gyman, a
man of some eminence according to the Archdeacon and so, presumably, not
the original curate had set an examination paper intended to test the
religious knowledge of Lalage and others. In it he quoted some words
from one of St Paul's epistles: "I keep my body under and have it
in subjection," and asked what they meant. Lalage submitted a novel
interpretation. "St. Paul," she wrote, "is here speaking of that
mystical body which is the Church. It ought always to be kept under and
had in subjection."

As a diplomatist--I suppose I am a diplomatist of a minor kind--whose
lot is cast among the Latin peoples, I am inclined to think that
Lalage's interpretation may one day be universally accepted as the true
one and so honoured with the crown of orthodoxy. It would even to-day
strike a Portuguese journalist as a simple statement of an obvious
truth. The Archdeacon regarded it as deplorable, and I understood from
his letter that the old charge of flippancy had been revived against
Lalage. She must, I suppose, have disliked the man who set the
examination paper. I cannot otherwise account for the viciously
anti-clerical spirit of her answer.

The next important news I got of Lalage reached me in the spring of the
fourth year I spent in the service of somebody else's country. It came
in a letter from Lalage herself, written on paper headed by the letters
A.T.R.S. embossed in red. She wrote:

"You'll be glad to hear that I entered Trinity College last October and
since then have been enjoying 'the spacious times of great Elizabeth.'
Our society, girls, is called the Elizabethan. That's the point of the
quotation."

I glanced at the head of the paper, but failed to see how A.T.R.S. could
possibly stand for Elizabethan Society. Lalage's letter continued:

"There is nothing equal to a university life for broadening out the mind
and enlarging one's horizon. I have just founded a new society called
the A.T.R.S., and the committee (Hilda, myself, and a boy called
Selby-Harrison, who got a junior ex: and is _very_ clever) is on the
lookout for members, subscription--a year, paid in advance, or life
members one pound. Our object is to check by every legitimate means the
spread of tommyrot in this country and the world generally. There is a
great deal too much of it and something ought to be done to make people
jolly well ashamed of themselves before it is too late. If the matter
is not taken in hand vigorously the country w