Robert took a seat by Madame de Netteville, whose appearance was picturesqueness itself. Her dress, a skilful mixture of black and creamy yellow, lay about her in folds, as soft, as carelessly effective as her manner. Her plumed hat shadowed a face which was no longer young in such a way as to hide all the lines possible; while the half-light brought admirably out the rich dark smoothness of the tints, the black lustre of the eyes. A delicate blue-veined hand lay upon her knee, and Robert was conscious after ten minutes or so that all her movements, which seemed at first merely slow and languid, were in reality singularly full of decision and purpose.
She was not easy to talk to on a first acquaintance. Robert felt that she was studying him, and was not so much at his ease as usual, partly owing to fatigue and mental worry.
She asked him little abrupt questions about the neighbourhood, his parish, his work, in a soft tone which had, however, a distinct aloofness, even hauteur. His answers, on the other hand, were often a trifle reckless and offhand. He was in a mood to be impatient with a mondaine's languid inquiries into clerical work, and it seemed to him the squire's description had been overdone.
'So you try to civilise your peasants,' she said at last. 'Does it succeed—is it worth while?'
'That depends upon your general ideas of what is worth while,' he answered smiling.
'Oh, everything is worth while that passes the time,' she said hurriedly. 'The clergy of the old régime went through life half asleep. That was their way of passing it. Your way, being a modern, is to bustle and try experiments.'
Her eyes, half closed but none the less provocative, ran over Elsmere's keen face and pliant frame. An atmosphere of intellectual and social assumption enwrapped her, which annoyed Robert in much the same way as Langham's philosophical airs were wont to do. He was drawn without knowing it into a match of wits wherein his strokes, if they lacked the finish and subtlety of hers, showed certainly no lack of sharpness or mental resource. Madame de Netteville's tone insensibly changed, her manner quickened, her great eyes gradually unclosed.
Suddenly, as they were in the middle of a skirmish as to the reality of influence, Madame de Netteville paradoxically maintaining that no human being had ever really converted, transformed, or convinced another, the voice of young Wishart, shrill and tremulous, rose above the general level of talk.
'I am quite ready; I am not the least afraid of a definition. Theology is organised knowledge in the field of religion, a science like any other science!'