“Not in the least,” he said; drew out the carriers and opened his desk.  I could not help seeing what he did.

I was so fretted by my impotence to leave him that at the moment it did not connect at all with the research of the morning that he was taking out money.  I listened sullenly to his talk with Miss Ramell, and saw only, as they say in Wales, with the front of my eyes, the small flat drawer that had, it seemed, quite a number of sovereigns scattered over its floor.  “They’re so unreasonable,” complained Miss Ramell.  Who could be otherwise in a social organization that bordered on insanity?

I turned away from them, put my foot on the fender, stuck my elbow on the plush-fringed mantelboard, and studied the photographs, pipes, and ash-trays that adorned it.  What was it I had to think out before I went to the station?

Of course!  My mind made a queer little reluctant leap—­it felt like being forced to leap over a bottomless chasm—­and alighted upon the sovereigns that were just disappearing again as Mr. Gabbitas shut his drawer.

“I won’t interrupt your talk further,” said Miss Ramell, receding doorward.

Mr. Gabbitas played round her politely, and opened the door for her and conducted her into the passage, and for a moment or so I had the fullest sense of proximity to those—­it seemed to me there must be ten or twelve—­sovereigns. . . .

The front door closed and he returned.  My chance of escape had gone.

Section 4

“I must be going,” I said, with a curiously reinforced desire to get away out of that room.

“My dear chap!” he insisted, “I can’t think of it.  Surely—­there’s nothing to call you away.”  Then with an evident desire to shift the venue of our talk, he asked, “You never told me what you thought of Burble’s little book.”

I was now, beneath my dull display of submission, furiously angry with him.  It occurred to me to ask myself why I should defer and qualify my opinions to him.  Why should I pretend a feeling of intellectual and social inferiority toward him.  He asked what I thought of Burble.  I resolved to tell him—­if necessary with arrogance.  Then perhaps he would release me.  I did not sit down again, but stood by the corner of the fireplace.

“That was the little book you lent me last summer?” I said.

“He reasons closely, eh?” he said, and indicated the armchair with a flat hand, and beamed persuasively.

I remained standing.  “I didn’t think much of his reasoning powers,” I said.

“He was one of the cleverest bishops London ever had.”

“That may be.  But he was dodging about in a jolly feeble case,” said I.

“You mean?”

“That he’s wrong.  I don’t think he proves his case.  I don’t think Christianity is true.  He knows himself for the pretender he is.  His reasoning’s—­Rot.”