n it. If he did not--well, there he invariably came to the
end of thought. Curiously enough, it was when faced with a mental blank
that Julie's image began to rise in his mind. If he admitted her, he
found himself abandoning himself to her. He felt sometimes that if he
could but take her in his arms he could let the world go by, and God with
it. Her kisses were at least a reality. There was neither convention nor
subterfuge nor divided allegiance there. She was passion, naked and
unashamed, and at least real.

And then he would remember that much of this was problematical after all,
for they had never kissed as that passion demanded, or at least that he
had never so kissed her. He was not sure of the first. He knew that he
did not understand Julie, but he felt, if he did kiss her, it would be a
kiss of surrender, of finality. He feared to look beyond that, and he
could not if he would.

He wrote, then, to Hilda, and he told of the death of Jenks, and of their
arrival in Abbeville, "You must understand, dear," he said, "that all
this has had a tremendous effect upon me. In that train all that I had
begun to feel about the uselessness of my old religion came to a head. I
could do no more for that soul than light a cigarette.... Possibly no one
could have done any more, but I cannot, I will not believe it. Jenks was
not fundamentally evil, or at least I don't think so. He was rather a
selfish fool who had no control, that is all. He did not serve the devil;
it was much more that he had never seen any master to serve. And I could
do nothing. I had no master to show him.

"You may say that that is absurd: that Christ is my Master, and I could
have shown Him. Hilda, so He is: I cling passionately to that. But
listen: I can't express Him, I don't understand Him. I no longer feel
that He was animating and ordering the form of religion I administered.
It is not that I feel Anglicanism to be untrue, and something else--say
Wesleyanism--to be true; it is much more that I feel them all to be out
of touch with reality. _That's_ it. I don't think you can possibly see
it, but that is the main trouble.

"That, too, brings me to my next point, and this I find harder still to
express. I want you to realise that I feel as if I had never seen life
before. I feel as if I had been shown all my days a certain number of
pictures and told that they were the real thing, or given certain
descriptions and told that they were true. I had always