“And it would be such a splendid chance, too,” Will cried, carried away by his enthusiasm—“the Dean coming to dinner and all! in a clergyman’s house, with such people to vouch for her! Why, with backers like that, scandal itself couldn’t venture to wag its vile tongue at her!” Maud looked at him with a faint quiver in her clear-cut nostrils. “That’s just it!” she answered promptly. “But there, Will, you’re a heathen! You’ll never understand! You have quite a congenital incapacity for appreciating and entering into the clerical situation. Isn’t that so, dear Arthur? You belong to another world—the theatrical world—where morals and religion are all topsy-turvy, anyhow! How could you suppose for a moment a clergyman’s wife could receive into her house, on such a night as this, an opera-singing woman with three _aliases_ to her name, who’s just run away in a fit of pique from her lawful husband! Whether she’s right or wrong, she’s not a person one could associate with! To mix oneself up like that with a playhouse scandal! and the Dean coming to dine, whose influence for a canonry’s so important to us all! The dear, good Dean! Now Arthur, isn’t Will just too ridiculous for anything?” “It certainly _would_ seem extremely inconsistent,” Arthur Sartoris replied, fingering that clerical face dubiously; “extremely inconsistent.” But he added after a pause, with a professional afterthought, “Though, of course, Maud, if she’s leaving him on sufficient grounds—compelled to it, in fact, not through any fault of her own, but through the man’s misconduct—and if she thinks it would be wrong to put up with him any longer, yet feels anxious to avoid all appearance of evil, why, naturally, _as_ Christians, we sympathise with her _most_ deeply. But as to taking her into our house—now really, Will, you must see—I put it to you personally—would you do it yourself if you were in our position?” Maud for her part, being a woman, was more frankly worldly. “And it’d get into the papers, too!” she cried. “Labby’d put it in the papers. . . . Just imagine it in _Truth_, Arthur!—‘I’m also told, on very good authority, that the erring soul, having drifted from her anchorage, went straight from her husband’s house to Mrs Arthur Sartoris’s. Now, Mrs Arthur Sartoris, it may be necessary to inform the innocent reader, is Mr Deverill’s sister; and Mr Deverill is the well-known author and composer of _Cophetua’s Adventure_,—in which capacity he must doubtless have enjoyed, for many months, abundant opportunities for making the best of the Signora’s society. _Verbum sap._—but I would advise the Reverend Arthur to remember in future the Apostle’s injunctions on the duty of ruling his own house well, and having his children in subjection with all gravity.’ That’s just about what Labby would say of it!”