She knew that Cleopatra felt no deep sympathy with any part of the "Inner Light" doctrine, and she was convinced, before enquiring, that Leonetta would sympathise with it even less. Although, therefore, she expected a number of young men that afternoon,--Lord Henry, St. Maur, and Malster, among them,--who might have interested her daughters, she was not in the least conscious of having acted with deliberate hostility in arranging so neatly that they should be out of the house when these gentlemen came. To explain precisely what the "Inner Light" meetings meant to Mrs. Delarayne would entail such a long discussion of the relation of women's religiosity in general to sex and to self-deception, that it would require almost the compass of another independent treatise to deal with it adequately. In a word Mrs. Delarayne suffered, as a large number of modern women suffer, from receiving no sure and reliable guidance from men. As a widow this was, of course, incidental to her position; but she knew well enough that there were thousands who still had their husbands, who were no better off than she was. In addition to this, she had succumbed to the influence of that absurd belief, so prevalent in cultivated circles, that typical modern thought is superior to Christianity. She felt the ease and peace of mind that resulted from having a belief of some sort; but she would have regarded it as a surrender of principle to return to Christianity; and, far from suspecting that most modern thought, as manifested in the doctrine of the "Inner Light," for instance, or Theosophy, or Christian Science, is inferior to Christianity, she had become a member of the Inner Light, and paid its heavy entrance fee of fifty guineas, with a feeling of deep pride and satisfaction. The doctrine of the Inner Light was an importation from America. It had been introduced into England by a very intelligent, very tall, but very delicate looking Virginian lady, about fifteen years before this story opens. It had not spread very much, it is true,--its total number of members in Great Britain amounted only to two thousand five hundred; but it was all the more select on that account, and it was guaranteed by its founders and by all who belonged to it, to be entirely free from those "regrettable remnants of superstition which so very much marred the beauty of the older religions." It professed to recognise only one purifying and creative agent in life, and that was Light. "The world was all darkness and death," said the first prophet of the "Inner Light,"--an American named Adolf Albernspiel, who had died worth half a million dollars,--"and then Light appeared, and with it Life and the great lucid Powers: Thought, Spirit, Order."