One of the things that tried him most severely was the timidity of those who should have been his best supporters. The clergy with a few noteworthy exceptions fulminated against the evil plays but failed to support the good. He knew that hundreds of them would troop to Washington’s theatre when they went to London, but they were generally conspicuous by their absence from the theatres in their own towns where their presence might really have done much good. Personally they respected him and spoke of him in warm terms, but very few of them at all understood how hard a fight this man was making in a time of exceptional difficulty, or how bitter it was to him when those, from whom he reasonably expected much, held aloof. It was quite the end of September when the Macneillie Company found themselves once more at Liverpool. They were giving the plays they had performed at Stratford during the Memorial week, and this made Macneillie feel the loss of Ralph more acutely than ever. To turn straight from a pupil who had been extraordinarily receptive, always good-humoured, always ready to study, and grudging no pains in the effort to please his instructor and conquer his own faults, to a man of exactly the opposite type, was hard indeed. It was all the more annoying to Macneillie because Ralph’s successor had excellent abilities but was cursed with the conviction that he already knew everything a little better than the Manager; he had moreover been born with one of those touchy and wayward natures that are so hard to deal with. He lived in a perpetual state of taking offence, and though Macneillie apparently ignored this and went quietly on his way, it nevertheless chafed him a good deal. Then, too, all the many vicissitudes of a travelling company--the illness of one, the quarrels of another--seemed to worry him more now that he was alone and had no one to discuss things with. The very rooms he occupied in Seymour Street were full of memories to him; he had stayed there more than once with Ralph and Evereld, it had been there that they had first come to him after their marriage, and the place looked horribly blank without them.