So, while we were still with the F.B.C., Pepper was playing every ball straight back to the inquisitive folk who wanted to know what was in the wind, we were ready to go over at a month's notice to that great new cathedral of a place with the mosaic floors and the bronze statues in the niches, and I was free to rub my rosy prospects into Aunt Angela to my heart's content. It had come off, or, thanks to Pepper and Robson and the rest of them, could hardly now fail to do so. But Aunt Angela, when I twinkled at her, and mentioned this, only gave me back my smiles thrice spiritualised. She never failed to rejoice, for our sakes, whenever a new piece of furniture came into the house in Well Walk, but for herself, her attitude was piously and amusingly penitential. I never knew austerity so resemble luxuriousness--or the other way about, whichever it was. And of this new furniture we presently began to have quite a lot. Collecting, as I have since come to understand the word, was as yet, of course, far beyond my means; but I used a bronze copy of a lioness by Barye on my desk as a paper-weight, I had good autotypes of Méryon on my study walls, I had bought Evie a dinner service, quite good enough for most occasions even to-day, and I had sales' catalogues and auctioneers' circulars, a dozen a week. Oh, yes, we were getting on, and Pepper winked, remembering his candlesticks, but said nothing. But let me return to Aunt Angela for a moment. The effect on her of these evidences of our increasing prosperity was curious. Without the loss of a jot of her amiability, but rather to the increase of it, she set herself apart from our modest splendours. If I use the word "religiosity" I mean it only in its most innocent sense: but something of the sort had been incipient in her for a long time, and now merely became declared. Perhaps I cannot do better than tell here of the evening in which I first discovered how far this had gone. If at this point my narrative seems a little diffuse, it is merely because the longest way round is often the shortest way home, and also because Aunt Angela's attitude was not the only thing I learned that night.