e White Blackbird said things about her.

It did not attack her. It did worse. It admired her ...impudently.

It spoke of her once as "Norah," and once as "the Scrope Flapper."

Its headline proclaimed: "Plucky Flappers Hold Up L. G."

CHAPTER THE THIRD - INSOMNIA

(1)

THE night after his conversation with Eleanor was the first night of the
bishop's insomnia. It was the definite beginning of a new phase in his
life.

Doctors explain to us that the immediate cause of insomnia is always
some poisoned or depleted state of the body, and no doubt the
fatigues and hasty meals of the day had left the bishop in a state of
unprecedented chemical disorder, with his nerves irritated by strange
compounds and unsoothed by familiar lubricants. But chemical disorders
follow mental disturbances, and the core and essence of his trouble was
an intellectual distress. For the first time in his life he was
really in doubt, about himself, about his way of living, about all his
persuasions. It was a general doubt. It was not a specific suspicion
upon this point or that. It was a feeling of detachment and unreality at
once extraordinarily vague and extraordinarily oppressive. It was as
if he discovered himself flimsy and transparent in a world of minatory
solidity and opacity. It was as if he found himself made not of flesh
and blood but of tissue paper.

But this intellectual insecurity extended into his physical sensations.
It affected his feeling in his skin, as if it were not absolutely his
own skin.

And as he lay there, a weak phantom mentally and bodily, an endless
succession and recurrence of anxieties for which he could find no
reassurance besieged him.

Chief of this was his distress for Eleanor.

She was the central figure in this new sense of illusion in familiar and
trusted things. It was not only that the world of his existence which
had seemed to be the whole universe had become diaphanous and betrayed
vast and uncontrollable realities beyond it, but his daughter had as it
were suddenly opened a door in this glassy sphere of insecurity that had
been his abiding refuge, a door upon the stormy rebel outer world, and
she stood there, young, ignorant, confident, adventurous, ready to step
out.

"Could it be possible that she did not believe?"

He saw her very vividly as he had seen her in the dining-room, slender
and upright, half child, half woman, so fragile and so fearless. And the
door she opened thus c