people have their religion just as we have ours, darling," Mrs. Lloyd-Evans said. "There are, unfortunately, a great number of Roman Catholics on the Continent, and one must be broad-minded and believe that they are sincere in worshipping their Pope, as they practically do. No doubt a great many of them really do not know any better."
"But they don't, Aunt Marianne," cried Zella—" I mean, worship the Pope. Catholics are really much more pious than Protestants—at least, all the French ones that I've known."
"Roman Catholics, Zella," said her aunt in the low voice of extreme forbearance. "It is because of the Pope of Rome that we, in the Catholic Church, are obliged to call them Roman Catholics. But that is quite enough. French people are known to be most irreligious, though I have no doubt you may find a well-meaning one here and there. But the Continental Sunday is well known, all over England, to be a disgrace."
"But Aunt Marianne, in Paris"
"That will do, dear. You are not likely to be allowed to go to Paris again, still less into a Roman Catholic place of worship."
The tone, and still more its dreadful suggestion of a new regime, never to be relaxed again, brought Zella's ever ready tears to the surface, and she gulped them down in silence with her coffee.
Her only consolation was a sub-audible aside from James, who sat next her.
"If French people worship the Pope, English people worship the Church of England," he muttered cryptically.
But James was not destined to be epigrammatic unobserved, and his mother's low tones, with their peculiar quality of gentle relentlessness, were once more addressed to him:
"Jimmy, do not show off and try and say smart things. It sounds irreverent, dear, though I dare say you spoke without quite knowing the meaning of your own words. Now, if you have all finished, you can go, and mind you are ready at twenty minutes to eleven punctually."
She rose as she spoke, and as her son, looking sulky and lowering, held open the door, she paused, and, laying her hand upon his shoulder, said, in tones just audible to Zella:
"Your last Sunday at home, Jimmy!"
The boy looked sulkier than before, and Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, with one long reproachful look, left the room.
James muttered, "Thank goodness it is my last Sunday at home!" as he crossed the hall with Zella and Muriel.
"Oh, James!" cried his sister piteously.
"I didn't mean that exactly—only I'm sick of being called Jimmy, and having my better feeling appealed to, and all the rest of it."
"I don't know why you should mind being called Jimmy," said Muriel resentfully, seizing on the only part of his speech which she had understood. "Not that anyone but mother ever does."
"I should hope not. You know better than to try it on, I should think!"
"Well, after all, I always used to. It's only lately you've made all this fuss," said Muriel, suddenly plaintive. "Jimmy is the dear old nursery name that we always"
"Good heavens!" cried her brother. "Is that an argument, my good ass? For the matter of that, there's the dear old nursery high chair that I used to sit in, but I suppose you don't want me to use it now because I did then?"
Zella laughed, entirely on the side of James, who always got the best of an argument.
Muriel's only retort was, "That is quite different," uttered in a sentimental voice verging on tearfulness.
"It's exactly the same principle," said James instructively, seating himself on the edge of the schoolroom table. "Because a thing was all right once, it doesn't mean it ought to go on for ever and ever. Things change, and it's all humbug and sentimentality to pretend one must go on in the dear old way long after it's become perfectly idiotic and unsuitable."
Zella had never heard her cousin so eloquent, and she felt a keen desire to show him, by some profound comment or sudden brilliant contribution of her own, that he had an audience fully capable of appreciating the depths of his remarks.
But James went on in a dictatorial manner that gave her no opportunity for uttering a word, even if she could have thought of anything sufficiently striking to say:
"The value of things alters, and what may mean something one year ceases to mean the same thing next year, or ten years hence. It's simply a form of rank insincerity to go on using old catchwords long after they've lost any appropriateness they may once have had."
Zella suddenly thought of an effective aphorism:
"Intellectual insincerity "she began.
"It's just the same," pursued James, unheeding, "as that ghastly habit mother has of Sunday evening talks, when we have to be solemn and holy and jaw about our own insides."
"James!" shrieked Muriel, acutely distressed," how can you say such hateful things and be so disloyal to mother?"
"It s not disloyal, as you call it," cried the boy contemptuously. "It's simple common-sense. Why, because it happens to be Sunday, should we have to go and sit in one particular corner of the drawing-room, and try and trump up something suitable to say, when we'd much rather not talk about our beastly feelings at all? It's sheer rank humbug."
"Intellectual insincerity"
"Nobody ought to want to talk about their own inside feelings after they're old enough to have any; and if they do, the sooner they learn to come off it, the better."
Zella suddenly felt that she understood why James had always been called a prig. Who was he, to speak with such an assumption of infallibility of what people ought or ought not to talk about? She felt, without formulating the idea into words, that she did like to talk about her own feelings, and immediately said aloud, " Of course, everybody hates talking about themselves, and I can't see why anyone should ever have to," because she was afraid lest James might think that his sweeping assertion applied to her.
"I'm rather under the impression that people don't hate talking about themselves at all," said James aggressively; "but they jolly well oughtn't to be allowed to, instead of being encouraged."
Zella thought that James wanted to be asked why, and immediately felt that wild-horses should not drag the question from her, but Muriel at once said: "But why, James?"
"Because it's an opportunity for posing and being sentimental, and every sort of insincere rot of that kind. People can't speak the truth about themselves."
"We don't all tell lies, thank you!" said Muriel, scandalized.
"You haven't understood a word I've said," her brother told her scathingly, as he got off the table.
"It all sounds horrid and wrong, and I don't want to, and neither does Zella."
"I understood absolutely," said Zella curtly.
"Oh, I knew that," remarked James unexpectedly.
Zella went to get ready for church with a curious mixture of gratification at James's remark, which appeared to point at appreciation of her understanding, and, on the other hand, a lurking dread lest it might merely have implied that he considered her a personally qualified judge of insincerity.
"James
