’I feel such a spout of platitudes that I could out With a Leading Article on a sheet of paper on your back while you’re bending over the baskets.  I seem to have got circularly round again to Eden when I enter a garden.  Only, here we have to pay for the fruits we pluck.  Well, and just the same there; and no end to the payment either.  We’re always paying!  By the way, Mrs. Victor Radnor’s dinner-table’s a spectacle.  Her taste in flowers equals her lord’s in wine.  But age improves the wine and spoils the flowers, you’ll say.  Maybe you’re for arguing that lovely women show us more of the flower than the grape, in relation to the course of time.  I pray you not to forget the terrible intoxicant she is.  We reconcile it, Mr. Carling, with the notion that the grape’s her spirit, the flower her body.  Or is it the reverse?  Perhaps an intertwining.  But look upon bouquets and clusters, and the idea of woman springs up at once, proving she’s composed of them.  I was about to remark, that with deference to the influence of Mrs. Burman’s legal adviser, an impenitent or penitent sinner’s pastor, the Reverend gentleman ministering to her spiritual needs, would presumptively exercise it, in this instance, in a superior degree.’

Carling murmured:  ‘The Rev. Groseman Buttermore’; and did so for something of a cover, to continue a run of internal reflections:  as, that he was assuredly listening to vinous talk in the streets by day; which impression placed him on a decorous platform above the amusing gentleman; to whom, however, he grew cordial, in recognizing consequently, that his exuberant flow could hardly be a mask; and that an indication here and there of a trap in his talk, must have been due rather to excess of wariness, habitual in the mind of a long-headed man, whose incorrigibly impulsive fits had necessarily to be rectified by a vigilant dexterity.

‘Buttermore!’ ejaculated Fenellan:  ’Groseman Buttermore!  Mrs. Victor’s Father Confessor is the Rev. Septimus Barmby.  Groseman Buttermore—­Septimus Barmby.  Is there anything in names?  Truly, unless these clerical gentlemen take them up at the crossing of the roads long after birth, the names would appear the active parts of them, and themselves mere marching supports, like the bearers of street placard-advertisements.  Now, I know a Septimus Barmby, and you a Groseman Buttermore, and beyond the fact that Reverend starts up before their names without mention, I wager it’s about all we do know of them.  They’re Society’s trusty rock-limpets, no doubt.’

‘My respect for the cloth is extreme.’  Carling’s short cough prepared the way for deductions.  ‘Between ourselves, they are men of the world.’

Fenellan eyed benevolently the worthy attorney, whose innermost imp burst out periodically, like a Dutch clocksentry, to trot on his own small grounds for thinking himself of the community of the man of the world.  ‘You lawyers dress in another closet,’ he said.  ’The Rev. Groseman has the ear of the lady?’