“I don’t see it much matters what a man’s family was,” the General said stoutly, “so long as he’s a fine, well-made, soldierly fellow, like this Ingledew body, capable of fighting for his Queen and country.  He’s an Australian, I suppose.  What tall chaps they do send home, to be sure!  Those Australians are going to lick us all round the field presently.”

“That’s the curious part of it,” Philip answered.  “Nobody knows what he is.  He doesn’t even seem to be a British subject.  He calls himself an Alien.  And he speaks most disrespectfully at times—­ well, not exactly perhaps of the Queen in person, but at any rate of the monarchy.”

“Utterly destitute of any feeling of respect for any power of any sort, human or divine,” the Dean remarked, with clerical severity.

“For my part,” Monteith interposed, knocking his ash off savagely, “I think the man’s a swindler; and the more I see of him, the less I like him.  He’s never explained to us how he came here at all, or what the dickens he came for.  He refuses to say where he lives or what’s his nationality.  He poses as a sort of unexplained Caspar Hauser.  In my opinion, these mystery men are always impostors.  He had no letters of introduction to anybody at Brackenhurst; and he thrust himself upon Philip in a most peculiar way; ever since which he’s insisted upon coming to my house almost daily.  I don’t like him myself:  it’s Mrs. Monteith who insists upon having him here.”

“He fascinates me,” the General said frankly.  “I don’t at all wonder the women like him.  As long as he was by, though I don’t agree with one word he says, I couldn’t help looking at him and listening to him intently.”

“So he does me,” Philip answered, since the General gave him the cue.  “And I notice it’s the same with people in the train.  They always listen to him, though sometimes he preaches the most extravagant doctrines—­oh, much worse than anything he’s said here this afternoon.  He’s really quite eccentric.”

“What sort of doctrines?” the Dean inquired, with languid zeal.  “Not, I hope, irreligious?”

“Oh, dear, no,” Philip answered; “not that so much.  He troubles himself very little, I think, about religion.  Social doctrines, don’t you know; such very queer views—­about women, and so forth.”

“Indeed?” the Dean said quickly, drawing himself up very stiff:  for you touch the ark of God for the modern cleric when you touch the question of the relations of the sexes.  “And what does he say?  It’s highly undesirable men should go about the country inciting to rebellion on such fundamental points of moral order in public railway carriages.”  For it is a peculiarity of minds constituted like the Dean’s (say, ninety-nine per cent. of the population) to hold that the more important a subject is to our general happiness, the less ought we all to think about it and discuss it.