Miss Carew was talking more to herself than to Adela.
"I thought perhaps he had pressed her to become a Roman Catholic; certainly he upset her in some way."
Adela's small eyes were like sharp points as she looked at the older woman.
Then was it really true? Oh! no; surely not. But then, what else could he have said to upset Molly?
At that moment Molly's maid came into the room.
"Miss Dexter has only just heard that you were here, madam. She is very sorry you have been waiting. She wished me to say that she is obliged to go immediately to a sale at Christie's, and would you be able to go with her?"
Adela declined, perceiving that Molly was in no mind for a private talk, and having parted affectionately from Miss Carew, went her way to have a chat with Lady Dawning.
In the afternoon she met several of her Roman Catholic acquaintances at a charity performance in a well-known garden, and she pumped all those she could decoy in turn into a tête-à-tête as to Father Molyneux. She was in reality devoured with the wish to know the truth. She had her own thin but genuine share of ideality, and she had been more impressed by Mark's renouncement of Groombridge Castle than by anything she had met with before.
But gradually, as she hunted the story, she gave him up, not because of any evidence of any kind, but because she did not find him regarded as anything very wonderful. She had need of the enthusiasms of others to make an atmosphere for her own ideals, and almost by chance she had not met anyone much interested in the young preacher. Then she had dim backwaters of anti-Popery in her mind, and they helped the reaction. She had come out, lance in rest, to defend the victim of calumny; in a very few days she had thrown him over, and was explaining pathetically to anybody who would listen that she had had a shock to her faith in humanity. And the story, starting by describing her own state of mind and being almost entirely subjective, ended in bringing home to her listeners with peculiar force the objective facts as asserted by Molly. Catholics, she found, when she came to this advanced state of propagation, were aghast at her story. They did not believe it, but they were excessively annoyed, and were, for the most part, inclined to think that Mark could not have been entirely prudent. But non-Catholics were, naturally, more credulous.
A calumny is a quick and gross feeder. It has a thousand different ways of assimilating things "light as air," or things dull from the ennui which produced them, or things prickly with envy, or slushy, green things born of unconscious jealousy, or unpleasant things born of false pieties, or hard views born of tired experience, or worldly products of incredulity, or directly evil suggestions, or the repulsions of satiated sensuality, or the bitter fruits of melancholia, or the foreshadowings of insanity, or the mere dislike of the lower moralities for the higher, or the uneasiness felt by the ordinary in the presence of the rare, or the revolt felt by the conventional against holier bonds, or the prattle of curiosity, or the roughness of mere vitality, or the fusion of minds at a low level.