doubtful whether this idea was critically present to any one but Stephen
Arnold, but people unconsciously tasted the dramatic substance offered
them, and leaned back in their chairs with the usual patient
acknowledgment that one mustn't expect too much of a company that found
it worth while to come to Calcutta. The house grew submissive and
stolid, but one could see half-awakened prejudices sitting in the
dress-circle. The paper-chasing Secretary said to the most intelligent
of his party that on the whole he liked his theology neat, forgetting
that the preference belonged to Mr. Andrew Lang in connection with a
notable lady novelist; and the most intelligent--it was Mrs.
Barberry--replied that it did seem strange. The depths under the gallery
were critically attentive, though Llewellyn Stanhope felt them hostile
and longing for verbal brick-bats; and the Reverend Mr. Arnold shrank
into the furthest corner of Surgeon-Major Livingstone's box, and knew
all the misery of outrage. Pilate and the slave-maidens, Pilate's fat
wife and an unspeakably comic centurion, offered as yet hardly more than
a prelude, but the monstrosity of the whole performance was already
projected upon Arnold's suffering imagination. This, then, was what
Patullo had done with it. But what other, he asked himself in quiet
anger, could Patullo have been expected to do--the fellow he remembered?
Arnold tilted his chair back and stared, with arms folded and sombre
brows, at the opposite wall. He looked once at the door, but some spirit
of self-torture kept him in his seat. If so much offence could be made
with the mere crust and envelope, so to speak, of the sacred story, what
sacrilege might not be committed with the divine personalities
concerned--with Our Lord and His Mother? He remembered, with the touch
of almost physical nausea that assailed him when he saw them, one or two
pictures in recent Paris exhibitions where the coveted accent of
surprise had been produced by representing the sacred figure in the
trivial monde of the boulevards, and fixed upon them as the source of