I dressed, and had my breakfast, and drove to St. Bartholomew’s.  It was a November morning, bright and sunny, as warm as summer; and it is always such a pleasure to see that goodly company of ladies and gentlemen, so perfectly groomed, so perfectly mannered, breathing a sense of peace and well being.  Ah, that wonderful sense of well being!  “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world!” And what a curious contrast with the Labor Temple!  For a moment I doubted Carpenter; surely these ladies with their decorative bonnets, their sweet perfumes, their gowns of rose and lilac and other pastel shades—­surely they were more important life-products than women in frowsy and dowdy imitation clothes!  Surely it was better to be serene and clean and pleasant, than to be terrible and bewildered, sick and quarrelsome!  I was seized by a frenzy, a sort of instinctive animal lust for this life of ease and prettiness.  No matter if those dirty, raucous-voiced hordes of strikers, and others of their “ilk”—­as the “Times” phrased it—­did have to wash my clothes and scrub my floors, just so that I stayed clean and decent!

I bowed to a score or two of the elegant ladies, and to their escorts in shiny top hats and uncreased kid gloves, and went into the exquisite church with its glowing stained glass window, and looked up over the altar—­and there stood Carpenter!  I tell you, it gave me a queer shock.  There he was, up in the window, exactly where he had always been; I thought I had suddenly wakened from a dream.  There had been no “prophet fresh from God,” no mass-meeting at Grant Hall, no editorial in the “Times”!  But suddenly I heard a voice at my elbow:  “Billy, what is this awful thing you’ve been doing?” It was my Aunt Caroline, and I asked what she meant, and she answered, “That terrible prophet creature, and getting your name into the papers!”

So I knew it was true, and I walked with my dear, sweet old auntie down the aisle, and there sat Aunt Jennie, with her two lanky girls who have grown inches every time I run into them; and also Uncle Timothy.  Uncle Timothy was my guardian until I came of age, so I am a little in awe of him, and now I had to listen to his whispered reproaches—­it being the first principle of our family never to “get into the papers.”  I told him that it wasn’t my fault I had been knocked down by a mob, and surely I couldn’t help it if this man Carpenter found me while I was unconscious, and made me well.  Nor could I fail to be polite to my benefactor, and try to help him about.  My Uncle Timothy was amazed, because he had accepted the “Times” story that it was all a “movie” hoax.  Everybody will tell you in Western City that they “never believe a word they read in the ‘Times’”; but of course they do—­they have to believe something, and what else have they?