Cunning Workmen

Miss Cora Parkhurst has perfected the art of looking devout while preparing absolutely nothing for her Sunday school class. She floats through lessons like a butterfly, beautiful and hollow, while the young women under her care deserve far better. Across town, Mr. Robert Hammond teaches his boys with genuine fervor and sleepless preparation. When he invites Cora to a teachers' meeting, expecting to find a kindred spirit, he discovers instead a woman who has never once considered what it means to actually believe. Her fiancé, George Tracy, watches these religious interruptions to his courtship with growing resentment, he wants the Cora who laughs at dances, not the one who might actually have to think. But Cora stands at a crossroads: continue performing faith she has never felt, or discover what Christianity demands beyond church attendance. Pansy, writing in the early twentieth century, was nobody's idea of a subtle moralist, and this novel doesn't pretend otherwise. It is sharp, purposeful, and entirely sure that the gap between pretending to be good and actually being good is the most important gap a person can close.