f full stops. Mr. Bodiham turned the pages.

"Soutane in best black merino. Ready to wear; in all sizes. Clerical
frock coats. From nine guineas. A dressy garment, tailored by our own
experienced ecclesiastical cutters."

Half-tone illustrations represented young curates, some dapper, some
Rugbeian and muscular, some with ascetic faces and large ecstatic eyes,
dressed in jackets, in frock-coats, in surplices, in clerical evening
dress, in black Norfolk suitings.

"A large assortment of chasubles.

"Rope girdles.

"Sheeny's Special Skirt Cassocks. Tied by a string about the waist...When
worn under a surplice presents an appearance indistinguishable from that
of a complete cassock...Recommended for summer wear and hot climates."

With a gesture of horror and disgust Mr. Bodiham threw the catalogue
into the waste-paper basket. Mrs. Bodiham looked at him; her pale,
glaucous eyes reflected his action without comment.

"The village," she said in her quiet voice, "the village grows worse and
worse every day."

"What has happened now?" asked Mr. Bodiham, feeling suddenly very weary.

"I'll tell you." She pulled up a brown varnished chair and sat down. In
the village of Crome, it seemed, Sodom and Gomorrah had come to a second
birth.

CHAPTER X.

Denis did not dance, but when ragtime came squirting out of the pianola
in gushes of treacle and hot perfume, in jets of Bengal light, then
things began to dance inside him. Little black nigger corpuscles jigged
and drummed in his arteries. He became a cage of movement, a walking
palais de danse. It was very uncomfortable, like the preliminary
symptoms of a disease. He sat in one of the window-seats, glumly
pretending to read.

At the pianola, Henry Wimbush, smoking a long cigar through a tunnelled
pillar of amber, trod out the shattering dance music with serene
patience. Locked together, Gombauld and Anne moved with a harmoniousness
that made them seem a single creature, two-headed and four-legged. Mr.
Scogan, solemnly buffoonish, shuffled round the room with Mary. Jenny
sat in the shadow behind the piano, scribbling, so it seemed, in a
big red notebook. In arm-chairs by the fireplace, Priscilla and Mr.
Barbecue-Smith discussed higher things, without, apparently, being
disturbed by the noise on the Lower Plane.

"Optimism," said Mr. Barbecue-Smith with a tone of finality, speaking
through strains of the "Wild, Wild Women"--"optimism is the opening out
of the soul t