II
The chapel of Abernathy College was full. In front were the gowned seniors, looking singularly like a row of armchairs covered with dust-cloths. On the platform, with the president and the senior members of the faculty, were the celebrities whose achievements were to be acknowledged by honorary degrees.
Besides the Reverend Elmer Gantry, these distinguished guests were the Governor of the state—who had started as a divorce lawyer but had reformed and enabled the public service corporations to steal all the waterpower in the state; Mr. B. D. Swenson, the automobile manufacturer, who had given most of the money for the Abernathy football stadium; and the renowned Eva Evaline Murphy, author, lecturer, painter, musician, and authority on floriculture, who was receiving a Litt. D. for having written (gratis) the new Abernathy College Song:
We’ll think of thee where’er we be,
On plain or mountain, town or sea,
Oh, let us sing how round us clings,
Dear Abernathy, thoooooooooughts—of—thee.
President Dodd was facing Elmer, and shouting: “—and now we have the privilege of conferring the degree of Doctor of Divinity upon one than whom no man in our honored neighboring state of Winnemac has done more to inculcate sound religious doctrine, increase the power of the church, uphold high standards of eloquence and scholarship, and in his own life give such an example of earnestness as is an inspiration to all of us!”
They cheered—and Elmer had become the Reverend Dr. Gantry.