Mr. Lyon had the air of conveying the impression that this question was settled in England, and that America was interesting on account of numerous experiments of this sort.  This state of mind was not offensive to his interlocutors, because they were accustomed to it in transatlantic visitors.  Indeed, there was nothing whatever offensive, and little defensive, in Mr. John Lyon.  What we liked in him, I think, was his simple acceptance of a position that required neither explanation nor apology—­a social condition that banished a sense of his own personality, and left him perfectly free to be absolutely truthful.  Though an eldest son and next in succession to an earldom, he was still young.  Fresh from Oxford and South Africa and Australia and British Columbia he had come to study the States with a view of perfecting himself for his duties as a legislator for the world when he should be called to the House of Peers.  He did not treat himself like an earl, whatever consciousness he may have had that his prospective rank made it safe for him to flirt with the various forms of equality abroad in this generation.

“I don’t know what Christianity is expected to produce,” Mr. Morgan replied, in a meditative way; “but I have an idea that the early Christians in their assemblies all knew each other, having met elsewhere in social intercourse, or, if they were not acquainted, they lost sight of distinctions in one paramount interest.  But then I don’t suppose they were exactly civilized.”

“Were the Pilgrims and the Puritans?” asked Mrs. Fletcher, who now joined the talk, in which she had been a most animated and stimulating listener, her deep gray eyes dancing with intellectual pleasure.

“I should not like to answer ‘no’ to a descendant of the Mayflower.  Yes, they were highly civilized.  And if we had adhered to their methods, we should have avoided a good deal of confusion.  The meeting-house, you remember, had a committee for seating people according to their quality.  They were very shrewd, but it had not occurred to them to give the best pews to the sitters able to pay the most money for them.  They escaped the perplexity of reconciling the mercantile and the religious ideas.”

“At any rate,” said Mrs. Fletcher, “they got all sorts of people inside the same meeting-house.”

“Yes, and made them feel they were all sorts; but in those, days they were not much disturbed by that feeling.”

“Do you mean to say,” asked Mr. Lyon, “that in this country you have churches for the rich and other churches for the poor?”

“Not at all.  We have in the cities rich churches and poor churches, with prices of pews according to the means of each sort, and the rich are always glad to have the poor come, and if they do not give them the best seats, they equalize it by taking up a collection for them.”

“Mr. Lyon,” Mrs. Morgan interrupted, “you are getting a travesty of the whole thing.  I don’t believe there is elsewhere in the world such a spirit of Christian charity as in our churches of all sects.”