“What did he say the blasphemy man meant?  Oh, I don’t know; some bilge, just as he used to about the masters.  You know the man talked some rubbish about how the State couldn’t have it both ways—­couldn’t blaspheme against God by flatly denying that all men were equal and basing all its legislation on keeping one class up and the other class down; couldn’t do that and at the same time prosecute him because he said that religion was—­well, you know what he said; I’m dashed if I like to repeat it.  Joke of it was that I found myself using exactly the same expression to old Sabre as we used to use at school.  I said, ’Good lord, man, fancy sticking up for a chap like that!’ And old Sabre—­by Jove, I tell you there we all were in a flash back in the playground at old Wickamote’s, down in that corner by the workshop, all kids again and old Puzzlehead flicking his hand out of his pocket—­remember how he used to?—­like that—­and saying, ’You sickening fool, I’m not sticking up for him, I’m only saying he’s right from how he looks at it and it’s no good saying he’s wrong!’ Rum, eh, after all those years....  No, he didn’t say, ‘You sickening fool’ this time.  I reminded him how he used to, and he laughed and said, ’Yes; did I?  Well, I still get riled, you know, when chaps can’t see—­’ And then he said ’Yes, “sickening fool”; so I did; odd!’ and he looked out of the window as though he was looking a thousand miles away—­this was in his office, you know—­and chucked talking absolutely....

“Yes, in his office I saw him....  He’s in a good business down there at Tidborough.  Dashed good.  ’Fortune, East and Sabre’...  Never heard of them?  Ah, well, that shows you’re not a pillar of the Church, old son.  If you took the faintest interest in your particular place of worship, or in any Anglican place of worship, you’d know that whenever you want anything for the Church from a hymn book or a hassock or a pew to a pulpit or a screen or a spire you go to Fortune, East and Sabre, Tidborough.  Similarly in the scholastic line, anything from a birch rod to a desk—­Fortune, East and Sabre, by return and the best.  No, they’re the great, the great, church and school-furnishing people.  ‘Ecclesiastical and Scholastic Furnishers and Designers’ they call themselves.  And they’re it.  No really decent church or really gentlemanly school thinks of going anywhere else.  They keep at Tidborough because they were there when they furnished the first church in the year One or thereabouts.  I expect they did the sun-ray fittings at Stonehenge.  Ha!  Anyway, they’re one of the stately firms of old England, and old Sabre is the Sabre part of the firm.  And his father before him and so on.  Fortune and East are both bishops, I believe.  No, not really.  But I tell you the show’s run on mighty pious lines.  One of them’s a ‘Rev.’, I know.  I mean, the tradition of the place is to be in keeping with the great and good works it carries out and for which, incidentally, it is dashed well paid.  Rather.  Oh, old Sabre has butter with his bread all right....