I Forbid the Banns! — page 295: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XI. ON FRENCH PORCELAIN. IS reflections were not of a very pleasing type. He knew that the men who had just left him had heard discussed in their own households the important ques- tion as to whether Bertha should be visited or left alone with the man whom she called her husband. He knew that, while the womenkind in each family had declared that nothing in the world would induce them to visit That Woman, the menkind had considered that it would be some- thing of the nature of a good lark totake a run across to the Court, and have achat with the young thing who was living there. It would be nearly as good as taking a tripto France, they thought. Charlton knew perfectly well that these Brackenshire young men had regarded the tripto the Court as being on a level of fastness with an excursion to Paris. He knew that some of them at least, would boast of having had “no end of a lark with that pretty young thing that Charlton had got hold of.’ ‘To talk to such men about the mystic beauty of spiritual marriage would be as ridiculous as to talk of the advantages of decency and repose to General Booth, or of the fascinations of the Westminster Confession to Colonel Ingersoll. He did not hear what it was that the humorist had said to drive Bertha from the room; but he had not failed to notice the jaunty air of fastness that each of the visitors affected. He was well aware that none of them would have ventured to talk about any particular line of conduct being “‘ damn nonsense ” in the presence of the wife of any of their own relations, unless the lady had been the first toswear—by no 285 CONIC LOOKS, EC)