And she did face the worldly situation, if a little sadly, at any rate with the courage of practical energy.  It was she who stood in one ungainly house after another and schemed how to make discomforts tolerable, while Scrope raged unhelpfully at landlordism and the responsibility of the church for economic disorder.  It was she who at last took decisions into her hands when he was too jaded to do anything but generalize weakly, and settled upon the house in Pembury Road which became their London home.  She got him to visit Hunstanton again for half a week while she and Miriam, who was the practical genius of the family, moved in and made the new home presentable.  At the best it was barely presentable.  There were many plain hardships.  The girls had to share one of the chief bedrooms in common instead of their jolly little individual dens at Princhester....  One little room was all that could be squeezed out as a study for “father”; it was not really a separate room, it was merely cut off by closed folding doors from the dining-room, folding doors that slowly transmitted the dinner flavours to a sensitive worker, and its window looked out upon a blackened and uneventful yard and the skylights of a populous, conversational, and high-spirited millinery establishment that had been built over the corresponding garden of the house in Restharrow Street.  Lady Ella had this room lined with open shelves, and Clementina (in the absence of Eleanor at Newuham) arranged the pick of her father’s books.  It is to be noted as a fact of psychological interest that this cramped, ill-lit little room distressed Lady Ella more than any other of the discomforts of their new quarters.  The bishop’s writing-desk filled a whole side of it.  Parsimony ruled her mind, but she could not resist the impulse to get him at least a seemly reading-lamp.

He came back from Hunstanton full of ideas for work in London.  He was, he thought, going to “write something” about his views.  He was very grateful and much surprised at what she had done to that forbidding house, and full of hints and intimations that it would not be long before they moved to something roomier.  She was disposed to seek some sort of salaried employment for Clementina and Miriam at least, but he would not hear of that.  “They must go on and get educated,” he said, “if I have to give up smoking to do it.  Perhaps I may manage even without that.”  Eleanor, it seemed, had a good prospect of a scholarship at the London School of Economics that would practically keep her.  There would be no Cambridge for Clementina, but London University might still be possible with a little pinching, and the move to London had really improved the prospects of a good musical training for Miriam.  Phoebe and Daphne, Lady Ella believed, might get in on special terms at the Notting Hill High School.