After the guests leave, Dr Cunningham throws himself into a chair and laughs as he has not laughed since Avis's mother died. He bets Dr Hammerfield never met a lamb that became a roaring lion, and he keeps inviting mixed company back to the house. Avis finds herself drawn to Ernest despite, or because of, his assault on her class assumptions. Ernest returns for tea with Bishop Morehouse, a man whose sincerity makes him the most dangerous kind of audience for Ernest's logic. On the veranda he seems to take up more room than his height should allow.
The conversation becomes a second battlefield over whether capital and labour can harmonise under Christian ethics. Ernest names the system pig-ethics and says the pulpit is standing for it every Sunday. The Bishop appeals to goodwill, gradual reform, and the moral conscience of employers; Ernest answers that conscience does not change the wage relation or the pressure to maximise profit. Each abstract claim is dragged back to material reality: who owns the machines, who sets the hours, and who absorbs the cost when production demands human sacrifice. When the Bishop grows pale and seems sickened, Ernest asks whether the Church has even protested.
The abstraction breaks when Jackson, a worker maimed in an industrial accident, enters the discussion as living evidence. Ernest forces the Bishop to confront a specific body and a specific injustice instead of a harmonious theory of classes. The Bishop's responses show the limit of charitable Christianity when it will not challenge ownership itself. Avis sees that Ernest is not performing brilliance for its own sake; he is stripping away the moral insulation that allows educated people to live comfortably inside a violent economy.
By the end of the visit her attraction to Ernest is also a threat to her old identity. He presses the Bishop on the economics of charity and the legal machinery that protects owners when workers are injured. They leave together. She is left smarting, calling him a beast in her mind, and still unable to return to polite ignorance as if she had not heard him.
Coming Up in Chapter 3
Avis begins her investigation into Jackson's case, but what she discovers about the one-armed peddler will force her to confront the true cost of her family's wealth. Meanwhile, Bishop Morehouse prepares for his own journey into the harsh realities Ernest promised to show him.
