“How kind!”

“Then, since I’ve been preaching, such odd people come to see me.”

“I know,” said the Canon, “there’s a fringe of the semi-insane round all churches; they used to lie in wait for me once.”

“Then I simply love society.  I’ve been to hear such interesting people talk at several houses lately.  I go a good deal to Miss Dexter.”

“Miss Molly Dexter.”

“Yes.”

“I wouldn’t do that; she’s a minx.  She is the girl who stayed with that kind little woman, Mrs. Delaport Green, who sometimes comes to see me.”

“You see,” Mark went on eagerly, “I’m doing no good like this.  So I have made up my mind to try and be a Carthusian.”

His face lit up now with the same intense delight.  “It’s such a splendid life!  Fancy!  No more humbug, and flattery, and insincerity.  ’Vous ne jouerez plus la comedie,’ an old monk said to me.  Wouldn’t it be splendid?  Think of the stillness, and then the singing of the Office while the world is asleep, like the little birds at dawn.  It would be simply and entirely to live for God!”

“I do believe in a personal devil,” muttered Canon Nicholls to himself, and Mark stared at him.  “Now listen,” he said.  “There is a young man who has a vocation to the priesthood, and he comes under obedience to work in London.  That is, to live in the thick of sin, of suffering, of folly and madness.  If it were acknowledged that the place was full of cholera or smallpox it would be simple enough.  But the place is thick with disguises.  The worst cases don’t seem in the least ill; the stench of the plague is a sweet smell, and the confusion is thicker because there are angels and demons in the same clothes, living in the same houses, doing the same actions, saying almost the same things.  In every Babylon there have been these things, but this is about the biggest.  And the most harmless of the sounds, the hum of daily work, is loud and continuous enough to dull and wear the senses.  So confused and perplexed is the young man that he doesn’t know when he has done good or done harm; being young, compliments appeal to him very seriously; being young, he takes too many people’s opinions; and, being young, he generalises and if, for instance, I tell him not to go often to the house of a capricious woman of uncertain temper, he probably resolves at once never to lunch in an agreeable house again.  Meanwhile, above this muddle, this tragicomedy, he sees the distant hills glowing with light; so, without waiting for orders, he leaves the people crying to him for help and turns tail and runs away!  And what only the skill of a personal devil could achieve, he thinks in his heart that he is choosing a harder fight, a more self-denying life.”

“But I could help those people more by my prayers.”