li called
"man-millinery." Inasmuch as the coiner of the phrase was a Jew, the
priests and people of St. Simon's paid no attention to it, and were
proud to consider themselves an outpost of the Catholic Movement in the
Church of England. James Lidderdale was given the charge of the Lima
Street Mission, a tabernacle of corrugated iron dedicated to St.
Wilfred; and Thurston, the Vicar of St. Simon's, who was a wise,
generous and single-hearted priest, was quick to recognize that his
missioner was capable of being left to convert the Notting Dale slum in
his own way.

"If St. Simon's is an outpost of the Movement, Lidderdale must be one of
the vedettes," he used to declare with a grin.

The Missioner was a tall hatchet-faced hollow-eyed ascetic, harsh and
bigoted in the company of his equals whether clerical or lay, but with
his flock tender and comprehending and patient. The only indulgence he
accorded to his senses was in the forms and ceremonies of his ritual,
the vestments and furniture of his church. His vicar was able to give
him a free hand in the obscure squalor of Lima Street; the
ecclesiastical battles he himself had to fight with bishops who were
pained or with retired military men who were disgusted by his own
conduct of the services at St. Simon's were not waged within the hearing
of Lima Street. There, year in, year out for six years, James Lidderdale
denied himself nothing in religion, in life everything. He used to
preach in the parish church during the penitential seasons, and with
such effect upon the pockets of his congregation that the Lima Street
Mission was rich for a long while afterward. Yet few of the worshippers
in the parish church visited the object of their charity, and those that
did venture seldom came twice. Lidderdale did not consider that it was
part of the Lima Street religion to be polite to well-dressed explorers
of the slum; in fact he rather encouraged Lima Street to suppose the
contrary.

"I don't like these dressed up women in my church," he used to tell his
vicar. "They distract my people's attention from the altar."

"Oh, I quite see your point," Thurston would agree.

"And I don't like these churchy young fools who come simpering down in
top-hats, with rosaries hanging out of their pockets. Lima Street
doesn't like them either. Lima Street is provoked to obscene comment,
and that just before Mass. It's no good, Vicar. My people are savages,
and I like them to remain savages