“Complimentary to you, at least.”

“To Lady Jane, I suspect, rather than to me; for he told me broadly enough that all the flattering attentions which he had received in Manchester-where, you know, all such prophets are received with open arms, their only credentials being that, whatsoever they believe, they shall not believe the Bible-had not given him the pleasure which he had received from that one introduction to what he called ‘the inner hearth-life of the English landed aristocracy.’  But what did you think of him?”

“Do you really wish to know?”

“I do.”

“Then, honestly, I never heard so much magniloquent unwisdom talked in the same space of time.  It was the sense of shame for my race which kept me silent all the evening.  I could not trust myself to argue with a gray-haired Saxon man, whose fifty years of life seemed to have left him a child in all but the childlike heart which alone can enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

“You are severe,” said Templeton, smilingly though, as if his estimate were not very different from mine.

“Can one help being severe when one hears irreverence poured forth from reverend lips?  I do not mean merely irreverence for the Catholic Creeds; that to my mind-God forgive me if I misjudge him-seemed to me only one fruit of a deep root of irreverence for all things as they are, even for all things as they seem.  Did you not remark the audacious contempt for all ages but ’our glorious nineteenth century,’ and the still deeper contempt for all in the said glorious time who dared to believe that there was any ascertained truth independent of the private fancy and opinion of-for I am afraid it came to that-him, Professor Windrush, and his circle of elect souls?  ’You may believe nothing if you like, and welcome; but if you do take to that unnecessary act, you are a fool if you believe anything but what I believe-though I do not choose to state what that is.’  Is not that, now, a pretty fair formulisation of his doctrine?”

“But, my dear raver,” said Templeton, laughing, “the man believed at least in physical science.  I am sure we heard enough about its triumphs.”

“It may be so.  But to me his very ‘spiritualism’ seemed more materialistic than his physics.  His notion seemed to be, though heaven forbid that I should say that he ever put it formally before himself-”

“Or anything else,” said Templeton, sotto voce.

“-that it is the spiritual world which is governed by physical laws, and the physical by spiritual ones; that while men and women are merely the puppets of cerebrations and mentations, and attractions and repulsions, it is the trees, and stones, and gases, who have the wills and the energies, and the faiths and the virtues and the personalities.”

“You are caricaturing.”