d's public work, and she had been popular upon her own
merits in Wealdstone. The portrait was abominable enough in itself; it
dwelt on her chin, doubled her age, and denied her gentleness, but it
was a mere starting-point for the subtle extravagance of The Snicker's
poisonous gift.... The thing came upon the bishop suddenly from the
book-stall at Pringle Junction.

He kept it carefully from Lady Ella.... It was only later that he found
that a copy of The White Blackbird had been sent to her, and that she
was keeping the horror from him. It was in her vein that she should
reproach herself for being a vulnerable side to him.

Even when the bishop capitulated in favour of Princhester, that decision
only opened a fresh trouble for him. Princhester wanted the palace to be
a palace; it wanted to combine all the best points of Lambeth and
Fulham with the marble splendours of a good modern bank. The bishop's
architectural tastes, on the other hand, were rationalistic. He was all
for building a useful palace in undertones, with a green slate roof
and long horizontal lines. What he wanted more than anything else was
a quite remote wing with a lot of bright little bedrooms and a
sitting-room and so on, complete in itself, examination hall and
everything, with a long intricate connecting passage and several doors,
to prevent the ordination candidates straying all over the place and
getting into the talk and the tea. But the diocese wanted a proud
archway--and turrets, and did not care a rap if the ordination
candidates slept about on the carpets in the bishop's bedroom.
Ordination candidates were quite outside the sphere of its imagination.

And he disappointed Princhester with his equipage. Princhester had
a feeling that it deserved more for coming over to the church from
nonconformity as it was doing. It wanted a bishop in a mitre and a gilt
coach. It wanted a pastoral crook. It wanted something to go with its
mace and its mayor. And (obsessed by The Snicker) it wanted less of Lady
Ella. The cruelty and unreason of these attacks upon his wife distressed
the bishop beyond measure, and baffled him hopelessly. He could not see
any means of checking them nor of defending or justifying her against
them.

The palace was awaiting its tenant, but the controversies and
bitternesses were still swinging and swaying and developing when King
George was being crowned. Close upon that event came a wave of social
discontent, the great railwa