t
spoken to her, and who, apparently in animated conversation with Sir
Lionel Borridge, had hitherto held himself aloof.

"You wouldn't remember, of course," Sir Joseph pursued, "the arrival of
Baroness Puckha Bilj in London in the late eighties, with her doctrine
of 'Self-Exteriorisation.' The Inner Light reminds me somewhat of that.
We were her bankers. She was most successful."

"Your husband surpassed himself, Mrs. Tribe," said Denis Malster to the
emaciated wife of the Incandescent Gerald. Denis felt extremely superior
behind his solid Anglican Protestant entrenchments, and thought that he
could afford to be generous and even patronising to the members of a
struggling creed.

"Of course, Baroness Puckha Bilj had not your advantages," continued the
undaunted Sir Joseph. "She was already advanced in years when she left
Hungary."

"Have some cake?" said Mrs. Delarayne.

"I admit," Lord Henry was saying, "that a new religion is perhaps the
most urgent need of modern times; but then this Age is scarcely great
enough to make it."

"Come, come!" exclaimed Sir Lionel gruffly, his melancholy eyes closing
heavily as he spoke, "you are a little hard surely. Is not this your
first attendance here? I don't seem to remember having seen you amongst
us before."

Lord Henry apologised and turned away. He had noticed his hostess's eye
upon him, and he hastened towards her.

"Sir Lionel's conversation seems to have been singularly engrossing,"
remarked Mrs. Delarayne as he approached.

"It always amazes me," declared the young nobleman with laughter in his
eyes, "how the men of the so-called 'exact sciences' become involved in
our new emergency substitutes for a great Faith."

Mrs. Delarayne purred with a slightly treble note of dissent.

"Why not?" Sir Joseph demanded.

"I suppose it is the refuge of the mind that deals only with precise and
exact terms and rules, to plunge into the opposite extreme,--into blue
mistiness for instance. Or is it perhaps the fact that mathematicians
and physicists deal very largely with symbols, with abstractions as
opposed to realities, and that they therefore easily fall a prey to this
sort of thing?"

Sir Joseph shrugged his shoulders and tried hard to look wise.

"The worst of it is," Lord Henry pursued, "the adherence of a man like
Borridge, makes lesser men imagine that the creed to which he lends his
support, must have something in it."

Mrs. Delarayne contented herself with