Ronder understood men very much better than he understood women. He understood Foster so long as ambition and religion were his motives, but there was something else in play that he did not understand. It was not only that Foster did not like him--he doubted whether Foster liked anybody except the Bishop--it was rather perhaps that Foster did not like himself. Now it is the first rule of fanaticism that you should be so lost in the impulse of your inspiration that you should have no power left with which to consider yourself at all. Foster was undoubtedly a fanatic, but he did consider himself and even despised himself. Ronder distrusted self- contempt in a man simply because nothing made him so uncomfortable as those moments of his own when he wondered whether he were all that he thought himself. Those moments did not last long, but he hated them so bitterly that he could not bear to see them at work in other people. Foster was the kind of fanatic who might at any minute decide to put peas in his shoes and walk to Jerusalem; did he so decide, he would abandon, for that decision, all the purposes for which he might at the time be working. Ronder would certainly never walk to Jerusalem. The silence and peace of Canon's Yard when he left Bodger's Street was almost dramatic. All that penetrated there was a subdued buzz with an occasional shrill note as it might be on a penny whistle. The Yard was dark, lit only by a single lamp, and the cobbles uneven. Lights here and there set in the crooked old windows were secret and uncommunicative: the Cathedral towers seemed immensely tall against the dusk. It would not be dark for another hour and a half, but in those old rooms with their small casements light was thin and uncertain. He climbed the rickety stairs to Foster's rooms. As always, something made him pause outside Foster's door and listen. All the sounds of the old building seemed to come up to him; not human voices and movements, but the life of the old house itself, the creaking protests of stairways, the sighs of reluctant doors, the harping groans of ill-mannered window- frames, the coughs and wheezes of trembling walls, the shudders of ill- boding banisters. "This house will collapse, the first gale," he thought, and suddenly the Cathedral chimes, striking the half-hour, crashed through the wall, knocking and echoing as though their clatter belonged to that very house. The echo died, and the old place recommenced its murmuring. Foster, blinking like an old owl, came to the door and, without a word, led the way into his untidy room. He cleared a chair of papers and books and Ronder sat down. "Well?" said Ronder.