he was sure of his audience, claimed to be just as advanced as
Thurston; but he was ambitious of preferment, or as he himself put it,
he felt that, when a member of the Catholic party had with the exercise
of prudence and tact an opportunity of enhancing the prestige of his
party in a higher ecclesiastical sphere, he should be wrong to neglect
it. Majendie's aim therefore was to avoid controversy with his
ecclesiastical superiors, and at a time when, as he told Lidderdale, he
was stepping back in order to jump farther, he was anxious that his
missioner should step back with him.

"I'm not suggesting, my dear fellow, that you should bring St. Wilfred's
actually into line with the parish church. But the Asperges, you know. I
can't countenance that. And the Adoration of the Cross on Good Friday.
I really think that kind of thing creates unnecessary friction."

Lidderdale's impulse was to resign at once, for he was a man who found
restraint galling where so much passion went to his belief in the truth
of his teaching. When, however, he pondered how little he had done and
how much he had vowed to do, he gave way and agreed to step back with
his vicar. He was never convinced that he had taken the right course at
this crisis, and he spent hours in praying for an answer by God to a
question already answered by himself. The added strain of these hours of
prayer, which were not robbed from his work in the Mission, but from the
already short enough time he allowed himself for sleep, told upon his
health, and he was ordered by the doctor to take a holiday to avoid a
complete breakdown of health. He stayed for two months in Cornwall, and
came back with a wife, the daughter of a Cornish parson called Trehawke.
Lidderdale had been a fierce upholder of celibacy, and the news of his
marriage astonished all who knew him.

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