IDETEST prigs,” said Mrs. Marjoy, as her hands flickered over the tea-tray in the drawing-room of The Hermitage. “And of that tribe commend me to young Strong as the prince of the sect.”

Mrs. Marjoy was one of those irreproachably vulgar persons whose mission in life appears to be the distilling of spiritual nostrums for the consciences of their neighbors. She was a born critic, a mercurial being ingrained with prejudice and dowered with an inordinate self-esteem. She had run “to tongue” in a remarkable degree; moreover, she scanned the world through the prisms of a none too generous philosophy.

“My dear,” quoth Mrs. Mince, balancing a large slab of cake in her saucer, “young people are naturally irreverent in these days. You would hardly believe me, but Gabriel Strong, a mere boy, had the impudence to argue with my husband on religious matters after dinner the other evening. Poor, dear Jacob came home quite upset.”

Mrs. Marjoy’s chair creaked. She was a lady who seemed to extract discords even from things inanimate. The harmonium in the church school-room was her most eloquent disciple.

“What had the young cub to say?”

“Well, my dear, he contested that he could see no harm in that ignorant nonconformist preaching at the village cross on Sundays. He snubbed poor, dear Jacob most abruptly, and declared that he should go and hear the fellow preach. Think of that—to the vicar of a parish!”

Mrs. Marjoy sniffed, a habit of hers when she wished to be expressive.

“Abominable!”

“Such bad taste!”

“Intellectual young men are always objectionable. Strong, Junior, always strikes me as a dissolute person. What do you think, my dear?”

Mrs. Mince cogitated over her cake. She was not exactly conversant with the characteristics of dissolute young men, but as the vicaress of Saltire she aimed at claiming a mild versatility in the technicalities of vice and virtue.

“Jacob declares,” she said, retreating upon an infallible authority, “that he has never met a young fellow so irreverently arrogant towards the opinions of his elders. And Jacob is such a man of the world!”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Marjoy, with a tinge of irony. “It is so ill-bred to argue with people more experienced than one’s self.”

The Cassandra of the tray solaced herself with a second cup of anÆmic tea. She had an irritable habit of shrugging her shoulders as though troubled—science forgive the expression!—with a chronic urticaria of the brain. Irritability, indeed, was her enshrouding atmosphere.

“As for those Gusset girls—” she began.

Mrs. Mince held up a horror-stricken hand.

“Such underbred young women. Why, I remember one of them coming to church in a red dress on Good Friday. The way they get up, too!”

Mrs. Marjoy plunged into detail with the fervor of a scientist.

“I told that woman Ophelia once,” she observed, “that I wondered how she could go into a public place with a low-cut blouse and no collar.”

“Really!” said Mrs. Mince, rapturously.

“She was rude, as usual. Said some necks did need covering up. It is no use giving such girls advice.”

“Absolutely useless,” observed Mrs. Mince.

The teapot was regarnished and two more slices of cake delivered to martyrdom. Mrs. Marjoy leaned back in her creaking chair and indulged in philosophies.

“The aristocracy is rotten to the core,” she remarked, with comprehensive complacency. “The broad-minded and educated middle-class forms the backbone of the country. Any third-rate actress could teach many duchesses manners.”

“My dear, your opinions are so full of commonsense.”

“I am always outspoken.”

“An excellent habit.”

“I flatter myself that I am a lady, Mrs. Mince, and I like to give people my frank opinion. I never speak wantonly and unjustly of absent neighbors. But as for those simpering and forward young Gussets, well—”

A knock at the door cut short Mrs. Marjoy’s unprejudiced diatribe. A servant entered with a letter on a salver and stood waiting. Mrs. Marjoy slit the envelope with the handle of a teaspoon, perused the contents of the note, flicked it away contemptuously into the grate.

“No answer.”

The girl disappeared. The doctor’s wife flounced back in her chair, shrugged her shoulders viciously, and surveyed her friend irritably through her spectacles.

