The great Doctor Potter, who was for a brief time Bishop of London, had been at cambridge with him in the 'nineties, and had once heard him deliver a scintillating sermon on an abstruse heresy which but twelve men in England could possibly have appreciated to a congregation of four shopkeepers and their families, five small boys, and a deaf old lady. When he had remonstrated that nobody could possibly have followed him, Avril had clasped his arm and chuckled contentedly, "Of course not, my dear fellow. But how wonderful for him if by chance one of them did!"In ordinary life he was, quite frankly, hardly safe out.
It's from Margery Allingham's The Tiger In The Smoke, a late (1952) addition to her Albert Campion detective series. I'm not really a fan of such things, but this one's fascinating. Albert's a minor aristocrat, whose heyday was the interwar period when the aristocracy was merely dying. By this point, the misery, poverty, greyness and desolation of the postwar period hangs over every person like the London smog which chokes the characters. It's like Sherlock Holmes has been forced into Wire in the Blood or some equally bloody modern drama. The plot centres on an innocent war-widow who suddenly gets sent pictures of her supposedly-dead, but loved husband on the eve of her second wedding five years later, presumably for blackmail purposes.
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