She had accepted the position with a kind of languid acquiescence, taking all things for granted, after the first year, when everything amused her. In this sixth year of marriage, and wealth without limit, she was tired of everything, except the society of authors and painters and actors and musicians--the people who appealed to her imagination. She had inherited from her father the yearning for things that earth cannot give--the _au delà_, the light that never was on sea or land. "The glory and the dream." She admired and respected Father Cyprian Hammond, and she liked him to talk to her, though she could divine that steadfast purpose at the back of his head, the determination to bring her into the Papal fold. She argued with him from her Anglican standpoint, and pleaded for that _via media_ that might reconcile old things with new; and she felt the weakness of her struggle against that skilled dialectician; but she refused to be converted. Half the pleasure of her intimacy with this Eagle of Monk Street would be lost if she surrendered, and had to exchange the struggle for the attitude of passive submission. His arguments sometimes went near to convincing her; but the Faith he offered did not satisfy those vague longings for the something beyond. It was too simple, too matter-of-fact to arrest her imagination. It offered little more than she had already in the ritual of her own Church. The change did not seem worth while. She looked up suddenly in the midst of the silvery treble talk about theatres and frocks. "Claude, do you ever keep a promise?" she asked. "Always, I hope." "You promised to bring Mr. Symeon to see me." "Did I?" "Indeed you did. Ages ago." "Ages?" "Well, nearly three weeks. It was at the Helstones' dinner." "Three weeks. Mr. Symeon is not at the call of the first comer." There was a little cry from the women, who had left off talking in order to listen. "He calls Madame Provana the first comer!" exclaimed the youngest and pertest of the circle. "I call myself the first comer where Symeon is concerned. I am not one of his initiated. I belong to the outer herd of wretches who eat butcher's meat and attach importance to dinner. Mr. Symeon condescends when he gives me half an hour of a life that is spent mostly in the clouds." "I would give worlds to know him," said Lady Susan. "I have taken his quarterly, _The Unseen_, from the beginning, His articles upon the spiritual life are adorable, but I am not conceited enough to pretend to understand him." "If people understood him, he would be less admired," said Rutherford. "What does he do?" asked the youngest and flippantest. "I am always hearing of Mr. Symeon and his spook magazine; but what does he do? Is it thought-reading, slate-writing, materialisation? Does he float up to the ceiling, as Home did? My Grannie swears she saw him, yes, positively floating, in that large house by the Marble Arch."