The Vicar, who was 'low' in doctrine, but inclined to be 'high' in practice--where it didn't matter--had cautiously commiserated Mrs. Pemberton on the extravagances of her pastor during his first visit. But he had discovered that they caused her no anxiety. The only thing she didn't care about was 'this confession'--auricular, she believed they called it. But as long as she wasn't expected to confess herself, which she should be very sorry to do, as it would be so awkward to ask Father Brill to dinner after it, she wasn't going to make any fuss. It would possibly do the young men of the place a lot of good to confess their sins to Father Brill, if he could induce them to do so; she was pretty certain it would do Bertie good, but, of course, he would never do it. As for the women, if they wanted to go in for that sort of thing, well, let 'em. Father Brill wasn't likely to do them any harm--with that nose. What she _should_ have objected to would be to be interfered with in the things she ran herself in the parish. But they got on all right together there. In fact, she went her way and Father Brill went his, and neither of them interfered with the other. The two clergymen sat on either side of their hostess, and the Vicar was rather inclined to envy the easy terms that Father Brill was on with her. It had not occurred to him to treat a lady in Mrs. Pemberton's position with anything but deference, to listen to her opinions politely, and not to press his own when they differed from hers. But here was Father Brill actually inviting her to discussion, and, while listening politely to what she had to say, finding food for amusement in it, and by no means hiding his amusement from her. "I'm afraid you must be a good deal older than you admit to," he said. "You must have gained your opinions in girlhood, and they are about those that were held in the thirties and forties of the nineteenth century. That would make you about ninety-three now, and I must admit that you wear very well for your age." Mrs. Pemberton seemed so to enjoy this kind of treatment that the Vicar took a leaf out of Father Brill's book and became a good deal more familiar, on the same lines, than he had ever thought of being in such a house as that, or at least with the older inhabitants of such a house. Perhaps he kept rather too much to the same lines. He asked Mrs. Pemberton whether she wore a wig, which as a matter of fact she did, though he was far from suspecting it; and as religious matters were being treated in a light vein, to which he had no objection, as long as anything like profanity was excluded, he begged her, if she should ever change her mind about confession, to confess to him and not to Father Brill. "I assure you, my dear lady," he said--Father Brill had once or twice called her 'my dear lady'--"that I shan't breathe a word of what you say to anybody--and I'm quite ready to be agreeably shocked."