She kept him waiting for perhaps ten minutes before she brought the plans to him.  He waited in the little room with the Wyndham Lewis picture that opened upon the balcony painted with crazy squares of livid pink.  On a golden table by the window a number of recently bought books were lying, and he went and stood over these, taking them up one after another.  The first was “The Countess of Huntingdon and Her Circle,” that bearder of lightminded archbishops, that formidable harbourer of Wesleyan chaplains.  For some minutes he studied the grim portrait of this inspired lady standing with one foot ostentatiously on her coronet and then turned to the next volume.  This was a life of Saint Teresa, that energetic organizer of Spanish nunneries.  The third dealt with Madame Guyon.  It was difficult not to feel that Lady Sunderbund was reading for a part.

She entered.

She was wearing a long simple dress of spangled white with a very high waist; she had a bracelet of green jade, a waistband of green silk, and her hair was held by a wreath of artificial laurel, very stiff and green.  Her arms were full of big rolls of cartridge paper and tracing paper.  “I’m so pleased,” she said.  “It’s ’eady at last and I can show you.”

She banged the whole armful down upon a vivid little table of inlaid black and white wood.  He rescued one or two rolls and a sheet of tracing paper from the floor.

“It’s the Temple,” she panted in a significant whisper.  “It’s the Temple of the One T’ue God!”

She scrabbled among the papers, and held up the elevation of a strange square building to his startled eyes.  “Iszi’t it just pe’fect?” she demanded.

He took the drawing from her.  It represented a building, manifestly an enormous building, consisting largely of two great, deeply fluted towers flanking a vast archway approached by a long flight of steps.  Between the towers appeared a dome.  It was as if the Mosque of Saint Sophia had produced this offspring in a mesalliance with the cathedral of Wells.  Its enormity was made manifest by the minuteness of the large automobiles that were driving away in the foreground after “setting down.”  “Here is the plan,” she said, thrusting another sheet upon him before he could fully take in the quality of the design.  “The g’eat Hall is to be pe’fectly ’ound, no aisle, no altar, and in lettas of sapphiah, ‘God is ev’ywhe’.’”

She added with a note of solemnity, “It will hold th’ee thousand people sitting down.”

“But—!” said Scrope.

“The’e’s a sort of g’andeur,” she said.  “It’s young Venable’s wo’k.  It’s his fl’st g’ate oppo’tunity.”

“But—­is this to go on that little site in Aldwych?”

“He says the’ isn’t ’oom the’!” she explained.  “He wants to put it out at Golda’s G’een.”

“But—­if it is to be this little simple chapel we proposed, then wasn’t our idea to be central?”

“But if the’ isn’t ’oem!” she said—­conclusively.  “And isn’t this—­isn’t it rather a costly undertaking, rather more costly—­”