happy without any of our advantages.

"It seems to me," said Mr. Lyon, who was always in the conversational
attitude of wanting to know, "that you Americans are disturbed by the
notion that religion ought to produce social equality."

Mr. Lyon had the air of conveying the impression that this question
was settled in England, and that America was interesting on account of
numerous experiments of this sort. This state of mind was not
offensive to his interlocutors, because they were accustomed to it in
transatlantic visitors. Indeed, there was nothing whatever offensive,
and little defensive, in Mr. John Lyon. What we liked in him, I
think, was his simple acceptance of a position that required neither
explanation nor apology--a social condition that banished a sense of his
own personality, and left him perfectly free to be absolutely truthful.
Though an eldest son and next in succession to an earldom, he was still
young. Fresh from Oxford and South Africa and Australia and British
Columbia he had come to study the States with a view of perfecting
himself for his duties as a legislator for the world when he should be
called to the House of Peers. He did not treat himself like an earl,
whatever consciousness he may have had that his prospective rank made it
safe for him to flirt with the various forms of equality abroad in this
generation.

"I don't know what Christianity is expected to produce," Mr. Morgan
replied, in a meditative way; "but I have an idea that the early
Christians in their assemblies all knew each other, having met elsewhere
in social intercourse, or, if they were not acquainted, they lost sight
of distinctions in one paramount interest. But then I don't suppose they
were exactly civilized."

"Were the Pilgrims and the Puritans?" asked Mrs. Fletcher, who now
joined the talk, in which she had been a most animated and stimulating
listener, her deep gray eyes dancing with intellectual pleasure.

"I should not like to answer 'no' to a descendant of the Mayflower. Yes,
they were highly civilized. And if we had adhered to their methods, we
should have avoided a good deal of confusion. The meeting-house, you
remember, had a committee for seating people according to their quality.
They were very shrewd, but it had not occurred to them to give the best
pews to the sitters able to pay the most money for them. They escaped
the perplexity of reconciling the mercantile and the religious ideas."

"At any rate," s