“That is the weakness I mean,” the scientist resumed calmly. “Her attraction towards Catholicism has given me some anxiety, and would give me more if I thought it went below the surface.” “But you are not a Protestant?” Sir Bernard Vanbrugh smiled at the old-fashioned word. “There are no more Protestants,” he pronounced. “There is Science and there is Superstition. Religion, as I understand it, is a form of hysteria, skilfully exploited in the interests of the clerical class. To me as a physician this Catholic revival is the symptom of a widespread cerebral disease which attacks individuals of morbid temperament. I have watched the class of persons who exhibit the symptom, and I have seldom failed to trace the disease. On the whole I am inclined to diagnose it as an obscure form of sexual perversion. A woman does not want to go to confession unless she has something to confess.” The Home Secretary shivered, as he listened to this brutal analysis, with the same sense of discomfort as a thinly-clad man exposed to a cold blast of air. He was not the first man who had experienced the same sensation in listening to Bernard Vanbrugh. A week later he received the scientist’s decision. “It gives me great pain,” Sir Bernard wrote, “not to be able to accept your proposal for my daughter’s hand, but your family history is too bad. Personally, you are everything that a father could desire, but my grandchildren must not have in their veins the same blood as Lord Alistair Stuart.” CHAPTER XI THE PRETENDER THAT mood of deep dissatisfaction with his life which had been growing upon Alistair Stuart of late was strongly with him as he left the Underground Railway-station at Westminster, and walked across the bridge on his way to see Des Louvres. The night was misty, but not dark, the lamps were lit, and the Palace showed up grey and spectral beside the water, while farther on there stretched a dim line of river-shore unillumined by any spark of light, as though night and slumber had overcome and blotted out that quarter of the city, while the other parts were still awake with feverish life. As Alistair reached the southern foot of the bridge all the lights and sounds of Lambeth burst upon him with an effect of squalid but stirring energy. He plunged into the bustling thoroughfare, with its noisy street-stalls, its jostling tramcars, and its hurrying passengers, as a bather plunges into the sea, and took his way along the road which branches southwards in the direction of Kennington. The sense of bankruptcy and failure no longer affected him disagreeably as it still did in the region he had just quitted. Here his poverty seemed to bring him into touch with the life about him, and he looked at everything with pleased, expectant eyes, like a traveller wandering through the picturesque slums of some romantic town of Spain or Italy in which he thinks of settling for a time.