Because after all faith is an emotional thing....

He began to think very rapidly and copiously of things he ought to have said to Eleanor.  And now the eloquence of reverie was upon him.  In a little time he was also addressing the tea-party at Morrice Deans’.  Upon them too he ought to have thundered.  And he knew now also all that he should have said to the recalcitrant employer.  Thunder also.  Thunder is surely the privilege of the higher clergy—­under Jove.

But why hadn’t he thundered?

He gesticulated in the darkness, thrust out a clutching hand.

There are situations that must be gripped—­gripped firmly.  And without delay.  In the middle ages there had been grip enough in a purple glove.

(2)

From these belated seizures of the day’s lost opportunities the bishop passed to such a pessimistic estimate of the church as had never entered his mind before.

It was as if he had fallen suddenly out of a spiritual balloon into a world of bleak realism.  He found himself asking unprecedented and devastating questions, questions that implied the most fundamental shiftings of opinion.  Why was the church such a failure?  Why had it no grip upon either masters or men amidst this vigorous life of modern industrialism, and why had it no grip upon the questioning young?  It was a tolerated thing, he felt, just as sometimes he had felt that the Crown was a tolerated thing.  He too was a tolerated thing; a curious survival....

This was not as things should be.  He struggled to recover a proper attitude.  But he remained enormously dissatisfied....

The church was no Levite to pass by on the other side away from the struggles and wrongs of the social conflict.  It had no right when the children asked for the bread of life to offer them Gothic stone....

He began to make interminable weak plans for fulfilling his duty to his diocese and his daughter.

What could he do to revivify his clergy?  He wished he had more personal magnetism, he wished he had a darker and a larger presence.  He wished he had not been saddled with Whippham’s rather futile son as his chaplain.  He wished he had a dean instead of being his own dean.  With an unsympathetic rector.  He wished he had it in him to make some resounding appeal.  He might of course preach a series of thumping addresses and sermons, rather on the lines of “Fors Clavigera,” to masters and men, in the Cathedral.  Only it was so difficult to get either masters or men into the Cathedral.

Well, if the people will not come to the bishop the bishop must go out to the people.  Should he go outside the Cathedral—­to the place where the trains met?

Interweaving with such thoughts the problem of Eleanor rose again into his consciousness.

Weren’t there books she ought to read?  Weren’t there books she ought to be made to read?  And books—­and friends—­that ought to be imperatively forbidden?  Imperatively!