“You appear to me to be getting into a tangle,” said Lalage, “so you’d better not go on. If you’re afraid of the Archdeacon—and I suppose that is what your excuses will come to in the end—I’ll do it myself. After all, you’d most likely have made a mess of it.”
I bore the insult meekly. I was anxious, if possible, to persuade Lalage to drop the idea of marrying the Archdeacon to Miss Battersby.
“Remember your promise to my mother,” I said.
“I’ve kept it. I submitted the matter to Lord Thormanby just as I said I would. If he won’t act I can’t help it.”
“The Archdeacon will be frightfully angry.”
Lalage sniffed slightly. I could see that the thought of the Archdeacon’s wrath did not frighten her. I should have been surprised if it had. After facing Thormanby in the morning the Archdeacon would seem nothing. I adopted another line.
“Are you perfectly certain,” I said, “about that text? Don’t you think that if it’s really in the Bible the Archdeacon would have seen it?”
“He might have overlooked it,” said Lalage; “in fact, he must have overlooked it. If he’d come across it he’d have got married at once. Anybody can see that he wants to be a bishop.”
This seemed unanswerable. Yet I could not believe that the Archdeacon, who has been a clergyman for many years, could have failed to read the epistle in which the verse occurs. I made another effort.
“Most likely,” I said, “that text means something quite different.”