The Henson Journals

[56]

Monday, July 11th, 1921.

We left the Castle at 7.45 a.m., & motored to the station in time to catch the early train for King's Cross, which brought us there at 2.15 p.m. We went in a taxi together as far as the Athenaeum. Ella went on with the bags to Miss Mundella: & I went to the Club, then to the hair–dresser, finally to Dean's Yard, where the "National Assembly" was beginning its session. Lord Selborne introduced finance, & was, on the Archbishop's motion, elected Chairman of the Central Board. He and Lord Hugh Cecil dominated everything. The Church of England has shrunk into an ecclesiola Coeciliana. I had tea in the Athenaeum, where I had some talk with Sir Lewis Dibdin, &, picking up George Macmillan, drove with him to Elvaston Place. Linetta came to dinner, & seemed very bright and well. I walked with her to South Kensington Station, and on the way she told me that she believed that Crauford Inge would become a Roman Catholick, so evident and so strong is his reaction from the contemptuous intellectualism of his distinguished father. This would be a severe blow to Ralph, and I trust may not happen: but there is evidently little confidence between the boy & his father, & the spectacle of the sons of liberal–minded parents embracing the narrowest of creeds is too common to make one more instance improbable. Certainly it would give the enemy a mighty handle, if such a "conversion" could be effected. In its way it would be hardly less polemically valuable, & personally humiliating, than the conversion of young Cosin!