She was dressed in a way and moved across the room in a way that was more reminiscent of Botticelli’s Spring than ever—­only with a kind of superadded stiffish polonaise of lace—­and he did not want to be reminded of Botticelli’s Spring or wonder why she had taken to stiff lace polonaises.  He did not enquire whether he had met Lady Sunderbund to better advantage at Mrs. Garstein Fellows’ or whether his memory had overrated her or whether anything had happened to his standard of taste, but his feeling now was decidedly one of disappointment, and all the talk and self-examination he had promised himself seemed to wither and hide away within him.  For a time he talked of her view, and then admired her room and its arrangement, which he thought really were quite unbecomingly flippant and undignified for a room.  Then came the black tea-things on their orange tray, and he searched in his mind for small talk to sustain their interview.

But he had already betrayed his disposition to “go on with our talk” in his telephone enquiry, and Lady Sunderbund, perceiving his shyness, began to make openings for him, at first just little hinting openings, and then larger and larger ones, until at last one got him.

“I’m so glad,” she said, “to see you again.  I’m so glad to go on with our talk.  I’ve thought about it and thought about it.”

She beamed at him happily.

“I’ve thought ova ev’y wo’d you said,” she went on, when she had finished conveying her pretty bliss to him.  “I’ve been so helped by thinking the k’eeds are symbols.  And all you said.  And I’ve felt time after time, you couldn’t stay whe’ you we’.  That what you we’ saying to me, would have to be said ’ight out.”

That brought him in.  He could not very well evade that opening without incivility.  After all he had asked to see her, and it was a foolish thing to let little decorative accidentals put him off his friendly purpose.  A woman may have flower-pots painted gold with black checkers and still be deeply understanding.  He determined to tell her what was in his mind.  But he found something barred him from telling that he had had an actual vision of God.  It was as if that had been a private and confidential meeting.  It wasn’t, he felt, for him either to boast a privilege or tell others of things that God had not chosen to show them.

“Since I saw you,” he said, “I have thought a great deal—­of the subject of our conversation.”

“I have been t’ying to think,” she said in a confirmatory tone, as if she had co-operated.

“My faith in God grows,” he said.

She glowed.  Her lips fell apart.  She flamed attention.

“But it grows less like the faith of the church, less and less.  I was born and trained in Anglicanism, and it is with a sort of astonishment I find myself passing now out of every sort of Catholicism—­seeing it from the outside....”

“Just as one might see Buddhism,” she supplied.