at had pushed back
her heavy hair fell on her lap. She looked at it and its shining rings,
and Mrs Jefferson's sharp glance followed hers. Was there a plain gold
circlet among that glittering array?--was the beautiful stranger wife or
maiden?

"If any man saw her now!" she thought involuntarily. "My! I wouldn't
give much for his peace of mind afterwards! What owls she makes us all
look!"

"Nerves are queer things," she said aloud. "Can't say I'm much troubled
with them, except here," and she moved her foot explanatorily. "Just
that joint. It's agony sometimes. Suppressed gout, you know. You
wouldn't think so to look at it, would you?"

"That the gout was--suppressed? certainly I should," answered the
stranger, smiling. "There is no external sign of it. I always thought
gout meant large lumps, and swellings of the joints."

"So it does," said Mrs Jefferson, with an involuntary glance at the
moist and crimson sufferer on her right. "But my form of it is
different. It is much worse, but no one sympathises with me because it
doesn't _look_ so bad as the other gout."

"It is not often that people do sympathise with illness," said the
beautiful woman. "When we ourselves are well, we think suffering can't
be so very great after all, and when we are ill we are quite sure no one
else has to bear so much pain. Human nature is essentially selfish. It
is a natural incident of living at all that we should estimate our own
life as more important than our neighbours."

"Well," laughed Mrs Jefferson, "if we sacrificed it to them, it might
be a doubtful benefit. I often thank my stars I wasn't born in the age
of martyrs. If J. had been, I'm sure the very sight of the rack or the
faggot would have made me swear anything."

"The history of religions is a very curious history," said the stranger
in her low clear tones. "Looked at dispassionately, it has done very
little for mankind in general, save to prove one fundamental truth that
is more significant than any doctrine or dogma. That truth is the
inherent need in all humanity of something to worship. From the highest
to the lowest degrees of civilisation that need has made itself the
exponent of external forms. It is the kernel of all religions."

"A kernel that is surrounded with a very hard shell," said Mrs
Jefferson glibly. She liked discussions, and was accustomed to say she
could talk on any subject--having indeed come from a country where women
did