Miss Fortescue was right. There was war in Mrs. Collingwood’s eye; there was crusade in her eye, and she marched out to attack the hosts of the infidel like Cœur de Lion. She made no parleying with the enemy, and though she alluded to Jeannie’s speech as “most suggestive and clever,” it was only to point out to her hearers how dangerous cleverness was. She hurled texts at their heads: the house built on sand, the kings who did evil, the captivity, the fall of Babylon, the mark of the beast, the seven foolish virgins, the man who put his hand to the plough and looked back, the seed on the dry ground, the pitcher broken at the well, the woman of Samaria--all these, if rightly understood, proclaimed how abhorrent was The Sheltered Life! Jeannie as she listened was first angry, and ended by being amused. There had been a seven days’ storm; Mrs. Collingwood had sent in her resignation, and Jeannie, hearing of it, sent in hers, provided that Mrs. Collingwood would remain. It ended in Jeannie’s calling on Mrs. Collingwood, in answer to the almost tearful request of Miss Clifford, and talking it out with her. She explained that she had not been criticising the data of the book, but the treatment of certain data, and made her points with such sweetness of temper and apparent inability to take offence that Mrs. Collingwood was charmed in spite of herself. “But these things are the most serious in the world, Miss Avesham,” she had said at parting. “You do not, I now believe, take them lightly, but that was the impression your very clever speech made on me. I was wrong, I am willing to confess that.” Then Jeannie started a musical society, at the meetings of which the Miss Cliffords quavered an uncertain alto, and Colonel Raymond thundered an approximate bass. They met originally once a week at Bolton Street, to sing glees for an hour, under the severe guidance of Miss Fortescue, who taught them by degrees not so much what good part singing was, as what it was not. Then they won their way to the passable. Her teaching seemed almost hair-splitting at first, especially when she insisted on the middle of a note being sung, and allowed nothing which to the ordinary mind was allowable enough, and insisted on the existence of notes intermediate between semitones. “Because a piano has black notes and white notes,” she observed once, “you think that there is no interval between. If you think you are lower than A flat, and higher than G sharp, you must be singing A. The chances are strongly against it. The basses again, please.”