"But why does everyone--everything--want to give pain?" asked the Angel. "It is not so in the Angelic Land?" said the Vicar. "No," said the Angel. "Why is it so here?" The Vicar wiped his lips with his napkin slowly. "It _is_ so," he said. "Pain," said he still more slowly, "is the warp and the woof of this life. Do you know," he said, after a pause, "it is almost impossible for me to imagine ... a world without pain.... And yet, as you played this morning---- "But this world is different. It is the very reverse of an Angelic world. Indeed, a number of people--excellent religious people--have been so impressed by the universality of pain that they think, after death, things will be even worse for a great many of us. It seems to me an excessive view. But it's a deep question. Almost beyond one's power of discussion----" And incontinently the Vicar plumped into an impromptu dissertation upon "Necessity," how things were so because they were so, how one _had_ to do this and that. "Even our food," said the Vicar. "What?" said the Angel. "Is not obtained without inflicting Pain," said the Vicar. The Angel's face went so white that the Vicar checked himself suddenly. Or he was just on the very verge of a concise explanation of the antecedents of a leg of lamb. There was a pause. "By-the-bye," said the Angel, suddenly. "Have you been pithed? Like the common people." THE ANGEL'S DEBUT. XXXIV. When Lady Hammergallow made up her mind, things happened as she resolved. And though the Vicar made a spasmodic protest, she carried out her purpose and got audience, Angel, and violin together, at Siddermorton House before the week was out. "A genius the Vicar has discovered," she said; so with eminent foresight putting any possibility of blame for a failure on the Vicar's shoulders. "The dear Vicar tells me," she would say, and proceed to marvellous anecdotes of the Angel's cleverness with his instrument. But she was quite in love with her idea--she had always had a secret desire to play the patroness to obscure talent. Hitherto it had not turned out to be talent when it came to the test. "It would be such a good thing for him," she said. "His hair is long already, and with that high colour he would be beautiful, simply beautiful on a platform. The Vicar's clothes fitting him so badly makes him look quite like a fashionable pianist already. And the scandal of his birth--not told, of course, but whispered--would be--quite an Inducement----when he gets to London, that is."