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 entrée 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.