se," I said, "you're prejudiced in favour of Sir Walter Scott.
You Scotch are all the same. A word against Sir Walter or Robbie
Burns is enough for you. But I'll put another case to you: Supposing a
bishop--understanding the word as I've explained it--were to say that
infant schools are a danger to public morality on account of the way
that boys and girls are mixed up together in the same classrooms, would
he, in your opinion----?"

Dodds has a horribly coarse mind. He stopped dealing and grinned. Then
he winked at the young engineer who sat opposite to him. He, I was
pleased to see, had the grace to look embarrassed. Mrs. Dodds, who of
course knows how her husband revels in anything which can be twisted
into impropriety, interrupted me with a question asked in a very biting
tone.

"Is it chess you think you are playing the now, or is it bridge?"

I had to let the next deal pass without any further attempt to discover
Dodds's opinion about tommyrot. I was trying to think out what Mrs.
Dodds meant by accusing me of wanting to play chess. It struck me as
an entirely gratuitous and, using the word in its original sense,
impertinent suggestion. Nothing I had said seemed in any way to imply
that I was thinking of chess. As a matter of fact, I detest the game and
never play it. I suppose I am slow-witted, but it did not occur to me
for quite a long time, that, being a Scotch Presbyterian, the mention
of bishops was more likely to call up to her mind the pieces which sidle
obliquely across a chessboard than living men of lordly degree. I was
not sure in the end that I had tracked her thought correctly, but I
know that I made several bad mistakes during the next and the following
hands.

When it worked round to my turn to deal again I gave out the cards very
slowly and made another attempt to find out whether Dodds did or did not
agree with Lalage about tommyrot.

"Supposing," I said, "that a clergyman, an ordinary clergyman, not
a bishop, the kind of clergyman whom you would perhaps describe as a
minister, were to preach a sermon about the British Empire and were to
say----"

"In our church," said Mrs. Dodds snappily, "the ministers preach the
Gospel."

"I am convinced of that," I said, "but you must surely admit that the
great idea of the imperial expansion of the race, Greater Britain beyond
the seas, and--the White Man's Burden, and all that kind of thing, are
not essentially anti-evangelical, when looked at from t