tate over the bishop's telegram, was
derived.

She ran over their names as she sat considering her reply.

What was there for a bishop to object to? There was that admirable
American widow, Lady Sunderbund. She was enormously rich, she was
enthusiastic. She was really on probation for higher levels; it was her
decolletage delayed her. If only she kept off theosophy and the Keltic
renascence and her disposition to profess wild intellectual passions,
there would be no harm in her. Provided she didn't come down to dinner
in anything too fantastically scanty--but a word in season was possible.
No! there was no harm in Lady Sunderbund. Then there were Ridgeway Kelso
and this dark excitable Catholic friend of his, Paidraig O'Gorman. Mrs.
Garstein Fellows saw no harm in them. Then one had to consider Lord
Gatling and Lizzie Barusetter. But nothing showed, nothing was likely to
show even if there was anything. And besides, wasn't there a Church and
Stage Guild?

Except for those people there seemed little reason for alarm. Mrs.
Garstein Fellows did not know that Professor Hoppart, who so amusingly
combined a professorship of political economy with the writing of
music-hall lyrics, was a keen amateur theologian, nor that Bent, the
sentimental novelist, had a similar passion. She did not know that her
own eldest son, a dark, romantic-looking youngster from Eton, had also
come to the theological stage of development. She did however weigh
the possibilities of too liberal opinions on what are called social
questions on the part of Miss Sharsper, the novelist, and decided that
if that lady was watched nothing so terrible could be said even in an
undertone; and as for the Mariposa, the dancer, she had nothing but
Spanish and bad French, she looked all right, and it wasn't very likely
she would go out of her way to startle an Anglican bishop. Simply she
needn't dance. Besides which even if a man does get a glimpse of a
little something--it isn't as if it was a woman.

But of course if the party mustn't annoy the bishop, the bishop must
do his duty by the party. There must be the usual purple and the silver
buckles.

She wired back:

"A little party but it won't put you out send your man with your
change."

(2)

In making that promise Mrs. Garstein Fellows reckoned without the
morbid sensibility of the bishop's disorganized nervous system and the
unsuspected theological stirrings beneath the apparent worldliness of
Hopp