through. You can't
suddenly call a halt in the middle of the scrap and have a sort of
millennium just because you want it....

"Of course if the church had a plan," he said, "if it had a proposal to
make, if it had anything more than a few pious palliatives to suggest,
that might be different. But has it?"

The bishop had a bankrupt feeling. On the spur of the moment he could
say no more than: "It offers its mediation."

(7)

Full as he was with the preoccupation of these things and so a little
slow and inattentive in his movements, the bishop had his usual luck
at Pringle Junction and just missed the 7.27 for Princhester. He might
perhaps have got it by running through the subway and pushing past
people, but bishops must not run through subways and push past people.
His mind swore at the mischance, even if his lips refrained.

He was hungry and, tired; he would not get to the palace now until long
after nine; dinner would be over and Lady Ella would naturally suppose
he had dined early with the Rev. Morrice Deans. Very probably there
would be nothing ready for him at all.

He tried to think he was exercising self-control, but indeed all his
sub-conscious self was busy in a manner that would not have disgraced
Tertullian with the eternal welfare of those city fathers whose
obstinacy had fixed the palace at Princhester. He walked up and down the
platform, gripping his hands very tightly behind him, and maintaining
a serene upcast countenance by a steadfast effort. It seemed a small
matter to him that the placards of the local evening papers should
proclaim "Lloyd George's Reconciliation Meeting at Wombash Broken up
by Suffragettes." For a year now he had observed a strict rule against
buying the products of the local press, and he saw no reason for varying
this protective regulation.

His mind was full of angry helplessness.

Was he to blame, was the church to blame, for its powerlessness in these
social disputes? Could an abler man with a readier eloquence have done
more?

He envied the cleverness of Cardinal Manning. Manning would have got
right into the front of this affair. He would have accumulated credit
for his church and himself....

But would he have done much?...

The bishop wandered along the platform to its end, and stood
contemplating the convergent ways that gather together beyond the
station and plunge into the hillside and the wilderness of sidings and
trucks, signal-boxes, huts, coal-pit