But the next day was a troubled one.  Whippham had muddled his timetable and crowded his afternoon; the strike of the transport workers had begun, and the ugly noises they made at the tramway depot, where they were booing some one, penetrated into the palace.  He had to snatch a meal between 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 was in this state that he came to his talk with Eleanor.