Swinging homeward over the Cotswolds Mark flattered himself on a victory over heretics, and he imagined his adversaries entering Wield that afternoon, the prey of doubt and mortification.  At the highest point of the road he even ventured to suppose that they might find themselves at Evensong outside St. Andrew’s Church and led within by the grace of the Holy Spirit that they might renounce their errors before the altar.  Indeed, it was not until he was back in the Rectory that the futility of his own bearing overwhelmed him with shame.  Anxious to atone for his self-conceit, Mark gave the Rector an account of the incident.

“It seems to me that I behaved very feebly, don’t you think?”

“That kind of fellow is a hard nut to crack,” the Rector said consolingly.  “And you can’t expect just by quoting text against text to effect an instant conversion.  Don’t forget that your friends are in their way as great enthusiasts probably as yourself.”

“Yes, but it’s humiliating to be imagining oneself leading a revival of the preaching friars and then to behave like that.  What strikes me now, when it’s too late, is that I ought to have waited and taken the opportunity to tackle the innkeeper.  He was just the ordinary man who supposes that religion is his natural enemy.  You must admit that I missed a chance there.”

“I don’t want to check your missionary zeal,” said the Rector.  “But I really don’t think you need worry yourself about an omission of that kind so long before you are ordained.  If I didn’t know you as well as I do, I might even be inclined to consider such a passion for souls at your age a little morbid.  I wish with all my heart you’d gone to Oxford,” he added with a sigh.

“Well, really, do you know,” said Mark, “I don’t regret that.  Whatever may be the advantages of a public school and university, the education hampers one.  One becomes identified with a class; and when one has finished with that education, the next two or three years have to be spent in discovering that public school and university men form a very small proportion of the world’s population.  Sometimes I almost regret that my mother did not let me acquire that Cockney accent.  You can say a lot of things in a Cockney accent which said without any accent sound priggish.  You must admit, Rector, that your inner comment on my tale of the gospellers and the innkeeper is ’Dear me!  I am afraid Mark’s turning into a prig.’”

“No, no.  I laid particular stress on the point that if I didn’t know you as well as I do I might perhaps have thought that,” the Rector protested.

“I don’t think I am a prig,” Mark went on slowly.  “I don’t think I have enough confidence in myself to be a prig.  I think the way I argued with Mr. Bullock and Mr. Smillie was a bit priggish, because at the back of my head all the time I was talking I felt in addition to the arrogance of faith a kind of confounded snobbishness; and this sense of superiority came not from my being