I had to let the next deal pass without any further attempt to discover Dodds’s opinion about tommyrot. I was trying to think out what Mrs. Dodds meant by accusing me of wanting to play chess. It struck me as an entirely gratuitous and, using the word in its original sense, impertinent suggestion. Nothing I had said seemed in any way to imply that I was thinking of chess. As a matter of fact, I detest the game and never play it. I suppose I am slow-witted, but it did not occur to me for quite a long time, that, being a Scotch Presbyterian, the mention of bishops was more likely to call up to her mind the pieces which sidle obliquely across a chessboard than living men of lordly degree. I was not sure in the end that I had tracked her thought correctly, but I know that I made several bad mistakes during the next and the following hands. When it worked round to my turn to deal again I gave out the cards very slowly and made another attempt to find out whether Dodds did or did not agree with Lalage about tommyrot. “Supposing,” I said, “that a clergyman, an ordinary clergyman, not a bishop, the kind of clergyman whom you would perhaps describe as a minister, were to preach a sermon about the British Empire and were to say----” “In our church,” said Mrs. Dodds snappily, “the ministers preach the Gospel.” “I am convinced of that,” I said, “but you must surely admit that the great idea of the imperial expansion of the race, Greater Britain beyond the seas, and--the White Man’s Burden, and all that kind of thing, are not essentially anti-evangelical, when looked at from the proper point of view. Suppose, for instance, that our hypothetical clergyman were to take for his text----” I laid down the last card in the pack on my own pile and looked triumphantly at Dodds. I had, at all events, not made a misdeal. Dodds put his hand down on his cards with a bang. He has large red hands, which swell out between the knuckles and at the wrists. I saw by the way his fingers were spread on the table that he was going to speak strongly. I recollected then, when it was too late, that Dodds is an advanced Radical and absolutely hates the idea of imperialism. I tried to diminish his wrath by slipping in an apologetic explanation before he found words to express his feelings. “The clergyman I mean,” I said, “isn’t--he’s purely imaginary, but if he had any real existence he wouldn’t belong to your church. He’d be a bishop.” “He’d better,” said Dodds grimly.