an unscrupulous publisher--I know too well to what ignoble
compromises one may be driven in such cases!..." He paused, as
though to give her the opportunity of confirming this conjecture, but
she preserved an apprehensive silence, and he went on, as though
taking up the second point in his sermon--"Or, again, the name may
have taken your fancy without your realizing all that it implies to
minds more alive than yours to offensive innuendoes. It
is--ahem--excessively suggestive, and I hope I am not too late to
warn you of the false impression it is likely to produce on the very
readers whose approbation you would most value. My friend Mrs.
Gollinger, for instance--"

Mrs. Fetherel, as the publication of her novel testified, was in
theory a woman of independent views; and if in practise she
sometimes failed to live up to her standard, it was rather from an
irresistible tendency to adapt herself to her environment than from
any conscious lack of moral courage. The Bishop's exordium had
excited in her that sense of opposition which such admonitions are
apt to provoke; but as he went on she felt herself gradually
enclosed in an atmosphere in which her theories vainly gasped for
breath. The Bishop had the immense dialectical advantage of
invalidating any conclusions at variance with his own by always
assuming that his premises were among the necessary laws of thought.
This method, combined with the habit of ignoring any classifications
but his own, created an element in which the first condition of
existence was the immediate adoption of his standpoint; so that his
niece, as she listened, seemed to feel Mrs. Gollinger's Mechlin cap
spreading its conventual shadow over her rebellious brow and the
"Revue de Paris" at her elbow turning into a copy of the "Reredos."
She had meant to assure her uncle that she was quite aware of the