‘Your experience is much larger than mine,’ remarked the listener, submissively.

‘Indeed I have widely studied the subject.’

Chilvers smiled with ineffable self-content, his head twisted like that of a sagacious parrot.

‘Granting your average citizen,’ said the other, ’what about the average citizeness?  The female church-goers are not insignificant in number.’

’Ha!  There we reach the core of the matter!  Woman! woman!  Precisely there is the most hopeful outlook.  I trust you are strong for female emancipation?’

‘Oh, perfectly sound on that question!’

’To be sure!  Then it must be obvious to you that women are destined to play the leading part in our Christian renascence, precisely as they did in the original spreading of the faith.  What else is the meaning of the vast activity in female education?  Let them be taught, and forthwith they will rally to our Broad Church.  A man may be content to remain a nullifidian; women cannot rest at that stage.  They demand the spiritual significance of everything.—­I grieve to tell you, Peak, that for three years I have been a widower.  My wife died with shocking suddenness, leaving me her two little children.  Ah, but leaving me also the memory of a singularly pure and noble being.  I may say, with all humility, that I have studied the female mind in its noblest modern type.  I know what can be expected of woman, in our day and in the future.’

‘Mrs. Chilvers was in full sympathy with your views?’

’Three years ago I had not yet reached my present standpoint.  In several directions I was still narrow.  But her prime characteristic was the tendency to spiritual growth.  She would have accompanied me step by step.  In very many respects I must regard myself as a man favoured by fortune,—­I know it, and I trust I am grateful for it, —­but that loss, my dear Peak, counterbalances much happiness.  In moments of repose, when I look back on work joyously achieved, I often murmur to myself, with a sudden sigh, Excepto quod non simul esses, caetera Iaetus!’

He pronounced his Latin in the new-old way, with Continental vowels.  The effect of this on an Englishman’s lips is always more or less pedantic, and in his case it was intolerable.

‘And when,’ he exclaimed, dismissing the melancholy thought, ’do you present yourself for ordination?’

It was his habit to pay slight attention to the words of anyone but himself, and Peak’s careless answer merely led him to talk on wide subjects with renewal of energy.  One might have suspected that he had made a list of uncommon words wherewith to adorn his discourse, for certain of these frequently recurred.  ‘Nullifidian’, ‘morbific’, ‘renascent’, were among his favourites.  Once or twice he spoke of ‘psychogenesis’, with an emphatic enunciation which seemed to invite respectful wonder.  In using Latin words which have become fixed in the English language, he generally