“From those Mallabys,” she said.

“Of Catford?”

“People I never could stand. An invitation to their garden-party—such garden-parties, too! The ices made me ill there last summer; James was about all night giving me chlorodyne. Let me see, what were we talking about?”

“The Gussets,” crowed Mrs. Mince.

“Oh yes, those most immoral women. Really, my dear, I wonder John Strong lets his daughter associate with such people, but of course everybody knows that John Strong is a snob and a toady. The way the girl Ophelia flirts with that young Gabriel is absolutely indecent. They are always about fishing together, now, down in the Mallan. Most improper! You should hear James’s views on society women. I’ve just been reading that awful Gosling case in the newspapers.”

Mrs. Mince’s interest revived ostensibly. She brushed sundry crumbs from her lap and rearranged her cushions.

“A most deplorable case,” she said, with Christian unction.

“How a man can run away from his wife passes my comprehension,” said the physician’s mate. “I really do not know what we are coming to in these days, what with women like the Gussets taking the lead in society.”

Mrs. Mince sighed an orthodox and Protestant sigh.

“The young men are so different, too,” she said.

“They want discipline, my dear, what with their absurd notions of independence and their revolutionary ideas about the Church and religion. We have had three assistants in a year—such boors! There was Snooks, who fell in love with little Miss Ginge; I soon put my foot on that. Then there was Lily, who talked theosophy and smoked such pipes in the surgery that the whole house stunk. I had to forbid smoking, and Lily left. The man we have now is such a glutton; always has two helpings at dinner and eats half a cake at tea.”

“I never see him at church,” said Mrs. Mince, grievedly.

“Young men never go to church in these days,” quoth Mrs. Marjoy, with an irascible twist of her mouth. “They are too enlightened, you know. I told young Bailey, the man we had last year, that he ought to be ashamed of himself setting the villagers such a bad example. He had the insolence to say that from his own observations church-going did not improve people’s tempers. Of course, I had to get James to give him a month’s notice.”

“Young men must be a great worry in a house,” said Mrs. Mince, sympathetically.

Mrs. Marjoy twitched her shoulders.

“They are so abominably selfish,” she said.

The doctor appeared at this period of the conversation, a kindly and easy-going Briton, artificially cheery and optimistic. He shook hands with Mrs. Mince and sat down on the extreme edge of a chair. His wife gave him the dregs of the teapot, and remarked that he was late.

“Met young Strong in the village and had a chat,” he ventured, by way of justification. “Bright young chap; a little too bookish, though.”

Mrs. Marjoy sniffed.

“The rising generation reads too much,” she said. “Do you remember Bailey, who was always reading novels on a Sunday till I gave him a talking to and he left?”

Mr. Marjoy sipped his tea and sighed. He was a suppressed soul, a Prometheus bound upon the rock of matrimony.

“Bailey was not half a bad chap,” he said, meekly.

Mrs. Marjoy ignored the remark.

“What’s Grimes doing?” she asked.

“He has been seeing folk all the afternoon.”

“James, I believe that fellow’s running after that Ginge girl like Snooks did. I won’t have it, mind. I can never catch Grimes in the surgery. What the man does with himself I can’t think.”

“Grimes is all right,” said the doctor. “I must say I like young Strong.”

“A prig, my dear—an arrant prig.”

The doctor did not contradict her. He had grown wise in season and took his chastenings with reverent patience. It was not his ambition to out-talk his wife.

“You take my word for it,” said Mrs. Marjoy, with acrimony, “there will be a scandal here soon. That young Strong is a most dissolute youth; and as for the Gusset girl—well, I will be charitable and conceal my thoughts. I always try to say kind things of people, when they will let me do so by leading decent and respectable lives.”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Mince, “you are a model of tact. By-the-way, I hear the church-bell. I must attend vespers. Are you coming to hear Jacob preach?”

“I will get my prayer-book,” said the doctor’s dame.