When one tired of viewing the gifts one wandered about the garden and admired the flowers, and a few of the younger people played tennis. The vicar hovered on the outskirts and smiled with remote affability upon every one. He discussed eighteenth century art with anyone who would listen to him. He claimed to be an authority on eighteenth century art, and possessed a few pictures which he had dug out of second-hand dealers' shops and bought for a trifle on account of their doubtful authenticity. He led the way triumphantly to his study where these treasures were hung, and discoursed learnedly on Humphreys, and other artists of that period, while he showed his canvasses to a listless, uninterested, and uninformed audience, who had seen most of them before. One crude portrait, that resembled a bad imitation of the Hamilton, he pronounced to be a Romney. No one believed him. It is doubtful whether he believed it himself; the dealer who had sold it to him had lied without conviction. But the possession of even a questionable Romney afforded him a sense of artistic importance. His collection was, he asserted, very valuable. He had insured it for a figure which would have tempted many people to the mean crime of arson: there were moments, when the vicar was harassed and the Easter offering had proved disappointing, when he gazed upon this comfortable asset lining his walls and decided that if Providence saw fit to raze his dwelling to the ground he would bear his loss with Christian fortitude and take a holiday abroad on the proceeds. Bobby, as one of the younger guests, enjoying also the doubtful privilege of being one of the two bachelors of the party--the other being the curate--was spared a review of the pictures and carried off to the tennis court by Mable North and several middle-aged spinsters, who cheated themselves into the deception that because romance had not been met in their youth, youth lay before instead of behind them, and saw in every unattached male a suppliant for their favour or an object for their womanly sympathy. Why country parishes beget these women remains an unsolved problem, but that they do beget them is very certain--women who cherish sickly sentimentality beyond the time for its decent interment and who look down on their sturdier sisters of a busier atmosphere as unsexed for putting the impossible aside and seeking a justification for their existence in an independence apart from these things.