w more about girls than any bishop, felt that Lalage had lost
something not to be regained when she became intimate enough with Tom
Kitterick to rub glycerine and cucumber into his cheeks.

Lalage was, in my opinion, herself guilty of something very like the sin
of tommyrot when she mocked another bishop for a sermon he had preached
on "Empire Day." He said that wherever the British flag flies there is
liberty for subject peoples and several other obviously true things of
the same kind. I do not see what else, under the circumstances, the poor
man could say. Nor do I blame him in the least for boldly demanding more
battleships to carry something--I think he said the Gospel--to still
remoter lands. Lalage chose to pretend that liberty and subjection are
contradictory terms, but this is plainly absurd. Lord Thormanby talked
over this part of the _Gazette_ with me some months later and gave it
as his opinion that a man whom he knew in the club had put the case very
well by saying that there are several quite distinct kinds of liberty.

I found myself still more puzzled by Lalage's attitude toward another
man who was not even, strictly speaking, a bishop. He was a moderator,
or an ex-moderator, of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church.
He had made a speech in which he set forth reasons why he and others
like him should have a recognized place in the vice-regal court. I am
not myself passionately fond of vice-regal courts, but I know that many
people regard them with great reverence, and I do not see why a man
should be laughed at for wanting to walk through the state rooms in
Dublin Castle in front of somebody else. It is a harmless, perhaps a
laudable, ambition. Lalage chose to see something funny in it, and I am
bound to say that when I had finished her article I too began to catch a
glimpse of the amusing side of it.

I spent a long time over the _Gazette_. The more I read it the greater
my perplexity grew. Many things which I had accepted for years as solemn
and necessary parts of the divine ordering of the world were suddenly
seized, contorted, and made to grin like apes. I felt disquieted,
inclined, and yet half afraid, to laugh. I was rendered acutely
uncomfortable by an editorial note which followed the last jibe at the
last bishop: "The next number of the _Anti-Tommy-Rot Gazette_ will
deal with politicians and may be expected to be lively. Subscribe at
once.--Ed."

I was so profoundy distrustful of my