Before he went home, Colonel Bellairs proposed a scheme to him. His youngest boy, Bob, having been ill, had been ordered to spend the summer at home, and was not to go back to Eton till September. Meanwhile he wanted to keep up with his work, and they had been looking out for a tutor for him, some intelligent young public-school man who would know what he ought to be learning. As Eddy intended to be at home for the present, would he take up this job? The Colonel proposed a generous payment, and Eddy thought it an excellent plan. He went home engaged for the job, and started it next morning. Bob, who was sixteen, was, like all the Bellairs’, neither clever nor stupid; his gifts were practical rather than literary, but he had a fairly serviceable head. Eddy found that he rather liked teaching. He had a certain power of transmitting his own interest in things to other people that was useful. As the Dean got better, Eddy sometimes stayed on at the Hall after work hours, and played tennis or bumble-puppy with Molly and Bob before lunch, or helped Molly to feed the rabbits, or wash one of the dogs. There was a pleasant coherence and unity about these occupations, and about Molly and Bob, which Eddy liked. Meanwhile he acted as amanuensis and secretary to his father, and was useful and agreeable in the home. Coherence and unity; these qualities seemed in the main sadly lacking in Welchester, as in other places. It was--country life is, life in Cathedral or any other cities is--a chaos of warring elements, disturbing to the onlooker. There are no communities now, village or other. In Welchester, and in the country round about it, there was the continuous strain of opposing interests. You saw it on the main road into Welchester, where villas and villa people ousted cottages and small farmers; ousted them, and made a different demand on life, set up a different, opposing standard. Then, in the heart of the town, was the Cathedral, standing on a hill and for a set of interests quite different again, and round about it were the canons’ houses of old brick, and the Deanery, and they were imposing on life standards of a certain dignity and beauty and tradition and order, not in the least accepted either by the slum-yards behind Church Street, or by Beulah, the smug tabernacle just outside the Close. And the Cathedral society, the canons and their families, the lawyers, doctors, and unemployed gentry, kept themselves apart with satisfied gentility from the townspeople, the keepers of shops, the dentists, the auctioneers. Sentiment and opinion in Welchester was, in short, disintegrated, rent, at odds within itself. It returned a Conservative member, but only by a small majority; the large minority held itself neglected, unrepresented.