H.E. Bates Companion

A forty-year old evangelist and his twenty-year-old assistant take a break from selling bibles and writing slogans on gates and telegraph poles. The girl attempts to interest the man sexually, but he is intent only on spreading the message: "Quick...Something short. God is love. Something short and sweet." The story joins others in condemning what Bates considered the life-negating philosophy of Methodism. In Something Short and Sweet (1937), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), Love in a Wych Elm and Other Stories (2009).