e best sport. You don't need wraps;
it's like a summer night and you look very smart. Come on! Your
husband won't object. It will be simply grand. We'll have a picnic
causerie!"

Helena was swept away. Bother Mrs. Boyd and every one! It really
would be fun and she would be so bored at home. Hubert had told her
she should go. Besides--did she feel dimly, ever so little even, that
she was somehow getting even with him? Let us pass quickly on, with
all the charity that we can muster....

The Institute was packed. This was clearly a great night.

Helena, directly she entered the room, full of an excitement that had
almost the sensation of magnetic waves, was glad that she had come.
And as they found their seats, the chairman and the speaker entered.

That evening, as Mr. Alison had promised, was the jolliest of the whole
of the series. She even enjoyed merely looking at this G. K. Shaw.

He was ever such a big man, who swelled genially outward and then ended
unexpectedly in quite a savage beard. He looked so comfortable and
friendly that she felt certain all the nice things he meant to say (you
could tell from his eyes) got somehow twisted all wrong in that horrid
beard.

Certainly, to judge by mere words, there was a lot with which she could
not sympathise and some she could not understand. If only Hubert had
been free!

He said, for instance, that conventional Religion was man's excuse to
the Almighty: that faith was the power of believing what we could not
prove untrue: and that churches should possibly be built, because of
unemployment, but left empty for the glory of their Maker. All this
puzzled her, and Mr. Alison would only chuckle, while most others
grunted. Then the lecturer got round to Art and said that life was the
Creator's masterpiece. He roughly defined Art as that which never
found its way to paper. He admitted the existence of a body of
literature and paintings. He did not for a moment wish to conceal the
existence of the Royal Academy. One corn-crake, however, did not cause
a winter: and he wished to-night to speak only about Art. The modern
out-look was parochial and men failed to see even the parish for
looking at the clergymen. An Artist had no fatherland. He had the key
of the World: for paint was thicker than blood. No two nations had
ever agreed on armaments or treaties: but all admitted that Farnese was
greater than Phil May. The worry with the world to-day was not