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 instinctive disposition 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 touched some hidden spring—­of vanity perhaps it was—­in him, that made him respond.  But partly also it was because after the evacuation of the palace at Princhester he had felt more and more, felt but never dared to look squarely in the face, the catastrophic change in the worldly circumstances