first-nights when Granville Barker was the producer, and knew and valued
people in the grey and earnest plains between the Cecils and the Sidney
Webbs. And thirdly there were the smart intellectual lot, again not very
well marked off, and on the whole practicable to bishops, of whom fewer
particulars are needed because theirs is a perennial species, and then
finally there was that fourth world which was paradoxically at once very
brilliant and a little shady, which had its Night Club side, and seemed
to set no limit to its eccentricities. It seemed at times to be aiming
to shock and yet it had its standards, but here it was that the dancers
and actresses and forgiven divorcees came in--and the bishops as a rule,
a rule hitherto always respected, didn't. This was the ultimate world of
Mrs. Garstein Fellows; she had no use for merely sporting people and
the merely correct smart and the duller county families, sets that led
nowhere, and it was from her fourth system of the Glittering Doubtfuls
that this party which made her hesitate over the bishop's telegram, was
derived.

She ran over their names as she sat considering her reply.

What was there for a bishop to object to? There was that admirable
American widow, Lady Sunderbund. She was enormously rich, she was
enthusiastic. She was really on probation for higher levels; it was her
decolletage delayed her. If only she kept off theosophy and the Keltic
renascence and her disposition to profess wild intellectual passions,
there would be no harm in her. Provided she didn't come down to dinner
in anything too fantastically scanty--but a word in season was possible.
No! there was no harm in Lady Sunderbund. Then there were Ridgeway Kelso
and this dark excitable Catholic friend of his, Paidraig O'Gorman. Mrs.
Garstein Fellows saw no harm in them. Then one had to consider Lord
Gatling and Lizzie Barusetter. But nothing showed, nothing was likely to