Grace Lidderdale with her slanting sombre eyes and full upcurving lips made the pink and white Madonnas of the little mission church look insipid, and her husband was horrified when he found himself criticizing the images whose ability to lure the people of Lima Street to worship in the way he believed to be best for their souls he had never doubted.  Yet, for all her air of having trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, Mrs. Lidderdale was only outwardly Phoenician or Iberian or whatever other dimly imagined race is chosen for the strange types that in Cornwall more than elsewhere so often occur.  Actually she was a simple and devout soul, loving husband and child and the poor people with whom they lived.  Doubtless she had looked more appropriate to her surroundings in the tangled garden of her father’s vicarage than in the bleak Mission House of Lima Street; but inasmuch as she never thought about her appearance it would have been a waste of time for anybody to try to romanticize her.  The civilizing effect of her presence in the slum was quickly felt; and though Lidderdale continued to scoff at the advantages of civilization, he finally learnt to give a grudging welcome to her various schemes for making the bodies of the flock as comfortable as her husband tried to make their souls.

When Mark was born, his father became once more the prey of gloomy doubt.  The guardianship of a soul which he was responsible for bringing into the world was a ceaseless care, and in his anxiety to dedicate his son to God he became a harsh and unsympathetic parent.  Out of that desire to justify himself for having been so inconsistent as to take a wife and beget a son Lidderdale redoubled his efforts to put the Lima Street Mission on a permanent basis.  The civilization of the slum, which was attributed by pious visitors to regular attendance at Mass rather than to Mrs. Lidderdale’s gentleness and charm, made it much easier for outsiders to explore St. Simon’s parish as far as Lima Street.  Money for the great church he designed to build on a site adjoining the old tabernacle began to flow in; and five years after his marriage Lidderdale had enough money subscribed to begin to build.  The rubbish-strewn waste-ground overlooked by the back-windows of the Mission House was thronged with workmen; day by day the walls of the new St. Wilfred’s rose higher.  Fifteen years after Lidderdale took charge of the Lima Street Mission, it was decided to ask for St. Wilfred’s, Notting Dale, to be created a separate parish.  The Reverend Aylmer Majendie had become a canon residentiary of Chichester and had been succeeded as vicar by the Reverend L. M. Astill, a man more of the type of Thurston and only too anxious to help his senior curate to become a vicar, and what is more cut L200 a year off his own net income in doing so.

But when the question arose of consecrating the new St. Wilfred’s in order to the creation of a new parish, the Bishop asked many questions that were never asked about the Lima Street Mission.  There were Stations of the Cross reported to be of an unusually idolatrous nature.  There was a second chapel apparently for the express purpose of worshipping the Virgin Mary.