en services, and the sense of hurry invaded his afternoon
lectures to the candidates. He hated hurry in Ember week. His ideal was
one of quiet serenity, of grave things said slowly, of still, kneeling
figures, of a sort of dark cool spiritual germination. But what sort of
dark cool spiritual germination is possible with an ass like Whippham
about?

In the fresh courage of the morning the bishop had arranged for that
talk with Eleanor he had already deferred too long, and this had proved
less satisfactory than he had intended it to be.

The bishop's experience with the ordination candidates was following
the usual course. Before they came there was something bordering upon
distaste for the coming invasion; then always there was an effect of
surprise at the youth and faith of the neophytes and a real response of
the spirit to the occasion. Throughout the first twenty-four hours
they were all simply neophytes, without individuality to break up their
uniformity of self-devotion. Then afterwards they began to develop
little personal traits, and scarcely ever were these pleasing traits.
Always one or two of them would begin haunting the bishop, giving way
to an appetite for special words, special recognitions. He knew the
expression of that craving on their faces. He knew the way-laying
movements in room and passage that presently began.

This time in particular there was a freckled underbred young man who
handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared memorandum upon what
he called "my positions." Apparently he had a muddle of doubts about
the early fathers and the dates of the earlier authentic copies of the
gospels, things of no conceivable significance.

The bishop glanced through this bale of papers--it had of course no
index and no synopsis, and some of the pages were not numbered--handed
it over to Whippham, and when he proved, as usual, a broken reed, the
bishop had the brilliant idea of referring the young man to Canon Bliss
(of Pringle), "who has a special knowledge quite beyond my own in this
field."

But he knew from the young man's eye even as he said this that it was
not going to put him off for more than a day or so.

The immediate result of glancing over these papers was, however, to
enhance in the bishop's mind a growing disposition to minimize the
importance of all dated and explicit evidences and arguments for
orthodox beliefs, and to resort to vague symbolic and liberal
interpretations, and it wa