“Chere Sovrani!  You are angry—­deliciously angry!  Impulsively, enthusiastically, beautifully vexed with me!  I like to see you so,—­ you are a woman of remarkable genius, and yet you are quite a little child in heart,—­a positive child, with beliefs and hopes!  I should not wonder if you even believed that love itself is eternal!—­that most passing of phantoms!—­yes—­and you exclaim against me because I venture to think for myself?  It is appalling that I should think for myself and yet remain in the Church?  My dear lady, you might just as well, after unravelling the dirty entanglement of the Dreyfus case, have turned upon our late friend Faure ancl exclaimed ’And yet you remained President!’”

Angela’s violet eyes glowed.

“He was not allowed to remain President,” she said.

“No, he was not.  He died.  Certainly!  And I know you think he would not have died if he had done his best to clear the character of an innocent man.  To women of your type, it always seems as if God—­the Large Person up above—­stepped in exactly at the right moment.  It would really appear as if it were so at times.  But such things are mere coincidences.”

“I do not believe in coincidences,” said Angela decisively, “I do not believe in ‘chance’ or ‘luck’, or what you call ‘fortuitous’ haphazard arrangements of any sort.  I think everything is planned by law from the beginning; even to the particular direction in which a grain of dust floats through space.  It is all mathematical and exact.  And the moving Spirit—­the Divine Centre of things, whom I call God,—­cannot dislodge or alter one particle of the majestic system without involving the whole in complete catastrophe.  It is our mistake to ‘chance’ things—­at least, so I think.  And if I exclaim against you and say,—­“Why do you remain in the Church?’ it is because I cannot understand a man of conscience and intellect outwardly professing one thing while inwardly he means another.  Because God will take him in the end at his own interior valuation, not at his outward seeming.”

“Uncomfortable, if true,” said the Abbe, still smiling.  “When one has been at infinite pains all one’s life to present a charmingly virtuous and noble aspect to the world, it would be indeed distressing if at the last moment one were obliged to lift the mask . . .”

“Sometimes one is not given the chance to lift it,” interposed Angela, “It is torn off ruthlessly by a force greater than one’s own.  ‘Call no man happy till his death,’ you know.”

“Yes, I know,” and the Abbe settled himself in his chair more comfortably;—­he loved an argument with “the Sovrani”, and was wont to declare that she was the only woman in the world who had ever made him wish to be a good man,—­“But that maxim can be taken in two ways.  It may mean that no man is happy till his death,—­which I most potently believe,—­or it may mean that a man is only judged after his death, in which case it cannot be said to affect his happiness, as he is past caring whether people think ill or well of him.  Besides, after death it must needs be all right, as every man is so particularly fortunate in his epitaph!”