It did not, however, give way.  His mind sat down for two days in a blank amazement at the course before him, and at the end of that time this reasonless and formless institution was as strong as ever.  During that time, except for some incidental exchanges at his clubs, he talked to no one.  At first he did not want to talk to any one.  He remained mentally and practically active, with a still intensely vivid sense that God, the true God, stood watching him and waiting for him to follow.  And to follow meant slipping right out of all the world he had ever known.  To thrust his foot right over the edge of a cliff would scarcely have demanded more from the bishop’s store of resolution.  He stood on the very verge.  The chief secretion of his mind was a shadowy experiment or so in explanation of why he did not follow.

(3)

Insensibly the extreme vividness of his sense of God’s nearness decreased.  But he still retained a persuasion of the reality of an immediate listener waiting, and of the need of satisfying him.

On the third day he found his mind still further changed.  He no longer felt that God was in Pall Mall or St. James’s Park, whither he resorted to walk and muse.  He felt now that God was somewhere about the horizon....

He felt too no longer that he thought straight into the mind of God.  He thought now of what he would presently say to God.  He turned over and rehearsed phrases.  With that came a desire to try them first on some other hearer.  And from that to the attentive head of Lady Sunderbund, prettily bent towards him, was no great leap.  She would understand, if any one could understand, the great change that had happened in his mind.

He found her address in the telephone book.  She could be quite alone to him if he wouldn’t mind “just me.”  It was, he said, exactly what he desired.

But when he got to her great airy flat overlooking Hyde Park, with its Omega Workshop furniture and its arresting decoration, he was not so sure whether this encounter was so exactly the thing he had desired as he had supposed.

The world had become opaque and real again as he walked up St. James’s Street and past the Ritz.  He had a feeling that he was taking an afternoon off from God.  The adventurous modernity of the room in which he waited intensified that.  One whole white wall was devoted to a small picture by Wyndham Lewis.  It was like a picture of an earthquake in a city of aniline pink and grey and keen green cardboard, and he wished it had never existed.

He turned his back upon it and stared out of the window over the trees and greenery.  The balcony was decorated with white and pink geraniums in pots painted black and gold, and the railings of the balcony were black and gold with crimson shape like squares wildly out of drawing.

Lady Sunderbund kept him waiting perhaps five minutes.  Then she came sailing in to him.