one's last 'bus. A woman, he said, who is careless of
disappearances is capable of leaving town before Good-wood,
and dying at the wrong moment of an unfashionable disease.

The Duchess thought that Reginald did not exceed the ethical
standard which circumstances demanded.

"Of course," she resumed combatively, "it's the prevailing
fashion to believe in perpetual change and mutability, and
all that sort of thing, and to say we are all merely an
improved form of primeval ape--of course you subscribe to
that doctrine?"

"I think it decidedly premature; in most people I know the
process is far from complete."

"And equally of course you are quite irreligious?"

"Oh, by no means. The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic
frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the
mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern
conveniences of the other."

The Duchess suppressed a sniff. She was one of those people
who regard the Church of England with patronising affection,
as if it were something that had grown up in their kitchen
garden.

"But there are other things," she continued, "which I suppose
are to a certain extent sacred even to you. Patriotism, for