But gradually, as she hunted the story, she gave him up, not because of any evidence of any kind, but because she did not find him regarded as anything very wonderful.  She had need of the enthusiasms of others to make an atmosphere for her own ideals, and almost by chance she had not met anyone much interested in the young preacher.  Then she had dim backwaters of anti-Popery in her mind, and they helped the reaction.  She had come out, lance in rest, to defend the victim of calumny; in a very few days she had thrown him over, and was explaining pathetically to anybody who would listen that she had had a shock to her faith in humanity.  And the story, starting by describing her own state of mind and being almost entirely subjective, ended in bringing home to her listeners with peculiar force the objective facts as asserted by Molly.  Catholics, she found, when she came to this advanced state of propagation, were aghast at her story.  They did not believe it, but they were excessively annoyed, and were, for the most part, inclined to think that Mark could not have been entirely prudent.  But non-Catholics were, naturally, more credulous.

A calumny is a quick and gross feeder.  It has a thousand different ways of assimilating things “light as air,” or things dull from the ennui which produced them, or things prickly with envy, or slushy, green things born of unconscious jealousy, or unpleasant things born of false pieties, or hard views born of tired experience, or worldly products of incredulity, or directly evil suggestions, or the repulsions of satiated sensuality, or the bitter fruits of melancholia, or the foreshadowings of insanity, or the mere dislike of the lower moralities for the higher, or the uneasiness felt by the ordinary in the presence of the rare, or the revolt felt by the conventional against holier bonds, or the prattle of curiosity, or the roughness of mere vitality, or the fusion of minds at a low level.

This particular calumny was well watered and manured with all these by-products of human life, and it grew to full size and height with a rapidity that could not have been attained under less favourable conditions.

BOOK IV

CHAPTER XXXII

ROSE SUMMONED TO LONDON

Rose was back in London the second week in July, summoned back rather imperiously by Mr. Murray, Junior.  The house had been shut up since the departure of her tenants at Whitsuntide, and she had hoped not to reopen it until the autumn.  She had intended to go directly to her mother’s home in the country as soon as they could leave Paris.  It was becoming a question whether it would be a greater risk for Lady Charlton to endure the heat in Paris or the fatigues of the long journey.  Mr. Murray’s letter decided them to move.  Rose must go, and her mother would not stay behind alone.  Lady Charlton decided to pay a month’s visit to her youngest daughter in Scotland, as Rose might be kept in London.