“Now, Ruth,” said Mr. Fellowes when he had finished and despatched his note, and, lighting a cigarette, settled himself in his armchair opposite to her, “I’ll yield you up all I know. It was the queerest interview I ever had with that queer pair.—You needn’t wriggle with anticipation, my dear, no human creature could reproduce the scene with any justice to himself or to his subject.—Waring had most palpably put on for the occasion a brisk man-of-the-world air that was superb, but his wife seemed dreamier than ever, and limper, and her hat looked rather askew.”

“It always does, but do go on.”

“Directly you give me a chance, dear. Waring opened the campaign with a little small talk as he always does, but it was quite off-hand and reckless to-day. He had hardly set his gentle tap fairly flowing however, when his wife suddenly woke up and chipped in with quite phenomenal clearness and precision,

“‘Dear Henry, suppose we state the object of our call, we can converse afterwards.’

“Then it all came out. First one stated a fact or a theory then the other had his innings. It was hard enough to follow the two and to watch them at the same time; one never likes to miss the moment when they clasp hands again and the little looks they cast on each other in the process. It appears the pair meditate a definite experiment on those wretched children, and want my help in securing a bear-leader for the task.”

“Good gracious!” gasped Mrs. Fellowes. “Go on,” she commanded grimly, “what is it?”

“On no account whatever is either to be sent to school or allowed to hold intercourse with other children; no woman is to have any hand in their tuition; naturally, cricket, football, and every other boyish sport is to be carefully excluded from the curriculum, and all Christian teaching is to be utterly tabooed.”

“Mercy on us!”

“The facts of the Old Testament are to be imparted to them with other ancient history, and they are to be well instructed in the natural sciences. By these means they will learn to know God in His Works—with a capital ‘W’—Mrs. Waring observed this solemnly to her husband for my benefit. ‘Exactly, my darling,’ he replied, with a most surprising alacrity—they had rehearsed this point, those two babies.—When the children are launched into their teens and have presumably arrived at an age of more or less discretion, the Bible and any other existing evidences of Christianity obtainable, are to be formally presented to them. The imps may then receive these or reject them according to their particular turn of mind, but in no case are they to be biased.

“The parents have seemingly occupied themselves a good deal with this part of the experiment and regard this presentation of a choice of beliefs as a sort of function on which they mean to take exhaustive observation.”

The rector paused to roll another cigarette; when he had finished and lighted it, he went on.

“Ruth, you are an intelligent woman and won’t misjudge me when I say, that this experiment in itself seems to be a reasonable one.

“This Bible-reading question is an awful one,” he went on, musing aloud, “we all have had, every decent English man, woman, and child of us has had the Bible religiously drilled into him from the time of consciousness till whatever time he can manage to read it for himself, then he is exhorted to carry on the exercise independently, and a good percentage of people do; you’d be astonished at the number of people who never miss reading their Bible every day of their lives, and perhaps more astonished still if you were to know the amazingly small effect it has on the lives of these people. Even from an intellectual point of view, it is incredible to me how little the average human being has grasped the heritage he possesses in this book.

“I was speaking to a girl the other day—by far the most intelligent one I know in these regions—she was talking to me with perfect unrestraint and frankness about all sorts of things. She told me she could see no beauty whatsoever in the Bible, and that she had never been able to derive an atom of encouragement or assurance from anything in it. If it did not bore, it upset her, and made belief harder. It had become a mere patter to her by vile reading and intonation, and the remarkable turns of thought given to it by many minds insulted her reason. Even the poetry of the diction had been spoilt for her and seemed, she said, to reek of half-fledged curates.—Under some conditions this experiment of the Warings might prove a success.”

“Oh, but with that mother!”

“Ah, yes, that alters the whole aspect of affairs! If you could only have heard the passionless, analytical style in which Waring and his wife discussed the matter and speculated on the issue, which they think will be more typical in Gwen than in Dacre, his brute strength being, in their opinion, his strong point, and his theological side hardly worth considering. They throw it in, however, ‘careless like’ as, if the experiment is to be tried, it is just as easy to try it on two as on one.”

“Mercy on us,” again said Mrs. Fellowes, clattering the fire-irons viciously.

