“Oh bless you!  I have been polytheistic as any other well-read pagan of my day, and changed the heads and the labels of the fetiches on my altar almost as often as my ball wardrobe.  I aspired to ‘culture’ in all the ‘cults’, and I improved diligently my opportunities.  One year the stylish craze was sesthetics, and I fought my way to the front of the bedlamites raving about Sapphic types, ’Sibylla Palmifera’ and ‘Astarte Syriaca’; and I wore miraculously limp, draggled skirts, that tangled about my feet tight as the robes of Burne Jones’ ‘Vivien.’  Next season the star of ceramics and bric-a-brac was in the ascendant, and I ran the gamut of Satsuma, Kyoto, de la Robbia, Limoge and Gubbio; of niello, and millchori glass, of Queen Anne brass and Japanese bronze; while my snuff boxes and my ‘symphony in fans’ graced all the loan exhibitions.  Soon after, a celebrated scientist from England who had bowled over all the pins set up by his predecessors, lectured in our Bojotia; and fired with zeal for truth, I swept aside all my costly idealistic rubbish into a ‘doomed pyramid of the vanities’, and swore allegiance to the Positive, the ‘Knowable’, whose priests handled hammers, spectroscopes, electric batteries—­and who set up for me a whole Pantheon of science fetiches.  I bought a microscope and peered into tissues, pollen cells, diatoms, ditch ooze; and pitied my clever and very talented grandmother who died ignorant of the family secrets revealed by ‘totemism’, ignorant of ‘parthenogenesis’ which proved so conclusively the truth of her own firm conviction, that the faults she deplored in her son’s children were all inherited directly from her daughter-in-law, whom she detested; ignorant of the fact that the sun which she regarded as a dazzling yellow fire was by bolometric measures shown to be in reality of a restful, and refreshing blue color.  By the time I was fully convinced that teleology was as dead as the Ptolemaic theory, and that ’wings were not planned for flight, but that flight has produced wings’, hence that Haeckel’s gospel of ‘Dysteleology’ or purposelessness in Nature satisfactorily explained creation—­a great wave of oriental theosophy overflowed us; and a revival of Buddhism invited me to seek Nirvana as the final beatitude, where—­

                                “’We shall be
     Part of the mighty universal whole,
     And through all icons mix and mingle with the
     Kosmic Soul!’”

Or to make matters clearer still: 

   “’Om, mani Padma, Om! the dewdrop slips
     Into the shining sea!’”

Even a sponge can hold only so much, and I fell back—­or shall I say forward—­in the path of progress to rest in the dimness of agnosticism.  Is it strange, Leo, that I am desperately tired; and willing to plant my feet on the rock of matrimony, which will neither dissolve nor slip away, and to which my vows will moor me firmly?”

“If you had clung to your Bible, and prayed more, you would not have wasted so signally the years that might have brought you enduring happiness.  Forgive me, Alma, but you have lived solely for self.”