And then this disconcerting lady did a still more disconcerting

thing. She staggered a step towards Scrape, seized the lapels of
his coat, bowed her head upon his shoulder, put her black hair

against his cheek, and began sobbing and weeping.
"My dear lady! " he expostulated, trying weakly to disengage

her.
"Let me k'y," she insisted, gripping more resolutely, and

following his backward pace. "You must let me k'y. You must let
me k'y."

His resistance ceased. One hand supported her, the other patted
her shining hair. "My dear child!" he said. "My dear child! I had

no idea. That you would take it like this...."
(7)

That was but the opening of an enormousinterview. Presently he
had contrived in a helpful and sympathetic manner to seat the

unhappy lady on a sofa, and when after some cramped discourse she
stood up before him, wiping her eyes with a wet wonder of lace,

to deliver herself the better, a newborn appreciation of the
tactics of the situation made him walk to the other side of the

table under colour of picking up a drawing.
In the retrospect he tried to disentangle the threads of a

discussion that went to and fro and contradicted itself and began
again far back among things that had seemed forgotten and

disposed of. Lady Sunderbund's mind was extravagantly untrained,
a wild-grown mentalthicket. At times she reproached him as if he

were a heartless God; at times she talked as if he were a
recalcitrant servant. Her mingling of utter devotion and the

completest disregard for his thoughts and wishes dazzled and
distressed his mind. It was clear that for half a year her clear,

bold, absurd will had been crystallized upon the idea of giving
him exactly what she wanted him to want. The crystalsphere of

those ambitions lay now shattered between them.
She was trying to reconstruct it before his eyes.

She was, she declared, prepared to alter her plans in any way
that would meet his wishes. She had not understood. "If it is a

Toy," she cried, "show me how to make it not a Toy! Make it
'eal!"

He said it was the bare idea of a temple that made it
impossible. And there was this drawing here; what did it mean? He

held it out to her. It represented a figure, distressingly like
himself, robed as a priest in vestments.

She snatched the offending drawing from him and tore it to
shreds.

"If you don't want a Temple, have a meeting-house. You wanted a
meeting-house anyhow."

"Just any old meeting-house," he said. "Not that special one. A
place without choirs and clergy."

"If you won't have music," she responded, "don't have music. If
God doesn't want music it can go. I can't think God does not

app'ove of music, but--that is for you to settle. If you don't
like the' being o'naments, we'll make it all plain. Some g'ate

g'ey Dome--all g'ey and black. If it isn't to be beautiful, it
can be ugly. Yes, ugly. It can be as ugly "--she sobbed--" as

the City Temple. We will get some otha a'chitect--some City
a'chitect. Some man who has built B'anch Banks or 'ailway

stations. That's if you think it pleases God.... B'eak young
Venable's hea't.... Only why should you not let me make a place

fo' you' message? Why shouldn't it be me? You must have a place.
You've got 'to p'each somewhe'."

"As a man, not as a priest."
"Then p'each as a man. You must still wea' something."

"Just ordinary clothes."
"O'dina'y clothes a' clothes in the fashion," she said. "You

would have to go to you' taila for a new p'eaching coat with
b'aid put on dif'ently, or two buttons instead of th'ee...."

"One needn't be fashionable."
"Ev'ybody is fash'nable. How can you help it? Some people wea'

old fashions; that's all.... A cassock's an old fashion. There's
nothing so plain as a cassock."

"Except that it's a clerical fashion. I want to be just as I am
now."

"If you think that--that owoble suit is o'dina'y clothes!"
she said, and stared at him and gave way to tears of real

tenderness.
"A cassock," she cried with passion. "Just a pe'fectly plain

cassock. Fo' deecency!... Oh, if you won't--not even that!"
(8)

As he walked now after his unsuccessful quest of Dr.
Brighton-Pomfrey towards the Serpentine he acted that stormy

interview with Lady Sunderbund over again. At the end, as a
condition indeed of his departure, he had left things open. He

had assented to certain promises. He was to make her understand
better what it was he needed. He was not to let anything that

had happened affect that "spi'tual f'enship." She was to abandon
all her plans, she was to begin again "at the ve'y beginning."

But he knew that indeed there should be no more beginning again
with her. He knew that quite beyond these questions of the

organization of a purified religion, it was time their
association ended. She had wept upon him; she had clasped both

his hands at parting and prayed to be forgiven. She was drawing
him closer to her by their very dissension. She had infected him

with the softness of remorse; from being a bright and spirited
person, she had converted herself into a warm and touching

person. Her fine, bright black hair against his cheek and the
clasp of her hand on his shoulder was now inextricably in the

business. The perplexing, the astonishing thing in his situation
was that there was still a reluctance to make a conclusive

breach.
He was not the first of men who have tried to find in vain how

and when a relationship becomes an entanglement. He ought to
break off now, and the riddle was just why he should feel this

compunction in breaking off now. He had disappointed her, and he
ought not to have disappointed her; that was the essential

feeling. He had never realized before as he realized now this
peculiar quality of his own mind and the gulf into which it was

leading him. It came as an illuminating discovery.
He was a social animal. He had an instinctivedisposition to

act according to the expectations of the people about him,
whether they were reasonable or congenial expectations or whether

they were not. That, he saw for the first time, had been the
ruling motive of his life; it was the clue to him. Man is not a

reasonable creature; he is a socially responsive creature trying
to be reasonable in spite of that fact. From the days in the

rectory nursery when Scrope had tried to be a good boy on the
whole and just a little naughty sometimes until they stopped

smiling, through all his life of school, university, curacy,
vicarage and episcopacy up to this present moment, he perceived

now that he had acted upon no authentic and independent impulse.
His impulse had always been to fall in with people and satisfy

them. And all the painful conflicts of those last few years had
been due to a growing realization of jarring criticisms, of

antagonized forces that required from him incompatible things.
From which he had now taken refuge--or at any rate sought

refuge--in God. It was paradoxical, but manifestly in God he
not only sank his individuality but discovered it.

It was wonderful how much he had thought and still thought of
the feelings and desires of Lady Sunderbund, and how little he

thought of God. Her he had been assiduously propitiating,
managing, accepting, for three months now. Why? Partly because

she demanded it, and there was a quality in her demand that had