had done with it.  But what other, he asked himself in quiet anger, could Patullo have been expected to do—­the fellow he remembered?  Arnold tilted his chair back and stared, with arms folded and sombre brows, at the opposite wall.  He looked once at the door, but some spirit of self-torture kept him in his seat.  If so much offence could be made with the mere crust and envelope, so to speak, of the sacred story, what sacrilege might not be committed with the divine personalities concerned—­with Our Lord and His Mother?  He remembered, with the touch of almost physical nausea that assailed him when he saw them, one or two pictures in recent Paris exhibitions where the coveted accent of surprise had been produced by representing the sacred figure in the trivial monde of the boulevards, and fixed upon them as the source of Patullo’s intolerable inspiration.  Certain muscles felt responsive at the thought of Patullo which Arnold had forgotten he possessed; it was so seldom that a missionary priest, even of athletic traditions, came in contact with anybody who required to be kicked.

Alicia was in front with the Yardleys, dropping her unfailing plummet into the evening’s experience.  Arnold, hesitating over the rudeness of departure, thought she was sufficiently absorbed; she would hardly mind.  The centurion slapped his tin armour, and made a jest about the King of the Jews which reached Stephen over his hostess’s shoulder and seemed to brand him where he sat.  He looked about for his hat and some excuse that would serve, and while he looked the sound of applause rose from the house.  It was a demonstration without great energy, hardly more than a flutter from stall to stall, with a vague, fundamental noise from the gallery; but it had the quality which acclaimed something new.  Arnold glanced at the stage and saw that while Pilate and the hollow-chested slaves and the tin centurion were still on they had somehow lost significance and colour, had faded into the impotent figures of a tapestry, and that all the meaning and the dominance of the situation had gathered into the person of a woman of the East who danced.  She was almost discordant in her literalness, in her clear olive tints and the kol smudges under her eyes, the string of coins in the mass of her fallen hair, and her unfettered body.  Beside her the slave-girls, crouching, looked liked painted shells.  She danced before Pilate in strange Eastern ways, in plastic weavings and gesturings that seemed to be the telling of a tale; and from the orchestra only one unknown instrument sobbed out to help her.  The women of the people have ever bought in Palestine, buy to-day in the Mousky, the coarse, thick grey-blue cotton that fell about her limbs, and there was audacity in the poverty of her beaten silver anklets and armlets.  These shone and twinkled with her movements; but her softly splendid eyes and reddened lips had the immobility of the bazaar.  People looked at their playbills to see whether it was really Hilda Howe or some nautch-queen borrowed from a native theatre.  By the time she sank before Pilate and placed his foot upon her head a new spirit had breathed upon the house.  Under the unexpectedness of the representation it sat up straight, and there was a keenness of desire to see what would happen next which plainly curtailed the applause, as it does with the children at a pantomime.