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 radiated from Buckingham Palace impressed her restless, shallow mind—­the sort of people who prefer pair horse carriages to automobiles, have quiet friendships in the highest quarters, quietly do not know any one else, busy themselves with charities, dress richly rather than impressively, and have either little water-colour accomplishments or none at all, and no other relations with “art.”  At the skirts of this crowning British world Mrs. Garstein Fellows tugged industriously and expensively.  She did not keep a carriage and pair and an old family coachman because that, she felt, would be considered pushing and presumptuous; she had the sense to stick to her common unpretending 80 h.p.  Daimler; but she wore a special sort of blackish hat-bonnet for such occasions as brought her near the centre of honour, which she got from a little good shop known only to very few outside the inner ring, which hat-bonnet she was always careful to sit on for a few minutes before wearing.  And