"Gentlemen, you jest with me—but I shall continue to feel grateful to our slightly dogmatic young friend for his artless brutalities. Now I know what the business man keeps to himself when I ask him why he has lost interest in the church."
"There's a large class we can't take from you," said Father Riley—"that class with whom religion is a mode of respectability."
"And you can't take our higher critics, either— more's the pity!"
"On my word, now, gentlemen," returned the Catholic, again, "that was a dear, blasphemous young whelp! You know, I rather liked him. Bless the soul of you, I could as little have rebuked the lad as I could punish the guiltless indecence of a babe—he was that shockingly naïf!"
"He is undoubtedly the just fruit of our own toleration," repeated the high-church rector.
"And he stands for our knottiest problem," said the Presbyterian.
"A problem all the knottier, I suspect," began Whittaker—
"Didn't I tell you?" interrupted Father Riley. "Oh, the outrageous cynic! Be braced for him, now!"
"I was only going to suggest," resumed the wicked Unitarian, calmly, "that those people, Linford and his brother—and even that singularly effective Mrs. Linford, with her inferable views about divorce—you know I dare say that they—really you know—that they possess the courage of——"
"Their convictions!" concluded little Floud, impatient alike of the speaker's hesitation and the expected platitude.