"
"Did she talk to you about God at afternoon tea?" said Feather.
"It's the kind of thing a religious Scotch woman might do."
"No, she did not talk to me. Perhaps that was her mistake. She
might have reformed me. She never says more to me than civility
demands. And it was not at tea. I accidentally dropped in on the
Bethunes and found an Oriental had been lecturing there. Mrs.
Muir was talking to him and I heard her. The man seemed to be a
scholar and a deep thinker and as they talked a group of us stood
and listened or asked questions."
"How funny!" said Feather.
"It was not funny at all. It was astonishingly calm and serious--and
logical. The logic was the new note. I had never thought of reason
in that connection."
"Reason has nothing to do with it. You must have faith. You
must just believe what you're told not think at all. Thinking is
wickedness--unless you think what you hear preached." Feather was
even a trifle delicately smug as she rattled off her orthodoxy--but
she laughed after she had done with it. "But it MUST have been
funny--a Turk or a Hindoo in a turban and a thing like a tea gown
and Mrs. Muir in her Edinburgh looking clothes talking about God."
"You are quite out of it," Coombe did not smile at all as he
said it. "The Oriental was as physically beautiful as Donal Muir
is. And Mrs. Muir--no other woman in the room compared with her.
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