carefully attentive to her, kinder and more
watchful, at times astonishingly apologetic, but rigidly set upon his
purpose of leaving the church. "I know you do not think with me in
this," he said. "I have to pray you to be patient with me. I have
struggled with my conscience.... For a time it means hardship, I know.
Poverty. But if you will trust me I think I shall be able to pull
through. There are ways of doing my work. Perhaps we shall not have to
undergo this cramping in this house for very long...."

"It is not the poverty I fear," said Lady Ella.

And she did face the worldly situation, if a little sadly, at any
rate with the courage of practical energy. It was she who stood in
one ungainly house after another and schemed how to make discomforts
tolerable, while Scrope raged unhelpfully at landlordism and the
responsibility of the church for economic disorder. It was she who at
last took decisions into her hands when he was too jaded to do anything
but generalize weakly, and settled upon the house in Pembury Road which
became their London home. She got him to visit Hunstanton again for half
a week while she and Miriam, who was the practical genius of the family,
moved in and made the new home presentable. At the best it was barely
presentable. There were many plain hardships. The girls had to share one
of the chief bedrooms in common instead of their jolly little individual
dens at Princhester.... One little room was all that could be squeezed
out as a study for "father"; it was not really a separate room, it was
merely cut off by closed folding doors from the dining-room, folding
doors that slowly transmitted the dinner flavours to a sensitive worker,
and its window looked out upon a blackened and uneventful yard and the
skylights of a populous, conversational, and high-spirited millinery
establishment that had been built over the corresponding garden of the
house in Restharrow Street. Lady Ella had this room lined with open
shelves, and Clementina (in the absence of Eleanor at Newuham)
arranged the pick of her father's books. It is to be noted as a fact of
psychological interest that this cramped, ill-lit little room distressed
Lady Ella more than any other of the discomforts of their new quarters.
The bishop's writing-desk filled a whole side of it. Parsimony ruled her
mind, but she could not resist the impulse to get him at least a seemly
reading-lamp.

He came back from Hunstanton full of ideas for work in