Section 11

Letty walked back slowly through the fields of stubble to her cottage.

She had been talking to Mr. Britling for an hour, and her mind was full of the thought of this changed and simplified man, who talked of God as he might have done of a bird he had seen or of a tree he had sheltered under.  And all mixed up with this thought of Mr. Britling was this strange idea of God who was also a limited person, who could come as close as Teddy, whispering love in the darkness.  She had a ridiculous feeling that God really struggled like Mr. Britling, and that with only some indefinable inferiority of outlook Mr. Britling loved like God.  She loved him for his maps and his dreams and the bareness of his talk to her.  It was strange how the straining thought of the dead Teddy had passed now out of her mind.  She was possessed by a sense of ending and beginning, as though a page had turned over in her life and everything was new.  She had never given religion any thought but contemptuous thought for some years, since indeed her growing intelligence had dismissed it as a scheme of inexcusable restraints and empty pretences, a thing of discords where there were no discords except of its making.  She had been a happy Atheist.  She had played in the sunshine, a natural creature with the completest confidence in the essential goodness of the world in which she found herself.  She had refused all thought of painful and disagreeable things.  Until the bloody paw of war had wiped out all her assurance.  Teddy, the playmate, was over, the love game was ended for ever; the fresh happy acceptance of life as life; and in the place of Teddy was the sorrow of life, the pity of life, and this coming of God out of utter remoteness into a conceivable relation to her own existence.

She had left Mr. Britling to his atlas.  He lay prone under the hedge with it spread before him.  His occupation would have seemed to her only a little while ago the absurdest imaginable.  He was drawing boundaries on his maps very carefully in red ink, with a fountain pen.  But now she understood.

She knew that those red ink lines of Mr. Britling’s might in the end prove wiser and stronger than the bargains of the diplomats....

In the last hour he had come very near to her.  She found herself full of an unwonted affection for him.  She had never troubled her head about her relations with any one except Teddy before.  Now suddenly she seemed to be opening out to all the world for kindness.  This new idea of a friendly God, who had a struggle of his own, who could be thought of as kindred to Mr. Britling, as kindred to Teddy—­had gripped her imagination.  He was behind the autumnal sunshine; he was in the little bird that had seemed so confident and friendly.  Whatever was kind, whatever was tender; there was God.  And a thousand old phrases she had read and heard and given little