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 railway strike, a curious sense of social and political instability, and the first beginnings of the bishop’s ill health.

(4)

There came a day of exceptional fatigue and significance.

The industrial trouble was a very real distress to the bishop.  He had a firm belief that it is a function of the church to act as mediator between employer and employed.  It was a common saying of his that the aim of socialism—­the right sort of socialism—­was to Christianize employment.  Regardless of suspicion on either hand, regardless of very distinct hints that he should “mind his own business,” he exerted himself in a search for methods of reconciliation.  He sought out every one who seemed likely to be influential on either side, and did his utmost to discover the conditions of a settlement.  As far as possible and with the help of a not very efficient chaplain he tried to combine such interviews with his more normal visiting.