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-pits, electric standards, goods sheds, turntables, and engine-houses, that ends in a bluish bricked-up cliff against the hill.  A train rushed with a roar and clatter into the throat of the great tunnel and was immediately silenced; its rear lights twinkled and vanished, and then out of that huge black throat came wisps of white steam and curled slowly upward like lazy snakes until they caught the slanting sunshine.  For the first time the day betrayed a softness and touched this scene of black energy to gold.  All late afternoons are beautiful, whatever the day has been—­if only there is a gleam of sun.  And now a kind of mechanical greatness took the place of mere black disorder in the bishop’s perception of his see.  It was harsh, it was vast and strong, it was no lamb he had to rule but a dragon.  Would it ever be given to him to overcome his dragon, to lead it home, and bless it?