This speech naturally made Connie feel extremely angry, and she had to pin the regulation smile rather firmly to her face. "You are utterly wrong!" she said,
"What's more," continued Hugh, "I couldn't for the life of me see why the platform was draped with a Union Jack."
"The rebirth of an Empire!"
"But, my dear Connie, what has the Empire got to do with a religious revival?"
"A lot of pernicious tomfoolery!" declared Sir William roundly.
"Oh, I wouldn't say that, sir! It was all quite innocuous as far as I could see."
"You think you're annoying me, but I assure you you're not!" said Connie, not very convincingly. "If ever you learn the three lessons of Absolute Truth, Absolute Honesty, and Absolute Love, you'll know how impossible it is for me to be annoyed by mere, silly, uninformed criticism."
"That seems to dispose of me," said Hugh, with a disarming grin.
The Prince, who considered that Connie Bawtry had held the stage for long enough, said that for himself he preferred ethics to religious creeds, and added that the narrow-mindedness of the Church had done much to bring Bolshevism into power. No one showed the smallest desire to argue the point, and Tom Bawtry, seizing the opportunity thus afforded of starting a less objectionable topic, leaned across Mary to ask the Prince whether he had been mixed up in the Russian Revolution. The Prince smiled somewhat cynically, and replied: "Merely, I lost my all."
Any sympathy that might have been expressed was nipped in the bud by Mrs. Bawtry, who said that worldly possessions were only dross, and that she knew many people who had given up their all to the Group Movement. Naturally, the Prince was not going to stand this kind of thing, and he said, with just as firm a smile as hers, that making voluntary sacrifices was very different from being stripped bare of your every possession, and cast into prison into the bargain.