“By the way, Waring amused me intensely by one revelation he made, he could hardly get it out, and I saw him fling a pathetically-deprecating glance at his wife and give her hand a squeeze before he began. He felt he had to account for the luckless Dacre’s strength of legs, of which he seems to have as poor an opinion as the Psalmist, he feared I might fall into the error of casting the blame on him or his wife, so he determined I should know the real cause. ‘You will hardly believe me,’ he observed, ‘when I tell you that my wife with her refined intellectuality is the outcome of long generations of soldiers and of—ahem,—famous duellists, and I fear our son, Dacre, is a very clearly-defined specimen of throwing-back.’ Poor Mrs. Waring! she felt her ancestry keenly and got as red as a rose during the confession.”

“Goodness gracious me! What a woman! what a pair! What in the name of goodness brought the two together and made them marry each other and produce children. If I were Providence and had that on my mind, I’d never look up again.”

“My dear child!”

“John, in the present state of my feelings, brought on by you yourself recollect, you must forget your sacerdotal character and only remember my state of original sin. Why should two beautiful children’s lives be spoilt for the vagaries of a pair who never had any right to bear children? Think of Gwen’s sad old face full of the trouble of all ages, think of her naughtiness with that horrible unique sort of infernal touch about it; that painting herself blue is the most childish escapade I remember.

“I was at Mrs. Doyle’s yesterday and she was telling me a lot about Mrs. Waring before we came. After Dacre’s birth, she said it was absolutely ghastly to see her with the child, she was terrified to hold it, and trembled like a leaf whenever she absolutely had to. Poor Mrs. Doyle, she got quite irritated and excited about one thing; it seems she could not nurse her own children at all, and that Mrs. Waring was a capital mother from that point of view, and Mrs. Doyle seemingly could not see at all why an unnatural little bundle of scientific data should score off her, a good wholesome creature made for a mother, in this manner.”

“It was certainly too bad, and one would never have expected it of Mrs. Waring,” said the rector laughing.

“Oh, and whenever Mary brought either of the babies to her or she met them in the corridors or about the grounds, Mrs. Doyle says her one request was that Mary should take the creature away and give it food, it looked faint! They were both huge, flourishing, healthy babies, I hear.”

“Ruth,” said Mr. Fellowes suddenly, “I wish those people would keep away from church.”

“You are shedding your sacerdotal character with a vengeance! What do you mean?”

“You have no idea how they distract me, sitting there together with their eyes far away and their ears sealed, except at the odd times they give those spasmodic simultaneous starts, and twist their thoughts back for the minute to what’s going on.”

“But, John, for the sake of the parish—”

“If the parish can’t keep up to its ordinary pretty low water-mark without this prick to its piety it must be in a poor state, and even more of a discredit to me than I imagine. They are far too good to be asked to play this weekly farce for the parish’s sake. It was Hopkins, not I, who insisted upon this church-going and of course they gave in in their gracious simple way; and now, not even a water spout would stop them from coming, they are so concerned for my feelings. What a pair of unconscious Christians they are to be sure! One sees it cropping up in all directions.”

“I wish it would appear anyway in the management of their children, I don’t see many traces of it there. When is this wretched experiment to be set going?” asked Mrs. Fellowes.

“As soon as I can procure a suitable person to conduct it. I think I know a fellow who might do.”

“What business have they with children, those two?” cried Mrs. Fellowes with a little spasm of pain twisting about her mouth. “I don’t believe those children ever got properly hugged in all their lives by that inhuman little mother of theirs. And oh, Gwen’s dress! That is awful!”

“Ah, yes, that makes the whole affair very much sadder! Don’t you think dinner is ready? Yes, those children have a great deal to fight against, it isn’t their ancestors alone that will handicap them, poor little beggars.”

“Cartloads of saints for ancestors wouldn’t be worth a rap to them with an eerie little creature like that for a mother,” said Mrs. Fellowes hotly, in the pretty lazy drawl into which her touch of twang had developed itself. “I pity that wretched coming tutor.”

She let her skirts drop and gave them a dexterous kick as she went out, to give them the correct “hang”.