"They don't spend it on themselves," retorted Rendell.
"Only on palaces and motors and flummery. No, my boy, it's all bunkum. Look at the fortunes they leave." Lawrence had collected a list of episcopal fortunes which he read with glee upon every possible occasion. It was an excellent array of figures, starting well up in the hundred thousands.
"Oh, chuck it," said Rendell. "We've heard all this before."
But Lawrence read irrepressibly on.
"What about your needle's eye now?" he roared.
"Oh, don't be a child," said Rendell.
"That's all you ever say. Childish! You with your Athanasian Creed and incense and swindling priests. Ever been to Notre Dame and seen the advertisements? Forty days' purgatory remitted in return for so many prayers! And you call me childish!" Lawrence had a fine flow of metaphors and expletives. He had been known to continue one sentence for ten minutes, his oratorical method being to substitute copulas for full stops. He began jerkily, it is true. But once the lumbering coach was set moving nothing could withstand its impetus.
Rendell yielded and began to discuss with Davenant the personality of Christ. Lawrence continued roaring at no one in particular. At last he sat heavily down in his arm-chair, so heavily that one of its legs gave way. He tore off the broken member and brandished it wildly, as a symbol of his attitude to all things episcopal.
As usual it was Chard who closed the discussion.
"Davenant's faith," he said, "makes me think of a mendicant professor of æsthetics and Rendell's of the first secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners (Nazareth branch). I move the question be put."