“Women make such a fuss about nothing!” complained Ishmael.

“What has always seemed to me the mistake about the religious life as it is lived to-day,” said Boase, “is the overweening importance given to trifles.  The distortion of the sweeping-a-room-to-the-glory-of-God theory.  If the mind is properly attuned to the spiritual sphere temporal things should lose significance, not gain them.  I don’t mean that we must leave off seeing to them—­that would result in our all lying down, shutting our eyes, and starving ourselves gently into futurity.  I mean that we should do the things, and do them well; because they are of such an insignificance they may just as well be done right as not.  Get yourself into the habit of washing dishes so well that instinctively you are thorough over the job, and you won’t have to think about it while you do it.  But the self-consciousness put into mundane affairs by the average religious beats the worldly person hollow.”

“They dissipate their secret bread into crumbs, in fact,” said Ishmael with a laugh.

The Parson nodded.  “Exactly—­and stale crumbs at that.  I wonder—­it’s easy to judge after all, and, as I once tried to tell you, it means something different to every man.  Tolerance—­the deeper tolerance which is charity ... if life doesn’t teach one that, it’s all been so much waste.  Who am I and who is anyone to despise the means by which another man lives?  Some of us find our relief in action, in the actual sweat of our bodies; some find it in set hours and rows of little devotional books—­the technique of the thing, so to speak.  And some of us find it out of doors and some within narrow walls—­some find it in goodness and some only by sin and shame....  One shouldn’t let other people’s salvation rub one up the wrong way.”

“It all goes to make the pattern, as Killigrew would say,” suggested Ishmael thoughtfully.

“When I was very young,” went on Ishmael after a pause, “I think I lived by the Spirit—­much more so than I can now, Da Boase.  I seem to have gone dead, somehow,” Boase nodded, but said nothing.  “And then it was Cloom that meant life to me when I came back here and started in on it.  Then it was love!”

He spoke the word baldly, looking away from the Parson.  “Then it was love!” he repeated; “and now it’s just emptiness, a sort of going on blindly from day to day.  It’s as though one were pressing through dark water instead of air, and one could only struggle on and let it go over one’s head and hope that some time one will come out the other side.”

“Don’t forget,” said Boase gently, “that no one can see a pattern when he is in the middle of it.  It all seems confused and without scheme while we are living in the midst of it; it’s only on looking back that we see it fall into shape.”

“And does it, always?”

“I firmly believe so.  It rests with us to make it as beautiful a pattern as possible, but a pattern it is bound to make.  And a terribly inevitable one, each curve leading to the next, as though we were spiders, spinning our web out of ourselves as we go....”