Anglicans who met him in society, mostly in the houses of the powerful or the rich, talked of him as a worldling; but his own flock knew better. They knew that wherever the brilliant Jesuit might be seen, however light his manner or trivial his conversation, one deeply-seated purpose was at the back of his mind, the making of proselytes, the aggrandisement of his Church, that Invincible, Indestructible, Incomparable, Supreme, and Unquestionable Power, to which he had given the service and the devotion of his whole being. If he went much among statesmen and rulers it was because his Church wanted influence; if he cultivated the friendship of millionaires it was because his Church wanted money. For himself he wanted nothing, for he had been born to independence; and though he had given much of his fortune to the necessities of his Order, his income was still ample for the only scheme of life that was possible for him. He was not a man who could have lived in sordid surroundings, though he could go down into the nethermost depths of East-End poverty, and give his days and nights to carrying the lamp of Faith into dark places. He had a refinement of sense that would have made squalor, or even shabby-genteel ugliness, unbearable; and he had an ardent and artistic imagination which made some touch of beauty in his surroundings as needful to him as fresh air and cold water. The attention of both these men, the priest and the man-about-town, was concentrated upon the lady of the house, who, just at this moment, was taking very little notice of either of them. She was surrounded by the smartest and prettiest women in the room, chief amongst them Lady Susan Amphlett, who was always to be found near Vera at these friendly tea-parties. Vera let Lady Susan and the other women do almost all the talking. She sat looking straight before her, dreamily silent, amidst the animated chatter about trivialities that had ceased to interest her. She was still as delicately slender as she had been six years ago at San Marco, when the parsons had called her ethereal, and the spinsters had called her half-starved; but those six years had made a transformation, and she was not the same Vera. She had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. She had enjoyed all the amusements and excitements that great cities can give to rich and beautiful women. She had been flattered and followed in Rome and Paris and London, had been written about in the _New York Herald_, and had been the fashion everywhere; a person whom not to know was to confess oneself as knowing nobody and going nowhere. Indeed, it was a kind of confession of outsiderism not to be able to talk of Madame Provana as "Vera."