Robert, who was leaning against
the chimney-piece, said in his cold drawl, "Your friend ought to be happy
that you have returned to London, seems to me, my dear, instead of
wasting your life in that wilderness."

John drew himself up. "It's not London I object to," he said; "that was
inevitable, I dare say."

"What then?"

"The profession she has come back to follow."

"Why, what's amiss with the profession?" said Lord Robert, and Drake, who
returned to the room at the moment, said: "Yes, what's amiss with it?
Some of the best men in the world have belonged to it, I think."

"Tell me the name of one of them, since the world began, who ever lived
an active Christian life."

Lord Robert made a kink of laughter, and, turning to the window, began to
play a tune with his finger tips on the glass of a pane. Drake struggled
to keep a straight face, and answered, "It is not their role, sir."

"Very well, if that's too much to ask, tell me how many of them have done
anything in real life, anything for the world, for humanity--anything
whatever, I don't care what it is."

"You are unreasonable, sir," said Drake, "and such objections could as
properly apply to the professions of the painter and the musician. These
are the children of joy. Their first function is to amuse. And surely
amusement has its place in real life, as you say."

"On the contrary," said John, following his own thought, for he had not
listened, "how many of them have lived lives of reckless abandonment,
self-indulgence, and even scandalous license!"

"Those are abuses that apply equally to other professions, sir. Even the
Church is not free from them. But in the view of reasonable beings one
clergyman of evil life--nay, one hundred--would not make the profession
of the clergy bad."

"A profession," said John, "which appeals above all to the senses, and
lives on the emotions, and fosters jealousy and vanity and backbiting,
and develops duplicity, and exists on lies, and does nothing to encourage
self-sacrifice or to help suffering humanity, is a bad profession and a
sinful one!"

"If a profession is sinful," said Drake, "in proportion as it appeals to
the senses, and lives on the emotions, and develops duplicity, then the
profession of the Church is the most sinful in the world, for it offers
the greatest temptations to lying, and produces the worst hypocrites and
impostors!"

"That," said John, with eyes flashing and passion vibrating in his
v