“My reason for asking,” the Bishop went on, with the bland inexorableness with which, in his younger days, he had been known to continue a sermon after the senior warden had looked four times at his watch—­“my reason for asking is, that I hoped I might not be too late to induce you to change the title.”

Mrs. Fetherel set down the cup she had filled.  “The title?” she faltered.

The Bishop raised a reassuring hand.  “Don’t misunderstand me, dear child; don’t for a moment imagine that I take it to be in anyway indicative of the contents of the book.  I know you too well for that.  My first idea was that it had probably been forced on you by an unscrupulous publisher—­I know too well to what ignoble compromises one may be driven in such cases!...”  He paused, as though to give her the opportunity of confirming this conjecture, but she preserved an apprehensive silence, and he went on, as though taking up the second point in his sermon—­“Or, again, the name may have taken your fancy without your realizing all that it implies to minds more alive than yours to offensive innuendoes.  It is—­ahem—­excessively suggestive, and I hope I am not too late to warn you of the false impression it is likely to produce on the very readers whose approbation you would most value.  My friend Mrs. Gollinger, for instance—­”

Mrs. Fetherel, as the publication of her novel testified, was in theory a woman of independent views; and if in practise she sometimes failed to live up to her standard, it was rather from an irresistible tendency to adapt herself to her environment than from any conscious lack of moral courage.  The Bishop’s exordium had excited in her that sense of opposition which such admonitions are apt to provoke; but as he went on she felt herself gradually enclosed in an atmosphere in which her theories vainly gasped for breath.  The Bishop had the immense dialectical advantage of invalidating any conclusions at variance with his own by always assuming that his premises were among the necessary laws of thought.  This method, combined with the habit of ignoring any classifications but his own, created an element in which the first condition of existence was the immediate adoption of his standpoint; so that his niece, as she listened, seemed to feel Mrs. Gollinger’s Mechlin cap spreading its conventual shadow over her rebellious brow and the “Revue de Paris” at her elbow turning into a copy of the “Reredos.”  She had meant to assure her uncle that she was quite aware of the significance of the title she had chosen, that it had been deliberately selected as indicating the subject of her novel, and that the book itself had been written indirect defiance of the class of readers for whose susceptibilities she was alarmed.  The words were almost on her lips when the irresistible suggestion conveyed by the Bishop’s tone and language deflected them into the apologetic murmur, “Oh, uncle, you mustn’t think—­I never meant—­” How much farther this current of reaction might have carried her, the historian is unable to computer, for at this point the door opened and her husband entered the room.