“Now what do you think? No, we never have. Would we understand him if we did? I expect not, do you know. Tell us when the mission (is that what you call it? But I thought they were for blacks and Jews) is over, and I’ll come again and play to the clubs. Till then, oughtn’t you to be going to services every night, and I wonder ought you to be dining and theatreing with us on Thursday?” “Oh, I can fit it in easily,” said Eddy, cheerfully. “But, seriously, I do wish you’d come one night. You’d like Father Dempsey. He’s an extraordinarily alive and stimulating person. Hillier thinks him flippant; but that’s rubbish. He’s the best man in the Church.” All the same, they didn’t come. How difficult it is to make people do what they are not used to! How good it would be for them if they would; if Hillier would but sometimes spend an evening at Datcherd’s settlement; if James Peters would but come, at Eddy’s request, to shop at the Poetry Bookshop; if Datcherd would but sit under Father Dempsey, the best man in the Church! It sometimes seemed to Eddy that it was he alone, in a strange, uneclectic world, who did all these things with impartial assiduity and fervour. * * * * * And he found, which was sad and bewildering, that those with less impartiality of taste got annoyed with him. The vicar thought, not unnaturally, that during the mission he ought to have given up other engagements, and devoted himself exclusively to the parish, getting them to come. All the curates thought so too. Meanwhile Arnold Denison thought that he ought to have stayed to the end of the debate on Impressionism in Poetry at the Wednesday Club that met in Billy Raymond’s rooms, instead of going away in the middle to be in time for the late service at St. Gregory’s. Arnold thought so particularly because he hadn’t yet spoken himself, and it would obviously have been more becoming in Eddy to wait and hear him. Eddy grew to have an uncomfortable feeling of being a little wrong with everyone; he felt aggrieved under it. At last, a fortnight before Christmas, the vicar spoke to him. It was on a Sunday evening. Eddy had had supper with Cecil Le Moine, as it was Cecil’s turn to have the Sunday Games Club, a childish institution that flourished just then among them, meet at his house. Eddy returned to St. Gregory’s late.