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Practically uninjured was the group that Manny Rosen had characterized as The Strong Stomach Club, whose fall had been the gentlest and the shortest: the Shelbys, Muller, the grab-bag table, the Rogos and the Rosens now began to extricate themselves.
    Mike Rogo, tossed aside the slender top of the Christmas tree, its crowning star broken in half and with the effort gasped, 'Jesus Christ! What's happened?'
    His wife Linda screamed over and over again, 'Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Jesus, Mary, come to our aid!'
    It was Jane Shelby who called the roll for her family, 'Dick? Susan? Robin? Are you all right? Dick, what's happened?'
    Shelby answered, 'I don't know, I think we've turned over. Stay by me all of you. Watch out for broken glass.'
    Manny Rosen picked himself up to a tinkling of shards that had all but covered him and which now fell from his shoulders. He said, 'Are you all right, Mamma?'
    Belle replied, 'Manny are you all right? You ain't hurt or anything, are you?'
    Manny said, 'I'm asking you.'
    His wife said, 'If I can ask you, I'm okay, ain't I?'
    'Can you stand up?' He assisted her to her feet and they stood there, holding on to one another, two grotesque figures in the wrong-way lighting. He short and stocky; she taller than him, enormously obese, trembling in spite of her words.
    Hubie Muller helped Miss Kinsale to arise. The lapels of his dinner-jacket were soiled by some sauce that had come spurting out of a dish flying through the air. She was bleeding from a cut on her lip. He took out his pocket handkerchief and staunched it, saying in his soft and extraordinarily gentle voice, 'Are you all right? I think something awful has happened to us.'
    She made no reply but went away from him, and wading through the ankle-deep debris knelt alongside the Reverend Scott and bowed her head. Blood from her mouth fell in diminishing drops on to her folded hands.
    No one had been aware that the young Minister had untangled himself from all those at his table and near by who had been thrown into a heap, and climbing to his knees some little distance away from them, hands unclasped, arms spread wide apart, his gaze turned upwards to the monstrous aspect of the things hanging from the ceiling, he was addressing his God. The fighting glare was in his eyes.
    He prayed, 'Lord, we are in deep trouble. You have seen fit to try us. We shall not fail you.'
    Miss Kinsale sighed, 'Amen! Help us, Father!'
    Scott did not so much as glance at her, but continued, 'Lord, we ask nothing but that we shall be strong to meet the challenge You have set us, and that we shall not be found wanting. We shall fight to live for You.'
    Miss Kinsale added, 'Father, we will abide by Thy will.'
    The Reverend Frank Buzz Scott said, 'We ask You, Lord, for nothing but what You have given us, the chance to prove ourselves. We will not fail. Trust in us.'
    The Rosens, the Shelby family, the Rogos and Hubie Muller were drawn into an embarrassed group about the kneeling figure of Scott.
    To Muller came the thought: What an extraordinary kind of prayer! And then an even more absurd one: My God, he's wearing his college colours and telling God he's going out to win the big game. Has he gone out of his mind?
    He looked almost with relief upon the wispy person of Miss Kinsale kneeling next to him in her short, grey taffeta evening frock. The material at her shoulder was barely touching the cloth of the clergyman's outstretched sleeve. The simplicity of the words she was murmuring were almost a comforting counterpoint to the clergyman's strange perversions of the usual litany of prayers.
    Still dazed and hardly aware of what Scott was saying, Shelby yet was ashamed of him somehow. He was used to the preacher clad in surplice in the pulpit with his big Bible open, talking down to him from his elevation and sometimes when he listened to him, even saying things which made him think a little. It was all right in its proper setting, which included stained-glass