He gives himself the solemn airs of the Foreign Minister, but he’s only a youngest son at the best. That is why I loathe him.’

Mrs. Satterthwaite said:

‘That isn’t the reason why he sent the telegram.’

Her daughter had a gesture of amused, lazy tolerance.

‘Of course it isn’t,’ she said. ‘He sent it out of consideration: the lordly, full dress consideration that drives me distracted. As he would say: He’d imagine I’d find it convenient to have ample time for reflection. It’s like being addressed as if one were a monument and by a herald according to protocol. And partly because he’s the soul of truth like a stiff Dutch doll. He wouldn’t write a letter because he couldn’t without beginning it “Dear Sylvia” and ending it “Yours sincerely” or “truly” or “affectionately”. He’s that sort of precise imbecile. I tell you he’s so formal he can’t do without all the conventions there are and so truthful he can’t use half of them.’

‘Then,’ Father Consett said, ‘if ye know him so well, Sylvia Satterthwaite, how is it ye can’t get on with him better? They say: Tout savoir c’est tout pardonner.’

‘It isn’t,’ Sylvia said. ‘To know everything about a person is to be bored … bored … bored!’

‘And how are ye going to answer this telegram of his?’ the Father asked. ‘Or have ye answered it already?’

‘I shall wait until Monday night to keep him as bothered as I can to know whether he’s to start on Tuesday. He fusses like a hen over his packings and the exact hours of his movements. On Monday I shall telegraph: “Righto” and nothing else.’

‘And why,’ the Father asked, ‘will ye telegraph him a vulgar word that you never use, for your language is the one thing about you that isn’t vulgar?’

Sylvia said:

‘Thanks!’ She curled her legs up under her on the sofa and laid her head back against the wall so that her Gothic arch of a chinbone pointed at the ceiling. She admired her own neck, which was very long and white.

‘I know!’ Father Consett said. ‘You’re a beautiful woman. Some men would say it was a lucky fellow that lived with you. I don’t ignore the fact in my cogitation. He’d imagine all sorts of delights to lurk in the shadow of your beautiful hair. And they wouldn’t.’

Sylvia brought her gaze down from the ceiling and fixed her brown eyes for a moment on the priest, speculatively.

‘It’s a great handicap we suffer from,’ he said.

‘I don’t know why I selected that word,’ Sylvia said, ‘it’s one word, so it costs only fifty pfennigs. I couldn’t hope really to give a jerk to his pompous self-sufficiency.’

‘It’s great handicaps we priests suffer from,’ the Father repeated. ‘However much a priest may be a man of the world – and he has to be to fight the world.…’

Mrs. Satterthwaite said:

‘Have a cup of tea, Father, while it’s just right. I believe Sylvia is the only person in Germany who knows how to make tea.’

‘There’s always behind him the Roman collar and the silk bib, and you don’t believe in him,’ Father Consett went on, ‘yet he knows ten – a thousand times! – more of human nature than ever you can.’

‘I don’t see,’ Sylvia said placably, ‘how you can learn in your slums anything about the nature of Eunice Vanderdecken, or Elizabeth B., or Queenie James, or any of my set.’ She was on her feet pouring cream into the Father’s tea. ‘I’ll admit for the moment that you aren’t giving me pi-jaw.’

‘I’m glad,’ the priest said, ‘that ye remember enough of yer schooldays to use the old term.’

Sylvia wavered backwards to her sofa and sank down again.

‘There you are,’ she said, ‘you can’t really get away from preachments. Me for the pyore young girl is always at the back of it.’

‘It isn’t,’ the Father said. ‘I’m not one to cry for the moon.’

‘You don’t want me to be a pure young girl,’ Sylvia asked with lazy incredulity.

‘I do not!’ the Father said, ‘but I’d wish that at times ye’d remember you once were.’

‘I don’t believe I ever was,’ Sylvia said, ‘if the nuns had known I’d have been expelled from the Holy Child.’

‘You would not,’ the Father said. ‘Do stop your boasting. The nuns have too much sense.… Anyhow, it isn’t a pure young girl I’d have you or behaving like a Protestant deaconess for the craven fear of hell. I’d have ye be a physically healthy, decently honest-with-yourself young devil of a married woman.