and I
want more clever people to talk to, and bigger and more educated
audiences to preach to, and I want to have leisure to write more and to
make a name.... It is merely a vulgar disease--a form of Potterism. One
has to face it and fight it out.

But to-night I wasn't feeling that. I wasn't feeling anything very much,
except that Gideon, and all that Gideon stood for, was worth immeasurably
more than anything the Aylesbury lot had ever stood for.

And when I got back, I found a note from Katherine saying that she
had warned Gideon about the talk and that he wasn't proposing to take
any steps.

3

Next morning I had to go to Church House for a meeting. I got the _Daily
Haste_ (which I seldom see) to read in the underground. On the front
page, side by side with murders, suicides, divorces, allied notes, and
Sinn Fein outrages, was a paragraph headed 'The Hobart Mystery. Suspicion
of Foul Play.' It was about how Hobart's sudden death had never been
adequately investigated, and how curious and suspicious circumstances had
of late been discovered in connection with it, and inquiries were being
pursued, and the _Haste_, which was naturally specially interested,
hoped to give more news very soon.

So old Pinkerton was making a journalistic scoop of it. Of course; one
might have known he would.

At my meeting (Pulpit Exchange, it was about) I met Frank Potter. He is a
queer chap--commercial and grasping, like all his family, and dull too,
and used to talk one sick about how little scope he had in his parish,
and so on. Since he got to St. Agatha's he's cheered up a bit, and talks
to me now instead of his big congregations and their fat purses. He's a
dull-minded creature--rather stupid and entirely conventional. He's all
against pulpit exchange, of course; he thinks it would be out of order
and tradition. So it would. And he's a long way keener on order and
tradition than he is on spiritual progress. A born Pharisee, he is
really, and yet with Christianity struggling in him here and there; and
that's why he's rather interesting, in spite of his dullness.

After the meeting I went up to him and showed him the _Haste_.

'Can't this be stopped?' I asked him.

He blinked at it.

'That's what Johnny is up in arms against too,' he said. 'He swears by
this chap who is suspected, and won't hear a word against him.'

'Well,' I said, 'the question is, can Johnny or any one else do anything
to stop it?... I've tried. I