Lionel burst out laughing.

“A very pretty description of Francie Wright!” he cried.  “Francie a poor, suffering, wretched woman—­because she happened to have a touch of neuralgia the last Sunday you were down here!  There’s very little of the poor and suffering about Francie; she’s as contented and merry a lass as you’d find anywhere.”

Mangan was silent for a second or two; and then he said, with a little hesitation,

“Didn’t you tell me Miss Wright had not been up yet to see ’The Squire’s Daughter?’”

“No, she has not,” Lionel answered, lightly.  “I don’t know whether you have been influencing her, Maurice, or whether you have picked up some of her highly superior prejudices; anyhow, I rather fancy she doesn’t quite approve of the theatre—­I mean, I don’t think she approves of the New Theatre, for she’d go to any other one fast enough, I suppose, if you could only get her away from her sick children.  But not the New Theatre, apparently.  Perhaps she doesn’t care to see me making myself a motley to the view.”

“She has a great regard for you, Linn.  I wouldn’t call her opinions prejudices,” Mangan said—­but with the curious diffidence he displayed whenever he spoke of Lionel’s cousin.

“Oh, Francie should have lived in the fifteenth century—­she would have been a follower of Savonarola,” Lionel said, with a laugh.  “She’s far too exalted for these present days.”

“Well, Linn,” said his friend, “I’m glad you know at least one person who has some notion of duty and self-sacrifice, who has some fineness of perception and some standard of conduct and aim to go by.  Why, those people you associate so much with now seem to have but one pursuit—­the pursuit of pleasure, the gratification of every selfish whim; they seem to have no consciousness of the mystery surrounding life—­of the fact that they themselves are inexplicable phantoms whose very existence might make them pause and wonder and question.  No, it is the amassing of wealth, and the expending of it, that is all sufficient.  I used to wonder why God should have chosen the Jews, of all the nations of the earth, for the revelation that there was something nobler than the acquisition of riches; but I suppose it was because no race ever needed it so much.  And what new revelation—­what new message is coming to the multitudes here in England who are living in a paradise of sensual gratification, blinded, besotted, their world a sort of gorgeous pig-stye—­”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Lionel said, cheerfully.  “Octavius Quirk has settled all that.  The cure for everything is to be a blowing of the whole social fabric to bits.  Then we’re going to begin again all over; and the New Jerusalem will be reached when each man has to dig for his own potatoes.”

“Quirk!” said Maurice Mangan, contemptuously; and then he took out his watch.  “We’d better be getting back, Linn.  We’ll just be in time to meet your people coming out of church.”