Neither did young Mr. Coppinger receive much encouragement from his own class. Bill Kirby, indeed, undertook to support him and even volunteered to go round with him on his canvassing expeditions, but this was considered by Larry's Committee as being of questionable advantage, even, possibly, affording to the enemy an occasion to blaspheme, and the offer (made, it may be said, at Judith's instigation) was declined. Nor, as a matter of fact, was Larry himself disposed to take Bill Kirby's proffered hand. He told himself that he was done with that lot. He was bitterly angry with Christian. He said to himself that he would never forgive her; would never, if he could help it, see one of them again. At a word from her father she had chucked him; without a moment of hesitation, without a word to show that she was even sorry for her father's treatment of him. "Apparently it's the only thing to do!" she had said. That was all she thought of keeping a promise! What about leaving father and mother and sticking to your husband, he would like to know! These Protestants who talked such a lot about reading the Bible! It was quite true what old Mangan had said: "When all comes to all, a man must stick to his own Church!" All these others, these St. Georges, and Westropps, and old Ardmore, and the rest of them, had only been waiting to jump on him as soon as he put a foot out of the rut they all walked in. They had waited for the chance to make him a pariah. Now they had it. All right! He could face that. They should soon see how little he thought of them! He pitched himself headlong into the contest. The weather had fallen from grace. October, having been borne in on the wings of a gale, was storming on through wind and wet, and the game of canvassing, that had seemed, on that sunny day when he had written to Christian, so "frightfully interesting," was beginning to pall. Boring as were the personal interviews, and exhausting the evening oratory in town halls and school-houses, the Sunday meetings at the gates of the chapels were still more arduous. On each Sunday, during the period between the death of Daniel Prendergast and the election of his successor, did young Mr. Coppinger, with chosen members of his "Commy-tee"--he had learnt to accept the inflexible local pronunciation--splash from chapel to chapel, to meet the congregations, and to shout platitudes to them. Larry began to feel that no conviction--however fervently held--could survive the ordeal of being slowly yelled to a bored crowd from the front seat of a motor car. He told himself that he had become a gramophone, and a tired gramophone, badly in want of winding up, at that.