“Don’t like it,” she cried, and stood apart from him with her chin in the air, a tall astonishment and dismay.

“I can’t do the work I want to do with this.”

“But—­Isn’t it you’ idea?”

“No.  It is not in the least my idea.  I want to tell the whole world of the one God that can alone unite it and save it—­and you make this extravagant toy.”

He felt as if he had struck her directly he uttered that last word.

“Toy!” she echoed, taking it in, “you call it a Toy!”

A note in her voice reminded him that there were two people who might feel strongly in this affair.

“My dear Lady Sunderbund,” he said with a sudden change of manner, “I must needs follow the light of my own mind.  I have had a vision of God, I have seen him as a great leader towering over the little lives of men, demanding the little lives of men, prepared to take them and guide them to the salvation of mankind and the conquest of pain and death.  I have seen him as the God of the human affair, a God of politics, a God of such muddy and bloody wars as this war, a God of economics, a God of railway junctions and clinics and factories and evening schools, a God in fact of men.  This God—­this God here, that you want to worship, is a God of artists and poets—­of elegant poets, a God of bric-a-brac, a God of choice allusions.  Oh, it has its grandeur!  I don’t want you to think that what you are doing may not be altogether fine and right for you to do.  But it is not what I have to do....  I cannot—­indeed I cannot—­go on with this project—­upon these lines.”

He paused, flushed and breathless.  Lady Sunderbund had heard him to the end.  Her bright face was brightly flushed, and there were tears in her eyes.  It was like her that they should seem tears of the largest, most expensive sort, tears of the first water.

“But,” she cried, and her red delicate mouth went awry with dismay and disappointment, and her expression was the half incredulous expression of a child suddenly and cruelly disappointed:  “You won’t go on with all this?”

“No,” he said.  “My dear Lady Sunderbund—­”

“Oh! don’t Lady Sunderbund me!” she cried with a novel rudeness.  “Don’t you see I’ve done it all for you?”

He winced and felt boorish.  He had never liked and disapproved of Lady Sunderbund so much as he did at that moment.  And he had no words for her.

“How can I stop it all at once like this?”

And still he had no answer.

She pursued her advantage.  “What am I to do?” she cried.

She turned upon him passionately.  “Look what you’ve done!” She marked her points with finger upheld, and gave odd suggestions in her face of an angry coster girl.  “Eva’ since I met you, I’ve wo’shipped you.  I’ve been ‘eady to follow you anywhe’—­to do anything.  Eva’ since that night when you sat so calm and dignified, and they baited you and wo’id you.  When they we’ all vain and cleva, and you—­you thought only of God and ‘iligion and didn’t mind fo’ you’self....  Up to then—­I’d been living—­oh! the emptiest life...”