return to the sanctities and proprieties he had offended.  He had been formally forgiven and received by the society which (however Fanny Eliott might explain away its action) had most unmistakably cast him out.  She had not expected him to part with his indomitable self-possession under the ordeal, but she could have wished that he had borne himself with a little more modesty.  He had failed to perceive the redemptive character of the feast, he had turned it into an occasion for profane personal display.

Mrs. Eliott’s dinner-party had not saved him; on the contrary, he had saved the dinner-party.

CHAPTER VIII

Anne was right.  Though Majendie was, as he expressed it, “up to her designs upon his unhappy soul,” he remained unconscious of the part to be played by Mrs. Eliott and her circle in the scheme of his salvation.  From his observation of the aristocracy of Thurston Square, it would never have occurred to him that they were people who could count, whichever way you looked at them.

Meanwhile he was a little disturbed by his own appearance as a heavenward pilgrim.  He was not sure that he had not gone a little too far that way, and he felt that it was a shame to allow Anne to take him seriously.

He confided his scruples to Edith.

“Poor dear,” he said, “it’s quite pathetic.  You know, she thinks she’s saving me.”

“And do you mind being saved?”

“Well, no, I don’t mind a little of it.  But the question is, how long I can keep it up.”

“You mean, how long she’ll keep it up?”

He laughed.  “Oh, she’ll keep it up for ever.  No possible doubt about that.  She’ll never tire.  I wonder if I ought to tell her.”

“Tell her what?”

“That it won’t work.  That she can’t do it that way.  She’s wasting my time and her own.”

“Oh, what’s a little time, dear, when you’ve all eternity in view?”

“But I haven’t.  I’ve nothing in view.  My view, at present, is entirely obscured by Anne.”

“Poor Anne!  To think she actually stands between you and your Maker.”

“Yes, you know—­in her very anxiety to introduce us.”

They looked at each other.  Her sainthood was so accomplished, her union with heaven so complete, that she could afford herself these profaner sympathies.  She was secretly indignant with Anne’s view of Walter as unpresentable in the circles of the spiritual elite.

“It never struck her that you mightn’t need an introduction after all; that you were in it as much as she.  That’s the sort of mistake one might expect from—­from a spiritual parvenu, but not from Anne.”

“Oh, come, I don’t consider myself her equal by a long chalk.”

“Well, say she does belong to the peerage; you’re a gentleman, and what more can she require?”

“She can’t see that I am (If I am.  You say so).  She considers me—­spiritually—­a bounder of the worst sort.”