need of the enthusiasms of others to
make an atmosphere for her own ideals, and almost by chance she had not
met anyone much interested in the young preacher. Then she had dim
backwaters of anti-Popery in her mind, and they helped the reaction. She
had come out, lance in rest, to defend the victim of calumny; in a very
few days she had thrown him over, and was explaining pathetically to
anybody who would listen that she had had a shock to her faith in
humanity. And the story, starting by describing her own state of mind
and being almost entirely subjective, ended in bringing home to her
listeners with peculiar force the objective facts as asserted by Molly.
Catholics, she found, when she came to this advanced state of
propagation, were aghast at her story. They did not believe it, but they
were excessively annoyed, and were, for the most part, inclined to think
that Mark could not have been entirely prudent. But non-Catholics were,
naturally, more credulous.

A calumny is a quick and gross feeder. It has a thousand different ways
of assimilating things "light as air," or things dull from the ennui
which produced them, or things prickly with envy, or slushy, green
things born of unconscious jealousy, or unpleasant things born of false
pieties, or hard views born of tired experience, or worldly products of
incredulity, or directly evil suggestions, or the repulsions of satiated
sensuality, or the bitter fruits of melancholia, or the foreshadowings
of insanity, or the mere dislike of the lower moralities for the higher,
or the uneasiness felt by the ordinary in the presence of the rare, or
the revolt felt by the conventional against holier bonds, or the prattle
of curiosity, or the roughness of mere vitality, or the fusion of minds
at a low level.

This particular calumny was well watered and manured with all these
by-products of human life, and it grew to full size and height with a
rapidity that could not have been attained under less favourable
conditions.

BOOK IV

CHAPTER XXXII

ROSE SUMMONED TO LONDON

Rose was back in London the second week in July, summoned back rather
imperiously by Mr. Murray, Junior. The house had been shut up since the
departure of her tenants at Whitsuntide, and she had hoped not to reopen
it until the autumn. She had intended to go directly to her mother's
home in the country as soon as they could leave Paris. It was becoming a
question whether it would be a greater ris