id. "She has rather a leaping mind."

He turned to the window, looked at his nails, and appeared to be
suddenly reminded of duties elsewhere....

It was chiefly manifest to him that the difficulties in explaining the
changes of his outlook to Lady Ella had now increased enormously.

(7)

A day or so after Lady Sunderbund's arrival in Princhester the bishop
had a letter from Likeman. The old man was manifestly in doubt about the
effect of their recent conversation.

"My dear Scrope," it began. "I find myself thinking continually about
our interview and the difficulties you laid bare so frankly to me.
We touched upon many things in that talk, and I find myself full of
afterthoughts, and not perfectly sure either quite of what I said or
of what I failed to say. I feel that in many ways I was not perhaps so
clear and convincing as the justice of my case should have made me, and
you are one of my own particular little company, you were one of the
best workers in that band of good workers, your life and your career
are very much my concern. I know you will forgive me if I still mingle
something of the paternal with my fraternal admonitions. I watched you
closely. I have still my old diaries of the St. Matthew's days, and I
have been looking at them to remind me of what you once were. It was my
custom to note my early impressions of all the men who worked with me,
because I have a firm belief in the soundness of first impressions and
the considerable risk one runs of having them obscured by the accidents
and habituations of constant intercourse. I found that quite early in
your days at St. Matthew's I wrote against your name 'enthusiastic, but
a saving delicacy.' After all our life-long friendship I would not write
anything truer. I would say of you to-day, 'This man might have been a
revivalist, if he were not a gentleman.' There is the enthusiast,
there is the revivalist, in you. It seems to me that the stresses and
questions of this great crisis in the world's history have brought it
nearer to the surface than I had ever expected it to come.

"I quite understand and I sympathize with your impatience with
the church at the present time; we present a spectacle of pompous
insignificance hard to bear with. We are doing very little, and we are
giving ourselves preposterous airs. There seems to be an opinion abroad
that in some quasi-automatic way the country is going to collapse after
the war into the arms of the church