How pleasantly young men and women of fifty or thereabouts can joke and flirt and poke their fun about, laughing and holding their sides, dealing in little innuendoes and rejoicing in nicknames when they have no Mentors of twenty-five or thirty near them to keep them in order. The vicar of Framley might perhaps have been regarded as such a Mentor, were it not for that capability of adapting himself to the company immediately around him on which he so much piqued himself. He therefore also talked to my Lady Papua, and was jocose about the Baron,—not altogether to the satisfaction of Mr. Harold Smith himself. For Mr. Harold Smith was in earnest and did not quite relish these jocundities. He had an idea that he could in about three months talk the British world into civilizing New Guinea, and that the world of Barsetshire would be made to go with him by one night’s efforts. He did not understand why others should be less serious, and was inclined to resent somewhat stiffly the amenities of our friend Mark. “We must not keep the Baron waiting,” said Mark, as they were preparing to start for Barchester. “I don’t know what you mean by the Baron, sir,” said Harold Smith. “But perhaps the joke will be against you, when you are getting up into your pulpit to-morrow and sending the hat round among the clodhoppers of Chaldicotes.” “Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones; eh, Baron?” said Miss Dunstable. “Mr. Robarts’s sermon will be too near akin to your lecture to allow of his laughing.” “If we can do nothing towards instructing the outer world till it’s done by the parsons,” said Harold Smith, “the outer world will have to wait a long time, I fear.” “Nobody can do anything of that kind short of a member of Parliament and a would-be minister,” whispered Mrs. Harold. And so they were all very pleasant together, in spite of a little fencing with edge-tools; and at three o’clock the _cortége_ of carriages started for Barchester, that of the bishop, of course, leading the way. His lordship, however, was not in it. “Mrs. Proudie, I’m sure you’ll let me go with you,” said Miss Dunstable, at the last moment, as she came down the big stone steps. “I want to hear the rest of that story about Mr. Slope.” Now this upset everything. The bishop was to have gone with his wife, Mrs. Smith, and Mark Robarts; and Mr. Sowerby had so arranged matters that he could have accompanied Miss Dunstable in his phaeton. But no one ever dreamed of denying Miss Dunstable anything. Of course Mark gave way; but it ended in the bishop declaring that he had no special predilection for his own carriage, which he did in compliance with a glance from his wife’s eye. Then other changes of course followed, and, at last, Mr. Sowerby and Harold Smith were the joint occupants of the phaeton.