d
been not least among the negligences and evasions of the sainted but
indolent Hood that he had invariably refused overnight hospitality
whenever it was possible for him to get back to his home. The morning
was his working time. His books and hymns had profited at the cost of
missing many a generous after-dinner subscription, and at the expense
of social unity. From the outset Scrope had set himself to alter this.
A certain lack of enthusiasm on Lady Ella's part had merely provoked
him to greater effort on his own. His ideal of what was needed with the
people was something rather jolly and familiar, something like a very
good and successful French or Irish priest, something that came
easily and readily into their homes and laid a friendly hand on their
shoulders. The less he liked these rich people naturally the more
familiar his resolution to be successfully intimate made him. He put
down the names and brief characteristics of their sons and daughters in
a little note-book and consulted it before every visit so as to get
his most casual enquiries right. And he invited himself to the Garstein
Fellows house on this occasion by telegram.

"A special mission and some business in Wombash may I have a scrap of
supper and a bed?"

Now Mrs. Garstein Fellows was a thoroughly London woman; she was one of
the banking Grunenbaums, the fair tall sort, and she had a very decided
tendency to smartness. She had a little party in the house, a sort of
long week-end party, that made her hesitate for a minute or so before
she framed a reply to the bishop's request.

It was the intention of Mrs. Garstein Fellows to succeed very
conspicuously in the British world, and the British world she felt was
a complicated one; it is really not one world but several, and if you
would surely succeed you must keep your peace with all the systems and
be a source of satisfaction to all of them. So at least Mrs. Garstein
Fellows saw it, and her method was to classify her acquaintances
according to their systems, to keep them in their proper bundles, and
to give every one the treatment he or she was accustomed to receive. And
since all things British are now changing and passing away, it may not
be uninteresting to record the classification Mrs. Garstein Fellows
adopted. First she set apart as most precious and desirable, and
requiring the most careful treatment, the "court dowdies "--for so it
was that the dignity and quiet good taste that radiat