This second look was differentiated according to the wearer of it. Some of them (like this man to-day) looked as if he didn't read it because it had become so inextricably bound up with vulgar superstition and an impossible religion that he despised it. Some, like Miss Grammont and her brother Anthony, looked as if they didn't read it because they already knew enough of it to be funny about it when they wanted to; others, like Miss Pansy Ponsonby, looked as if she had really once given it a try, but had found it dry and put off further perusal until such time as she lay dying and might want to do something about her future state. And Miss Grammont's brother Cyril looked as if it was a Protestant book, and rather vulgar. Some, again, looked innocent, as if they had never heard of it, others guilty, as if they never wanted to again. Ivy Delmer walked home to the Vicarage, hoping rather that the End House wouldn't come to church to-morrow. It was taken, from time to time, with an unaccountable fit of doing this. It made Ivy uncomfortable. Whether or not it came to pray, she could not help having an uneasy suspicion that it stayed to mock. 2 "Hullo, old dear," said Miss Pansy Ponsonby, in her rich and resonant drawl, as Kitty and her companion came out of the station. "Here we all are again. _And_ the Cheeper. He's a growin' boy, our Cheeper: he puts on weight. Takes after me: I put on weight when I forget my exercises and don't keep an eye on myself. Don't I, Tony? Mr. Prideaux, isn't it? How do, Mr. Prideaux? Vurry pleased you've come. You know Mr. Amherst, don't you? You clever folks all know each other." Miss Ponsonby, who was not an American, had once performed in the same company as Miss Lee White, and had caught an inflexion or two. She looked with the satisfaction of the hospitable hostess at the little group, and added, "So here we all are. And vurry nice too." It was, indeed, not an unpleasing group. Dominating it was Miss Ponsonby herself, very tall, very beautiful, very supple (only a year ago she had been doing her celebrated eel-dance in "Hullo, Peace!"), with long and lovely violet eyes and the best kind of Icilma skin, adorned tastefully but quite unnecessarily with pink paint, white powder, scarlet lip salve, and black lash-darkener. All this was from force of habit: Miss Ponsonby was quite adequately pink, white, scarlet and black in her own person. But, as Kitty observed, having been given by heaven such an absurd thing as a human face, what could one do but make it yet more absurd by these superimposed gaieties? You cannot take a face as a serious thing; it is one of nature's jests, and it is most suitably dealt with as the clown and the pierrot deal with theirs. This was Kitty's point of view; Pansy had none, only habits.