Neither the bishop's insomnia nor his incertitudes about himself and his
faith developed in a simple and orderly manner. There were periods of
sustained suffering and periods of recovery; it was not for a year or
so that he regarded these troubles as more than acute incidental
interruptions of his general tranquillity or realized that he was
passing into a new phase of life and into a new quality of thought.
He told every one of the insomnia and no one of his doubts; these he
betrayed only by an increasing tendency towards vagueness, symbolism,
poetry and toleration. Eleanor seemed satisfied with his exposition; she
did not press for further enlightenment. She continued all her outward
conformities except that after a time she ceased to communicate; and in
September she went away to Newnham. Her doubts had not visibly affected
Clementina or her other sisters, and the bishop made no further attempts
to explore the spiritual life of his family below the surface of its
formal acquiescence.

As a matter of fact his own spiritual wrestlings were almost exclusively
nocturnal. During his spells of insomnia he led a curiously double
existence. In the daytime he was largely the self he had always been,
able, assured, ecclesiastical, except that he was a little jaded and
irritable or sleepy instead of being quick and bright; he believed in
God and the church and the Royal Family and himself securely; in
the wakeful night time he experienced a different and novel self, a
bare-minded self, bleakly fearless at its best, shamelessly weak at its
worst, critical, sceptical, joyless, anxious. The anxiety was quite the
worst element of all. Something sat by his pillow asking grey questions:
"What are you doing? Where are you going? Is it really well with the
children? Is it really well with the church? Is it really well with the
country? Are you indeed doing anything at all? Are you anything more
than an actor wearing a costume in an archaic play? The people turn