There was an instant lowering of eyes towards soup plates, an announcing of the various letters seen therein. Trix had an application for each, making the letters stand as the initials for words.

"C. S.," said Miss Tibb.u.t.t presently, entering into the spirit of the game.

"Sure there isn't a T?" asked Trix.

"No," said Miss Tibb.u.t.t peering closer, "I mean there isn't one."

"Well then, it can't be Catholic Truth Society. My imagination has given out. I can only think of Christian Science. I don't think it's quite right of you, Tibby dear."

Miss Tibb.u.t.t blinked good-humouredly.

"Aren't they the people who think that the Bible dropped down straight from heaven in a shiny black cover with S. P. G. printed on it?" she asked.

Trix shook her head.

"No," she declared solemnly, "they're Bible Christians. The Christian Science people are the ones who think we haven't got any bodies."

"No bodies!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Miss Tibb.u.t.t.

"Well," said Trix, "anyhow they think bodies are a false--false something or other."

"False claim," suggested Father Dormer.

"That's it," cried Trix, immensely delighted. "How clever of you to have thought of it. Only I'm not sure if it's the bodies are a false claim, or the aches attached to the bodies. Perhaps it's both."

"I thought that was the New Thought Idea," said Pia.

Trix shook her head. "Oh no, the New Thought people think a lot about one's body. They give us lots of bodies."

"Really?" queried Doctor Hilary doubtfully.

"Oh yes," responded Trix. "I once went to one of their lectures."

"My dear Trix!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Miss Tibb.u.t.t fl.u.s.tered.

"It was quite an accident," said Trix rea.s.suringly. "A friend of mine, Sybil Martin, was coming up to town and wanted me to meet her. She suggested I should meet her at Paddington, and then go to a lecture on psychometry with her, and tea afterwards. I hadn't the faintest notion what psychometry was, but I supposed it might be first cousin to trigonometry, and quite as dull. But she wanted me, so I went. It _was_ funny," gurgled Trix.

Doctor Hilary was watching her.

"You'd better disburden your mind," he said.

Trix crumbled her bread, still smiling at the recollection.

"Well, the lecture was held in a biggish room, and there were a lot of odd people present. But the oddest of all was the lecturer. She wore a kind of purple velvet tea-gown, though it was only three o'clock in the afternoon. She talked for a long time about vibrations, and things that bored me awfully, and people kept interrupting with questions. One man interrupted particularly often. He kept saying, 'Excuse me, but am I right in thinking--' And then he would give a little lecture on his own account, and look around for the approval of the audience. I should have flung things at him if I had been the purple velvet lady. It was so obvious that he was not desiring _her_ information, but merely wishful to air his own. There was a text on the wall which said, 'We talk abundance here,' and when I pointed out to Sybil how true it was, she wasn't a bit pleased, and said it didn't mean what I thought _in the least_. But she wouldn't explain what it did mean. After the lecture, the purple velvet lady held things--jewelry chiefly--that people in the audience sent up to her, and described their owners, and where they'd got the things from.

There was quite a lot of family history, and people's characteristics and virtues and failings, and very, _very_ private things made public, but no one seemed to mind."

"That's the odd thing about those people," said Doctor Hilary thoughtfully. "Disclosing their innermost thoughts, feelings, and so-called experiences, seems an absolute mania with them. And the more public the disclosure the better they are pleased. But go on, Miss Devereux."

"Well," said Trix, "at last she began describing a sort of Cleopatra lady, and--and rather vivid love scenes, and--and things like that. When she'd ended, the bracelet turned out to belong to a little dowdy woman looking like a meek mouse. I thought the purple velvet lady would have been really upset and mortified at her mistake. But she wasn't in the least. She just smiled sweetly, and returned the bracelet to the owner, and said that the dowdy little woman had been Cleopatra in a former incarnation. Of course when she began on _that_ tack, I saw the kind of lecture I'd really let myself in for, and I knew I'd no business to be in the place at all, so I made Sybil take me away. It was nearly the end, and she didn't mind, because she missed the silver collection. But she talked to me about it the whole of tea-time, and she really believed it all," sighed Trix pathetically.

