Ryder shook his head with easy pleasantry. He had been handsome once, and was still well groomed. His figure had thickened, but was not unshapely, and had not lost a certain athletic grace. His face was fair, with a complexion that showed a faint purplish flush beneath the skin, paling where his smooth flaxen hair was parted upon his forehead. On the crown of his head there was a round bald spot which had the effect of transparency. His deceptive frankness of manner was contradicted by an expression of secretiveness in his light-blue eyes. He lifted the slice of lemon from his plate, squeezing it with his ruddy and well-formed fingers. "Oh, but he's a divinity in his own right!" he retorted. "Apollo turned celibate, you know. He is the Lothario of religions--" "Bruce!" said his wife again. A vexed light was shining in her eyes, giving a girlish look to her full and mature beauty. She wore a dress of black gauze, cut low from her splendid shoulders, above which her head, with its ash-blond hair, rose with a poise that was almost pagan in its perfection. "For my part," said a little lady upon Mr. Ryder's right, "Mount Sinai or not, I quite feel that he speaks with God." Her name was Dubley, and she was round and soft and white, suggesting the sugar-coated dinner-pills which rested as the pedestal of her social position, since her father, with a genius for turning opportunities to account, had coined into gold the indigestion of his fellows. "Ah! You are a woman," returned Ryder, smilingly. "You might as well ask a needle to resist a magnet as a woman to resist a priest. I wonder what the attraction is?" "Aberration of the religious instinct," volunteered Nevins, who had not lost his youthful look with his youthful ardor, and whom success had appeared to settle without surfeiting. "On the contrary," interposed a short-sighted gentleman in eye-glasses, who regarded the oyster upon his fork as if he expected to recognize an old acquaintance, "the religious instinct is entirely apart from the vapid feminine sentimentalizing over men in long coats and white neckties. Indeed, I question if woman has developed the true religious instinct. I am collecting notes for a treatise upon the subject." He stopped breathlessly, swallowed his oyster, and looked gloomily at the table-cloth. His name was Layton, and he was a club-man who had turned criminologist for a whim. Having convinced himself by generalizations from experience of the total depravity of the female sex, he had entered upon his researches in the hope of verifying his deductions. The point he advanced being called in question by a vivacious and pretty woman who sat next him, there followed a short debate upon the subject. When it was ended, John Driscoll looked up languidly from Mrs. Ryder's left hand.