Hilda’s audience that night knew all about The Offence of Galilee from the English illustrated papers.  The illustrated papers had a great way of ministering to the complacency of Calcutta audiences; they contained photographs of almost every striking scene, composed at the leisure of the cast, but so vividly supplemented with descriptions of the leading lady’s clothes that it hardly required any effort of the imagination to conjure up the rest.  The postures and the chief garments of Pilate—­he was eating pomegranates when the curtain rose, and listening to scandal from his slave-maidens about Mary Magdalene—­were at once recognised in their resemblance to those of the photographs, and in the thrill of this satisfaction any discrepancies in cut and texture passed generally unobserved.  A silent curiosity settled upon the house, half reverent, as if with the Bible names came thronging a troop of sacred associations to cluster about personalities brusquely torn out of church, and people listened for familiar sentences with something like the composed gravity with which they heard on Sundays the reading of the second lesson.  But as the stage-talk went on, the slave-maidens announcing themselves without delay comfortably modern and commonplace, and Pilate a cynic and a decadent, though as distinctively from Melbourne, it was possible to note the breaking up of this sentiment.  It was plain after all that no standard of ideality was to be maintained or struggled after.  The relief was palpable; nevertheless, when Pilate’s wife cast a shrewish gibe at him over the shoulder of her exit, the audience showed but a faint inclination to be amused.  It was to be a play evidently like any other play, the same coarse fibre, the same vivid and vulgar appeals.  It is doubtful whether this idea was critically present to anyone but Stephen Arnold, but people unconsciously tasted the dramatic substance offered them, and leaned back in their chairs with the usual patient acknowledgment that one mustn’t expect too much of a company that found it worth while to come to Calcutta.  The house grew submissive and stolid, but one could see half-awakened prejudices sitting in the dress-circle.  The paper-chasing Secretary said to the most intelligent of his party that on the whole he liked his theology neat, forgetting that the preference belonged to Mr. Andrew Lang in connection with a notable lady novelist; and the most intelligent—­it was Mrs. Barberry—­replied that it did seem strange.  The depths under the gallery were critically attentive, though Llewellyn Stanhope felt them hostile and longing for verbal brick-bats; and the Reverend Mr. Arnold shrank into the farthest corner of Surgeon-Major Livingstone’s box, and knew all the misery of outrage.  Pilate and the slave-maidens, Pilate’s fat wife, and an unspeakable comic centurion, offered as yet hardly more than a prelude, but the monstrosity of the whole performance was already projected upon Arnold’s