She was not easy to talk to on a first acquaintance. Robert felt that she was studying him, and was not so much at his ease as usual, partly owing to fatigue and mental worry. She asked him little abrupt questions about the neighborhood, his parish, his work in a soft tone which had, however, a distinct loftiness, even _hauteur_. His answers, on the other hand, were often a trifle reckless and offhand. He was in a mood to be impatient with a _mondaine’s_ languid inquiries into clerical work, and it seemed to him the Squire’s description had been overdone. ‘So you try to civilize your peasants,’ she said at last. ‘Does it succeed--is it worth while?’ ‘That depends on your general ideas of what is worth while,’ he answered smiling. ‘Oh, everything is worth while that passes the time,’ she said hurriedly. ‘The clergy of the old regime went through life half asleep. That was their way of passing it. Your way, being a modern, is to bustle and try experiments.’ Her eyes, half closed but none the less provocative, ran over Elsmere’s keen face and pliant frame. An atmosphere of intellectual and social assumption entrapped her, which annoyed Robert in much the same way as Langham’s philosophical airs were wont to do. He was drawn without knowing it into a match of wits, wherein his strokes, if they lacked the finish and subtlety of hers, showed certainly no lack of sharpness or mental resource. Madame de Netteville’s tone insensibly changed, her manner quickened; her great eyes gradually unclosed. Suddenly, as they were in the middle of a skirmish as to the reality of influence, Madame de Netteville paradoxically maintaining that no human being had ever really converted, transformed or convinced another--the voice of young Wishart, shrill and tremulous, rose above the general level of talk. ‘I am quite ready; I am not the least afraid of a definition. Theology is organized knowledge in the field of religion, a science like any other science!’ ‘Certainly, my dear sir, certainly,’ said Mr. Spooner, leaning forward, with his hands round his knees, and speaking with the most elegant and good-humored _sang-froid_ imaginable, ‘the science of the world’s ghosts! I cannot imagine any more fascinating.’ ‘Well,’ said Madame de Netteville to Robert, with a deep breath; ‘_that_ was a remark to have hurled at you all at once out of doors on a summer’s afternoon! Oh, Mr. Spooner!’ she said, raising her voice. ‘Don’t play the heretic here! There is no fun in it; there are too many with you.’ ‘I did not begin it, my dear madam, and your reproach is unjust. On one side of me Archbishop Manning’s _fidus Achates_,’ and the speaker took off his large straw hat and gracefully, waved it--first to the right and then to the left. ‘On the other, the Rector of the parish. “Cannon to right of me, cannon to left of me.” I submit my courage is unimpeachable!’