only to very few outside the inner ring, which hat-bonnet she was

always careful to sit on for a few minutes before wearing. And it
was to this first and highest and best section of her social

scheme that she considered that bishops properly belonged. But
some bishops, and in particular such a comparatively bright

bishop as the Bishop of Princhester, she also thought of as being
just as comfortably accommodated in her second system, the

"serious liberal lot," which was more fatiguing and less boring,
which talked of books and things, visited the Bells, went to all

first-nights when Granville Barker was the producer, and knew and
valued people in the grey and earnest plains between the Cecils

and the Sidney Webbs. And thirdly there were the smart
intellectual lot, again not very well marked off, and on the

whole practicable to bishops, of whom fewer particulars are
needed because theirs is a perennialspecies, and then finally

there was that fourth world which was paradoxically at once very
brilliant and a little shady, which had its Night Club side, and

seemed to set no limit to its eccentricities. It seemed at times
to be aiming to shock and yet it had its standards, but here it

was that the dancers and actresses and forgiven divorcees came in
--and the bishops as a rule, a rule hitherto always respected,

didn't. This was the ultimate world of Mrs. Garstein Fellows; she
had no use for merely sporting people and the merely correct

smart and the duller county families, sets that led nowhere, and
it was from her fourth system of the Glittering Doubtfuls that

this party which made her hesitate over the bishop's telegram,
was derived.

She ran over their names as she sat considering her reply.
What was there for a bishop to object to? There was that

admirable American widow, Lady Sunderbund. She was enormously
rich, she was enthusiastic. She was really on probation for

higher levels; it was her decolletage delayed her. If only she
kept off theosophy and the Keltic renascence and her disposition

to profess wild intellectualpassions, there would be no harm in
her. Provided she didn't come down to dinner in anything too

fantastically scanty--but a word in season was possible. No!
there was no harm in Lady Sunderbund. Then there were Ridgeway

Kelso and this dark excitable Catholic friend of his, Paidraig
O'Gorman. Mrs. Garstein Fellows saw no harm in them. Then one had

to consider Lord Gatling and Lizzie Barusetter. But nothing
showed, nothing was likely to show even if there was anything.

And besides, wasn't there a Church and Stage Guild?
Except for those people there seemed little reason for alarm.

Mrs. Garstein Fellows did not know that Professor Hoppart, who so
amusingly combined a professorship of political economy with the

writing of music-hall lyrics, was a keen amateur theologian, nor
that Bent, the mental" target="_blank" title="a.感伤的；多愁善感的">sentimentalnovelist, had a similar passion. She

did not know that her own eldest son, a dark, romantic-looking
youngster from Eton, had also come to the theological stage of

development. She did however weigh the possibilities of too
liberal opinions on what are called social questions on the part

of Miss Sharsper, the novelist, and decided that if that lady was
watched nothing so terrible could be said even in an undertone;

and as for the Mariposa, the dancer, she had nothing but Spanish
and bad French, she looked all right, and it wasn't very likely

she would go out of her way to startle an Anglican bishop. Simply
she needn't dance. Besides which even if a man does get a glimpse

of a little something--it isn't as if it was a woman.
But of course if the party mustn't annoy the bishop, the bishop

must do his duty by the party. There must be the usual purple and
the silver buckles.

She wired back:
"A little party but it won't put you out send your man with

your change."
(2)

In making that promise Mrs. Garstein Fellows reckoned without
the morbid sensibility of the bishop's disorganized nervous

system and the unsuspected theological stirrings beneath the
apparent worldliness of Hoppart and Bent.

The trouble began in the drawing-room after dinner. Out of
deference to the bishop's abstinence the men did not remain to

smoke, but came in to find the Mariposa and Lady Sunderbund
smoking cigarettes, which these ladies continued to do a little

defiantly. They had hoped to finish them before the bishop came
up. The night was chilly, and a cheerful wood fire cracking and

banging on the fireplace emphasized the ordinary heating. Mrs.
Garstein Fellows, who had not expected so prompt an appearance of

the men, had arranged her chairs in a semicircle for a little
womanly gossip, and before she could intervene she found her

party, with the exception of Lord Gatling, who had drifted just a
little too noticeably with Miss Barnsetter into a window, sitting

round with a conscious air, that was perhaps just a trifle too
apparent, of being "good."

And Mr. Bent plunged boldly into general conversation.
"Are you reading anything now, Mrs. Garstein Fellows?" he

asked. "I'm an interested party."
She was standing at the side of the fireplace. She bit her lip

and looked at the cornice and meditated with a girlish
expression. "Yes," she said. "I am reading again. I didn't think

I should but I am."
"For a time," said Hoppart, "I read nothing but the papers. I

bought from a dozen to twenty a day."
"That is wearing off," said the bishop.

"The first thing I began to read again," said Mrs. Garstein
Fellows, "--I'm not saying it for your sake, Bishop--was the

Bible."
"I went to the Bible," said Bent as if he was surprised.

"I've heard that before," said Ridgeway Kelso, in that slightly
explosive manner of his. "All sorts of people who don't usually

read the Bible--"
"But Mr. Kelso!" protested their hostess with raised eyebrows.

"I was thinking of Bent. But anyhow there's been a great wave
of seriousness, a sudden turning to religion and religious

things. I don't know if it comes your way, Bishop...."
"I've had no rows of penitents yet."

"We may be coming," said Hoppart.
He turned sideways to face the bishop. "I think we should be

coming if--if it wasn't for old entangled difficulties. I don't
know if you will mind my saying it to you, but...."

The bishop returned his frank glance. "I'd like to know above
all things," he said. "If Mrs. Garstein Fellow will permit us.

It's my business to know."
"We all want to know," said Lady Sunderbund, speaking from the

low chair on the other side of the fireplace. There was a
vibration in her voice and a sudden gleam of enthusiasm in her

face. "Why shouldn't people talk se'iously sometimes?"
"Well, take my own case," said Hoppart. "In the last few weeks,

I've been reading not only in the Bible but in the Fathers. I've
read most of Athanasius, most of Eusebius, and--I'll confess it

--Gibbon. I find all my old wonder come back. Why are we pinned
to--to the amount of creed we are pinned to? Why for instance

must you insist on the Trinity?"
"Yes," said the Eton boy explosively, and flushed darkly to

find he had spoken.
"Here is a time when men ask for God," said Hoppart. "And you

give them three!" cried Bent rather cheaply. "I confess I find
the way encumbered by these Alexandrian elaborations," Hoppart

completed.
"Need it be?" whispered Lady Sunderbund very softly.

"Well," said the bishop, and leant back in his armchair and
knitted his brow at the fire. "I do not think," he said, "that

men coming to God think very much of the nature of God.