on the rectory table, in case of immediate need. Any of the Drone
girls, Lilian, or Jocelyn, or Theodora, would show it to you. But, as
I say, mathematics were not the rector's forte, and he blamed for it
(in a Christian spirit, you will understand) the memory of his
mathematical professor, and often he spoke with great bitterness. I
have often heard him say that in his opinion the colleges ought to
dismiss, of course in a Christian spirit, all the professors who are
not, in the most reverential sense of the term, fit for their jobs.

No doubt many of the clergy of the diocese had suffered more or less
just as the Dean had from lack of mathematical training. But the Dean
always felt that his own case was especially to be lamented. For you
see, if a man is trying to make a model aeroplane--for a poor family
in the lower part of the town--and he is brought to a stop by the
need of reckoning the coefficient of torsion of cast-iron rods, it
shows plainly enough that the colleges are not truly filling their
divine mission.


But the figures that I speak of were not those of the model
aeroplane. These were far more serious. Night and day they had been
with the rector now for the best part of ten years, and they grew, if
anything, more intricate.

If, for example, you try to reckon the debt of a church--a large
church with a great sweep of polished cedar beams inside, for the
special glorification of the All Powerful, and with imported tiles on
the roof for the greater glory of Heaven and with stained-glass
windows for the exaltation of the All Seeing--if, I say, you try to
reckon up the debt on such a church and figure out its interest and