‘I cannot agree with the gentleman in the magenta coat that Potter’s Pond is only an ugly little hamlet. But it is certainly a very distant and quiet village; so that it seems quite strange, like a village of a hundred years ago. The spinsters are really spinsters – damn it, you could almost see them spin[9]. The ladies are not just ladies. They are gentlewomen; and their chemist is not a chemist, but an apothecary; pronounced potecary. They think that doctors like myself just help the apothecary. But I am seen as rather a new addition, because I am only fifty-seven years old and have only been in the county for twenty-eight years. The lawyer looks as if he had known his job for twenty-eight thousand years. Then there is the old Admiral, who is just like a Dickens illustration[10]; with a house full of swords and fish and even with a telescope.’
‘I think,’ said Father Brown, ‘there are always a certain number of Admirals left on the shore. But I never understood why they get so far inland.’
‘Certainly no lifeless place in the depths of the country is finished without one of these little creatures,’ said the doctor. ‘And then, of course, there is the proper sort of clergyman; Tory and High Church dating from Archbishop Laud; more of an old woman than any of the old women. He’s a white-haired old bird, more easily shocked than the spinsters. Indeed, the gentlewomen, though Puritan in their principles, are sometimes pretty plainin their speech; as the real Puritans were. Once or twice I have heard old Miss Carstairs-Carew use expressions as lively as anything in the Bible[11]. The dear old clergyman is busy reading the Bible; but I think he closes his eyes when he comes to those words. Well, you know I’m not very modern. I don’t enjoy this fooling around of the Bright Young Things[12] – ’
‘The Bright Young Things don’t enjoy it,’ said Father Brown. ‘That is the real tragedy.’
‘But I am naturally more in touch with the world than the people in this old village,’ said the doctor. ‘And I had reached a point when I almost welcomed the Great Scandal.’
‘Don’t say the Bright Young Things have found Potter’s Pond after all,’ said the priest, smiling.
‘Oh, even our scandal is on old-established melodramatic lines. Need I say[13]