“Now,” she said, “trot out your best dictionary.”
I collected five, one of them an immense work in four volumes, and laid them in a row on the table.
“Hilda,” said Lalage, “look it out.”
Hilda chose, the largest dictionary and after a short hesitation picked up the volume labelled “Jab to Sli.” She stared at the word without speaking for some time after she found it. Lalage and I looked over her shoulder and, when we saw the definition, stared too. It was Lalage who read it out in the end:
“Simony from Simon Magus, Acts VIII. The crime of buying or selling ecclesiastical preferment or the corrupt presentation of any one to an ecclesiastical benefice for money or reward.”
I own that I was puzzled. Lalage is a person of great originality and daring, but I did not see how even she could possibly have committed simony. She and Hilda looked at each other. There was an expression of genuine astonishment on their faces.
“Do you think,” said Lalage at last, “that the Archdeacon could by any chance have gone suddenly dotty in the head?”
“He was quite sane the day before yesterday,” I said. “I was talking to him.”
“Well, then, I don’t understand it. Whatever else we did we didn’t do that or anything like it. Did we, Hilda?”
“I didn’t,” said Hilda, who seemed as unwilling as ever to answer for Lalage.