‘Well, sir, we are always ready to learn; perhaps you would like to take a service yourself next Sunday? You are not in orders, but you have heard the Archbishop of Canterbury, I dare say.’
‘No, only a bishop now and then.’
‘Oh, what opportunities!’ said Victoria sadly. ‘We once had a navy-chaplain here, but it was four years ago. Though, of course, that is no excuse for our not being better than we are.’
‘They say he has fifteen thousand a year to spend on the poor,’ said the schoolmaster, returning to the Primate.
‘Yes, he has fifteen thousand a year.’
‘How much would that be in potatoes, let’s see?’ murmured Reuben, and he withdrew for an operation in mental arithmetic.
‘I’ve heard of a lady who has made fifty thousand people happy, all by herself,’ said one of the women. ‘She’s a baroness.’
‘And that’s not the highest,’ said another, ‘there’s duchesses who must be richer. Oh, what a country for the poor!’
‘It’s the big churches I’m thinking of,’ observed the schoolmaster. ‘Why, there’s one that holds six thousand people. Six thousand people, twice a day! Think of the spread of it!’
‘Them’s the things I want to see,’ said Reuben, returning, not unoppressed, I thought, by his weight of potatoes, ‘the big things—St. Paul’s, the Railway.’