 world, and is as hungry now, after her long fast, for titles and big-wigs, as though she were the purest parvenu. The squire of course makes mock of her, and she has no influence with him. However, there is something naïve in the stories they tell of her. I feel as if I might get on with her. But the squire!'

And the rector, having laid down his pipe, took to studying his boots with a certain dolefulness.

Langham, however, who always treated the subjects of conversation presented to him as an epicure treats foods, felt at this point that he had had enough of the Wendovers, and started something else.

'So you physic bodies as well as minds?' he said, pointing to the medicine cupboard.

'I should think so!' cried Robert, brightening at once. 'Last winter I causticked all the diphtheritic throats in the place with my own hand. Our parish doctor is an infirm old noodle, and I just had to do it. And if the state of part of the parish remains what it is, it's a pleasure I may promise myself most years. But it shan't remain what it is.'

And the rector reached out his hand again for his pipe, and gave one or two energetic puffs to it as he surveyed his friend stretched before him in the depths of an armchair.

'I will make myself a public nuisance, but the people shall have their drains!'

'It seems to me,' said Langham, musing, 'that in my youth people talked about Ruskin; now they talk about drains.'

'And quite right too. Dirt and drains, Catherine says I have gone mad upon them. It's all very well, but they are the foundations of a sound religion.'

'Dirt, drains, and Darwin,' said Langham meditatively, taking up Darwin's Earthworms, which lay on the study table[Pg 171] beside him, side by side with a volume of Grant Allen's Sketches. 'I didn't know you cared for this sort of thing!'

Robert did not answer for a moment, and a faint flush stole into his face.

'Imagine, Langham!' he said presently, 'I had never read even The Origin of Species before I came here. We used to take the thing half for granted, I remember, at Oxford, in a more or less modified sense. But to drive the mind through all the details of the evidence, to force one's
