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Sylvia brought her gaze down from the ceiling and fixed her brown eyes for a moment on the priest, speculatively.

'It's a great handicap we suffer from,' he said.

'I don't know why I selected that word,' Sylvia said, 'it's one word, so it costs only fifty pfennigs. I couldn't hope really to give a jerk to his pompous self-sufficiency.'

'It's great handicaps we priests suffer from,' the Father repeated. 'However much a priest may be a man of the world--and he has to be to fight the world...

Mrs Satterthwaite said:

'Have a cup of tea, Father, while it's just right. I believe Sylvia is the only person in Germany who knows how to make tea.'

'There's always behind him the Roman collar and the silk bib, and you don't believe in him,' Father Consett went on, 'yet he knows ten--a thousand times!--more of human nature than ever you can.'

'I don't see,' Sylvia said placably, 'how you can learn in your slums anything about the nature of Eunice Vanderdecken, or Elizabeth B. or Queenie James, or any of my set.' She was on her feet pouring cream into the Father's tea. 'I'll admit for the moment that you aren't giving me pi-jaw.'