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 perennial species, 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 intellectual passions, 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 sentimental novelist, 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