under’ the Board of Education for Negroes, as you put it, for a long time myself, in the days when it was called the Freedmen’s Aid Society.  And so was my wife.  But now we’re doing missionary work, and that’s the other Board’s job.”

“Oh, yes,” J.W. assented.  “I might have known that.  And you mean that you were under the Freedmen’s Aid Society when you were going to school—­is that it?”

“That’s it,” said Pastor Driver, with a gleaming smile.  “I was in two of the schools.  Philander Smith College, at Little Rock, Arkansas, and Clark University, at Atlanta, Georgia.  Then I got my theological course at Gammon, on the same campus as Clark.”

“You say your wife was in school too?”

“Yes”—­with an even brighter smile—­“she was at Clark when I met her. 
Like me, she attended two schools on that campus.  The other was Thayer
Home, a girls’ dormitory, supported by the Woman’s Home Missionary
Society.”

“A home?  Then how could it be a school?” J.W. asked.

“That’s just it, Mr. Farwell,” the minister explained.  “It was a school of home life, not only cooking and sewing and scrubbing, and what all you think of as domestic science, but a school of the home spirit—­just the thing my people need.  Thayer was, and is, a place where the girl students of Clark University learn how to make real homes.  And in the college classes they learn what you might suppose any college student would learn.  That’s why I said Mrs. Driver went to two schools.”

J.W. recalled the Hightower speech of the night before, and the discussion with Mr. Drury on the way home.  He wanted to go into it all with this pastor, who wasn’t much past his own age, and evidently had some ideas.  For the first time he wondered too how it happened that in that draft of the Everyday Doctrines of Delafield they had altogether ignored the Negro.  Was that a symptom of something?  Then he remembered his errand, and the work which was waiting up at the store.

So he said:  “Excuse me, Mr. Driver, for being so inquisitive.  I’ve never thought much about our church’s colored work, but what I heard at last night’s meeting started me.  Rather curious that I should be here talking about it with you the very next morning, isn’t it?  But about that roofing, now.  Of course you’ll look around and get other estimates, but anyway I’d be glad to take the measurements and give you our figures.  I promise you they’ll be worth considering.”