vicar was not a bad little thing in his way; but Mrs Sheepshanks, with her patronising disapproval and affected airs of smartness, he couldn’t endure, while the Socialistic curate was his aversion.  The reason he hated the curate was partly because he always wore black knickerbockers, and partly because he was such chums with the MacTavish boys.  How any self-respecting individual could put up with such savages as Jock and Sandy was a problem that Austin was wholly unable to solve, until it was suggested to him by somebody that the real attraction was neither Jock nor Sandy, but one of their screaming sisters—­a Florrie, or a Lottie, or an Aggie—­it really did not matter which, since they were all alike.  When this once dawned upon him, Austin despised the knickerbockered curate more than ever.

On the present occasion, however, the MacTavishes were happily not there; the only other guest (for of course the curate didn’t count) being a friend of the curate’s, who had come to spend a few days with him in the country.  The friend was a harsh-featured, swarthy young man, belonging to what may be called the muscular variety of high Ritualism; much given to a sort of aggressive slang—­he had been known to refer to the bishop of his diocese as “the sporting old jester that bosses our show”—­and representing militant sacerdotalism in its most blusterous and rampant form.  He was also in the habit of informing people that he was “nuts” on the Athanasian Creed, and expressing the somewhat arbitrary opinion that if the Rev. John Wesley had had his deserts he would have been exhibited in a pillory and used as a target for stale eggs.  There are a few such interesting youths in Holy Orders, and the curate’s friend was one of them.

The party were assembled in the garden, where Mrs Sheepshanks’s best tea-service was laid out.  To say that the conversation was brilliant would be an exaggeration; but it was pleasant and decorous, as conversations at a vicarage ought to be.  The two ladies compared notes about the weather and the parish; the curate asked Austin what he had been doing with himself lately; the friend kept silence, even from good words, while the vicar, one of the mildest of his cloth, sat blinking in furtive contemplation of the friend.  Certainly it was not a very exhilarating entertainment, and Austin felt that if it went on much longer he should scream.  What possible pleasure, he marvelled, could Aunt Charlotte find in such a vapid form of dissipation?  Even the garden irritated him, for it was laid out in the silly Early Victorian style, with wriggling paths, and ribbon borders, and shrubs planted meaninglessly here and there about the lawn, and a dreadful piece of sham rockwork in one corner.  Of course the vicar’s wife thought it quite perfect, and always snubbed Austin in a very lofty way if he ever ventured to express his own views as to how a garden should be fitly ordered.  Then his eye happened to fall upon the curate’s friend; and he caught the curate’s friend in the act of staring at him with a most offensive expression of undisguised contempt.