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‘I believe you’d talk the hind leg off a donkey, Athelny,’
she answered calmly.
She succeeded in buttoning her gloves, but before she
went she turned to Philip with a kindly, slightly embar-
rassed smile.
‘You’ll stay to tea, won’t you? Athelny likes someone
to talk to, and it’s not often he gets anybody who’s clever
enough.’
‘Of course he’ll stay to tea,’ said Athelny. Then when his
wife had gone: ‘I make a point of the children going to Sun-
day school, and I like Betty to go to church. I think women
ought to be religious. I don’t believe myself, but I like wom-
en and children to.’
Philip, strait-laced in matters of truth, was a little shocked
by this airy attitude.
‘But how can you look on while your children are being
taught things which you don’t think are true?’
‘If they’re beautiful I don’t much mind if they’re not true.
It’s asking a great deal that things should appeal to your rea-
son as well as to your sense of the aesthetic. I wanted Betty
to become a Roman Catholic, I should have liked to see her
converted in a crown of paper flowers, but she’s hopeless-
ly Protestant. Besides, religion is a matter of temperament;
you will believe anything if you have the religious turn of
mind, and if you haven’t it doesn’t matter what beliefs were
instilled into you, you will grow out of them. Perhaps re-
ligion is the best school of morality. It is like one of those
drugs you gentlemen use in medicine which carries another
in solution: it is of no efficacy in itself, but enables the other

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