This waistcoat, on week-days of broadcloth and on Sundays of a more sensual silk, was the symbol of Mr. Leeming’s possibilities. He didn’t know it. Even if he were aware, in the lacing of his boots, of its physical existence; he hadn’t the least idea of its spiritual significance. If he had realised this, if he had been content to see himself as he actually stood upon the brink of his morning bath instead of as a snowy surpliced priest of God or a knightly figure in the armour of Sir Percivale (such, indeed, was his Christian name), Mr. Leeming might have been a healthier and a happier man. As it was, the devil that he believed he had conquered, in reality possessed his soul. In his quest for the thing which he had labelled purity he had unconsciously allowed the idea of “Impurity” to become an obsession. In the activities of a parish, hustled by the continual accidents of stark life and stabilised by the actual responsibility of a wife and an increasing family, Mr. Leeming might have become a thinner and a wiser man. In the sedentary and monotonous duties of a public school, he had become gradually more fat and introspective, and, as the years advanced, more perpetually conscious of the unashamed presence throughout human nature of his own suppressed desires,—more frightened . . . and more curious . . . of their terrible existence and more terrible power. Mr. Leeming, with the best intentions in the world, was in a bad way. A number of circumstances favoured the development of the unfortunate gentleman’s obsession. In the last Easter holidays he had attended a conference of assistant masters in London, at which the whole question had been discussed with the greatest solemnity, and plans had been formulated for the stamping out of “impurity” in every public school in England. The speeches of the delegates had convinced him of his own blindness. It was impossible that St. Luke’s should be so very different from any other public school, yet other people had assured the meeting that in their own schools the disease was “rampant,” and Mr. Leeming had returned to his summer duties convinced that if only he looked with sufficient care more ills than he had ever suspected might be found. He had become a man with a mission.