"You didn't visit any place of devotion, did you? If you've left her
mooning about Westminster Abbey or St. Peter's, Eaton Square, without
being able to give any satisfactory reason why she's there, she'll be
seized under the Cat and Mouse Act and sent to Reginald McKenna."

"That would be extremely awkward," said Jane, meeting an irresolute piece
of bread and butter halfway; "we hardly know the McKennas, and it would
be very tiresome having to telephone to some unsympathetic private
secretary, describing Louise to him and asking to have her sent back in
time for dinner. Fortunately, I didn't go to any place of devotion,
though I did get mixed up with a Salvation Army procession. It was quite
interesting to be at close quarters with them, they're so absolutely
different to what they used to be when I first remember them in the
'eighties. They used to go about then unkempt and dishevelled, in a sort
of smiling rage with the world, and now they're spruce and jaunty and
flamboyantly decorative, like a geranium bed with religious convictions.
Laura Kettleway was going on about them in the lift of the Dover Street
Tube the other day, saying what a lot of good work they did, and what a
loss it would have been if they'd never existed. 'If they had never
existed,' I said, 'Granville Barker would have been certain to have
invented something that looked exactly like them.' If you say things
like that, quite loud, in a Tube lift, they always sound like epigrams."

"I think you ought to do something about Louise," said the dowager.

"I'm trying to think whether she was with me when I called on Ada
Spelvexit. I rather enjoyed myself there. Ada was trying, as usual, to
ram that odious Koriatoffski woman down my throat, knowing perfectly well
that I detest her, and in an unguarded moment she said: 'She's leaving
her present house and going to Lower Seymour Street.' 'I dare say she