you wanted him to be a priest?  You don’t necessarily want him to become a Jesuit or a Benedictine or a Dominican.  Where can you send him now?  Stonyhurst, Downside, Beaumont.  There isn’t a single decent school run by the secular clergy.  You know what I mean?  A school for the sons of gentlemen—­a public school.  We’ve got magnificent buildings, grounds, everything you could wish.  I’ve been promised all the money necessary, and then the Bishop of Dudley steps in and says that these Dominicans ought to take it on.”

“I’m afraid I’ve somehow given you a wrong impression,” Mark interposed when Monseigneur Cripps at last filled his mouth with plaice.  “I’m not a Roman Catholic.”

“Oh, aren’t you?” said Monseigneur indifferently.  “Never mind, I expect you see my point about the necessity for the school to be run by secular clergy.  Did I tell you how I got the land for my church here?  That’s rather an interesting story.  It belonged to Lord Evesham who, as perhaps you may know, is very anti-Catholic, but a thorough good sportsman.  We always get on capitally together.  Well, one day I said to his agent, Captain Hart:  ’What about this land, Hart?  Don’t you think you could get it out of his lordship?’ ‘It’s no good, Father Cripps,’ said Hart—­I wasn’t Monseigneur then of course—­’It’s no good,’ he said, ’his lordship absolutely declines to let his land be used for a Catholic church.’  ‘Come along, Hart,’ I said, ‘let’s have a round of golf.’  Well, when we got to the eighteenth hole we were all square, and we’d both of us gone round three better than bogie and broken our own records.  I was on the green with my second shot, and holed out in three.  ‘My game,’ I shouted because Hart had foozled his drive and wasn’t on the green.  ’Not at all,’ he said.  ’You shouldn’t be in such a hurry.  I may hole out in one,’ he laughed.  ‘If you do,’ I said, ’you ought to get Lord Evesham to give me that land.’  ‘That’s a bargain,’ he said, and he took his mashie.  Will you believe it?  He did the hole in two, sir, won the game, and beat the record for the course!  And that’s how I got the land to build my church.  I was delighted!  I was delighted!  I’ve told that story everywhere to show what sportsmen are.  I told it to the Bishop, but of course he being an Irishman didn’t see anything funny in it.  If he could have stopped my being made Monseigneur, he’d have done so.  But he couldn’t.”

“You seem to have as much trouble with your bishops as we do with ours in the Anglican Church,” said Mark.

“We shouldn’t, if we made the right men bishops,” said Monseigneur.  “But so long as they think at Westminster that we’re going to convert England with a tagrag and bobtail mob of Irish priests, we never shall make the right men.  You were looking round my church just now.  Didn’t it remind you of an English church?”

Mark agreed that it did very much.

“That’s my secret:  that’s why I’ve been the most successful mission priest in this diocese.  I realize as an Englishman that it is no use to give the English Irish Catholicism.  When I was in Rome the other day I was disgusted, I really was.  I was disgusted.  I thoroughly sympathize with Protestants who go there and are disgusted.  You cannot expect a decent English family to confess to an Irish peasant.  It’s not reasonable.  We want to create an English tradition.”