“That reminds me,” said Mr. Heard.  “She gave me some remarkable tea-cakes not long ago.  Delicious.  She said they were your specialty.”

“You have found them out, have you?” laughed the American.  “I always tell her that once a man begins on those tea-cakes there is no reason on earth, that I can think of, why he should ever stop again.  All the same, I nearly overate myself the other day.  That was because we had a late luncheon on board.  It shall never occur again—­the late luncheon, I mean.  Have you discovered, by the way, whether the business of Miss Wilberforce has been settled?”

Mr. Heard shook his head.”

“Is that the person,” enquired the Count, “who is reported to drink to excess?  I have never spoken to her.  She belongs presumably to the lower classes—­to those who extract from alcohol the pleasurable emotions which we derive from a good play, or music, or a picture gallery.”

“She is a lady.”

“Indeed?  Then she has relapsed into the intemperance of her inferiors.  That is not pretty.”

“Temperance!” said the bishop.  “Another of those words which I am always being obliged to use.  Pray tell me, Count, what you mean by temperance.”

“I should call it the exercise of our faculties and organs in such a manner as to combine the maximum of pleasure with the minimum of pain.”

“And who is the judge of what constitutes the dividing line between use and abuse?”

“We cannot do better, I imagine, than go to our own bodies for an answer to that question.  They will tell us exactly how far we may proceed with impunity.”

“In that case,” said the millionaire, “if you drink a little too much occasionally—­only occasionally, I mean!—­you would not call that intemperance?”

“Certainly not.  We are not Puritans here.  We do not give wrong names to things.  What you suggest would be by the way of a change, I presume—­like the eating of a pike:  something we do not indulge in every day.  If I were to come home a little joyful now and then, do you know what these people would say?  They would say:  ’The old gentleman is pleased to be merry to-night.  Bless his heart!  May the wind do him good.’  But if I behaved as Miss Wilberforce is reported to do, they would say:  ’That old man is losing self-control.  He is growing intemperate.  Every evening!  It is not a pretty sight.’  They never call it wrong.  Their mode of condemnation is to say that it is not pretty.  The ethical moment, you observe, is replaced by an aesthetic one.  That is the Mediterranean note.  It is the merit of the Roman Church that she left us some grains of common sense in regard to minor morals.”

The bishop remarked: 

“What I have seen of the local Catholicism strikes me as a kind of pantomime.  That is the fault of my upbringing, no doubt.”

“Oh, I am not referring to externals!  Externally, of course, our Church is the purest rococo—­”