“Not always,” Mrs. Hilary truly replied, meaning that religion did not always last.

“No,” Grandmama agreed.  “Unfortunately not always.  Particularly when it is High Church.  There was your uncle Bruce, of course....”

Mrs. Hilary’s uncle Bruce, who had been High Church for a season, and had even taken Orders in the year 1860, but whose faith had wilted in the heat and toil of the day, so that by 1870 he was an agnostic barrister, took Grandmama back through the last century, and she became reminiscent over the Tractarian movement, and, later, the Ritualists.

“The Queen never could abide them,” said Grandmama.  “Nor could Lord Beaconsfield, nor your father, though he was always kind and tolerant.  I remember when Dr. Jowett came to stay with us, how they talked about it....  Ah well, they’ve become very prominent since then, and done a great deal of good work, and there are many very able, excellent men and women among them....  But they’re not High Church any longer, they tell me.  They’re Catholics in these days.  I don’t know enough of them to judge them, but I don’t think they can have the dignity of the old High Church party, for if they had I can’t imagine that Gilbert’s wife, for instance, would have joined them, even for so short a time as she did....  Well, it suits some people, and psycho-analysis obviously suits others.  Only I do hope you will try to keep moderate and balanced, my child, and not believe all this young man tells you.  Parts of it do sound so very strange.”

(But Mrs. Hilary would not have dreamt of repeating to Grandmama the strangest parts of all.)

“I feel a new woman,” she said, fervently, and Grandmama smiled, well pleased, thinking that it certainly did seem rather like the old evangelical conversions of her youth. (Which, of course, did not always last, any more than the High Church equivalents did.)

All Grandmama committed herself to, in her elderly caution, which came however less from age than from having known Mrs. Hilary for sixty-three years, was “Well, well, we must see.”

3

And then Rosalind’s letter came.  It came by the afternoon post—­the big, mauve, scented, sprawled sheets, dashingly monographed across one corner.

“Gilbert’s wife,” pronounced Grandmama, non-committally from her easy chair, and, said in that tone, it was quite sufficient comment.  “Another cup of tea, please, Emily.”

Mrs. Hilary gave it to her, then began to read aloud the letter from Gilbert’s wife.  Gilbert’s wife was one of the topics upon which she and Grandmama were in perfect accord, only that Mrs. Hilary was irritated when Grandmama pushed the responsibility for the relationship onto her by calling Rosalind “your daughter-in-law.”