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....”