(2)

Scrope halted outside the stucco portals of the doctor’s house.  He hesitated whether he should turn to the east or the west.

“That door closes,” he said.  “There’s no getting back that way."...

He stood for a time on the kerb.  He turned at last towards Park Lane and Hyde Park.  He walked along thoughtfully, inattentively steering a course for his new home in Pembury Road, Notting Hill.

(3)

At the outset of this new phase in Scrope’s life that had followed the crisis of the confirmation service, everything had seemed very clear before him.  He believed firmly that he had been shown God, that he had himself stood in the presence of God, and that there had been a plain call to him to proclaim God to the world.  He had realized God, and it was the task of every one who had realized God to help all mankind to the same realization.  The proposal of Lady Sunderbund had fallen in with that idea.  He had been steeling himself to a prospect of struggle and dire poverty, but her prompt loyalty had come as an immense relief to his anxiety for his wife and family.  When he had talked to Eleanor upon the beach at Hunstanton it had seemed to him that his course was manifest, perhaps a little severe but by no means impossible.  They had sat together in the sunshine, exalted by a sense of fine adventure and confident of success, they had looked out upon the future, upon the great near future in which the idea of God was to inspire and reconstruct the world.

It was only very slowly that this pristine clearness became clouded and confused.  It had not been so easy as Eleanor had supposed to win over the sympathy of Lady Ella with his resignation.  Indeed it had not been won over.  She had become a stern and chilling companion, mute now upon the issue of his resignation, but manifestly resentful.  He was secretly disappointed and disconcerted by her tone.  And the same hesitation of the mind, instinctive rather than reasoned, that had prevented a frank explanation of his earlier doubts to her, now restrained him from telling her naturally and at once of the part that Lady Sunderbund was to play in his future ministry.  In his own mind he felt assured about that part, but in order to excuse his delay in being frank with his wife, he told himself that he was not as yet definitely committed to Lady Sunderbund’s project.  And in accordance with that idea he set up housekeeping in London upon a scale that implied a very complete cessation of income.  “As yet,” he told Lady Ella, “we do not know where we stand.  For a time we must not so much house ourselves as camp.  We must take some quite small and modest house in some less expensive district.  If possible I would like to take it for a year, until we know better how things are with us.”

He reviewed a choice of London districts.

Lady Ella said her bitterest thing.  “Does it matter where we hide our heads?”

That wrung him to:  “We are not hiding our heads.”