I knew nine myself, my own, of which I was a little proud, being the ninth. I did not expect McNeice to deliver a harangue on the whole seventeen, but that is what he did. Having bolted his fish, he began in a loud, harsh voice to pour contempt on all attempts at investigating the early history of our national saint. He delayed our progress through dinner a good deal, because he would neither refuse nor help himself to the _entree_ which my butler held at his elbow. It was not until he had finished with the whole seventeen theories about the saint that he turned his attention to dinner again. I ventured to suggest that he had not even mentioned my own theory. "Oh," he said, "you have a theory too, have you?" My theory, at the time of its first appearance, occupied ten whole pages of the _Nineteenth Century_, and when republished, with notes, in pamphlet form, was reviewed by two German papers. I felt hurt by his ignorance of it, and reminded him again that we had corresponded about the subject while I was writing the article. "If you've time to waste on that sort of thing," he said, "why not devote it to living bishops instead of one who has been dead over a thousand years?" The idea of investigating the origins of our existing bishops was new to me but not in the least attractive. "Wouldn't it be rather waste of labour," I said, "to build up an hypothesis about the birthplace of a living bishop when--" "It's certainly waste of labour to build up an hypothesis about a dead one." "I meant to say," I added, "that if one did want to know such a thing--" "Nobody does," said McNeice. "It would," I went on, "be much simpler to write and ask him." I gathered from the way in which he spoke that McNeice did not like bishops; but I was not prepared for the violence of the speech which he made to me after dinner. Marion and Power were at the piano, which stands in a far-off corner of my rather oversized drawing-room. McNeice settled himself in front of the fire, his long legs straddled far apart, the bow of his white tie twisted under his ear. He is a man of singularly ferocious appearance. He has very bushy eyebrows which meet across the bridge of his nose, shining green eyes, a large jaw heavily underhung, and bright red hair.