Miss Tibb.u.t.t looked quite shocked.

"Oh, but, my dear, she couldn't really."

"She did," nodded Trix.

Miss Tibb.u.t.t appealed helplessly to Father Dormer.

"Why do people believe such extraordinary things?" she demanded almost wrathfully.

Father Dormer laughed. "That's a question I cannot pretend to answer. But I suppose that if people reject the truth, and yet want to believe something beyond mere physical facts, they can invent anything, that is if they happen to be endowed with sufficient imagination."

"Then the devil must help them invent," said Miss Tibb.u.t.t with exceeding firmness.

After dinner they had coffee in the garden. A big moon was coming up in the dusk behind the trees, its light throwing the shadows dark and soft on the gra.s.s.

"It's so astonishingly silent after London," said Trix, gazing at the blue-grey velvet of the sky.

She looked more than ever elfin-like, with the moonlight falling on her fair hair and pointed oval face, and the shimmering green of her dress.

"I wonder why we ever go to bed on moonlight nights," she pursued.

"Brilliant sunshine always tempts us to do something--a long walk, a drive, or boating on a river. Over and over again we say, 'Now, the very next fine day we'll do--so and so.' But no one ever dreams of saying, 'Now, the next moonlight night we'll have a picnic.' I wonder why not?"

"Because," said Doctor Hilary smiling, and watching her, "the old and staid folk have no desire to lose their sleep, and--well, the conventions are apt to stand in the way of the young and romantic."

"Conventions," sighed Trix, "are the bane of one's existence. They hamper all one's most cherished desires until one is of an age when the desires become non-existent. My aunt Lilla is always saying to me, 'When you're a much older woman, dearest.' And I reply, 'But, Aunt Lilla, _now_ is the moment.' I know, by experience, later is no good. When I was a tiny child my greatest desire was to play with all the grubbiest children in the parks. Of course I was dragged past them by a haughty and righteous nurse. I can talk to them now if I want to, and even wheel their perambulators. But it would have been so infinitely nicer to wheel a very dirty baby in a very ramshackle perambulator when I was eight.

Conventions are responsible for an enormous lot of lost opportunities."

"Mightn't they be well lost?" suggested Father Dormer.

Trix looked across at him.

"Serious or nonsense?" she demanded.

"Whichever you like," he replied, a little twinkle in his eyes.

"Oh, serious," interpolated Miss Tibb.u.t.t.

Trix leant a little forward, resting her chin on her hands.

"Well, seriously then, conventions--those that are merely conventions for their own sake,--are detestable, and responsible for an enormous lot of unhappiness. 'My dear (mimicked Trix), you can be quite polite to so and so, but I cannot have you becoming friendly with them, you know they are not _quite_.' I've heard that said over and over again. It's hateful. I'm not a socialist, not one little bit, but I do think if you like a person you ought to be able to be friends, even if you happen to be a d.u.c.h.ess and he's a chimney-sweep. The motto of the present-day world is, 'What will people think?' People!" snorted Trix wrathfully, warming to her theme, "what people? And is their opinion worth twopence halfpenny? Fancy them a.s.sociating with St. Peter if he appeared now among them as he used to be, with only his goodness and his character and his fisherman's clothes, instead of his halo and his keys, as they see him in the churches."

The two men laughed. Miss Tibb.u.t.t made a little murmur of something like query. The d.u.c.h.essa's face looked rather white, but perhaps it was only the effect of the moonlight.

"But, Miss Devereux," said Doctor Hilary, "even now the world--people, as you call them, are quite ready to recognize genius despite the fact that it may have risen from the slums."

"Yes," contended Trix eagerly, "but it's not the person they recognize really, it's merely their adjunct."