THAT night when he cried aloud at the memory of his furtive cigarette,
the bishop was staying with a rich man named Garstein Fellows. These
Garstein Fellows people were steel people with a financial side to them;
young Garstein Fellows had his fingers in various chemical businesses,
and the real life of the firm was in various minor partners called
Hartstein and Blumenhart and so forth, who had acquired a considerable
amount of ungentlemanly science and energy in Germany and German
Switzerland. But the Fellows element was good old Princhester stuff.
There had been a Fellows firm in Princhester in 1819. They were not
people the bishop liked and it was not a house the bishop liked staying
at, but it had become part of his policy to visit and keep in touch with
as many of the local plutocracy as he could, to give and take with them,
in order to make the presence of the church a reality to them. It had
been not least among the negligences and evasions of the sainted but
indolent Hood that he had invariably refused overnight hospitality
whenever it was possible for him to get back to his home. The morning
was his working time. His books and hymns had profited at the cost of
missing many a generous after-dinner subscription, and at the expense
of social unity. From the outset Scrope had set himself to alter this.
A certain lack of enthusiasm on Lady Ella's part had merely provoked
him to greater effort on his own. His ideal of what was needed with the
people was something rather jolly and familiar, something like a very
good and successful French or Irish priest, something that came
easily and readily into their homes and laid a friendly hand on their
shoulders. The less he liked these rich people naturally the more
familiar his resolution to be successfully intimate made him. He put
down the names and brief characteristics of their sons and daughters in
a little note-book and consulted it before every visit so as to get
his most casual enquiries right. And he invited himself to the Garstein
Fellows house on this occasion by telegram.
“A special mission and some business in Wombash may I have a scrap of
supper and a bed?”
Now Mrs. Garstein Fellows was a thoroughly London woman; she was one of
the banking Grunenbaums, the fair tall sort, and she had a very decided
tendency to smartness. She had a little party in the house, a sort of
long week-end party, that made her hesitate for a minute or so before
she framed a reply to the bishop's request.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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