"Of course, Baroness Puckha Bilj had not your advantages," continued the undaunted Sir Joseph. "She was already advanced in years when she left Hungary."
"Have some cake?" said Mrs. Delarayne.
"I admit," Lord Henry was saying, "that a new religion is perhaps the most urgent need of modern times; but then this Age is scarcely great enough to make it."
"Come, come!" exclaimed Sir Lionel gruffly, his melancholy eyes closing heavily as he spoke, "you are a little hard surely. Is not this your first attendance here? I don't seem to remember having seen you amongst us before."
Lord Henry apologised and turned away. He had noticed his hostess's eye upon him, and he hastened towards her.
"Sir Lionel's conversation seems to have been singularly engrossing," remarked Mrs. Delarayne as he approached.
"It always amazes me," declared the young nobleman with laughter in his eyes, "how the men of the so-called 'exact sciences' become involved in our new emergency substitutes for a great Faith."
Mrs. Delarayne purred with a slightly treble note of dissent.
"Why not?" Sir Joseph demanded.
"I suppose it is the refuge of the mind that deals only with precise and exact terms and rules, to plunge into the opposite extreme,—into blue mistiness for instance. Or is it perhaps the fact that mathematicians and physicists deal very largely with symbols, with abstractions as opposed to realities, and that they therefore easily fall a prey to this sort of thing?"