It was not his relationship towards Nicky that Ishmael was weighing as he sat in the still room; it was his whole relationship towards life.  It was not his fatherhood that he felt reeling; it was the fatherhood of God.  It was not love that he felt slipping from his grasp; it was truth:  not Nicky that he was despairing of, but the figure of Christ Himself.

If all that emotion, that love, that faith, that ardent passion of joy and work, were founded, caused by, built upon what had never been, could they really exist either?

Once he did hear his voice saying aloud “My boy ... mine ...”; but even then, his passion for truth outweighing indulgence to self, he knew that it was the mere mechanical speech of the situation rising to his lips unconsciously.  He said the words again to try and get at exactly what their import was.  “Mine....”

All that had struck him while Archelaus had been lying watching him read the letters was “This couldn’t happen to a woman ... how unfairly it’s arranged ... it’s only a man this could happen to ...”; and that had shown him how small, after all, was the man’s share, that such a thing could be possible.  Him or another, it really did not seem to matter so very much.  Both he and Archelaus had had Phoebe.  That this spark of life should have been from him or from Archelaus ... was that, after all, so important?  It seemed such a small share.  Fatherhood, looked at dispassionately, seemed to him a thing very artificial in its convention.  Life, that there should be life—­yes, that was different, but not that it should have been from him or another on that particular occasion....  When one thought that both had equally possessed the woman they seemed to merge so in her personality as to lose individual personalities of their own.

If he had not kept away from Phoebe for those two months, thus, in the light of her letter, putting the matter beyond doubt, how would any of the three of them ever have known whose son Nicky was?  Women always said they knew, even when they were going equally with two men; but did they?  Was it not rather that they always decided it was the child of the man they cared for most?  And if conditions had all along been normal between him and Phoebe, then how would he have felt in the light of his brother’s avowal?  It would have been impossible to say whether the child had been his or his brother’s; and yet Nicky would have been himself, even as he was now, and he, Ishmael, would have felt the same about him, and nothing would have been really different any more than if he had never known; or, knowing that there was doubt, still could not have told for certain which of the two it was who had fathered Nicky.  How, then, was it different now that he did know beyond a doubt?  Nicky was the same....