matter for once
in a way, will it? It is no good making ourselves miserable about
comparative trifles."

"He might leave out a curse or two when he next reads the Commination
Service, and balance matters in that way," said Madame Valtesi, aside to
Amarinth.

"The rusticity of the service was quite delicious," Mrs. Windsor went on
graciously. "So appropriate! Everything was so well chosen and in
character! Ah, Mr. Smith, although you are a clergyman, I am certain
you must have the artistic temperament."

"I trust not," Mr. Smith said very gravely--"I earnestly trust not. The
artistic temperament is a sin that should be sternly struggled against,
and, if possible, eliminated. In these modern days I notice that every
wickedness that is committed is excused on the ground of temperament."

They were walking home across the common as he said this, and Lady Locke
turned to Lord Reggie, who was by her side, still rather flushed by his
exertions.

"Are you one of those who make a god of their temperament?" she said.
"What Mr. Smith says seems to me rather true."

"I think one's temperament should be one's leader in life, certainly,"
he answered.

"The blind leading the blind."

"It is beautiful to be blind. Those who can see are always avoiding just
the very things that would give them most pleasure. Esme says that to
know how to be led is a much greater art than to know how to lead."

"I don't care to hear the opinions of Mr. Amarinth," she answered in a
low voice. "His epigrams are his opinions. His actions are performed
vicariously in conversation. If he were to be silent he would cease to
live."

"You don't know Esme at all, really," Reggie said.

"And you know him far too well," she answered.

He looked at her for a moment rather curiously.

XIII.

Sunday afternoon is always a characteristic time. Even irreligious
people, who have no principles to send them to sleep, or to cause them
to take a weekly walk, or to induce them to write an unnecessary letter
to New Zealand--why are unnecessary letters to New Zealand invariably
written on Sunday afternoons?--even irreligious people are generally in
an unusual frame of mind on the afternoon of the day of rest. They don't
feel week-day. There is a certain atmosphere of orthodoxy which affects
them. Possibly it causes them to feel peculiarly unorthodox. Still, it
affects them. In the country, in summer especially, Sunday afternoon
lays a certain spell upo