“Chapters of stories, if you want to hear them,” she resumed; “and I can vouch some of them true.  Lord Ormont was never one of the wolves in a hood.  Whatever you hear of him; you may be sure he laid no trap.  He’s just the opposite to the hypocrite; so hypocrites date him.  I’ve heard them called high-priests of decency.  Then we choose to be indecent and honest, if there’s a God to worship.  Fear, they’re in the habit of saying—­we are to fear God.  A man here, a Rev. Hampton-Evey, you’ll hear him harp on ‘fear God.’  Hypocrites may:  honest sinners have no fear.  And see the cause:  they don’t deceive themselves—­that is why.  Do you think we call love what we fear?  They love God, or they disbelieve.  And if they believe in Him, they know they can’t conceal anything from Him.  Honesty means piety:  we can’t be one without the other.  And here are people—­parsons—­who talk of dying as going into the presence of our Maker, as if He had been all the while outside the world He created.  Those parsons, I told the Rev. Hampton-Evey here, make infidels—­they make a puzzle of their God.  I’m for a rational Deity.  They preach up a supernatural eccentric.  I don’t say all:  I’ve heard good sermons, and met sound-headed clergymen—­not like that gaping Hampton-Evey, when a woman tells him she thinks for herself.  We have him sitting on our pariah.  A free-thinker startles him as a kind of demon; but a female free-thinker is one of Satan’s concubines.  He took it upon himself to reproach me—­flung his glove at my feet, because I sent a cheque to a poor man punished for blasphemy.  The man had the right to his opinions, and he had the courage of his opinions.  I doubt whether the Rev. Hampton-Evey would go with a willing heart to prison for his.  All the better for him if he comes head-up out of a trial.  But now see:  all these parsons and judges and mobcaps insist upon conformity.  A man with common manly courage comes before them, and he’s cast in penalties.  Yet we know from history, in England, France, Germany, that the time of nonconformity brought out the manhood of the nation.  Now, I say, a nation, to be a nation, must have men—­I mean brave men.  That’s what those hosts of female men combine to try to stifle.  They won’t succeed, but we shall want a war to teach the country the value of courage.  You catch what I am driving at?  They accuse my brother of immorality because he makes no pretence to be better than the men of his class.”

Weyburn’s eyelids fluttered.  Her kite-like ascent into the general, with the sudden drop on her choice morsel, switched his humour at the moment when he was respectfully considering that her dartings and gyrations had motive as mach as the flight of the swallow for food.  They had meaning; and here was one of the great ladies of the land who thought for herself, and was thoughtful for the country.  If she came down like a bird winged, it was her love of her brother that did it.  His look at Lady Charlotte glistened.