“But that is just where the whole of this state of mind is false and wrong,” he told himself.  “God is something more than a priggish devotion, an intellectual formula.  He has a hold and a claim—­he should have a hold and a claim—­exceeding all the claims of Phoebe, Miriam, Daphne, Clementina—­all of them....  But he hasn’t’!...”

It was to that he had got after he had left Lady Sunderbund, and to that he now returned.  It was the thinness and unreality of his thought of God that had driven him post-haste to Brighton-Pomfrey in search for that drug that had touched his soul to belief.

Was God so insignificant in comparison with his family that after all with a good conscience he might preach him every Sunday in Lady Sunderbund’s church, wearing Lady Sunderbund’s vestments?

Before him he saw an empty seat.  The question was so immense and conclusive, it was so clearly a choice for all the rest of his life between God and the dear things of this world, that he felt he could not decide it upon his legs.  He sat down, threw an arm along the back of the seat and drummed with his fingers.

If the answer was “yes” then it was decidedly a pity that he had not stayed in the church.  It was ridiculous to strain at the cathedral gnat and then swallow Lady Sunderbund’s decorative Pantechnicon.

For the first time, Scrope definitely regretted his apostasy.

A trivial matter, as it may seem to the reader, intensified that regret.  Three weeks ago Borrowdale, the bishop of Howeaster, had died, and Scrope would have been the next in rotation to succeed him on the bench of bishops.  He had always looked forward to the House of Lords, intending to take rather a new line, to speak more, and to speak more plainly and fully upon social questions than had hitherto been the practice of his brethren.  Well, that had gone....

(9)

Regrets were plain now.  The question before his mind was growing clear; whether he was to persist in this self-imposed martyrdom of himself and his family or whether he was to go back upon his outbreak of visionary fanaticism and close with this last opportunity that Lady Sunderbund offered of saving at least the substance of the comfort and social status of his wife and daughters.  In which case it was clear to him he would have to go to great lengths and exercise very considerable subtlety—­and magnetism—­in the management of Lady Sunderbund....

He found himself composing a peculiar speech to her, very frank and revealing, and one that he felt would dominate her thoughts....  She attracted him oddly....  At least this afternoon she had attracted him....

And repelled him....

A wholesome gust of moral impatience stirred him.  He smacked the back of the seat hard, as though he smacked himself.

No.  He did not like it....