Sally got rather pink, and glanced at Arnold, who looked cynically interested.
“What is the Band of Hope?” he inquired.
“Temperance girls, temperance boys, always happy, always free,” Eddy answered, in the words of their own song.
“Oh, I see. Fight the drink. And does making baskets help them to fight it?”
“Well, of course if you have a club and it has to meet once a week, it must do something,” said Sally, stating a profound and sad truth. “But I told Jimmy I was frightfully busy; I don’t think I can go, really.... I wish Jimmy wouldn’t go on asking me. Do tell him not to, Mr. Oliver. Jimmy doesn’t understand; one can’t do everything.”
“No,” said Eddy dubiously, thinking that perhaps one could, almost, and that anyhow the more things the more fun.
“It’s a pity one can’t,” he added, from his heart.
Arnold said that doing was a deadly thing, doing ends in death. “Only that, I believe, is the Evangelical view, and you’re High Church at St. Gregory’s.”
Jane laughed at him. “Imagine Arnold knowing the difference! I don’t believe he does in the least. I do,” she added, with a naïve touch of vanity, “because I met a clergyman once, when I was drawing in the Abbey, and he told me a lot about it. About candles, and ornaments, and robes that priests wear in church. It must be much nicer than being Low Church, I should think.” She referred to Eddy, with her questioning smile.
“They’re both rather nice,” Eddy said. “I’m both, I think.”