about himself, about his way of living, about all his

persuasions. It was a general doubt. It was not a specific
suspicion upon this point or that. It was a feeling of detachment

and unreality at once extraordinarily vague and extraordinarily
oppressive. It was as if he discovered himself flimsy and

transparent in a world of minatory solidity and opacity. It was
as if he found himself made not of flesh and blood but of tissue

paper.
But this intellectual insecurity extended into his physical

sensations. It affected his feeling in his skin, as if it were
not absolutely his own skin.

And as he lay there, a weak phantom mentally and bodily, an
endless succession and recurrence of anxieties for which he could

find no reassurance besieged him.
Chief of this was his distress for Eleanor.

She was the central figure in this new sense of illusion in
familiar and trusted things. It was not only that the world of

his existence which had seemed to be the whole universe had
become diaphanous and betrayed vast and uncontrollable realities

beyond it, but his daughter had as it were suddenly opened a door
in this glassysphere of insecurity that had been his abiding

refuge, a door upon the stormy rebel outer world, and she stood
there, young, ignorant, confident, adventurous, ready to step

out.
"Could it be possible that she did not believe?"

He saw her very vividly as he had seen her in the dining-room,
slender and upright, half child, half woman, so fragile and so

fearless. And the door she opened thus carelessly gave upon a
stormy background like one of the stormy backgrounds that were

popular behind portrait Dianas in eighteenth century paintings.
Did she believe that all be had taught her, all the life he led

was--what was her phrase?--a kind of magic world, not really
real?

He groaned and turned over and repeated the words:
"A kind of magic world--not really real!"

The wind blew through the door she opened, and scattered
everything in the room. And still she held the door open.

He was astonished at himself. He started up in swift
indignation. Had he not taught the child? Had he not brought her

up in an atmosphere of faith? What right had she to turn upon him
in this matter? It was--indeed it was--a sort of insolence, a

lack of reverence....
It was strange he had not perceived this at the time.

But indeed at the first mention of "questionings" he ought to
have thundered. He saw that quite clearly now. He ought to have

cried out and said, "On your knees, my Norah, and ask pardon of
God!"

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!
But how to define the forbidden?

He began to compose an address on Modern Literature
(so-called).

It became acrimonious.
Before dawn the birds began to sing.

His mind had seemed to be a little tranquillized, there had
been a distinct feeling of subsidence sleepwards, when first one

and then another little creature roused itself and the bishop to
greet the gathering daylight.

It became a little clamour, a misty sea of sound in which
individuality appeared and disappeared. For a time a distant

cuckoo was very perceptible, like a landmark looming up over a
fog, like the cuckoo in the Pastoral Symphony.

The bishop tried not to heed these sounds, but they were by
their very nature insistent sounds. He lay disregarding them

acutely.
Presently he pulled the coverlet over his ears.

A little later he sat up in bed.
Again in a slight detail he marked his strange and novel

detachment from the world of his upbringing. His hallucination of
disillusionment had spread from himself and his church and his

faith to the whole animatecreation. He knew that these were the
voices of "our feathered songsters," that this was "a joyous

chorus" greeting the day. He knew that a wakeful bishop ought to
bless these happy creatures, and join with them by reciting Ken's

morning hymn. He made an effort that was more than half habit, to
repeat and he repeated with a scowling face and the voice of a

schoolmaster:
"Awake my soul, and with the sun

Thy daily stage of duty run...."
He got no further. He stopped short, sat still, thinking what

utterly detestable things singing birds were. A. blackbird had
gripped his attention. Never had he heard such vain repetitions.

He struggled against the dark mood of criticism. "He prayeth best
who loveth best--"