The head waiter there is an old Viennese friend of mine and looks

after me beautifully. I've never been there with a lady before,
and he's sure to ask me afterwards, in his fatherly way, if we're

engaged."
The lunch was a success in every way. There was just enough

orchestral effort to immerse the conversation without drowning it,
and Youghal was an attentive and inspired host. Through an open

doorway Elaine could see the cafe reading-room, with its imposing
array of NEUE FREIE PRESSE, BERLINER TAGEBLATT, and other exotic

newspapers hanging on the wall. She looked across at the young man
seated opposite her, who gave one the impression of having centred

the most serious efforts of his brain on his toilet and his food,
and recalled some of the flattering remarks that the press had

bestowed on his recent speeches.
"Doesn't it make you conceited, Courtenay," she asked, "to look at

all those foreign newspapers hanging there and know that most of
them have got paragraphs and articles about your Persian speech?"

Youghal laughed.
"There's always a chastening corrective in the thought that some of

them may have printed your portrait. When once you've seen your
features hurriedly reproduced in the MATIN, for instance, you feel

you would like to be a veiled Turkish woman for the rest of your
life."

And Youghal gazed long and lovingly at his reflection in the
nearest mirror, as an antidote against possible incitements to

humility in the portraitgallery of fame.
Elaine felt a certain soothed satisfaction in the fact that this

young man, whose knowledge of the Middle East was an embarrassment
to Ministers at question time and in debate, was showing himself

equally well-informed on the subject of her culinary likes and
dislikes. If Suzette could have been forced to attend as a witness

at a neighbouring table she would have felt even happier.
"Did the head waiter ask if we were engaged?" asked Elaine, when

Courtenay had settled the bill, and she had finished collecting her
sunshade and gloves and other impedimenta from the hands of

obsequious attendants.
"Yes," said Youghal, "and he seemed quite crestfallen when I had to

say 'no.'"
"It would be horrid to disappoint him when he's looked after us so

charmingly," said Elaine; "tell him that we are."
CHAPTER X

THE Rutland Galleries were crowded, especially in the neighbourhood
of the tea-buffet, by a fashionablethrong of art-patrons which had

gathered to inspect Mervyn Quentock's collection of Society
portraits. Quentock was a young artist whose abilities were just

receiving due recognition from the critics; that the recognition
was not overdue he owed largely to his perception of the fact that

if one hides one's talent under a bushel one must be careful to
point out to everyone the exact bushel under which it is hidden.

There are two manners of receiving recognition: one is to be
discovered so long after one's death that one's grandchildren have

to write to the papers to establish their relationship; the other
is to be discovered, like the infant Moses, at the very outset of

one's career. Mervyn Quentock had chosen the latter and happier
manner. In an age when many aspiring young men strive to advertise

their wares by imparting to them a freakish imbecility, Quentock
turned out work that was characterised by a pleasing delicate

restraint, but he contrived to herald his output with a certain
fanfare of personal eccentricity, thereby compelling an attention

which might otherwise have strayed past his studio. In appearance
he was the ordinary cleanly young Englishman, except, perhaps, that

his eyes rather suggested a library edition of the Arabian Nights;
his clothes matched his appearance and showed no taint of the

sartorial disorder by which the bourgeois of the garden-city and
the Latin Quarter anxiously seeks to proclaim his kinship with art

and thought. His eccentricity took the form of flying in the face
of some of the prevailing social currents of the day, but as a

reactionary, never as a reformer. He produced a gasp of admiring
astonishment in fashionable circles by refusing to paint actresses

- except, of course, those who had left the legitimate drama to
appear between the boards of Debrett. He absolutely declined to

execute portraits of Americans unless they hailed from certain
favoured States. His "water-colour-line," as a New York paper

phrased it, earned for him a crop of angry criticisms and a shoal
of Transatlantic commissions, and criticism and commissions were

the things that Quentock most wanted.
"Of course he is perfectly right," said Lady Caroline Benaresq,

calmly rescuing a piled-up plate of caviare sandwiches from the
neighbourhood of a trio of young ladies who had established

themselves hopefully within easy reach of it. "Art," she
continued, addressing herself to the Rev. Poltimore Vardon, "has

always been geographically exclusive. London may be more important
from most points of view than Venice, but the art of portrait

painting, which would never concern itself with a Lord Mayor,
simply grovels at the feet of the Doges. As a Socialist I'm bound

to recognise the right of Ealing to compare itself with Avignon,
but one cannot expect the Muses to put the two on a level."

"Exclusiveness," said the Reverend Poltimore, "has been the
salvation of Art, just as the lack of it is proving the downfall of

religion. My colleagues of the cloth go about zealously
proclaiming the fact that Christianity, in some form or other, is

attracting shoals of converts among all sorts of races and tribes,
that one had scarcely ever heard of, except in reviews of books of

travel that one never read. That sort of thing was all very well
when the world was more sparsely populated, but nowadays, when it

simply teems with human beings, no one is particularly impressed by
the fact that a few million, more or less, of converts, of a low

stage of mental development, have accepted the teachings of some
particular religion. It not only chills one's enthusiasm, it

positively shakes one's convictions when one hears that the things
one has been brought up to believe as true are being very

favourably spoken of by Buriats and Samoyeds and Kanakas."
The Rev. Poltimore Vardon had once seen a resemblance in himself to

Voltaire, and had lived alongside the comparison ever since.
"No modern cult or fashion," he continued, "would be favourably

influenced by considerations based on statistics; fancy adopting a
certain style of hat or cut of coat, because it was being largely

worn in Lancashire and the Midlands; fancy favouring a certain
brand of champagne because it was being extensively patronised in

German summer resorts. No wonder that religion is falling into
disuse in this country under such ill-directed methods."

"You can't prevent the heathen being converted if they choose to
be," said Lady Caroline; "this is an age of toleration."

"You could always deny it," said the Rev. Poltimore, "like the
Belgians do with regrettable occurrences in the Congo. But I would

go further than that. I would stimulate the waning enthusiasm for
Christianity in this country by labelling it as the exclusive

possession of a privileged few. If one could induce the Duchess of
Pelm, for instance, to assert that the Kingdom of Heaven, as far as

the British Isles are concerned, is strictlylimited to herself,
two of the under-gardeners at Pelmby, and, possibly, but not

certainly, the Dean of Dunster, there would be an instant reshaping
of the popular attitude towards religious convictions and

observances. Once let the idea get about that the Christian Church
is rather more exclusive than the Lawn at Ascot, and you would have

a quickening of religious life such as this generation has never
witnessed. But as long as the clergy and the religious

organisations advertise their creed on the lines of 'Everybody
ought to believe in us: millions do,' one can expect nothing but

indifference and waning faith."
"Time is just as exclusive in its way as Art," said Lady Caroline.

"In what way?" said the Reverend Poltimore.
"Your pleasantries about religion would have sounded quite clever

and advanced in the early 'nineties. To-day they have a dreadfully
warmed-up flavour. That is the great delusion of you would-be

advanced satirists; you imagine you can sit down comfortably for a
couple of decades sayingdaring and startling things about the age

you live in, which, whatever other defects it may have, is
certainly not standing still. The whole of the Sherard Blaw school

of discursive drama suggests, to my mind, Early Victorian furniture