"There's always behind him the Roman collar and the silk bib, and you don't believe in him," Father Consett went on, "yet he knows ten--a thousand times!--more of human nature than ever you can." "I don't see," Sylvia said placably, "how you can learn in your slums anything about the nature of Eunice Vanderdecken, or Elizabeth B. or Queenie James, or any of my set." She was on her feet pouring cream into the Father's tea. "I'll admit for the moment that you aren't giving me pi-jaw." "I'm glad," the priest said, "that ye remember enough of yer schooldays to use the old term." Sylvia wavered backwards to her sofa and sank down again. "There you are," she said, "you can't really get away from preachments. Me for the pyore young girl is always at the back of it." "It isn't," the Father said. "I'm not one to cry for the moon." "You don't want me to be a pure young girl," Sylvia asked with lazy incredulity. "I do not!" the Father said, "but I'd wish that at times ye'd remember you once were." "I don't believe I ever was," Sylvia said, "if the nuns had known I'd have been expelled from the Holy Child." "You would not," the Father said. "Do stop your boasting. The nuns have too much sense. . . . Anyhow, it isn't a pure young girl I'd have you or behaving like a Protestant deaconess for the craven fear of hell. I'd have ye be a physically healthy, decently honest-with-yourself young devil of a married woman. It's them that are the plague and the salvation of the world." "You admire mother?" Mrs. Tietjens asked suddenly. She added in parenthesis: "You see you can't get away from salvation." "I mean keeping bread and butter in their husband's stomachs," the priest said. "Of course I admire your mother." Mrs. Satterthwaite moved a hand slightly. "You're at any rate in league with her against me," Sylvia said. She asked with more interest: "Then would you have me model myself on her and do good works to escape hell fire? She wears a hair shirt in Lent." Mrs. Satterthwaite started from her doze on the edge of her chair. She had been trusting the Father's wit to give her daughter's insolence a run for its money, and she imagined that if the priest hit hard enough he might, at least, make Sylvia think a little about some of her ways. "Hang it, no, Sylvia," she exclaimed more suddenly. "I may not be much, but I'm a sportsman. I'm afraid of hell fire; horribly, I'll admit. But I don't bargain with the Almighty. I hope He'll let me through; but I'd go on trying to pick men out of the dirt--I suppose that's what you and Father Consett mean--if I were as certain of going to hell as I am of going to bed to-night. So that's that!" "'And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest!'" Sylvia jeered softly. "All the same I bet you wouldn't bother to reclaim men if you could not find the young, good-looking, interestingly vicious sort." "I wouldn't," Mrs. Satterthwaite said. "If they didn't interest me, why should I?" Sylvia looked at Father Consett.