During that
time, except for some incidental exchanges at his clubs, he talked to no
one. At first he did not want to talk to any one. He remained mentally
and practically active, with a still intensely vivid sense that God,
the true God, stood watching him and waiting for him to follow. And to
follow meant slipping right out of all the world he had ever known.
To thrust his foot right over the edge of a cliff would scarcely have
demanded more from the bishop's store of resolution. He stood on the
very verge. The chief secretion of his mind was a shadowy experiment or
so in explanation of why he did not follow.

(3)

Insensibly the extreme vividness of his sense of God's nearness
decreased. But he still retained a persuasion of the reality of an
immediate listener waiting, and of the need of satisfying him.

On the third day he found his mind still further changed. He no longer
felt that God was in Pall Mall or St. James's Park, whither he
resorted to walk and muse. He felt now that God was somewhere about the
horizon....

He felt too no longer that he thought straight into the mind of God. He
thought now of what he would presently say to God. He turned over and
rehearsed phrases. With that came a desire to try them first on some
other hearer. And from that to the attentive head of Lady Sunderbund,
prettily bent towards him, was no great leap. She would understand,
if any one could understand, the great change that had happened in his
mind.

He found her address in the telephone book. She could be quite alone
to him if he wouldn't mind "just me." It was, he said, exactly what he
desired.

But when he got to her great airy flat overlooking Hyde Park, with its
Omega Workshop furniture and its arresting decoration, he was not so
sure whether this encounter was so exactly the thing he had desired as
he had supposed.

The world had become opaque and real again as he walked up St. James's
Street and past the Ritz. He had a feeling that he was taking an
afternoon off from God. The adventurous modernity of the room in which
he waited intensified that. One whole white wall was devoted to a small
picture by Wyndham Lewis. It was like a picture of an earthquake in a
city of aniline pink and grey and keen green cardboard, and he wished it
had never existed.

He turned his back upon it and stared out of the window over the trees
and greenery. The balcony was decorated with white and pink geraniums in
pots painted blac