This was the lady who was saying, as Peter entered, "And my mother's last words were, 'Find Elizabeth Dean's grave.' Elizabeth Dean was an author, you know—oh, very well known, I believe. She treated my mother and me none too well; didn't stand by us when she should have—but we won't say anything about that now. Anyhow, it was a costly funeral—forty pounds and eight horses—and my mother hadn't an idea where she was laid. So she said, 'Find Elizabeth Dean's grave,' just like that. And the strange thing was that in the first churchyard I walked into, in a little village down in Sussex, there was a tombstone, 'Elizabeth Dean, 65. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away.' Wasn't that queer, now? So I went straight and...."
"The woman's a fool," muttered the gentleman next Peter, a cynical-faced commercial traveller. Peter had heard the remark from him frequently before, and did not feel called upon to reply to it.
But the tale of Elizabeth Dean was interrupted by a lady of a speculative habit of mind.
"Now I want to ask you all, should one put up a tombstone to the departed? I've been having quite a kick-up with my sisters about it lately. Hadn't one better spend the money on the living? What do you think, Miss Matthews?"
Miss Matthews said she liked to see a handsome headstone.
"After all, one honours them that way. It's all one can do for them, isn't it."
"Oh, Miss Matthews, all?" Several ladies were shocked. "What about one's prayers for the dead?"
"I don't pray for the dead," said Miss Matthews, who was a protestant, and did not attend the large church in the next street. "I do not belong to the Romish religion. I'm not saying anything against those who do, but I consider that those who do not should confine their prayers to those who may require them in this troubled world, and not waste them upon those whose fate we have every reason to believe is settled once and for all."
The lady who always quarrelled with her on this subject rose to the occasion. Peggy, soothing them down, said mechanically, "There now.... Three lumps, Peter?... Micky, one doesn't suck napkin rings; naughty."
Peter was appealed to by his neighbour, who knew that he occasionally attended St. Austin's church. People were always drawing him into theological discussions, which he knew nothing at all about.