Not this one, whose good spirit warned him that his puissance lay rather with groups of men than with individuals.

From back of the chancel railing he could sway the crowd and make it all his own; whereas, taking that same crowd singly, and beyond his sacerdotal functions, he might be at the mercy of each man composing it.

He knew, in short, that Cyrus Browett as one of his congregation on a Sabbath morning would be a mere atom in the plastic cosmos below him; whereas Browett by himself, with the granite hardness of his crag-like face, his cool little green eyes--unemotional as two algebraic x's--would be a matter fearfully different.

Even his white moustache, close-clipped as his own hedges, and guarding a stiff, chilled mouth, was a thing grimly repressed, telling that the man was quite invulnerable to his own vanity.

A human Browett would have permitted that moustache to mitigate its surroundings with some flowing grace.